WILLIAM CORBETT

Selected and otherwise

WILLIAM CORBETT — Tue, 13 May 2008 15:54:13 GMT

A sheaf of post-April poetry and poets
Simic is a poet not of big gloomy poems but of small glooms and fears that haunt our waking lives and disturb our sleep.

LOVED: Charles Simic is a poet not of big gloomy poems but of small glooms and fears that haunt our waking lives and disturb our sleep.

After I exited Lafayette College in June 1964, I spent the summer as a cub reporter for my Connecticut home-town newspaper, The Trumbull Times. The only news worth repeating is that I interviewed Jayne Mansfield. She was doing summer stock in a nearby theater and promoting her record album Byron, Tchaikovsky and Me. The interview took place in a motel room. Ms. Mansfield sat on the bed wearing a bikini. Behind her sat her agent, the soon-to-be king of porn movies Matt Cimber. Being a wiseacre, I asked, “Miss Mansfield, what is your favorite Byron poem?” She whispered with Cimber, then turned to me and purred, “All of them are my favorite.”

Ms. Mansfield notwithstanding, most poetry readers make their own selections of their favorite poets. Recently in an unconvincing, and in my opinion unfair, New York Review of Books review of Robert Creeley’s Collected Poems, CHARLES SIMIC bemoaned the thick “collected” volumes of the recently dead like Creeley and Kenneth Koch. Simic argued that books of selected poems would best serve most, if not all, poets. At present he is as good as his word, and the current 60 Poems (Harcourt) is the result. Well, half as good as his word, since the book selects only from 1987 onward, leaving the first 25 years of Simic’s work to come.

Simic is prolific — his 19th book of poems, That Little Something (Harcourt), has just appeared. He has written many worthy, funny, dark, and beautiful poems. Why should we be denied him on his off days? Like so many prolific poets, he has to write a lot to write his good ones — what Elizabeth Bishop, author of 90 published poems, called “the real poems.” I’m all for the cream, but if you love a poet — and Simic’s work is loved — you want it all, if only to enjoy him at his second-best or worst and make your own selection in context. That Little Something reminds readers that Simic is a poet not of big gloomy poems but of small glooms and fears that haunt our waking lives and disturb our sleep. “I come with an expiration date,” he writes in “Eternities.” So do we all.

Sweet fallout

WILLIAM CORBETT — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 20:15:22 GMT

Philip Whalen’s word bombs
Philip Whalen (1923–2002) is a great American poet.

BEAT: No other American poet sounds like Whalen, though Ginsberg and Kerouac come close.

The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen | Edited by Michael Rothenberg | Wesleyan | 920 pages | $49.95

Philip Whalen (1923–2002) is a great American poet. Some — too few — readers have known this since the mid 1950s, when his poems first appeared in little magazines and small-press books. In publishing The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen (edited by Michael Rothenberg), Wesleyan gives the world at large this incomparable poet, and a major literary event. The book is huge (920 pages!) and at $49.95 expensive. Readers may have to forgo a few lunches or just slap their plastic down with blithe abandon. Either way, you will enjoy Whalen’s poems, and you may come to love them.

This is Whalen in high gear, from “Hymnus Ad Patrem Sinensis”:

I praise those ancient Chinamen
Who left me a few words,
Usually a pointless joke or a silly question
A line of poetry drunkenly scrawled on the margin of a quick
splashed picture — bug, leaf,
caricature of Teacher
on paper held together now by little more than ink
& their own strength brushed momentarily over it.
Their world & several others since
Gone to hell in a handbasket, they knew it —
Cheered as it whizzed by —
& conked out among the busted spring rain cherryblossom winejars
Happy to have saved us all.
31:viii:58

Whalen is kin to those ancient Chinamen, and his American cohort includes Gary Snyder (classmate at Oregon’s Reed College), Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Joanne Kyger, Michael McClure, Charles Olson, and, perhaps the most significant influence on his writing, Jack Kerouac. Whalen was a Beat writer who read at the famous Six Gallery event at which Ginsberg debuted “Howl.” He adored Jane Austen and Gertrude Stein, had more than a passing knowledge of several realms of science, read widely in ancient and modern history, and was a thoroughly cultivated gent, “a Fat and Silly poet” who rarely took himself seriously. He committed the last 35 years of his life to Zen Buddhism.

News to me

WILLIAM CORBETT — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 19:31:46 GMT

Robert Hass’s National Book Award
Notwithstanding the occasional university-press finalist (this year: David Kirby), the National Book Award for poetry is generally open to only a few American poets.

