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Something Said
Analyzes the writings of modern authors such as William Carlos Williams, Ross Macdonald, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino, and Nathanael West
266 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
2 people are currently reading
149 people want to read
About the author
Gilbert Sorrentino
45 books132 followersGilbert Sorrentino was one of the founders (1956, together with Hubert Selby Jr.) and the editor (1956-1960) of the literary magazine Neon, the editor for Kulchur (1961-1963), and an editor at Grove Press (1965-1970). Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) and The Autobiography of Malcolm X are among his editorial projects. Later he took up positions at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, the University of Scranton and the New School for Social Research in New York and then was a professor of English at Stanford University (1982-1999). The novelists Jeffrey Eugenides and Nicole Krauss were among his students, and his son, Christopher Sorrentino, is the author of the novels Sound on Sound and Trance.
Mulligan Stew is considered Sorrentino's masterpiece.
Obituary from The Guardian
Interview 2006
Mulligan Stew is considered Sorrentino's masterpiece.
Obituary from The Guardian
Interview 2006
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 2, 2014
Back to the Classroom! That's how it felt to me but that's the nature of authoritative academic writing & if you are the kind that delights in that (& I do), you'll dig this book.
Professor Sorrentino takes his role as critic seriously : "the rationale for ( a critic's) writing is that it serves to explicate or illuminate the texts of others; it is useful. What a fine ambiguity (...) to detach itself from its cause, and to float free of it. It begins to move, that is, toward the literature that it purports to be "talking about." It is as if it wants to be literature too, as if it cannot countenance its function as that of the useful but wishes to approach the condition of the useless." ( From the Preface)
Wow, did he just label literature "useless"! Provocative, huh? Not really, as the first chapter The Act of Creation and Its Artifact, opening with a Walter Benjamin quote, makes Sorrentino's aesthetics absolutely clear: "No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener."
In other words, art as art, existing solely for itself, in itself—it has no need to be *useful*, get it?
Something said: the unusual title comes from a Maurice Blanchot quote: "No sooner is something said than something else must be said to correct the tendency of all that is said to become final..." It emphasises the essential nature of criticism that it must define itself in terms of what has come before it. Sorrentino is prudent enough to admit that his views have undergone considerable changes over the years but that he "has resisted the urge to alter the past." I read the 1984 North Point Press version which lacks the additional 25 essays covered in the Dalkey 2001 expanded edition but this one has a really pretty cover though the typeset is very small, in a large typeface, this could easily have run into 450 pages. This book should be read slowly because as a writer, Sorrentino "sees inside the process to offer remarkable insights and evaluations."
Written & published over a period of 25 years, this critical collection of 47 essays deal specifically with the discovery of an American aesthetic. There's righteous anger here over the callous sidelining & marginalization of authentic American voices in literature by the pashas of public opinion in publishing & academia. Sorrentino would make an eloquent spokesperson for the Buried Book Club (!) in fact many of the BBC luminaries are covered here.
Art is its own country: this moving line comes from William Carlos Williams who gets the lion's share of attention here ( a chapter of 36 pages & a total of 5 articles), Sorrentino makes a persuasive case for him, the only sour point is the repetition of the same arguements & quoting the same poem across the different articles (!), they lose force that way, thankfully, the next poet, Jack Spicer, escapes that fate–he gets a brilliantly-written chapter.
Of nearly 20 writers & 20 poets ( not counting the ones in anthologies) covered here, the running theme is a celebration of originality, boldness, & not being a sell-out to crass commercial interests, of not playing it safe either in their lives or in their works: "His voice is the voice of one advocating for a particular aesthetic principle. In poetry, it is much ado against image as the structuring principle of a poem. In fiction, it is in favor of writing what is there and treating the book as an object and not a thing which represents (anti- mimesis) objects. To be crass, he is against flowery, literary language. But the man, his voice, is grinding the correct axe."
Poetry lovers will delight in discovering many obscure (?) poets here, they'll also find the correct tools for reviewing poetry collections—each poet covered here gets a unique treatment & a fresh perspective. Sorrentino takes frequent jabs at the so-called "Poetic Style" which is indiscriminately used for any prose that is dense and/or merely strings pretty words together without any rhyme or reason: "...it is but another assault upon that embattled art. (...) This is the opposite of the way poetic language functions, in which the writing becomes clearer as the emotion is focused more sharply." ( P.185)
And again, in the Updike chapter: "Oddly (and sadly) enough, this kind of fiction is often thought to be poetic, though it has nothing to do with poetry unless one conceives of the poem as a bauble.(...) Hugh Kenner has termed this sort of writing " a surface scummed by iridescent prose." That strikes me as both just and exact."( P.189)
Sorrentino is also not a man to mince his words—he reserves his most withering criticism for Marianne Moore, & John Gardner, while his essays on Woiwode, & Updike are textbook lessons on witty put downs. Robert Frost & Carl Sandburg are his favourite whipping boys, & Tom Wolfe is plumber-like!
This essay collection is different from the ones I read by Gass, & Barth recently, in that Barth, as a matter of principle, never did book reviews, while Gass' essays, in Sorrentino's terminology would be called "literary" ones.
But they are all essential readings, that goes without saying.
Essays written by writers are wonderful resource materials— they correct, enhance, & illuminate our reading experiences, e.g.; I recently read The Day of the Locust, having already seen Hollywood-based movies like Barton Fink, and Mulholland Drive, it didn't leave that much of an impact on me but reading Sorrentino's take on it, gave me a fresh appreciation of it. Sorrentino didn't indulge in the tired old cliches of the *dirty underbelly of the dream machine* etc, etc, rather he read future events into it:
This is called a reader's contribution to the text—that way, a text never turns stale!
