This was really good! Never in a million years would I have expected to find you writing about Gary Snyder. I grew up in San Francisco so there were no end of ex-hippies pressing him on you, you are totally right about how dour and preachy he is but I have a lot of affection for stuff like "Smokey the Bear Sutra" and the Cold Mountain poems, where he displays a little bit of a sense of humor (same way I have it for "Howl" and "A Supermarket in California" despite Ginsberg's many annoying qualities). And his Han Shan translations introduced me to classical Chinese poetry, through which I found Pound etc. The Merrill stuff sounds so good, I always was interested in Sandover but wasn't sure if he was just a random crank propped up by Big Modernism -- happy to see that's not the case.
thanks! It was the editor's idea that I write about Snyder (whom I indeed had never read...)... Riprap and Cold Mountain are great, and there's a lot of good stuff too in like Regarding Wave, Axe Handles etc even though it's not work I'd probably ever reread for pleasure... Ginsberg can be really annoying, but ofc the two you mention are wonderful--and I love too things like Kaddish, Wichita Vortex Sutra, Fall of America.... I'm not really sure what Merrill's critical status is; I have rather the impression that the 'Big Modernists' of yesteryear (Olson, Creely, Duncan etc) aren't much read, and that Merrill is appreciated by people who also like his bff Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens etc, and so are more leery of Sandover's sweeping pretensions
This was really good! Never in a million years would I have expected to find you writing about Gary Snyder. I grew up in San Francisco so there were no end of ex-hippies pressing him on you, you are totally right about how dour and preachy he is but I have a lot of affection for stuff like "Smokey the Bear Sutra" and the Cold Mountain poems, where he displays a little bit of a sense of humor (same way I have it for "Howl" and "A Supermarket in California" despite Ginsberg's many annoying qualities). And his Han Shan translations introduced me to classical Chinese poetry, through which I found Pound etc. The Merrill stuff sounds so good, I always was interested in Sandover but wasn't sure if he was just a random crank propped up by Big Modernism -- happy to see that's not the case.
thanks! It was the editor's idea that I write about Snyder (whom I indeed had never read...)... Riprap and Cold Mountain are great, and there's a lot of good stuff too in like Regarding Wave, Axe Handles etc even though it's not work I'd probably ever reread for pleasure... Ginsberg can be really annoying, but ofc the two you mention are wonderful--and I love too things like Kaddish, Wichita Vortex Sutra, Fall of America.... I'm not really sure what Merrill's critical status is; I have rather the impression that the 'Big Modernists' of yesteryear (Olson, Creely, Duncan etc) aren't much read, and that Merrill is appreciated by people who also like his bff Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens etc, and so are more leery of Sandover's sweeping pretensions