Reader's almanac; M.L. Rosenthal

It's time for the reader's Allman act with Warren Bauer. Originally broadcast over station WNYC New York and distributed by national educational radio. The reader's almanac is America's oldest continuous book program. Here now is Mr. Bauer modern poetry is not easy to keep up with. There are many reasons for saying that flatly. First for those who are not specialists in modern literature or who are not widely read there are difficulties in the text of some modern poets not insurmountable of course. If they study and care are given to the reading of the work. Contemporary poets the language will come clear with figures of speech yield their meanings and their suggestions. The surface difficulties will disappear. Communication can come about. But the poetry of our time is not quite ready to be read as one runs listening to what cannot be perfunctory. I think it deserves to be given one it requires careful consideration and rereading until the poem gives up to the reader of what it was meant or created to say. There is always another difficulty for the

ordinary reader too even one with a particular interest in poetry. The means of publication in magazines and books on a serious level are not really easy to come by. The best work does not get into the most available journals and books of contemporary poetry seldom sell in considerable quantities. And I thus often not easily available outside of a few major centers. All readers of current serious butter therefore need help and I get it from a breed of men and editors who are not sufficiently appreciated I think. I mean an anthologist. And I have one with me here today distinctly one of the good ones. Professor L. Rosenthal of New York University the editor of the just published the new modern poetry subtitled British and American poetry since World War 2. Now the subtitle defines the scope of the book exactly. Reza Rosenthal has brought together significant examples of the best at least in his informed opinion. The best poets

who have come up on the scene since the war. Now this is typical of the distinct service that an anthologist performs to win all of what has been available and widely scattered publications discover the main trends and minor ones as well. Select the best among both poets and their individual works thus making up a book that is both meaningful and highly useful to American readers interested in keeping up with contemporary poetry. You know a word or two more about Professor Rosenthal. He is of course more than an editor more than an anthologist he is a poet author of a distinguished volume of poetry called Blue Boy the skates. He's also a critic was published studies AWB ates and William Carlos Williams an authoritative reviewer of poetry and a former poetry editor of the magazine The Nation. And a highly esteemed professor of English and I've been telling our listeners about why I think anthologies are important and useful fellows but I haven't said anything at all much of a

job putting together such a book as the one we're talking about the new modern poetry probably was. But obviously you know that better than I for you would it. Can you give me and our listeners some concept of the magnitude of the job. Well I thank you first for that head swimming kind introduction. The magnitude of the job. Well it's a simple job and a complex one both. I've been reading the poets. I know a great many of them personally. I've edited their work in magazines help them publish their books. Over a number of years. So that it wasn't simply a matter as you doubtless realise of just reading through magazines and books. On the other hand before I actually made my decisions I had to. Reread a great many of their poems and read a number of the things really with a fresh eye. For the first time in their several books

and select out the work that I thought was best or most relevant or both to the whole current scene was there any labor saving device possible to aid you in all of this. Any assistance of any sort who do you bend depends solely upon your own industry and taste. Well I use my eyes as a visual aid. It's pretty hard to use assistance there were some very kind people who helped me with some of the purely mechanical work such as typing out poems or getting copies of books for me that sort of thing. But there really are no shortcuts to an anthology let me ask you if poets attempt to get in to such a book perhaps by influencing you in any particular way does that happen to you and I'll just. I think it happens to anthologies generally didn't happen very much to me because the book The fact of the book was going to be published was mentioned in the press

only after the book was pretty fired vast and in the preparation and I was also out of the country for a couple of years before I before the word got around certain poets Yeats anthology of The Oxford Book of Modern English verse. Yates was plagued by people who wanted to get into his anthology. And I think that was a quite different literary milieu and situation. So there's something to savor and that was just getting out of the country just read a book. Very true. And I want to get out of the country now to come out. Now how many boys did you end by including. Must have been a flexible number all along in your alliance that you finally ended up at about 100. 5 I'm not quite sure it's around that number. I thought I had them up and got somewhere around a hundred or something that was actually counting them right. I was going to be a very small block originally with just a few poets and then as I was I went into the matter and.

Just explored both the poets would really establish themselves quite well and the other poets who were very promising and. Had a few poems indicated that in the future they do very very well indeed and the problem got somewhat more complex as you can imagine with the middle of a running stream. It's not it's not a review of the work of the past. What you were just saying I think you're touching at any rate upon some of the criteria that you use to help you decide who should go ahead. I wasn't married to include the best poets who had published since World War 2 was that you had other criteria no doubt. Well best poems I would cite. That's part of the two. Because you have a number of poets. The whole body of this work doesn't yet amount to what you might call a major. Body of work. But who on the other hand have written poems of the utmost interest importance in the in the contemporary context.