Such critical essays also boost our morale when our reading turns out to be similar to the writer-critic's, as happened with Sorrentino's review of Gass' Blue book & my reading of it— that was such a high!
My favourite chapters:
The Act of Creation and Its Artifact: an essay to turn again & again to when discussing the creative process.
Jack Spicer: it makes you want to run to his poems right now!
Edward Dahlberg: more readers please.
Hubert Selby: a tremendous chapter, I loved it more cause I saw parallels with Vollmann, e.g.;
AN OCTOPUS/of ice: evisceration!
John Hawkes' Oranges: I'll read the book first & then watch the movie.
Le Style de Queneau: charming!
Paul Bowles: The Clash of Cultures. Excellent.
John Gardner:Rhinestone in the Rough. Sorrentino's sense of humour is amazing! Gotta read his fiction soon.
Genetic Coding: a writer not only belongs to a tradition of writing, his writing also follows the dictates of his DNA. An essay to return to when reading Sorrentino's novels.
That's all folks.
Professor Sorrentino takes his role as critic seriously : "the rationale for ( a critic's) writing is that it serves to explicate or illuminate the texts of others; it is useful. What a fine ambiguity (...) to detach itself from its cause, and to float free of it. It begins to move, that is, toward the literature that it purports to be "talking about." It is as if it wants to be literature too, as if it cannot countenance its function as that of the useful but wishes to approach the condition of the useless." ( From the Preface)
Wow, did he just label literature "useless"! Provocative, huh? Not really, as the first chapter The Act of Creation and Its Artifact, opening with a Walter Benjamin quote, makes Sorrentino's aesthetics absolutely clear: "No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener."
In other words, art as art, existing solely for itself, in itself—it has no need to be *useful*, get it?
Something said: the unusual title comes from a Maurice Blanchot quote: "No sooner is something said than something else must be said to correct the tendency of all that is said to become final..." It emphasises the essential nature of criticism that it must define itself in terms of what has come before it. Sorrentino is prudent enough to admit that his views have undergone considerable changes over the years but that he "has resisted the urge to alter the past." I read the 1984 North Point Press version which lacks the additional 25 essays covered in the Dalkey 2001 expanded edition but this one has a really pretty cover though the typeset is very small, in a large typeface, this could easily have run into 450 pages. This book should be read slowly because as a writer, Sorrentino "sees inside the process to offer remarkable insights and evaluations."
Written & published over a period of 25 years, this critical collection of 47 essays deal specifically with the discovery of an American aesthetic. There's righteous anger here over the callous sidelining & marginalization of authentic American voices in literature by the pashas of public opinion in publishing & academia. Sorrentino would make an eloquent spokesperson for the Buried Book Club (!) in fact many of the BBC luminaries are covered here.
Art is its own country: this moving line comes from William Carlos Williams who gets the lion's share of attention here ( a chapter of 36 pages & a total of 5 articles), Sorrentino makes a persuasive case for him, the only sour point is the repetition of the same arguements & quoting the same poem across the different articles (!), they lose force that way, thankfully, the next poet, Jack Spicer, escapes that fate–he gets a brilliantly-written chapter.
Of nearly 20 writers & 20 poets ( not counting the ones in anthologies) covered here, the running theme is a celebration of originality, boldness, & not being a sell-out to crass commercial interests, of not playing it safe either in their lives or in their works: "His voice is the voice of one advocating for a particular aesthetic principle. In poetry, it is much ado against image as the structuring principle of a poem. In fiction, it is in favor of writing what is there and treating the book as an object and not a thing which represents (anti- mimesis) objects. To be crass, he is against flowery, literary language. But the man, his voice, is grinding the correct axe."
Poetry lovers will delight in discovering many obscure (?) poets here, they'll also find the correct tools for reviewing poetry collections—each poet covered here gets a unique treatment & a fresh perspective. Sorrentino takes frequent jabs at the so-called "Poetic Style" which is indiscriminately used for any prose that is dense and/or merely strings pretty words together without any rhyme or reason: "...it is but another assault upon that embattled art. (...) This is the opposite of the way poetic language functions, in which the writing becomes clearer as the emotion is focused more sharply." ( P.185)
And again, in the Updike chapter: "Oddly (and sadly) enough, this kind of fiction is often thought to be poetic, though it has nothing to do with poetry unless one conceives of the poem as a bauble.(...) Hugh Kenner has termed this sort of writing " a surface scummed by iridescent prose." That strikes me as both just and exact."( P.189)
Sorrentino is also not a man to mince his words—he reserves his most withering criticism for Marianne Moore, & John Gardner, while his essays on Woiwode, & Updike are textbook lessons on witty put downs. Robert Frost & Carl Sandburg are his favourite whipping boys, & Tom Wolfe is plumber-like!
This essay collection is different from the ones I read by Gass, & Barth recently, in that Barth, as a matter of principle, never did book reviews, while Gass' essays, in Sorrentino's terminology would be called "literary" ones.
But they are all essential readings, that goes without saying.
Essays written by writers are wonderful resource materials— they correct, enhance, & illuminate our reading experiences, e.g.; I recently read The Day of the Locust, having already seen Hollywood-based movies like Barton Fink, and Mulholland Drive, it didn't leave that much of an impact on me but reading Sorrentino's take on it, gave me a fresh appreciation of it. Sorrentino didn't indulge in the tired old cliches of the *dirty underbelly of the dream machine* etc, etc, rather he read future events into it:
This is called a reader's contribution to the text—that way, a text never turns stale!