MILOSZ MAN: Hass is a master of the “long breath,” lines musical and packed yet leisurely.

Time And Material: Poems 1997–2005 | By Robert Hass | Ecco | 96 pages | $22.95

Notwithstanding the occasional university-press finalist (this year: David Kirby), the National Book Award for poetry is generally open to only a few American poets — those published by major presses like Ecco (HarperCollins), Knopf, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Poets published by small presses rarely get nominated and never win. This year’s winner, Robert Hass, is published by Ecco, and he is a fine poet despite the handicap of having an unfair advantage when it comes to prizes. If you do not know his poetry (it’s new to me), the prize-winning Time and Materials, his first book in nine years, is a good place to start.

Time and Materials opens with a two-line poem, as if Hass were getting started after a layoff. That’s followed by nine shortish poems that, though nicely made, feel like warm-ups. Then “Winged and Acid Dark” with the lines that I take to be one of the book’s moral hubs:

Bashô told Rensetsu to avoid sensational materials.
If the horror of the world were the truth of the world,
he said, there would be no one to say it
and no one to say it to.

The ease of statement turns out to be typical of Hass, and so is the somewhat distant regard from which he sees things. But he is also a poet of great intimacy, and his distance is the “Oh!” that he defines for his friend Czeslaw Milosz as “a long breath of wonder.”

Hass is a master of that long breath, and his lines are as supple and sure, as musical and packed yet leisurely, as those of any American poet I know writing today. That’s evident in this volume’s “The World As Will and Representation” and at least 10 other poems equal to it. Hass’s long lines create the free flow and amplitude of stories while accommodating much beautiful natural description — beautiful in visual and aural accuracy.

Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place

WILLIAM CORBETT — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 19:18:14 GMT

The best film about an American poet ever made
Ferrini and Riaf present the complex American literary figure Charles Olson in a clear way by focusing not on the facts of his life but on the facts of his work.

What was, and what might have been

WILLIAM CORBETT — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 16:16:35 GMT

Sara and Gerald Murphy in Williamstown
Sara and Gerald Murphy are back, and in the words of their friend Cole Porter, “What a swell party it is.”

Gerald Murphy, Razor (1924)
Art © Estate of Honoria Murphy Donnelly/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Sara and Gerald Murphy are back, and in the words of their friend Cole Porter, “What a swell party it is.” They are as attractive and fascinating as they were in Calvin Tomkins’s New Yorker profile, which was published in 1971 as the book Living Well Is the Best Revenge. Deborah Rothschild has curated a superb exhibition, “Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy,” at the Williams College Museum of Art that is lavish and rich in detail. It has many levels, but the paramount reason for going to Williamstown is that all seven of Gerald Murphy’s extant paintings are on view. You will see for yourself that Murphy is a major artist, America’s foremost Cubist painter.

It’s rare that an exhibition has at its core as much loss and heartbreak as “Making It New” does, and rarer still that a mystery unfolds. As for the world of the Murphys, last names are enough — their friends in Paris and Cap d’Antibes in the 1920s included Picasso, Léger, Stravinsky, Cocteau, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Fitzgerald. Man Ray took many of the Murphy family photographs that are on display, and the record of their grace, style, and gift for friendship is abundant. This is an exhibition that requires the time it takes to read letters, notebooks, diaries, the helpful wall texts, and the excellent catalogue.

The Murphys were glamorous — Sara was a celebrated beauty — and smart in all senses of the word, interested in music, dance, painting, sailing . . . well, everything worthy of interest, and they didn’t have to work at it. They were natural aristocrats devoted to each other and to their three children. Loss and heartbreak stunned them and contributed to Gerald’s giving up painting, but in the 1920s he painted brilliantly, and the family dazzled like the sun.

Murphy saw his first Cubist work in Paris and knew at once that he wanted to paint. Of the paintings he produced, only seven have survived. His personal favorite, Wasp and Pear (1929), has long hung in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Like all of his pictures, it is heraldic, public art from an imagination concentrated on things for their own sake and painted without a visible brushstroke. His work is powerful in reproduction, so that photographs of lost paintings give us a sense of what we are missing. When Murphy painted these pictures, they were modern. Now they appear timeless.

Rhyme schemes

WILLIAM CORBETT — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 15:04:25 GMT

Some 'Poetry Month' bon-bons
In honor of poetry month, these books have been plucked from the torrent.

INDELIBLE: Earlier Poems collects the books and chapbooks Franz Wright published before his 2001 Pulitzer Prize.

