Back from Georgia

Last week I was on vacation in Georgia, on Saint Simon's Island, about an hour south of Savannah. The parents of TBG rented a house there, very large and very close to the beach, and it was extremely generous of them to invite me along with their family. Somehow — amid all the guitar playing, feasting & libation, sailing, walks on the beach, sunburns, driving to and fro, arguments or fights and conversations — I found time to read Roberto Bolaño's new novel, The Skating Rink; to pick through the forthcoming Swallow Anthology of New American Poets; and to make it halfway through Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady, which I'm enjoying more than I had expected and plan to finish. Although, as I also learned and learned well on this vacation, the best plans have a way of unraveling on you.

* It is good to see continued, and I think growing, interest in Geoffrey Hill, a poet you know — if you read my review at The Critical Flame — I admire enormously. I've heard a rumor that there is a complete collected edition in the works; I hope it is fact because no amount of selection does his verse justice. Dipti Saravanamutt has a new essay on Hill at Jacket Magazine, entitled 'Some Aspects of the Tetragrammaton: on Geoffrey Hill'. It is not the finest essay I've read on Hill, but I suppose they cannot all be gems.

* Robert Shnall at The Boston Review reviews the late Reginald Shepherd's collection of essays, Orpheus in the Bronx. 'In this National Book Critics Circle Award-nominated collection of essays, the late poet, critic, and editor Reginald Shepherd rejects what he calls “identity poetics,” or “the use of poetry as a means to assert or claim social identity.” Such an approach, he argues, is “constraining, limiting the imaginative options of the very people it seeks to liberate or speak for.” As a gay African-American writer raised in the Bronx ghetto, Shepherd sought to transcend sexual and racial “otherness” through poetry. . .' As I came across this review it struck me — strangely, since I knew him exclusively online or in print but never personally — that I actively miss reading his blog and his writing at the Poetry Foundation website.

In the midst of many arguments and much beating of the breast (by myself as well) over contemporary poetry movements and their underlying theories, I recall this reasoned and reasonable paragraph by Reginald: 'In the interstices of being horribly sick (this was another chemotherapy week, with the usual panoply of crushing exhaustion, constant diarrhea, intermittent attacks of abdominal pain, continual nausea, and serial vomiting), I have been thinking about Lin Dinh’s fascinating recent Harriet post “Our Bodies, Our Selves,” which begins by juxtaposing my recent litany of my various physical ailments with Kenneth Goldsmith’s claims that an undefined “we” no longer have coherent selves, that “We’re infinitely adaptable and changeable minute-to-minute.” Lin Dinh’s response to Goldsmith begins with these words: “Could someone with even a single serious illness believe that he can be ‘everyone and no one at all’? That’s he’s ‘infinitely adaptable and changeable minute-to-minute’ I don’t think so. Hell, even a simple headache brings me back to my senses, reminds me of the limitations of my body and mind.” I think that everyone is at least a somewhat different person in different situations, but I don’t believe that people are wholly malleable. Nor do I think that anything is infinite, not even the universe: the most decentered self still has boundaries. But I can see the truth in both viewpoints.'

His ability to see the truth in so many viewpoints was a true and unqualified virtue. I believe it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who said (likely it is apocryphal) that intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing viewpoints in the mind at once and still be able to function. That we could all be so intelligent!

* And: an interview with myself! At Between the Lines, a blog run by book lover Kevin Neilson. Here is a little tidbit.

'KN: Actors, comedians, and athletes are often elected to political office. Is there a novelist you think would make a good senator? Explain.'

'DEP: No decent novelist would burden himself with the world of government — which is essentially the business of being for others. Writers are for themselves and their writing, too solitary to shake babies & kiss hands. (Actors are used to being for others, having a different relationship with the audience.) Bad novelists, on the other hand, would love to win an election but would be terrible statesmen, and ought really to give up fiction and write obituaries for a living.'