EverY Soul is a CiRcus

Vachel Lindsay.
Collected Poems.
New York, Macmillan, 1925.
Revised and Illustrated edition. One of 350 copies printed and signed and numbered by the author.

“I am Knocking on the Door of the [American] world with a dream in my hand.”
Vachel Lindsay. Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (1914)

“Indeed, Lindsay is a modern knight-errant, the Don Quixote of our so called unbelieving, unromantic age.”
Harriet Monroe. Poets and their Art (1932)

By the time he published the colorful revised and illustrated 1925 version of his Collected Poems, Vachel Lindsay was a household name in the United States, having read his poetry to over thousands in his many countrywide hikes (or tramps as he called them) across the United States. Lindsay’s Collected Poems
was first published in an austere and un-illustrated edition in 1923, but the new edition includes reproductions of some of his own drawings as well as new poems. Perhaps Lindsay included these in this edition to give the volume a greater sense of integrity or a more colorful flair. The book is surely more like the poet himself, than the sedate 1923 Collected Poems. Although he became beloved by the American working classes, Lindsay’s work was badly pummeled by many critics and by most other poets (including Pound and Eliot). In 1931 a desperate and despairing Lindsay was to commit suicide by drinking Lysol.

A truly original poet, Lindsay’s volumes of poetry are visionary and eccentric, but only begin to approach the pyrotechnics of his flamboyant, in-person performances. During the Twenties Lindsay embarked on a series of lecture and recitation tours, modeled on his tramps, but more formal, organized and of course, remunerative. Students at Yale were typical of the large, primarily student audiences Lindsay attracted:

“The nice boys from the ivory towers of the best school and the Gothic dormitories
of Yale tittered at first. But as he began to swing into the pervasive rhythms of General
William Booth Enters Into Heaven and The Congo, and as the rich imagery lifted the homely
language into poetry, they warmed, and soon were chanting with him. Yet to them it was
only a show. . . Henry Seidel Canby. American Memoir (1947)

Although Lindsay’s message of spirituality and social concern, of reform and revival was lost in the increasingly materialistic years of the twenties, he was nevertheless, along with Masters and Sandburg, one of the new poets of the Midwest. Like them he championed the everyday and the local, but in his particular way, as a “vain and foolish mendicant” determined to change the world. After hearing him recite in Chicago William Butler Yeats rhapsodized: “What are we going to do to restore the primitive singing of poetry?”

Current Reading

Some Readings from the Periodicals

Umberto Saba “Sixteen Poems,” Translated by Geoffrey Brock,
PN Review, no. 164 (July-August 2005), pages 22-23.
“I’ve spoken to a goat./She was out in the field, and leashed.”

Geoffrey Brock, “ “Five Poems,”
PN Review, no. 164 (July-August 2005), page 47.

Denis Donoghue, “Contemporary Poetry: Keeping the Conversation Going,”
PN Review, no. 164 (July-August 2005), pages 16-21.
“I confess that I do not understand how reputations in literature are made or why they come and go. I have heard it maintained that in the long run the writers whose works continue to live are those who are important to other writers; not necessarily to a multitude of readers.”

Mahmoud Darwish, “ Three Poems,”
The Kenyon Review, Volume XXVII, no. 3 (Summer 2005), pages 1-4.
“I said: you killed me. . .and I forgot, /like you, to die.”

Henry Hart. “Charles Simic’s Dark Night of the Soul,”
Kenyon Review, Volume XXVII, no. 3 (Summer 2005), pages 124-147.
“Simic has claimed that ‘every poem, knowingly or unknowingly, is addressed to God (Orphan Factory 21), but he has always been more skeptical and apophatic than Saint John, even to the point of embracing atheism in his quests for a Supreme Being.”

“Collaboration/Collage” Special Issue
Indiana Review, Volume 27, no. 1 (Summer 2005).
The entire issue devoted to works by two, three or more writers/artists. The issue starts off by reprinting five collaborations by Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery from the famous Locus Solus collaborations issue of 1961. Other collaborations include Christopher Stackhouse (poetry and art), D. A. Powell and Rachel Zucker, and Timothy Liu and a number of people. Unfortunately no introduction meditating on the topic.

“Nine Vietnamese Poets,” edited and translated by Nguyen Do and Paul Hoover.
New American Writing, no. 23 (2005), pages 177-208.

Mahmoud Darwish, Five Poems,” translated by Fady Joudah.
New American Writing, no. 23 (2005), pages 1-9.

Mark Jarman. “When the Light Came on: The Epic Gilgamesh,”
Hudson Review, Volume LVIII, number 2(Summer 2005), pages 329-334.
Spiritualist poet Jarman’s intelligent & long review of Stephen Mitchell’s translation of Gilgamesh, the great Mesopotamian poem of 3000 B.C. is almost a Cliff Notes version itself.

Joan Larkin “Amy Lowell’s erotic audacity: A conversation with Honor Moore,”
Bloom, Volume 2, no. 1 (Spring 2005). Poet’s Larkin and Moore back and forth revaluation of the work of Amy Lowell, often forgotten, often surpressed. Moore edited the new Library of America American Poets Project Selected Lowell. And a pretty magazine this new Bloom is.

