Some No Doubt Mainly Personal Refections on The Collected Poems of Charles Olson

 

I’ve read a fair amount of the work of Charles Olson: The Maximus Poems (twice), the Selected Writings, which at one point in time was many people’s introduction to Olson’s work, Call Me Ishmael, some essays in the Collected Prose, but although I’ve looked through The Collected Poems of Charles Olson many times and owned it for decades, I’ve never read it cover to cover like I’m doing now (Rod Smith gave me the idea). It’s the book that contains all Olson’s poems except Maximus.

When I first was reading what has often been called The New American Poetry, around 1986-87, first introduced to me through issues of Boundary Two (which would soon introduce me to Language Poetry as well), a journal edited by my then professor William Spanos, it seemed exciting, and very contemporary, something I needed to know RIGHT NOW.

At some point though, the New American Poetry began to seem historical to me, no longer contemporary in that it no longer seemed to be speaking quite to the present and its problems but to the American past. When I started to feel that way, I’m not sure. Maybe after I moved to Southern California and my sense of the culture I was living in had to go through some significant changes.

Just so I’m clear, I LIKE poetry that has the feel of history in it, and that belongs significantly to the past. To say that something no longer feels contemporary to me is not to say that it sucks. But it is to say that it seems to be responding to a reality that feels at a remove from contemporary reality, and that its understanding of literature and of itself speaks to a framework of a world that is gone.

The mythologizing urge of Olson in these poems, not as consistently developed as in Maximus, is fascinating, the mythologizing and psychologizing of gender especially, all the man and woman overarching archetypes (and the sexual mythologizing that would have probably been risky then but maybe seems quaint now–I realize some people might critique this more harshly) that come across as shifting and unstable.

It’s that shifting, the instability, that mark the poems not only as clearly Modernist but also as, I might venture to say, Postmodernist. The poems offer big frameworks but also seem to pull them away. They speak both within and against a world in which grand claims, grand absolutes, were probably norms of U.S. culture that are long gone now, in whatever distorted fashion they might sometimes (even often, lately) cross the U.S. contemporary political and cultural landscape.

If these poems are taking me into the past though, I feel them simultaneously defining a world which I was coming out of (in two senses: I was from there but had to leave it behind). It helps me understand how I got here, how poetry got here, in all the variety of heres that present themselves so relentlessly every day. They’re a crucial part of the American literary landscape in which my thinking and writing developed, as they were also a profound force for his own generation and the generations that more immediately followed him.

Ross Macdonald, the Early Novels

 

Some of Raymond Chandler's short stories were published in magazines in the years before his first novel, The Big Sleep, cane out. He was 51, and a fully realized writer, by the time that first novel reached its first readers in 1939.

The situation was different for Ross Macdonald (1915-1983), usually considered the last of the great triumvirate of U.S. hard-boiled detective noir writers (Dashiell Hammett is the first of the three). Macdonald published four novels before the first book in his Lew Archer detective series. I read all of those novels in the last few weeks as I prepare to teach my detective fiction course again this spring. The books are (in order) The Dark Tunnel (1944), Trouble Follows Me (1946), Blue City (1947), and The Three Roads (1948).

Each of these books was a pleasure to read. Maybe the fourth, The Three Roads, was the toughest going. None of them are as successful as the Archer series, the first book of which, The Moving Target, was published in 1949, when Macdonald was 34. The action in these early books is sometimes overblown, sometimes silly, and yet always fascinating enough that I wasn’t tempted to put any of them down. Parts of all of them are riveting. All four are murder mysteries too, minus a central detective, but they’re also noir action thrillers mired in the problems of World War II as it is affecting people living in the U.S. All of them feature central characters with experiences as soldiers who are either on leave or recently discharged.