Such critical essays also boost our morale when our reading turns out to be similar to the writer-critic's, as happened with Sorrentino's review of Gass' Blue book & my reading of it— that was such a high!
My favourite chapters:
The Act of Creation and Its Artifact: an essay to turn again & again to when discussing the creative process.
Jack Spicer: it makes you want to run to his poems right now!
Edward Dahlberg: more readers please.
Hubert Selby: a tremendous chapter, I loved it more cause I saw parallels with Vollmann, e.g.;
AN OCTOPUS/of ice: evisceration!
John Hawkes' Oranges: I'll read the book first & then watch the movie.
Le Style de Queneau: charming!
Paul Bowles: The Clash of Cultures. Excellent.
John Gardner:Rhinestone in the Rough. Sorrentino's sense of humour is amazing! Gotta read his fiction soon.
Genetic Coding: a writer not only belongs to a tradition of writing, his writing also follows the dictates of his DNA. An essay to return to when reading Sorrentino's novels.
That's all folks.
September 8, 2014
One of the great writers of our barbarian America, writing on great writers from our barbarian America, and a few scribblers from Lands Beyond, which we might all visit some day or another, if only in books. I read this piecemeal over a period of what might have been years- (there's really no accounting for Time anymore, is there?) - and feel primed to set out and explore the fertile wordworlds Sorrentino is here rhapsodizing eloquently upon. The Americas, they are broad and wide and still scarcely mapp'd, if you ask me... When Britain dreamt of conquering the Far West, did they dream strange eventual portentous dreams of Gilbert Sorrentino?
Read
May 20, 2017Readers of fiction ought to read essays written by fictioneers. This means that readers of fiction ought to read Sorrentino’s Something Said; and doubly so for readers of poetry. Be sure to find the 2001 edition from Dalkey Archive which includes 25 pieces in addition to those found in the 1984 first edition from North Point Press, the edition reviewed here. These pieces, mostly book reviews, are enumerated here for your unBURYing pleasure.
“The Act of Creation and Its Artifact” -- A meditation upon the relationship between the object and its production.
William Carlos Williams -- The writer who haunts much of this collection. Reviewed are: Spring and All (poems); The Collected Later Poems; A Voyage to Pagany, a BURIED novel; WCW’s “Stecher trilogy” comprised of White Mule, In the Money, and The Build-Up, all BURIED; William Carlos Williams: The Knack of Survival in America, a study of WCW; William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked, a critical biography by Paul Mariani; the short story “The Knife of the Times,” in which Sorrentino comments on WCW’s description of his language as proceeding “from the mouths of Polish mothers.”
Jack Spicer -- six pieces about this poet, a Sorrentino favorite.
Louis Zukofsky -- a poet of some importance to Gil.
William Bronk -- poet.
Kenneth Rexroth -- poet; essays, The Alternative Society: Essays From the Other World.
Lorine Niedecker -- poet.
Jonathan Chamberlain Williams -- poet; BURIED. What might be the titles of his books, nothing I can identify on goodreads with certainty, Amen Huzza Selah and In England’s Green &.But he may have no books. ** BUTBUTBUT, LISTEN, “Jargon Book has been, since 1951 or therabouts, a phenomenon in American publishing. And Jargon Books is, quite simply, Jonathan Williams.” Gil’s first book came off of Jargon’s presses. And then, we hear that his stable includes -- Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Oppenheimer, Duncan, Layton, Perkoff, Loy, Patchen, Lowenfels, Eigner, Levertov, McClure, etc., etc.
**A little more digging, and I’ve located who the who this guy is. Jonathan Chamberlain Williams; or, from the wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan...
Edward Dahlberg -- A member of The BURIED Book Club, unEARTHing begun by Friend Garima. Dahlberg’s books should be read stat.
Paul Blackburn -- poet; BURIED.
Hubert Selby -- Selby fans have here a bit of required reading.
Coleman Dowell -- A member of The BURIED Book Club. Please unEARTH stat.
Michael McClure -- poet; BURIED.
Max Finstein -- poet; BURIED.
Ron Loewinsohn -- poet; here is reviewed his Watermelons, but goodsreaders will know him for his novel, Magnetic Field(s).
Denise Levertov -- poet.
Charles Olson -- poet.
Andrew Hoyem -- poet; BURIED.
Neruda -- some comments here on the difficulty of translating Neruda, who, even to me, needs no introduction.
Marianne Moore -- an evisceration. “It is instructive to note that the three elder poets that this country has taken to its heart are almost wholly ignorant of the reality of living in this country.” Those three are Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, and Marianne Moore.
Ross Feld -- poet; BURIED.
John Wieners -- poet; BURIED.
George Oppen -- poet.
Nathanael West -- novelist. “A Glance at West’s West” with some remarks on the question of the Hollywood novel. His The day of the Locust is on McCaffery’s 100.
John Hawkes -- a review of his The Blood Oranges which Gil loves and which I destroyed by having seen the film before reading the book. Don’t do that.
William Gaddis -- The Sorrentino review of J R.
Larry Woiwode -- “I am not suggesting that this novel is a failure; it is far from that.” A review of Beyond the Bedroom Wall. Woiwode might be BURIED.
John Updike -- a review of his A Month of Sundays. “Oddly (and sadly) enough, this kind of fiction is often thought to be poetic, though it has nothing to do with poetry unless one conceives of the poem as a bauble.”