Christopher Middleton: Portraits, edited by W. Martin.
The Chicago Review 51:1/2 (Spring 2005). A large part of the issue is devoted to various takes on the work of the British Critic, poet and translator Christopher Middleton. Includes pieces by the Waldrops, August Kleinzahler and many others, including some really nice “Pastels” by the artist Yvonne Jacquette. This is the Chicago Review’s third very large issue in a row (the previous two being devoted to Louis Zukofsky (ZUK!) and to Edward Dorn. The magazine is fast becoming the most scholarly and smart of the current literary journals.

Peter O’Leary. “Duncan, Levertov and the age of correspondences,”
The Chicago Review 51:1/2 (Spring 2005), pages 232-239. A long review by O’Leary of the monumental published correspondence of Levertov and Duncan (1993, University of California Press). Everything O’Leary writes is well worth reading.

Jeff Hamilton. “Letters, Abroad and Back,”
The Chicago Review 51:1/2 (Summer 2005), pages 242-249. A review of the recently republished (by Peter O’Leary’s Flood Books) edition of Robert Duncan’s Letters: Poems 1953-1956.

“A Selection of Lyrics from Lyre, Lyre, Lyre, Poems from the Greek Anthology,”
The Gettysburg Review, Spring 2005. Excerpts from a book of translations from said anthology, by Sherrod Santos to be published in the fall by Norton.

Dan Beachy-Quick “from Mulberry,”
Colorado Review, Spring 2005, pages 84-85.
A new young Louis Zukofsky.

“A Tribute to Peter Redgrove, essays, poems, Interview and Review,”
Manhattan Review, Winter/Spring 2005. Special Double Issue of this magazine, devoted to the sometimes controversial British Poet.

Philip Levine, “A Day in May: Los Angeles, 1960,”
Georgia Review, Spring 2005, pages 60-75.
Inimitable memoir of a day spent with Thom Gunn and John Berryman

John Taylor, “Two Cultures of the Prose Poem,”
Michigan Quarterly Review, Spring 2005, pages 362-381.
A review of David Lehman’s Anthology, The Great American Prose Poem (Scribner, 2003) and three other books, but a good overview of the issues swirling around this form.

“You cannot discourage your wingspread:” Alice Notley Issue,
Interim 2005, v.23, nos. 1-2.
Includes separate interviews of their mother by the Berrigan boys and articles by Maggie Nelson, Claudia Keelan, Eleni Sikelianos and many others. Includes email correspondence between Alice and Leslie Scalipino.

Rebecca Solnit “Yves Klein and the Blue of Distance,”
New England Review, Volume 26, number 2 2005, pages 176-182. Issue also includes Robert Lowell letters, Mark Rudman’s “A Garland for Nicanor Parra,” and Myles Weber, “Reading Salinger’s silence.”

“A Symposium on Thom Gunn,”
The Threepenny Review Summer 2005.
Issue also includes reproductions of great photographs by William Gedney


G. C. Waldrep. “Precision Castanets”
Black Warrior Review, Volume 31, number 2 (Summer 2005), pages 66-80. A chapbook within a magazine, Waldrep’s prose poems are spectacularly mysterious, funny and enchanting (even better than his Goldbeater’s Skin). “I purchased a small box of Masonic paraphernalia at a local yard sale never expecting the decadent’s son would track me down.”


John Emil Vincent. “Pinnacle of No Explanation: Jack Spicer’s Exercise of the Novel,”
Massachusetts Review, Vol. XLVI, no. 2 (Summer 2005), pages 212-341
A smart, extended exegesis of Jack Spicer’s Detective Novel: The Tower of Babel, integrating biographical criticism with close reading of this experiment of genre-bending. Also deals with a series of poems, “Exercises,” which Spicer wrote near the time of his novel.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von. “From Italian Journey (1786-1788)”
Jubilat, number 10 (2005), pages 40-52.
This translation of a section of Italian Journey is by W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer, the entire Italian Journey, was originally published in 1962. This section deals with
Goethe’s visit to an active Vesuvius and a scarcely less active Naples. A tour de force
of volcanology (Vulcanology?)

Swenson, Cole. “Interview,”
Jubilat, number 10 (2005), pages 81-94.
Stresses method and meditation, art and literature in her work.
“. . . I think Juxtapositions and broken syntax open a subject to a different kind of view. Through the cracks, we cansee aspects that are not yet articulated and can get intimations of what those articulations might be. Broken language is not in the process of breaking further down, but of building up, heading toward fuller expressions, heading toward articulations that have not been previously achieved.”

Vigee, Claude. “Robert Frost in His Own Words” Edited and Introduced by Anthony Rudolph.
PN Review 165 (September-October 2005), pages 19-23.
Reportage from 1954 and 1960 visits by Frost to Brandeis and Jerusalem respectively.

Noel-Tod, Jeremy. “Definite Sentences”
PN Review 165 (September-October 2005), pages 46-48.
Smart and long, British review of Ron Silliman’s sort of autobiographical long poem, Under Albany.
“In this, the single-mindedly progressive Silliman-prospective author of a poem called Universe-resembles D. H. Lawrence’s shrewd caricature of Walt Whitman, who drove his “great fierce poetic machine” “along the track of a fixed ide”: “ALLNESS! Shrieks Walt at a cross-road, going whiz over an unwary Red Indian.” As, Eleanor Roosevelt said, Nevertheless.