Dixie Chicks Yes, Reba NO.

Still Valid Advice from Ezra Pound

"Don't use such an expression as "dim lands of peace." It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol."

"Go in fear of abstractions. Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don't think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably dificult art of good prose by chopping your compostion into line lengths."

----------------Ezra Pound. from "A Retrospect" in Pavannes and Divigations (1918)

Glynn Maxwell on Hart Crane

"Hart Crane brings a really bizarre kind of collection of influences to his work. He has this Webster, Jacobean line, the sort of richness of that line, he has the French thing, and it’s not really like anyone else’s. It doesn’t resemble anything that was around at the time. To me it’s a beautiful gateway that hasn’t led anywhere. But I think it’s terrible that it hasn’t led anywhere. Crane should have been one of the people that is most looked up to. I think that’s just exemplary in terms of reading deep into the past and building your style out of that, rather than glancing around and saying, “Okay, this is what poets are doing now, is to be elliptical and to give out very little.” I think people who cite their influences from their own generation are quite suspect. Just go to a library, just put your feet in the past. It will just give you more range, it will just give you more reach."
----------------------------from an interview in CPR

Rae Armantrout in the New Yorker!

Startling occurrence: Rae Armantrout has a poem in the New Yorker! It is entitled "The Ether" and is on page 74 of the May 22, 2006 issue. It is a sensitive and mercurial piece. Can we now hope for a more varied presentation of American poetry from the magazine? Since so many "general" readers get their idea of poetry from the poems published in the New Yorker, it would be nice if it was more democratic, actually representative of the "scene."

Against dualism, as such

Let us attempt not to think in dualisms
dualities, twos, this and that, one or zero
that kind of thing. Ambiguity is good
and so is multiplicity, though it sounds

like complicity. The divine persuasion
harbors such inequities, Talmudic footlings
as Pound said of Zukofsky, with a
judgmental absolutism. Rabbinic

reading of things, though, is beautiful.
But we love artifice. Not we but I, who
am always trying to make others
complicit. Like footnotes which are glorious

minimums of knowledge, essays in con-
cision, scissor-like boxcars, six, six, six
blue jewels, droplets drole with sincerity,
devolving into critical aporia, spelunkers

in the cave of language. Dire warnings not
to be missed. Facture, Fraktur, specialized
to a point of clarity, mirrors of souls, or
pilgrims bent on pictures, Rudolfo Tamayo

Charles Demuth, Tina Modotti exit the
white bowl of life, but their hands
remain. Blink, blink, with the eyes
closed.

S. S. Van Dine. The Benson Murder Case. New York, Scribner’s, 1926.

“When an author has been so unfortunate as to write a popular novel, it is a difficult thing to live down the reputation. Personally I have no sympathy with such a person, for there are few punishments too severe for a popular novel writer.” Willard Huntington Wright, 1909.

Philo Vance/Needs a kick in the pants.

Ogden Nash

With sales of over one million volumes, S. S. Van Dine was one of the most popular detective novelists of the Twenties. His series of novels featuring the self-consciously aristocratic detective Philo Vance were published by the august firm of Charles Scribner, and edited by the indefatigable Maxwell Perkins, also shepherd to the talents of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. S. S. Van Dine was really Willard Huntington Wright , a former academic and aesthete, art critic and editor with H. L Mencken of The Smart Set. Under his own name he published a half dozen books on art, society and literature (including a well reasoned attack on the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica). As S. S. Van Dine, his first of twelve mystery novels was The Benson Murder Case, published in 1926. His cultured and erudite detective/hero/alter ego, clearly reflects the new privileged lifestyles of the Jazz Age. as well as any number of quintessentially twenties qualities such as nerve and excess. They were highly and dramatically publicized. Although now they are more likely to be judged preposterous and pompous, they were immensely popular in their time and forecast an American obsession with the rich and famous continuing into the 21st Century. The Canary Murder Case broke all records for detective fiction, selling 20,000 copies in the first week of publication. It was also the first detective fiction to run in the eminent literary magazine Scribner’s.

Van Dine’s stories were the anti-thesis of the hard-boiled school, taking place largely among the upper classes and in the realms of high society and high culture, featuring the people, events and institutions of New York, including Stieglitz and his gallery, the famous Halls-Mills Murder and other true crimes of the decade. Many of Van Dine’s six letter murder cases (Canary, Bishop, Kennel, etc) were made into movies starring William Powell or Basil Rathbone as Vance, and including among others the wildly popular Louise Brooks (who ends up a corpse in the Canary Murder Case). Ellery Queen and Rex Stout, were to follow more successfully in his footsteps as the fascination of the public with Van Dine and Vance waned in the thirties. He is largely forgotten today and when remembered, as a curiosity of the times.