Poetry pours on in America. So, in honor of poetry month, these books have been plucked from the torrent. They range from the silly to the sublime, and offer so much pleasure that it is a wonder so few read poetry. No matter. They’re here for our enjoyment; 100,000 readers wouldn’t make the best of them any better.

THIRD RAIL: THE POETRY OF ROCK AND ROLL (MTV Books/Pocket Books, 204 pages, $12, paper) is edited by Jonathan Wells with a foreword by Bono. Wells is a “widely published poet” and Bono actually wrote (or allowed his name to be used for) a foreword that quotes Bob Dylan, “he not busy being born is busy dying.” Bono further describes the poets in this book as “evangelists and hopeless addicts” of “the mysterious power of Rock and Roll” — in other words, the one-two craperoo to be expected from this sort of marketing approach to anthology-making. Who might buy a book like this? I have no idea, but whoever does will find good poems by August Kleinzahler, Thom Gunn, Kevin Young, Paul Muldoon, and a host of other poets who sing in no one’s doo-wop chorus.

MICHAEL O’BRIEN’s SLEEPING AND WAKING (Flood Editions, 80 pages, $12.95, paper) is the most alert book of poems I have read in some time, both alert-eyed and alert to street speech and the weights and measures of words. His turf is Manhattan’s West 20s, but in whatever locale he finds himself, like Thoreau in Concord, he travels a good deal. His poems, often set in short sequences, are as spare and subtle as those of any American poet writing today. At 68 years old, O’Brien already has many self-published books, and has translated poems from a number of languages. Now, the splendid Floor Editions has given him the well-made book he deserves. His poetry is first-rate.

Poetry magazine has used some of its Lily bequest to endow a prize for humor in poetry, which Billy Collins won. (If Henny Youngman said that, you might laugh. No one had to look very far to find him.) Perhaps the next time Poetry awards the prize they will look far enough to find PAUL VIOLI, whose new book, OVERNIGHT (Hanging Loose Press, 77 pages, $15, paper), should win every prize for humor in poetry on the basis of two poems: “As I Was Telling Dave and Alex Kelley” and “Counterman.” There is nothing light about Violi’s verse; his subject is the rich vitality of language, his nose so keen and ear so sharp that he finds it in places like Islip, New York, and when ordering a “Roast beef on rye, tomato and mayo.” Violi’s poems are fearless — humor courts failure at every turn — and beautifully constructed. He is one of a handful of American poets worth making a detour to hear read aloud.

Howling in Boston

WILLIAM CORBETT — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 19:50:09 GMT

This old towne
A city is small geography — even the City on the Hill, the Athens of America — to merit a poet laureate.

The pro

WILLIAM CORBETT — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 17:23:46 GMT

Robert Crais’s winning formula
During dinner parties nowadays, everyone, writers included, talks about movies. Rarely does a “serious” novel dominate conversation, but crime novels sometimes have a moment.

HIS MOMENT: Crais’s brutal protagonist punishes transgressors with impunity.

During dinner parties nowadays, everyone, writers included, talks about movies. Rarely does a “serious” novel dominate conversation, but crime novels sometimes have a moment. Readers have a thirst for formula fiction. We want the pull of narrative and the comfort of the tried and true with a twist, an edge, something original to the writer. Not original in the sense of Proust or Joyce, whose novels can be measured only against fiction that is dissimilar but considered to be of a like stature. The crime novelist has to be a professional, for his work will be measured against Chandler, Hammett, MacDonald (no need for first names), Leonard, Connolly, Mankell, and Child, the masters of the form. Robert Crais is a pro. The Watchman is his 14th novel, but it’s my first, and now I’ll have the pleasure of catching up with him.

The Watchman is “a Joe Pike novel” — Pike being the silent and deadly half of a two-man team. His partner, in all but name only, is the funny and dogged Elvis Cole, the gumshoe of the two. Pike is, like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher and Michael Connolly’s Harry Bosch, an ex-soldier. Like Bosch, Pike served in Vietnam, and like Reacher, he’s capable of sudden, deadly violence. He’s a master of Asian martial arts, his body a scarred and tattoo’d weapon. The Pike-Cole partnership is one of Crais’s fresh wrinkles, but the most interesting wrinkle is Pike himself. Like Chandler’s Marlowe, he’s a knight, but his killing force and near total indifference to the deaths he causes make him feel contemporary. He is a man in a permanent state of rage (not that he knows it) who because of his profession (in this novel he guards a rich young woman) is free to think and act with little emotion and afterward feels no remorse. Pike can do what Americans of whatever political stripe seem to want to do: punish transgressors with impunity and be in the right. His father abused him as a child, and that gives him even greater moral authority. In crime fiction you can load the dice and still, if you write with force as Crais does, come up a winner.