The novels have many of the strengths of Macdonald’s later, more successful books, a great style, compelling conflicts, unexpected turns. It’s also interesting that some of their shortcomings are similar to some that turn up in the later books as well if in smaller degrees. In any case all four remain very readable today, and not just as exercises in the development of greatness, although they certainly proved very valuable to me in showing the characteristics of Macdonald’s writing in proto-form.

Flash Review: Mort(e) by Robert Repino

 

I liked the concept of the novel Mort(e) by Robert Repino, a science-fiction tale about an animal revolution against human control over their lives. And there were some strong chapters, especially the first one, which really drew me in, and some others later that kept a focused intensity. Too much of this book though was long-winded world building and summarized action that often felt unnecessary. And nothing much happened with the central concept to illuminate either the human world or animal resistance to it.

The characterizations weren’t all that interesting, and the central motive for the drama, Mort(e) the cat’s love for Sheba the dog, never felt convincing or interesting and seemed mostly an empty shell created to connect together the too-often summarized action. Mort(e)’s name, which stands out so prominently every time it appears, turns on an idea that felt tangential and random and without much power. Ultimately this book depends on a flashy main idea that was not developed in a way that had great significance.

Having a compelling main idea and a visually catchy name for your main character is no substitute for having an engaging story to tell, but an idea like that and an excellent opening chapter might get a writer all the way to a book contract.

Lafcadio Hearn, Japanese Ghost Stories

 

I had a read a few of Lafacadio Hearn’s ghost stories set in Japan in various editions over the years and never quite connected with them, maybe because I was expecting something that they didn’t offer. But rereading the stories in this more complete collection, I found them to be some of the most beautiful ghost stories I’ve ever read, equally capable of being tender and moving as of inspiring a subtle but genuine sense of fright.

Hearn lived all over the world and was often notorious in his lifetime (in 1874 he married in Ohio a biracial woman who had been born into slavery, breaking the law since interracial marriage was illegal in the state) both for his behavior and outspoken attitudes, in which he frequently and openly rejected American and British racism, and for some of his newspaper writing, in which he sometimes covered some of the most sensational murders and violent crimes of the day. It was after he moved to Japan in 1890 that he wrote these stories which are now the basis of his fame. The stories are highly regarded and frequently read in Japan, while he remains a familiar name in British and U.S. supernatural fiction.

If you like your moments of fright tinged with a melancholy and sometimes tragic sense of loss, and with a historical and cultural richness that isn’t that common in the history of ghost stories, you’ll be very happy reading Japanese Ghost Stories. You’ll even forget about the silly cover quickly enough.

Happy Halloween to those who celebrate it!

The Romantic Dogs by Roberto Bolaño

 

A lot of people find Roberto Bolaño’s poetry less interesting than his fiction. I can see why, in some ways. The poems lack the same scope, and they feel more youthful and more romantic, even as their political concerns seem in line with what he would do later in his fiction. On the other hand, the youthfulness and smaller scope is significantly the result of the poems being the work of a young writer on his way to greater heights. I found the poems in The Romantic Dogs enjoyable and insightful on their own terms, but they also seem like short blueprints for the later, more in-depth writing that he would do (at many thousands of pages of length overall, as his readers know). In some ways, The Romantic Dogs shows a more personal, approachable writer than Bolaño’s novels do, with more of his own personality and desires on display. In the poems I could see more of what was at stake for him personally, what concerns he was wrestling with, than I sometimes can in the novels. The poems show his struggles to break out of the restrained and limiting environments in which he finds himself. The novels are going to be that breakout, an expansive portrayal of many social dynamics that take him far beyond any one individual’s concerns. In the poems though, I could see him working his way towards what would happen next. They feel like they provide a very intimate look at what it might take to find one’s way towards literary greatness.