I. Know it's here somewhere I think that you begin functioning as a critic as well as a teacher perhaps I think an anthologist is a teacher among other things. And you're lecturing on what has happened to contemporary poetry. And that wasn't in effect what you were doing in the introduction which I thought altogether admirable and balanced full of observations upon literature in our time. But it did strike me some of the things that you said in your introduction would suggest that you had some special ends to achieve and I just picked out one or two. Like making human Dermott better known for example and an Austin Clark too. Yes those were enthusiasms of yours and you took the opportunity to too. Well this is a collection for American readers. And American readers really because there is a general problem that when people think about modern or contemporary poetry they still generally are talking about TS Eliot. And as a Republican and perhaps some people. Would bring in Robert Lowell who is

unquestionably the outstanding poet of our generation. But a great many of these poets have done superb work without being known at all. And the further away you go from America. The more this is likely to be true for American readers not human. DERMOTT has been a great force in Scottish poetry and to a lesser extent but very important extent British poetry generally throughout most of this century. And yet he's virtually unknown to Americans. He's still writing with great prophecy. And so I thought. That really he ought to be presented whereas other poets like William Carlos Williams and the elder pound and so on they're very very important for our modern poets as well. Quite well-known by anyone who doesn't know poetry. Well I certainly wasn't and wasn't making any suggestion that you should not have urged a number of new poets upon it as in effect that's what an anthology does

yes. Random from the very beginning I thought as an act of criticism. That's right. Of course. I wonder are you now with the book in hand and sometime gone maybe since the final choice had to be made. Are you convinced you made the proper choice is no one out and want to have been in. Not at all I mean I'm a hotbed of remorse suffering grief whatever you call it. And I was at the moment that I actually chose the poems as well. These are all made as it were under the pressure of. The conception of this particular book. There are many poets who are very interesting a number of them. Perhaps quite as interesting as a few that I have included. There are particular poems that have been published since. I got the book together and. It was a rather quickly come out of the press that I wish I could have had for the book. And there were some delays in the printing that cost me some suffering.

But I think this is simply standard. The standard experience of an anthologist if it's at all conscientious. He can't help thinking of what he left out. Yes true and of course sometimes he has to leave things out I mean I know very well because you probably had some difficulties in getting permissions to reprint some of these works that you might want to include. Well there were two kinds of difficulties it was only only one poet who luckily is not essential to the book would not allow her work to be published in any anthology. Then there are the publishers who ask enormous permissions fees for individual poems without any regard for the fact that if a book with several hundred poems in it. I have to pay $100 or more for each poem it would be financially impossible. For the for the usual editor who usually has to back. His own choices

or for the publisher to back up those choices. It does seem reprehensible and also it's sort of a diet book. Eight point three almost to take such an attitude it would seem to me so I think it is beyond a certain point obviously. Poets don't have very large incomes they all have incomes commensurate with their talent ordinarily and one wants to help them get income. But a publisher can very easily destroy a useful publication and publicity for his poet by demanding a fee that is completely out of line. Yes this happened in a few instances I try to to. I try to meet the charges whenever possible and whenever I did not when the when a poem was absolutely essential to the conception of the book. But this is a very special problem which anthologist of many kinds of right into the problem of the publishing industry really how to keep the authors going while.

Collecting fees for themselves that will have to be the subject of another. Yeah she's probably a much longer than that and this one probably needed international conference I set it. Let me ask you what trends in the poetry of our time are distinguishable in the verse that passed under your eyes you were working on this book you had some very interesting things to say about this sort of thing. In your introduction and you can steal as many of those ideas as you. Well I can't really remember exactly what I said. Deduction and I say this I think the most important trends are probably the most difficult to ferret out and state explicitly there. When one reads a poem with thinks this is a wonderful poem. And this poem feels and says and moves into something which is beautiful significant helpful wonderful for us in some way. There are factors at work that are very very difficult to isolate consciously. They have to do with the poet's artistry and. His sensibility in general and his relation to the feeling of the

age. And so it was a kind of relevance and really fine poetry. It's almost indefinable in a sense one can say there are certain movements of course. For example Robert Lowell whom I mentioned has been the leader of what we call the confessional movement in poetry in which the poet uses his own. Personal life and particularly the neurotic crises of his life the moments of greatest vulnerability and often shameful vulnerability as a chief subject of his poem. This this movement is very very active today. We have wonderful poems by Sylvia Plath who is one of Lowell's. Most interesting followers a lot of very independent in her own right. And sexton as well. WD Snodgrass and even Allen Ginsberg is a confessional poet in his long poem cut ish. Which actually I don't have represented in this collection but haven't what's written in that

manner before or has it been simply that a new name has been conferred upon this kind of writing. Well I think it has been. It's in a way it's implicit in lyric poetry which is expressed as private emotions and there's no question that romantic poetry the great romantics wrote about themselves and their feelings. It's just that it's done more violently more explicitly in greater private detail. People give the game away about their private lives to a general public they don't know. Far more than most poets ever did in the past. It's not the only movie by any means. We have a very interesting movement experimental so-called in this country called the Black Mountain poets which has. But but influential are a great number of young writers. I notice that phrase a number of times in your book and I suspected of course that these reports who were associated with Black Mountain College they had a black man revue perhaps yes a few of them a top of Black Mountain College a number of years ago and the poets in the group

generally that are the most important ones. As far as the general public is concerned. CHARLES OLSSON and Robert Duncan Paul Blackburn and Denise leverage are the young portly Roy Jones has released related to this group in the character of his work and then there are a number of others as well. I'm particular glad to have had your explanation of the confessional type of poet. I just simply assumed it was a kind of an intensification of the lyrical function of the verse. Well I think you know it is more than that I think it is the latest turn on the romantic tradition far more extreme than this respect. The poet generally feels that his private suffering and really its excuse for his bringing out his private problems explicitly nakedly somehow that the suffering embodies the predicament of the whole culture of the whole civilization.