Just the facts

WILLIAM CORBETT — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 21:23:26 GMT

Frederick Seidel’s odd charms
Ooga-Booga is Frederick Seidel’s 12th book of poetry to appear since 1963. Frederick Seidel reads from Ooga-Booga (mp3)

HUTU DANCER: It’s in Seidel’s favor that his poems stand so far from the mainstream — far, in fact, from any stream.

Ooga-Booga is Frederick Seidel’s 12th book of poetry to appear since 1963. A balding, necktied, dark-suited middle-aged man looks out from the book’s cover. His expression is deadpan. This is not a man about to get down and boogie. An edgy sense of humor is among this book’s charms, but it means to keep you at arm’s length. Seidel is cool and not one to give too much away.

Seidel’s collections of poetry have been making waves for years (his first was reviewed by James Dickey in the New York Times Book Review), but this is the first I’ve read, and I wonder how I’ve missed him. His poems are certainly an acquired taste — any American poet who begins a book with the lines “Huntsman indeed is gone from Savile Row,/And Mr. Hall, the head cutter.” is an acquired taste. But it’s in his favor that his poems stand so far from the mainstream — far, in fact, from any stream. Their chief virtue is fidelity to a world of travel, money, and privilege, an Upper East Side New York life. Seidel knows who he is and does not try to buddy up to his readers. Ooga-Booga’s first poem, “Kill Poem,” centers on fox hunting. I wager that this is not a sentence you will read in any other review of a new book of American poetry. Fox hunting, yes, but as with all Seidel poems of more than a page and half, “Kill Poem” accumulates much else before it ends. He knows how to give a poem its head. To keep the various materials straight he uses a procession of declarative sentences:

--
I spend most of my time not dying
That’s what living is for.
--
I stand in the open field on the far side of Wainscott Road
And watch the summer, autumn, winter sky.
--
The downpour drumming on my taxi gets the Hutu in me dancing.
--

This flat tone, all brass and no strings, allows him to say odd things in a matter-of-fact way: “I saw the moon in the sky at sunset over a river pink as a ham.” His other organizing principle is rhyme, which he wields the way rappers do when his line is long, but in a few instances, like “Love Song,” he wants a pop lyric’s lilt. Seidel’s sound is hard, at times monotonous, and his attack is straight ahead. After 12 books he isn’t looking to experiment with that sound — he is writing the poems that he can write.

Nice shot

WILLIAM CORBETT — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 20:11:20 GMT

Joshua Prager revisits the home run
No home run in baseball history is as famous as Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard round the world.”

HOT-STOVE TALE: Prager tells you more than you want to know, but it’s still a great story.

No home run in baseball history is as famous as Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard round the world.” Not Pirate Bill Mazeroski’s off Yankee Ralph Terry in 1960, or Pudge Fisk’s in 1975 against the Big Red Machine in the 12th inning at Fenway Park, or Dodger Kirk Gibson’s home run on one leg off Oakland’s Dennis Eckersley in 1988. Mazeroski’s won a World Series; Fisk’s and Gibson’s blasts won World Series games: Thomson’s won a pennant for the come-from-behind New York Giants. It would have been memorable in any case, but coming off the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Ralph Branca to win a one-game playoff lifted the “shot” to the pinnacle of baseball’s Parnassus.

Joshua Prager’s book about Thomson, Branca, and the home run begins by noting that fans of a certain age know where they were on October 3, 1951 when Thomson hit the “shot.” It is an American date like December 7, November 22, and September 11. My relationship to the home run is threefold. I saw it on television though, truth be told, it did not mean that much to me because neither the Giants nor Dodgers were my team. In 1959 I bowled at an alley in Stratford, Connecticut, owned by Ralph Branca so that I could receive a pair of bowling shoes from the hands of baseball’s reigning goat. On the home run’s 13th anniversary I married Beverly Mitchell, whose father, a lifelong Dodger fan, had been at the game. (October 3 is also the date of O.J. Simpson’s acquittal.)

