Word: reade
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...began Under the Volcano as the train left the quiet, modern city of San Luis Potosi, read through the night, and finished it just outside of Nuevo Laredo. Even from the first deliberately subdued chapters, I found the novel completely engrossing. By the mid-point I was entirely under Lowry's spell. The distractions of each station-stop became intertwined with the awesome experience of discovering Malcolm Lowry. A small pig urinated on my duffle bag, right there in the car. Lowry's Consul awoke from a drunken stupor, trying to focus on the scorpion in front of him, stringing...
Respectful of his heritage, Wilbur stood patiently last week before a lot of people who like Norman Mailer and Sylvia Plath (which is alright!) and read like a poet exhausted by the age. At dinner, he'd said something about growing "older and more vulgar," but in Burr he seemed young, and strangely erudite. Introducing one of his poems, "A Baroque Wall Fountain in the Villa," he dismissed the question of "transcendance and acceptance" as "sounding too much like a critic," but at other moments talked offhandedly of Pascal ("The spirit doesn't have any business denying things...
Last week Wilbur recounted what he had been told as a grad student at Harvard, wherein we are told: "Show, don't tell." Then he read a long narrative poem in blank verse which first appeared in the New Yorker last year, and which I remember was about someone telling an insomniac how to get to sleep. What I had not remembered was that the poem explained much more, was a defining of perception and a sad discussion of his art. "What you must manage is to bring to life/ A landscape not worth looking at." "Nor must you dream...
...been dominated by something during this century: by Eliot, or W. C. Williams, or now by confessionalism. What is so remarkable about Wilbur is the way in which he belongs to other ages than his own, without ignoring the crises of the present. In a rare political poem he read at Harvard, Wilbur spoke of President Johnson's less than gracious response to a portrait he commissioned; "Wait, sir, and see how time will render you,/ Who talk of vision but have no sight." "The Marginal Way," a poem about the dying capacity for celebration, confessed "the time's fright...
...have possibly known what he was doing when he gave us "this book." Nor could Permelia have known what she was doing when she conceived and raised a son in such a way that her death would cause him to provide us with a book by Kurt Vonnegut to read...