Sylvia Plath whom you mentioned of course is one of the most fascinating of the new poets and I suspect she does represent that quite as well almost as Lowell perhaps even to a prep your greater extent in some respects. You say something about her and what you think of her. Well as you probably know she committed suicide as years ago. She published one book the Colossus before her death. And then posthumously her poem The poems of the last months of her life Ariel were published. It was Ariel that won everybody's attention Colossus was an interesting book but not specially exciting. But in Ariel a great number of the poems were poems written under in the state of suicidal excitement as it were. And which poet was readying herself for her final act. But. The elements entered that whole state psychological state

had a good deal to do with seamed and in the poetry with the experience of Western Europe and America in the war and after the war. A number of the poems and daddy for example and Lady Lazarus and other poems. She dandified herself with the people. The Jews who were murdered Schmitz for example. But another sense she takes on the responsibility for their murders as well so that she. She feels in the poetry that we were all Nazis somehow as well as all victims of the Nazis. But coupled to all this I'm sure you agree with this that there is a great poetic effect it is an almost incandescence in her work. She's a marvelous grains. Yes it's very odd that because otherwise it wouldn't really make any difference as in Korean trade right. She the title poem of Ariel for example is a marvelous lyric poem beautiful soaring turning into just a highly charged poem that explodes at the very end. Magnificent way.

Now another group I daresay of course is those who might be called social protesters and I suppose probably Alan Ginsburg would do as well as an exemplar as any. What would you be inclined to say or racket or our Encanto or a type of poet. Well actually most of our poets are social protesters and have been ever since the romantics. But I must modern poets are very profound critics of modern civilization and its pretensions and for joy and aspects and betrayal of romantic and democratic ideals. Robert Lowell for example has many of us poems cut right at the heart of some of our most cherished institutions and I think that Ginsberg makes use of the poetic tradition that partly goes back to Blake and Whitman and partly is based on left wing oratory

of the 30s and so on that his family was where radicals of the 30s Lisa's mother was according to his poem cottage. And he was very much affected by. Populist revolutionary oratory I should say. I thought it was a very conservative boy if I remember as a poet Yes I don't know much about his I don't know him by him to be sure. Well I don't know this is necessarily true that a poet is at odds with his surroundings or more critical of them at least if we had any happy poets and. Well it depends what the poet looks at and he's in love with somebody writes a love poem I think it could be a happy partner if you look at it as children and doesn't think about what the world holds in store for them or just thinks about them. He has happy poems that we have a number of poets whose poetry if not ecstatically happy has at least. A. Sadly joyous even that poem of Sylvia Plath's Ariel that I mentioned in a way it's an ecstatic poet.

Yes though it does have a suicidal tendency and whatever else we can say poetry is going to be written in the years to come it's quantity will surely not diminish. Are you optimistic about its quality even as the appearance of good poets is utterly unpredictable I suppose. Yes I am. You can't help being you can't predict that we won't have any more good poetry in the future. We've had a. We've had a go in tradition of tremendous poetry now in the English language especially the United States. Since World War 1 since shortly before World War One. Let me ask a corollary question. What about the audience reporter is that growing Is there any belief or hope that the audience reporters are really growing. It's very hard to pontificate on that subject actually. I mean the little idea what I mean by saying is if I said anything I think I've been pontificating here that well there are great audiences and very large

audiences who go to hear poets read. That's one sign. Another sign is that many poets are teaching and very popular teachers certainly at the college level. And I think we've had two or three university generations who have been who have learnt to see what the poets are doing and have developed a certain of an appreciation of poetry this is all it seems to me that the poets have gone around to high schools. The new programs are being developed and written and read to high school children that have usually they come back very enthusiastic about the response. I suppose what it really is critical is we ought to have a publisher here or a number of publishers to testify to know whether the books original books of poetry are selling any better than they used to let's say I don't think they really are they still seem to sell it best at between three and five hundred copies with a few exceptions. Well that's very very small indeed and perhaps

you cannot blame altogether the publishers trying to get four poets as much as they possibly can. Although it is very likely to be sure that they will get more for their poets by sending them out to read them and to teach as you have just suggested which is a very hopeful sign at any rate. Well thank you Professor Rosen fall for this quick overview of contemporary poetry as it has been reflected in your anthology called a new modern poetry just published by Mick Millen. It's a critical attitude I'm altogether certain contributes to the possibility that poetry may come to mean more and many more people than has been its audience for some time. You heard Warren Bower and critic M.L. Rosenthal as they discuss the book the new modern poetry. This was another program in the series the reader's Allman act. On our next program Mr. Bowers guest will be Ben Lucian Burman author of blow a wild bugle for catfish band the readers on an act is

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