Prager, who writes for the Wall Street Journal, spent five years on this book, during which time he found out seemingly everything there is to know about the events of that afternoon at Coogan’s Bluff in the Bronx. His book is enjoyable, and I recommend it, but he could have used a stern editor. There is so much detail here — the make of spikes Thomson and Branca wore! — that this reader became overwhelmed to the point of scanning entire sections. It’s clear Prager emptied his notebooks, tape recordings, and the drawer he kept them in to fill nearly 500 pages. His title comes from the poem in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience — too bad he did not heed Blake’s proverb “Enough! or Too Much.”

Demon daze

WILLIAM CORBETT — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 14:54:42 GMT

Hart Crane complete
Hart Crane roared through his short, tormented, and doomed life.

TOUGH LOVE: The accessible poets of Crane’s days are dust, but his hard lines endure.

Hart Crane roared through his short, tormented, and doomed life. Born in Ohio in 1899 and reared by feuding parents, he quit high school at 17 to be a poet in New York. His great talent was recognized early, and his work found publishers and patrons. But Crane could not escape his demons: his drunks were epic and obnoxious, testing all his friendships. Returning from Mexico in 1932, he drowned himself off the Isle of Pines near Cuba. It is a stunning irony that his father invented the Life Saver candy. The facts of his volatile life have prompted several biographies, the most recent of which appeared in 2002.

Crane was not a modernist, but his long poem The Bridge is a modern poem. His literary grandfathers were Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. He found more in common with Yvor Winters and Allen Tate than with his great contemporaries Pound, Stevens, and Williams. His poetry is celebrated for wild genius and knotty brilliance but in the next breath disparaged as flawed.

In this volume, well edited by Langdon Hammer (I am no expert but a fan of 47 years who still has his heavily marked copy of the paperback selected poems), there are 143 pages of poetry followed by a selection of Crane’s critical prose and more than 500 pages of his letters. No other significant 20th-century American poet’s work has this configuration. Crane’s short life is one explanation; a second is his tireless revising. Who cares how many pages a poet produces when he writes of Melville, “The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath/An embassy,” and begins the exquisite “Pastorale”:

No more violets
And the year
Broken into smoky panels.

Even in his drunken, downward-speeding last days, Crane wrote “And so it was I entered the broken world/To trace the visionary company of love . . . ” We would love to have more Crane, but that was not to be.

The first of his two published books, White Buildings, 29 pages in this volume, may be slender, but it is exceptional. If Crane did not arrive entirely coherent, his packed lines and high tone are original to him. Allen Tate’s plodding introduction, reprinted here, missed the point in emphasizing his obscurity. The accessible poets of Crane’s days are dust; his hard lines endure.

All poetry is local

WILLIAM CORBETT — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 22:19:50 GMT

Heaney’s District encompasses the world
The poems achieved are graspable physical objects, not “infinite,” but so wide and so deep, and solid.

INSIDE OUT: Heaney writes about a turnip snedder, a Boston fireman’s helmet, Wordsworth’s ice skates, a coal scuttle, and a stove lid.

“District” in Seamus Heaney’s title might mean the places where his imagination has jurisdiction and holds sway. “Circle” is easier. Poems in this book circle back to his childhood, his love of things, to Wordsworth, a formative and continuing influence, to the Tollund Man and, in the last poem, to the signal event in his youth, the accidental death of his younger brother. This book does not come full circle but expands outward as the past resonates “Always new to me, always familiar.” The poems achieved are graspable physical objects, not “infinite,” but so wide and so deep, and solid.

The first poem, “The Turnip-Snedder” (Hughie O’Donoghue’s photograph of the machine and its teenage worker is on the book’s cover), begins, “In an age of bare hands,” reminding us that from the start Heaney meant to write handmade poems built out of his feel for words. Another of the book’s widening circles is the appeal things long lived with have for him. He knew the turnip snedder from his youth, and he also writes about a Boston fireman’s helmet, Wordsworth’s ice skates, a coal scuttle, and a stove lid. About is the wrong word. Heaney writes from the inside out — you don’t just see what is described, you hold and heft the thing. He is as adept, masterful in fact, at physical actions. “A Shiver” asks the man swinging the sledge whether it does him good “To have known it in your bones, directable,/Withholdable at will,/A first blow that could make air of a wall,/A last one so unanswerably landed,/The staked earth quailed and shivered in the handle?” We can’t answer for the man, but the feel is palpable enough to carry wider circles of ambiguity, the shock of force in the world, that are among this book’s deeper notes.

“A Shiver” is a sonnet, and so are the sequences titled “District and Circle” and “The Tollund Man in Springtime,” and a half-dozen other poems in this book. Heaney’s sonnets are containers that, like musical instruments, contain sounds. The form holds the energy of his words and thoughts, his music, and simultaneously releases it. No poet alive uses the sonnet with such ease and power. He has made something old new again.