William H. Gass -- a review of his Blue book.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- a review of The Autumn of the Patriarch.
David Antin -- poet, BURIED.
Queneau -- a review of the genius, Exercises in Style. Required reading.
Calvino -- review of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Don’t tell me haven’t read this one yet. OR, tell me you can’t resist any longer its reading.
Paul Bowles -- on the occasion of the publication of Collected Stories, 1936-1976.
Luis Rafael Sanchez -- a review of his Macho Camacho’s Beat, perhaps the novel most of interest to me of what’s been unEARTHed for me here by Mr Sorrentino, next to the William Carlos Williams fiction. He’s BURIED if he’s only read in Puerto Rico. goodreads has only one reviewish review.
Manuel Puig -- review of his wonderfully titled Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages.
John Gardner -- an evisceration of his cliche-ridden prose on the occasion of the publication of his October Light. Now I’ve gotta really dig up those pieces from Gass about Gardner. Here Gil says that he is “of the puppeteer school of novelists.”
Ralph Cusack -- his Cadenza, which has an afterword from Gil himself in the Dalkey edition. BURIED.
Ross Macdonald -- according to Gil, a genre writer (detective) who does genre writing the right way.
Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America (would appear to be the right book) -- you’ll read Something Said yourself, and this is taking too long, so I’ll not adumbrate the contents of this volume, reviewed by Gil, unless the Spirit move me at a later date.
Ten Pamphlets -- (10 books of stuff reviewed) Aime Cesaire, Clayton Eshleman, Paul Blackburn, Frank Samperi, David Antin, Richard Brautigan, Robin Magowan, Ted Berrigan, Jim Brodey, Bill Dodd. [this is taking too long and they’re poets so do your own homework]
The Black Mountain Review -- a review of several products of this periodical.
“Empty, Empty Promises Promises” -- what has capitalism ever done for art?
Dan Rice -- painter.
Mort Lucks -- painter.
William Anthony -- he draws.
“Genetic Coding” -- a bit about influence and inheritance.
That is all. You are left now with one of two tasks, your choice. A) read Something Said or B) read something from the above list which you have hitherto not known about. Myself, I’ll go with either a novel from WCW or the one from Sanchez or a Dahlberg or a Coleman. Until next time, which next time is when I find the more complete version of this volume, happy reading.
[if you MUST know, the star-dock is cuz there’s too much stuff about poetry in here. I make those stars dance exactly how I want to make them dance.]
“The Act of Creation and Its Artifact” -- A meditation upon the relationship between the object and its production.
William Carlos Williams -- The writer who haunts much of this collection. Reviewed are: Spring and All (poems); The Collected Later Poems; A Voyage to Pagany, a BURIED novel; WCW’s “Stecher trilogy” comprised of White Mule, In the Money, and The Build-Up, all BURIED; William Carlos Williams: The Knack of Survival in America, a study of WCW; William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked, a critical biography by Paul Mariani; the short story “The Knife of the Times,” in which Sorrentino comments on WCW’s description of his language as proceeding “from the mouths of Polish mothers.”
Jack Spicer -- six pieces about this poet, a Sorrentino favorite.
Louis Zukofsky -- a poet of some importance to Gil.
William Bronk -- poet.
Kenneth Rexroth -- poet; essays, The Alternative Society: Essays From the Other World.
Lorine Niedecker -- poet.
Jonathan Chamberlain Williams -- poet; BURIED. What might be the titles of his books, nothing I can identify on goodreads with certainty, Amen Huzza Selah and In England’s Green &.
**A little more digging, and I’ve located who the who this guy is. Jonathan Chamberlain Williams; or, from the wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan...
Edward Dahlberg -- A member of The BURIED Book Club, unEARTHing begun by Friend Garima. Dahlberg’s books should be read stat.
Paul Blackburn -- poet; BURIED.
Hubert Selby -- Selby fans have here a bit of required reading.
Coleman Dowell -- A member of The BURIED Book Club. Please unEARTH stat.
Michael McClure -- poet; BURIED.
Max Finstein -- poet; BURIED.
Ron Loewinsohn -- poet; here is reviewed his Watermelons, but goodsreaders will know him for his novel, Magnetic Field(s).
Denise Levertov -- poet.
Charles Olson -- poet.
Andrew Hoyem -- poet; BURIED.
Neruda -- some comments here on the difficulty of translating Neruda, who, even to me, needs no introduction.
Marianne Moore -- an evisceration. “It is instructive to note that the three elder poets that this country has taken to its heart are almost wholly ignorant of the reality of living in this country.” Those three are Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, and Marianne Moore.
Ross Feld -- poet; BURIED.
John Wieners -- poet; BURIED.
George Oppen -- poet.
Nathanael West -- novelist. “A Glance at West’s West” with some remarks on the question of the Hollywood novel. His The day of the Locust is on McCaffery’s 100.
John Hawkes -- a review of his The Blood Oranges which Gil loves and which I destroyed by having seen the film before reading the book. Don’t do that.
William Gaddis -- The Sorrentino review of J R.
Larry Woiwode -- “I am not suggesting that this novel is a failure; it is far from that.” A review of Beyond the Bedroom Wall. Woiwode might be BURIED.
John Updike -- a review of his A Month of Sundays. “Oddly (and sadly) enough, this kind of fiction is often thought to be poetic, though it has nothing to do with poetry unless one conceives of the poem as a bauble.”
William H. Gass -- a review of his Blue book.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- a review of The Autumn of the Patriarch.
David Antin -- poet, BURIED.
