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August 15, 2007

KIRSCH ON LOWELL

Critical Mass, the NBCC blog, has inaugurated a new feature in which "critics and writers revisit NBCC finalists and winners they know well."  We hope they'll come up with a catchier name for the series but it gets off to a wildly promising start.  (UPDATE:  They've decided to name it "In Retrospect".)  Adam Kirsch appears to have overcome his distaste for blogs and contributed a first-rate appreciation of Robert Lowell's 1977 NBCC winner Day by Day.

Since Lowell died, no poet has achieved his kind of centrality, and probably no poet has wanted it. Edmund Wilson judged that only Lowell and Auden, of late-twentieth-century poets, managed to achieve literary careers "on the old nineteenth-century scale." But that is partly because, since World War II, poets have generally mistrusted that scale and its larger-than-life measurements. Lowell's sublime egotism, his guileless assumption that his life was representative of his times and deserved to be accordingly grand in scope, is now decidedly out of fashion. For today's poets and readers, Elizabeth Bishop--the only great poet of Lowell's generation to outlive him--offers a more trustworthy model of how a poet should write: carefully, precisely, attaining large ends with modest means.

In fact, by the end of his life, Lowell himself seemed to come to the same conclusion. That is why his last collection of poems, "Day by Day," occupies such an important, and ambiguous, place in his body of work. Published in 1977, just weeks before Lowell died, "Day by Day" went on to win the National Book Critics' Circle award--the last honor in a career that had already included the National Book Award and two Pulitzer Prizes. To its first readers, encountering "Day by Day" that fall, in the wake of the poet's ugly, anonymous death, must have been a strange experience--like reading a last will and testament, or a suicide note. For there are few books of poetry, by Lowell or anyone else, more saturated with death and the expectation of death. More than a subject, death in "Day by Day" is an optic, a way of seeing that colors every image and metaphor. It is a book written to be posthumous.

Critical Mass can feel a bit too insular sometimes, a bit too much like an NBCC cheering section.  But if this post is an indication of things to come, this series may well become essential blog reading for a deservedly wide audience.

UPDATE: Reader Tess notes in the comments box that this is, in fact, Kirsch's column in the Sun, which is mildly disappointing as the series is presented as original content for NBCC website, although the introduction to the post does acknowledge the Sun.  We've made an inquiry as to what's going on and if the rest of the series will be original posts, and will let you know when we hear.

FINAL UPDATE:  Thanks to John Freeman, who clarifies the situation in the comments box below, reproduced here:

This essay did run simultaenously in the New York Sun, you're right, but it is part of this project - "commissioned" by the NBCC and scheduled to dovetail with our program. Here's why it's run in two places though: #1 We don't have the budget to pay writers for their work, and that seems unfair, so we've told writers who have outlets where they can place these pieces (and get paid for them) to go ahead and we'll run them simultaneously. Some of these pieces will run the day they appear on Critical Mass also in the Hartford Courant, on poetryfoundation.org, and in many other publications.

And that leads to the focus of these project -- it's not about exclusivity. We want these pieces to be read by as many people as possible because, well, we hope they're good enough to merit a wide audience and we hope the books are good enough to deserve being read by a lot of people. On a great day, Critical Mass' readership is still in the low thousands, and print publications or popular web publications can still reach many more people.

The other pieces on Lowell you will see this week will be "original" -- as will next week's lead-off essay, and the posts we've got scheduled to follow it.

Posted at 12:15 AM in Litlinks |

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Comments

Tess

It's Adam Kirsch's column from today's issue of the NY Sun, so I don't think it truly counts as a blog post. Does it?
Though it doesn't matter if the writing is good.

Posted by: Tess | August 15, 2007 at 07:22 AM

John Freeman

This essay did run simultaenously in the New York Sun, you're right, but it is part of this project - "commissioned" by the NBCC and scheduled to dovetail with our program. Here's why it's run in two places though: #1 We don't have the budget to pay writers for their work, and that seems unfair, so we've told writers who have outlets where they can place these pieces (and get paid for them) to go ahead and we'll run them simultaneously. Some of these pieces will run the day they appear on Critical Mass also in the Hartford Courant, on poetryfoundation.org, and in many other publications.

And that leads to the focus of these project -- it's not about exclusivity. We want these pieces to be read by as many people as possible because, well, we hope they're good enough to merit a wide audience and we hope the books are good enough to deserve being read by a lot of people. On a great day, Critical Mass' readership is still in the low thousands, and print publications or popular web publications can still reach many more people.

The other pieces on Lowell you will see this week will be "original" -- as will next week's lead-off essay, and the posts we've got scheduled to follow it.

--John Freeman

Posted by: John Freeman | August 15, 2007 at 08:08 AM

Daniel

This pleases me to no end – an essay good enough for print, posted on a blog. Who could've imagined? "...it's not about exclusivity. We want these pieces to be read by as many people as possible because, well, we hope they're good enough to merit a wide audience and we hope the books are good enough to deserve being read by a lot of people." Absolutely right. Does this mean bloggers and print critics can be friends again?

Posted by: Daniel | August 15, 2007 at 11:31 AM

ed

No, Daniel, not at all. You are considering a Venn diagram that would wreak great havoc upon the universe. It starts with this notion of "original," which is none other than an outright prevarication. It continues with "clarifications" such as the above. It ends with a Warriors-style rumble at Penn Station, with litbloggers and print critics getting into a violent but nevertheless entertaining knife fight. Film, as they say, at eleven.

Posted by: ed | August 15, 2007 at 06:01 PM

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