A New Book of Poetry
Parmenides in Minneapolis [Contubernales Books, 2025]
Today I learned that Contubernales Books, the small independent publisher of primarily Greek & Latin works in translation, has published a second book of mine : Parmenides in Minneapolis. (Their first effort was last year’s Mississippi River extravaganza, Green Radius.) One day I hope these books will surface, somehow, through the still pond of our culture’s literary-critical apparatus – its hearing-aid technology, so to speak (such as it is).
For a long time – since the early 1980s, in fact – I have been mining my own vein (or cursèd dry cistern, if you will) of the “American sublime”, or the modernist epic, or simply the l-o-o-n-g poem. The 20th century, and perhaps the early 21st century, have proven fertile ground for multifarious efforts of this kind, some of them quite brilliant and even great; but my own primary model and paragon in this regard, if you want to know, has not been Ezra Pound, or H.D., or T.S. Eliot, or W.C. Williams, or Charles Olson, or… or… or the many other imposing and erudite examplars.
No, I have only had two prime instigators : Osip Mandelstam – who is not even American, nor a writer of long poems! – and Hart Crane – who is. Crane, I find, mingled the classic beautiful-and-sublime into a profound contemporary long-poem invention : The Bridge. About Crane, I stand with Harold Bloom, and the sometimes-formidable critic John Irwin.
Fundamentally, American culture and politics are grounded in a particular measure, or concept, of human being – human nature, human personality. Both Eliot and Pound, reckoning all their shortcomings, are still inarguably great poets : yet in my view they missed something in American culture – its deeply liberal (as opposed to illiberal, also there) leanings. Americans at their best are optimistic, generous, hopeful, courageous, tolerant, humorous, humble, intrepid, and kind : and these character traits infuse their poetry with a sometimes-visionary splendor (Whitman; Dickinson; Stevens (sometimes); Marianne Moore; Crane…).
I can’t claim these qualities for my own poetry : but this is some of the general background that inspires it, and resists some of the more pessimistic and reactionary leanings of their grand contemporaries (Eliot, Pound, et al).