Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Whom might Novelist Meyer Levin have been thinking of when he wrote Gore and Igor (see BOOKS), about a randy, globe-hopping Russian poet whose inspiration goes from bed to verse? Nobody knows, naturally, but Evgeny Evtushenlco, 34, did happen to be whooping around South America on publication day. As if to make Levin's publisher even happier, Evtushenko was seen with a mysterious, unnamed Chilean admirer, who followed him to Montevideo and checked into an adjoining hotel room. Come check-out time and the Dark Lady of the Sonnets was still with him, hiding discreetly in one corner...
...through wintry New Hampshire, found a more congenial welcome at the Manhattan town house of Socialite Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper. About 200 friendly writers, artists and jet-setters crowded around to hear him proclaim that "it is necessary now to admit to a kind of complete failure in Viet Nam." Poet Robert Lowell responded on the spot by announcing that he has formed a brand-new National Committee of Arts and Letters for McCarthy for President...
Amusedly saddened by his own middle-aged moral spread, Mailer moves with almost prissy distaste among the rabble. His sharpest barb is reserved for Poet-Polemicist Paul Goodman, who "looked like the sort of old con who had first gotten into trouble in the Y.M.C.A., and hadn't spoken to anyone since." Arrested himself during the opening hours of the Pentagon siege, Mailer winds up in the same paddy wagon with a tall, ferocious American Nazi, and stares him down in the inevitable Mailerian confrontation of wills. "You Jew bastard," shouts the Nazi. "Kraut pig!" replies Norman, only...
...they bring it down? With some exceptions, the musical element in the performances of these troubadours is strangely disappointing. Words are what interests them, as is obvious from their undistinguished melodies. At best, the lyrics attain a gentle, sometimes mystical eloquence. Leonard Cohen, 33, an established Canadian poet and novelist (The Spice-Box of Earth, Beautiful Losers) who recently began performing his songs, tells of Suzanne, who "leads you to the river" and shows...
...novelist invented a character like Lord Byron, he would be set down as an opportunistic fictioneer with an eye on the bestseller list. Byron, after all, was almost too much. He was a good if not great poet; he was handsome; he could swim the Hellespont, even with a game leg; he had affairs with men as well as women including, some believe, his half sister. He was also a political rebel. When he died at 34 in Missolonghi, Greece, he was planning and financing a revolt against the Turkish oppressors...