Queneau -- a review of the genius, Exercises in Style. Required reading.
Calvino -- review of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Don’t tell me haven’t read this one yet. OR, tell me you can’t resist any longer its reading.
Paul Bowles -- on the occasion of the publication of Collected Stories, 1936-1976.
Luis Rafael Sanchez -- a review of his Macho Camacho’s Beat, perhaps the novel most of interest to me of what’s been unEARTHed for me here by Mr Sorrentino, next to the William Carlos Williams fiction. He’s BURIED if he’s only read in Puerto Rico. goodreads has only one reviewish review.
Manuel Puig -- review of his wonderfully titled Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages.
John Gardner -- an evisceration of his cliche-ridden prose on the occasion of the publication of his October Light. Now I’ve gotta really dig up those pieces from Gass about Gardner. Here Gil says that he is “of the puppeteer school of novelists.”
Ralph Cusack -- his Cadenza, which has an afterword from Gil himself in the Dalkey edition. BURIED.
Ross Macdonald -- according to Gil, a genre writer (detective) who does genre writing the right way.
Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America (would appear to be the right book) -- you’ll read Something Said yourself, and this is taking too long, so I’ll not adumbrate the contents of this volume, reviewed by Gil, unless the Spirit move me at a later date.
Ten Pamphlets -- (10 books of stuff reviewed) Aime Cesaire, Clayton Eshleman, Paul Blackburn, Frank Samperi, David Antin, Richard Brautigan, Robin Magowan, Ted Berrigan, Jim Brodey, Bill Dodd. [this is taking too long and they’re poets so do your own homework]
The Black Mountain Review -- a review of several products of this periodical.
“Empty, Empty Promises Promises” -- what has capitalism ever done for art?
Dan Rice -- painter.
Mort Lucks -- painter.
William Anthony -- he draws.
“Genetic Coding” -- a bit about influence and inheritance.
That is all. You are left now with one of two tasks, your choice. A) read Something Said or B) read something from the above list which you have hitherto not known about. Myself, I’ll go with either a novel from WCW or the one from Sanchez or a Dahlberg or a Coleman. Until next time, which next time is when I find the more complete version of this volume, happy reading.
[if you MUST know, the star-dock is cuz there’s too much stuff about poetry in here. I make those stars dance exactly how I want to make them dance.]
December 12, 2016
Undue Care and Attention
In my last couple of years of secondary school, I did some holiday work for an attorney who lived next door.
He hated litigation, and must have come perilously close to some professional negligence actions, because my job was to draft the pleadings that would initiate legal action against drivers who had injured his clients or damaged their cars in motor vehicle accidents. Often the files had been sitting in his in-basket for over 12 months. I had to empty his in-basket.
I found a pleading that somebody had served on one of his clients, and used that as the basis of my first draft.
I alleged that the defendant had driven "without due care and attention". My boss crossed it out and alleged that they had driven "with undue care and attention".
I couldn't convince him that this seemed to mean that they had driven with more care and attention than was appropriate, rather than less!
"Something Else Must Be Said"
Sorritoni's essays reminded me of this experience, because he seems to have been motivated by the desire to remedy situations where some authors or books were paid undue attention, i.e., either more or less attention than they were due.
Most of his essays could be labelled "Corrections" in the sense, ironically, used in the title of Jonathan Franzen's novel.
If Sorritoni felt an author had been given more attention than they were due, he would be the instrument of massive ad hominem eviscerations and putdowns.
If, on the other hand, he felt that they had received less attention than they were due, he would eulogise them, especially if they had been one of his buddies or had praised his works and deserved to have the favour returned.
Sputter and Rage
Either way, Sorritoni approached his task with a sense of "moral imperative" and a belief that he was being "brilliantly funny":
"I’ve always been taken with ad hominem attacks - I love them - they’re so deliberately unfair. There is no rational reply to them except a sputter - and rage."
Needless to say, those whom Sorritoni took such pleasure in eviscerating weren't very pleased about it, and often used the very next opportunity to reciprocate.
Which is probably the reason such novels as "Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things" received a less positive reaction than was due to it:
"Hostile, cold, and silent. They were the three states. Or let’s put it: hostility, frigidity and silence. The book was born into those, that climate. But, you see, the thing that has always annoyed me about the people who were deeply displeased with the book is that they did not see in the book two things: the comic aspects of the book, which I think are obvious, and the compassion in the book."
Mind you, I'm sure that the authors whom he eviscerated, if they had been alive, would likewise have felt that Sorritoni had overlooked the comic and compassionate aspects of their books.
Some would argue that Sorritoni was just applying high standards of artistic integrity.
Tell them they're dreaming!
Rant and Cant
If you read only one of the essays or reviews in this collection, you might think that Sorritoni is an exquisite writer and critic.
When you read two or more, you inevitably realise that the criteria he uses to judge works vary from author to author and work to work. This recognises the subjectivity of critical standards. However, what becomes apparent after a few reviews is that Sorritoni's criteria are often inconsistent. He's just making it up as he goes along. On the other hand, there's one criterion that all the authors he praises lavishly share, and that is that Sorritoni thinks they've been unjustly ignored or neglected by other critics. His praise is motivated not just by redressing the balance, but by scorning his academic and professional rivals and implicitly or explicitly attacking the authors whom they have praised (he singles out Mailer, Roth and Updike as novelists).