Imagining the truth

WILLIAM CORBETT — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 17:42:42 GMT

Filmmaker Robert Gardner’s ‘nonfiction’
Gardner’s work may be fact-based, but this has not crimped his imagination or his ability to tell stories.

THE TRANSIENT EYE: Gardner allows us to consider that the worlds he has filmed so beautifully were disappearing as his camera rolled.

The flyleaf of The Impulse To Preserve describes Robert Gardner — for years the director of Harvard’s Carpenter Center of the Visual Arts and the creator of its film program — as a “nonfiction filmmaker.” This bland label is preferable to the dry and restrictive “anthropological” or “documentary,” but descriptions are inadequate. In all of Gardner’s films — from Dead Birds (1961), which is set among the Dani people of Papua, New Guinea, to Passenger, his account of artist Sean Scully’s painting a picture — there is a lyricism and a personality that lifts his work out of category. He writes, “the true nature of film resides in its capacity for storytelling.” Gardner’s work may be fact-based, but this has not crimped his imagination or his ability to tell stories.

His book consists of diaries, letters, and photographs (more than 400) that chart his adventures in making films for more than 40 years in Indonesia, Africa, and Asia. The record will interest anyone who’s seen Deep Hearts, Forest of Bliss, or City of Lights. It’s also a practical education for non-fiction filmmakers similar to what John Boorman’s The Emerald Forest Diary and Eleanor Coppola’s Notes provide for those who make “movies.” But what gives Gardner’s book its kick, its emotional and intellectual impact, are his meditations, short essays in boldface type, at the opening and closing of The Impulse To Preserve.

The book opens with a photograph of a wrinkled, crawling African Pygmy woman. “In filming,” Gardner writes, “there is always a problem of conveying a true indication of scale; on the screen the head of a fly can look like a monster, and a toy boat on a tiny pool like a ship at sea. This may be why there are so many pictures of anthropologists with their hands on pygmies’ heads.” In other words, we need to remember that in the medium we commonly consider the most realistic, the problem is illusion. The filmmaker achieves a truth in pointing his camera and editing the results of what he sees, but he never achieves the truth.

Hearsay

WILLIAM CORBETT — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 20:36:27 GMT

One man’s ‘Bush Chronicle’
Eliot Weinberger is a New York editor, translator, anthologist, essayist, and throwback to the day when American literary intellectuals more regularly spoke their political views in print.

Eliot Weinberger is a New York editor, translator (most notably of Octavio Paz’s poetry), anthologist, essayist, and throwback to the day when American literary intellectuals more regularly spoke their political views in print. Most of the essays collected in What Happened Here first appeared in European and Asian publications and on the Internet. This book and Weinberger’s recent essay published in the London Review of Books, “What I Heard About Iraq in 2005,” brings his intelligent dissent home where it might do some good.

In the early essays, Weinberger gives an eyewitness report of life in Manhattan’s West Village on and immediately after September 11. He revisits New York “One Year After” and then “Sixteen Months After” the fall of the Twin Towers. His stance is that of “one person who reads the newspapers,” a version of the man in the street. He pays readers the compliment of imagining that they’re as baffled and angered by what they read as he is. His prose is clean and precise, and he delivers his opinions in calm, measured tones. He’s outraged by the coup d’état that, he’s convinced, criminal manipulation of the presidential vote in Florida and the Rehnquist Supreme Court staged for George W. Bush, but he’s not bombastic. It’s as if he sought to be heard by lowering his voice so that it flies under the radar with which we protect ourselves from the professional blowhards who pass on news and opinion these days.

By accepting what he reads as fact and organizing them in simple, elegant forms, Weinberger raises obvious questions and subtler ones as well. In “What I Heard About Iraq,” he begins each sentence with “I heard.” The result is a document of Bush government words and deeds that any attentive newspaper reader might have come across. “I heard Donald Rumsfield say: ‘I don’t believe anyone that I know in the administration ever said that Iraq had nuclear weapons.’ ” What is there to think but that Rumsfield, speaking from the power of his Defense Department podium, is lying? If challenged, which will not happen in the forums Rumsfield controls, the Secretary might demand that his challenger come up with one such statement. I don’t have one on the tip of my tongue, and neither does Weinberger, but we know that Rumsfield is lying. We know, as Weinberger shows, because his heap of quotations demonstrates that Rumsfield and others in the Bush administration lie consistently. This is hardly news.