Word: reads
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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PERHAPS this all has something to do with why I was so gladdened when Robert Bly read here that Friday night when most of us were going or had gone to Washington. Talking into an Advocate tape recorder before-hand, he discussed a new sense of space in poetry, that feeling for the vast empty untouched universe of things to be felt and said. Besides the Orientals, who have always known where space is, perhaps only the Americans, with the expanse of physical space to their right and left, can strike it rich-even if their minds are just half...
Then, almost as a tease of an answer from out of the infinite west, Richard Brautigan came a week ago and read spacey little one-liners that laughed in the now-vulnerable face of "serious" poetry everywhere. American literature at its most libertine spoke, ruthlessly mocking the discipline and care of poetry along with the paralyzing limitations that have admittedly been placed upon it. The line between space and sloppiness, like the one between innovativeness and perversity, grew tenuous. With Brautigan, things were looking grim for those of us who were counting on salvation in looseness and space...
...days later, Galway Kinnell appeared and read in Boylston Auditorium, and for me, it was like sunrise in a misty eastern sky... Suddenly schools of poetry and communities of like-minded poets seemed obsolete; idealism and purity reigned again. Kinnell read from an inexhaustible richness of things both everyday and vast, from the flesh and bones and stones of the woods and its parts. He read about the mountains in Vermont and I thought of Frost: he read about things growing and I thought of Rocthke; he read about the creative necessity of solitude and I thought...
...simply overwhelmed his age with his will, energy and versatility. Yet out of the 10 million words that Besterman estimates he wrote, how many are read-how many are readable-today? Certainly not his dated verse tragedies about Frenchified classical heroes. Nor his special-pleading history. Nor his philosophical tracts like Traité de Métaphysique which placed him, in Besterman's phrase, only "the tiniest possible step away from atheism...
...more likely to read Pascal, whom Voltaire hated, or Rousseau, who hated Voltaire, than Voltaire himself, who lives today mainly through Candide. In this black-comedy response to the evils of history, he seems closest to the modern reader, as in his conclusion: Cultivate your garden (modern translation: Do your own thing...