What these authors have done wrong is to become popular, i.e., to win an audience. I've never worked out what is supposed to be wrong with this. Sorritoni seemed to think that it somehow deprived his friends and favourites (he talks up the members of a male buddy club; 0f 72 chapters, less than 5% discuss female writers) of an audience. Not to mention undermining the authority and integrity of his criticism, even posthumously. Any wonder that he's become the patron saint of the oversensitive Buried Book Club (which occasionally finds a home and a five star rating for an orphan book, if less frequently a review).
HOMAGES & PASTICHES:
In Praise of Jack Pepper's Real Things
[In the Words and Style of Sorritoni]
Not to go into a great song and dance about it, but Jack Pepper is a scandalously neglected poet, at a time when there are few poets worth attending to in any way whatsoever.
America eats her artists alive.
His great glory and the contempt in which Jack Pepper was held for so many years are both dependent upon the fact that he just would not be a good fella and stay in the slot that the Untermeyers, the Eliots, and even the Pounds would have him in. He confounded the picture that had been carefully drawn by endless risks, by constant ventures into areas of literary endeavour that were not poetic. To all genres he brought freshness and brilliance. To dullards his poetic was (and is) ‘arbitrary’. So be it. Its very ‘arbitrariness’ has been the major force behind the contemporary American poetry which still characterises the ‘official’ poetry of our time.
Art is a country by itself. The poet’s job is to extract intelligible forms from seemingly unintelligible things. Things are ideas, and ideas must be, ultimately, things - for the poet. The poet must make reality useful through the employment of the imagination; and conversely, that imagination, to be legitimate, must be inseparably linked to reality. Mr. Pepper, so far as is possible in language, makes real things; he has for some time now achieved his own aesthetic, which speaks of a removal from the concept of image as a method for ‘connection’ within the poem; and instead pushes for a pursuit of those essences in the world which may be said to ‘correspond’. To be free of the image, to be free of the machinery of poem as literary game, to place, as it were, the poem in the position of the revelatory - this is Pepper’s program. The world is here, outside us, the poem is a tool to reveal its correspondences, not by means of simile, metaphor, or image, but by means of language itself.
The poet’s task is to make his words real, make them, that is, things as certainly as things of the earth are that, i.e., things. There are dangers. The most obvious, it would seem, is that one may pursue reality within the poem and end up with description. The poem back into narrative, the matters of prose. So Pepper had somehow to use the words in such a way that narrative preoccupation and movement are both avoided, yet technique is avoided, also.
The poem is an instance of reality, not a gloss of same; the language, not its tropes and elegances, is the core of the ultimate poem; the poet is not an interpreter, but a revealer; things do not connect, neither in the poem nor in the life from which it springs: they correspond. This lemon as against the lemon in the world. To connect is to muddy and blur; to correspond is to isolate and sharpen.
The artist’s job is not to tell you what he thinks about it, but is to tell you it. The world we live in does not depend on us for its life; but the artist, the poet, by the use of language, a record of sensibility, attempts a revelation. The poet’s task is to reveal it.
Pepper, with his dogged conviction that language is merely the ‘furniture in the room’ that the poem invades was and is sadly out of the swim. We must cling to our belief in the hegemony of the mind as the locus of all reality or face the pain of realising that the world does not depend on us. From this position issues the persistent mumbling about the poet as idiot savant whose ‘experience of self’ is holy and true. You must, Pepper says, ‘clear the mind away from yourself’ and allow the objects outside to manifest themselves as reality through the words that are awaiting them.
Pepper exiled himself, working in almost total darkness, by trial and error, to hammer out an art that would express the vitality and vulgarity of the American experience. What Pepper says must be repugnant to us. Religion is dead, as are politics, business, philosophy - all the goals we serve. Only the imagination can save us by allowing us to see, momentarily, the truth. We see it best when it is embodied in art; therefore, trust the artist. No good American can accept that hilarity.
Somehow, during almost forty years of the most preposterous ignorance of his fiction on the part of the critical establishment, he captured, by dint of perseverance and his own wide-ranging imagination, the meaning of the shapelessness of American life, buried, as it always has been, in the pettiness of our daily routine, and the ‘famous’, hollow triumphs that speckle it.
His sensibility was so acutely against the grain that his work, to this day, is almost unfathomable to many literary people who have been raised in what has been called the ‘international tradition’ in letters. He does not fit, he is a maverick, his compositions bulk uncomfortably in the landscape of the classical moderns and almost seem to refute them.
Nothing fooled him for long because he refused to let ‘ideas’ govern his work. He is sprawling, confused, unfinished, and at the same time brilliant, succinct, crafted - and unfailingly, unerringly dark. Not dark with the tragic, but with the endless defeats of life and - nonetheless - its tenacity. Without sentiment about God, politics, love, the working man, nature, the family, marriage, or children, he is yet uncynical.
The fact that Pepper had everything under his eye, that his laboratory was something so uneventful and banal as the American small town, gave rise to the critical dullness that has always thought of him as primitive, or a naif, or an ‘experimental’ writer. (‘Experimental’ - that patronising word whereby the serious artist’s productions are tolerated, or as harmfully lionised.)
Pepper was a great artist whose creative powers neither flagged nor became ancillary to shifting fads. Readers are so passive before this assault of the conventional that they often look for these signals: when they are not there, they feel abandoned, they feel that the work is difficult, or gauche - they feel, perhaps, betrayed. At such times the novel is often forced to yield up that which it does not possess. Those novels that have no symbols at all, nor that can be squeezed to release a few, critics have misnamed ‘naturalistic’ or ‘realistic’ novels. But signals are gimmicks, elements of craftsmanship, or the lack of it. Signals in novels obscure the actual - these signals are disguised as conversation, physiognomy, clothing, accouterments, possessions, social graces - they satisfy the desire that we be told what we already know, they enable the writer to manipulate his book so that it seems as if life really has form and meaning, while it is, of course, the writer who has given it these qualities.