Raymond Chandler and Jack Spicer

 

The similarities between these two books are remarkable. Stylistically, they both feature taut understated prose that’s remarkably precise and filled with restrained tension. Thematically, both dwell significantly and harshly on the limitations of the larger environment of writing that they’re part of: in Spicer, the failings of poetry and poetry cultures, in Chandler, the failures of the detective fiction marketplace and publishers and the limitations of the Hollywood culture of writing for films. Both books significantly (if hardly exclusively) discuss California and California writing cultures. And both are written largely during the same time period, the 40s and 50s, although Spicer continued living into the 60s. Spicer was interested in detective fiction and likely knew of Chandler’s work, but Chandler almost certainly never heard of Spicer.

Neither of these writers has huge sympathy for others or for themselves. Their harsh takes might seem cynical if not for the fact that they also often seem painfully correct. Still, both men are also at points unpleasantly misanthropic. They are both loners and alcoholics who don’t quite seem able to find stable friendships or communities. Both did have a community context and were in touch with lots of people, but the written conversations they were involved in do not always seem sustaining to them as friendship.

I’m not sure what to make of these similarities except that the cultural contexts of these two writers were not as far apart as it might seem on the surface. However, because genre remains so divisive in U.S. literary contexts, how many readers are likely to be interested in both Spicer and Chandler? The similarities between these two might be very easy never to notice.

And that last point might be emphasized by the fact that it’s to some degree accidental that I’m reading these books simultaneously. I bought the book of Spicer’s letters when it came out. Suzanne recently found the book of Chandler’s selected letters in an antique mall and thought I might be interested, and since I’m teaching a Detectives in Film and Fiction class in the spring semester, I thought I would read it before teaching the class. I had no intention of looking for similarities when I started reading both books, but the similarities are impossible (for me anyway) to ignore.

Let the Corpses Tan

 

Let the Corpses Tan is a 2018 French film based on a crime novel by the French novelist Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-95), who has been repopularized in the U.S. recently, at least among literary and leftist political folks, by the release of a number of his books in translation by New York Review Books.

Manchette’s tightly-presented, crisp noir crime plots and characters filled with various clashing political ideologies usually feature a radical leftist political content that is at the same time subjected to Manchette’s ironic, even cynical (which is part of the fun) presentation of leftist political futility. The portrayal of radical left political criminals drowning themselves in the absurd confusions of French society in the 60s and 70s and forward seems to have a lot of appeal for those who feel stuck these days in the political dead ends of current U.S. culture.

Let the Corpses Tan presents a series of remarkably vivid and unique images and sounds in its presentation of a gang of murderers and bank robbers who find themselves increasingly trapped by some combination of bad luck, armed police response, and their own duplicity. In fact in some ways the film is best understood as a series of cool effects. Image by image, sound by sound, the narrative shows the members of the gang spiraling down, even with occasional victories, into their own bad dreams and bad ends. The constantly violent and sexually-charged images give the movie some combination of repellant attraction in nearly every frame, although it’s not necessarily the violence that’s repellant and the sexuality that’s attractive.

What’s missing is, unfortunately, much of any kind of politics, beyond the brief mention that these murdering thieves hate cops and have a lawyer with them who’s a thief too but playing both sides of the law. The various kinds of geographical images shown throughout the film might suggest that the characters are trapped not only by the landscape but by a set of social ideologies that they’re squirming inside, unable to get themselves free of, but whatever ideologies those might be, they never prove especially relevant to the action.

In terms of social content, the film reminded me most maybe of Reservoir Dogs, in which the layers of cynicism and violence reduce the identities of the characters to mere functions of their own violence. There are no real people in Let the Corpses Tan. The men are all assholes crazed by their urges for money or sex or both, and stuck in a situation they can’t escape, and the women are stuck with them. The whole thing is going to explode in one hail of gunfire after another. People are character-less pawns of their own duplicity. That might be a point worthy of Manchette’s writing and social attitudes, some might say. But the lack of any significant political or social framework, or much in the way of interesting character dynamics, leaves the movie as a kind of detached exercise in watching human ants get crushed in a maze of their own good-looking but nearly personality-free violence. I bet the crazy images and sounds sure are cool on a big screen though.