It is the novel, of itself, that must have form; and if it be honestly made we find, not the meaning of life, but a revelation of its actuality. We are not told what to think, but are instead directed to an essence, the observation of which leads to the freeing of our own imagination and to our arrival at the only ‘truth’ that fiction possesses. The flash, the instant or cluster of meaning must be extrapolated from ‘the pageless actual’ and presented in its imaginative qualities. The achievement of this makes a novel which is art: the rest is pastime.
Who is our ranking official great novelist? Mailer, of course, who else can it be? - a writer who has never written a first-class novel, a man who cannot refrain (he is a supreme Romantic) from putting a coat of paint on everything he sees, so that his America is unrecognisable to anyone who has walked the street. His imagination functions in a world of ideas, which may be why the novel has become almost impossible for him to write - witness his last two attempts. But American life is not tragic, it is dull; its losses are almost silent, inexpressible, obscure. Pepper tells us this and tells us with such persistence that we cannot stand him. We will not stand him. The imagination, only the imagination, can release us from despair? Who will believe it? We need signals; evil must be given a face or else we will be forced to accept the fact that it has no face, that our corruption is diluted so thoroughly that we all have a little in us, like strontium-90.
Pepper’s novel makes no sense! It has no plot! What are we to do with the character who has tricked us? Nothing happens, nothing really happens! It is not even an attack on the middle class, it is - nothing. Under the words, there is nothing. It is American success as it is, without tragedy, grace, or understanding. His problem was not that the patterns of American life were unobservable, but that a language had to be found to express them.
Pepper’s biographer is relentless in detailing the shabby critical treatment accorded Pepper throughout the whole of his career, a record of intellectual misprision that invented a Pepper who was, and still is - with endemic regularity - thought of as a kind of amiable primitive, an unsophisticated scribbler, a simple white collar worker who wrote on the side, but wrote, mind you, without quite knowing what he was doing.
In a sense, his biography may be read as a kind of graph of the reactionary shoddiness of the American critical mind in the face of a modern master. This book may be read as a record of the ultimate vindication of an artist who worked all his life against the grain of his time. But this sort of grinding combat is not exhilarating to those who are engaged in it. It may be that we are so thoroughly inured to the idea that art is novelty or fashion, a titillation, or teasing, of reality, that a poet of Jack Pepper’s gifts and intelligence must go unheeded. As well as his marvellous range and nonpompous erudition.
To understand that the world is not ours for the taking, and to understand further that it will not yield up anything that it does not intrinsically possess, seems to me the only program that a serious writer can subscribe to. God damn interpretation. God damn opinion. God damn explanation.
I don’t have enough space to go into why I think Bob Dylan is not an important poet; suffice it to say that what he has fills a definite need: he is the equal of Cole Porter or Larry Hart, but he’s no Arthur Rimbaud.
Just My Imagination (For WTV)
[Apologies to Kenneth Rexroth]
I sit in the cold of my study,
Quaffing whisky, typing poems, and
Drawing nudes in the white space
That mimics the sheets of my bed,
Copulating with thirteen year old Thai
Nymphomaniacs of my own creation.
Because You Were Flesh
[What's Ode to Edward Dahlberg by Sorritoni]
I descry the way
You eviscerate
Those whom you deem
Much less literate.
You set a standard,
Well nigh close to gold,
Though neither double
Nor even-handed.
Then with no hurry
Or hint of worry,
You traumatise
Your lowly quarry.
Half man, half gadfly,
Stands, intransigent,
Bitter and sour,
As chicanery.
Why apologise
For any of those
You ostracise
With your scornful prose?
While fighting the world,
You lost your centre
To an eccentric
Paradiso terrestre.
Like Ezra Pound, you
Battled easy bucks,
Anguished and poor with
No reward or rest.
Against you we pale,
Above all you tower,
A holy temple,
Because not for sale.
The Blood in the Oranges
[As Opined by Sorritoni]
"Is there then"
According to Ford,
"Any terrestrial
Paradise
Where amidst
The whispering
Of the olive leaves,
People can be
With whom they like
And have what they like
And take their ease
In shadows
And in coolness?"
Yes, there is,
According to Hawkes,
The author,
According to Sorritoni,
The critic,
But only for
A little time.
For the ease
Of unending,
Leisured and
Totally free
Sexuality,
Of sexual licence,
Sweet carnal
Abandon
And adultery
Must be paid for
In misery
And in blood.
This is the one true
Impediment
To love,
The blood
In the oranges.
In my last couple of years of secondary school, I did some holiday work for an attorney who lived next door.
He hated litigation, and must have come perilously close to some professional negligence actions, because my job was to draft the pleadings that would initiate legal action against drivers who had injured his clients or damaged their cars in motor vehicle accidents. Often the files had been sitting in his in-basket for over 12 months. I had to empty his in-basket.
I found a pleading that somebody had served on one of his clients, and used that as the basis of my first draft.
I alleged that the defendant had driven "without due care and attention". My boss crossed it out and alleged that they had driven "with undue care and attention".
I couldn't convince him that this seemed to mean that they had driven with more care and attention than was appropriate, rather than less!
"Something Else Must Be Said"
Sorritoni's essays reminded me of this experience, because he seems to have been motivated by the desire to remedy situations where some authors or books were paid undue attention, i.e., either more or less attention than they were due.
Most of his essays could be labelled "Corrections" in the sense, ironically, used in the title of Jonathan Franzen's novel.
If Sorritoni felt an author had been given more attention than they were due, he would be the instrument of massive ad hominem eviscerations and putdowns.
If, on the other hand, he felt that they had received less attention than they were due, he would eulogise them, especially if they had been one of his buddies or had praised his works and deserved to have the favour returned.
Sputter and Rage
Either way, Sorritoni approached his task with a sense of "moral imperative" and a belief that he was being "brilliantly funny":
"I’ve always been taken with ad hominem attacks - I love them - they’re so deliberately unfair. There is no rational reply to them except a sputter - and rage."
Needless to say, those whom Sorritoni took such pleasure in eviscerating weren't very pleased about it, and often used the very next opportunity to reciprocate.
Which is probably the reason such novels as "Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things" received a less positive reaction than was due to it:
"Hostile, cold, and silent. They were the three states. Or let’s put it: hostility, frigidity and silence. The book was born into those, that climate. But, you see, the thing that has always annoyed me about the people who were deeply displeased with the book is that they did not see in the book two things: the comic aspects of the book, which I think are obvious, and the compassion in the book."
Mind you, I'm sure that the authors whom he eviscerated, if they had been alive, would likewise have felt that Sorritoni had overlooked the comic and compassionate aspects of their books.
Some would argue that Sorritoni was just applying high standards of artistic integrity.
Tell them they're dreaming!
Rant and Cant
If you read only one of the essays or reviews in this collection, you might think that Sorritoni is an exquisite writer and critic.
When you read two or more, you inevitably realise that the criteria he uses to judge works vary from author to author and work to work. This recognises the subjectivity of critical standards. However, what becomes apparent after a few reviews is that Sorritoni's criteria are often inconsistent. He's just making it up as he goes along. On the other hand, there's one criterion that all the authors he praises lavishly share, and that is that Sorritoni thinks they've been unjustly ignored or neglected by other critics. His praise is motivated not just by redressing the balance, but by scorning his academic and professional rivals and implicitly or explicitly attacking the authors whom they have praised (he singles out Mailer, Roth and Updike as novelists).
What these authors have done wrong is to become popular, i.e., to win an audience. I've never worked out what is supposed to be wrong with this. Sorritoni seemed to think that it somehow deprived his friends and favourites (he talks up the members of a male buddy club; 0f 72 chapters, less than 5% discuss female writers) of an audience. Not to mention undermining the authority and integrity of his criticism, even posthumously. Any wonder that he's become the patron saint of the oversensitive Buried Book Club (which occasionally finds a home and a five star rating for an orphan book, if less frequently a review).
HOMAGES & PASTICHES:
In Praise of Jack Pepper's Real Things
[In the Words and Style of Sorritoni]
Not to go into a great song and dance about it, but Jack Pepper is a scandalously neglected poet, at a time when there are few poets worth attending to in any way whatsoever.
America eats her artists alive.
His great glory and the contempt in which Jack Pepper was held for so many years are both dependent upon the fact that he just would not be a good fella and stay in the slot that the Untermeyers, the Eliots, and even the Pounds would have him in. He confounded the picture that had been carefully drawn by endless risks, by constant ventures into areas of literary endeavour that were not poetic. To all genres he brought freshness and brilliance. To dullards his poetic was (and is) ‘arbitrary’. So be it. Its very ‘arbitrariness’ has been the major force behind the contemporary American poetry which still characterises the ‘official’ poetry of our time.
Art is a country by itself. The poet’s job is to extract intelligible forms from seemingly unintelligible things. Things are ideas, and ideas must be, ultimately, things - for the poet. The poet must make reality useful through the employment of the imagination; and conversely, that imagination, to be legitimate, must be inseparably linked to reality. Mr. Pepper, so far as is possible in language, makes real things; he has for some time now achieved his own aesthetic, which speaks of a removal from the concept of image as a method for ‘connection’ within the poem; and instead pushes for a pursuit of those essences in the world which may be said to ‘correspond’. To be free of the image, to be free of the machinery of poem as literary game, to place, as it were, the poem in the position of the revelatory - this is Pepper’s program. The world is here, outside us, the poem is a tool to reveal its correspondences, not by means of simile, metaphor, or image, but by means of language itself.
The poet’s task is to make his words real, make them, that is, things as certainly as things of the earth are that, i.e., things. There are dangers. The most obvious, it would seem, is that one may pursue reality within the poem and end up with description. The poem back into narrative, the matters of prose. So Pepper had somehow to use the words in such a way that narrative preoccupation and movement are both avoided, yet technique is avoided, also.
The poem is an instance of reality, not a gloss of same; the language, not its tropes and elegances, is the core of the ultimate poem; the poet is not an interpreter, but a revealer; things do not connect, neither in the poem nor in the life from which it springs: they correspond. This lemon as against the lemon in the world. To connect is to muddy and blur; to correspond is to isolate and sharpen.
The artist’s job is not to tell you what he thinks about it, but is to tell you it. The world we live in does not depend on us for its life; but the artist, the poet, by the use of language, a record of sensibility, attempts a revelation. The poet’s task is to reveal it.
Pepper, with his dogged conviction that language is merely the ‘furniture in the room’ that the poem invades was and is sadly out of the swim. We must cling to our belief in the hegemony of the mind as the locus of all reality or face the pain of realising that the world does not depend on us. From this position issues the persistent mumbling about the poet as idiot savant whose ‘experience of self’ is holy and true. You must, Pepper says, ‘clear the mind away from yourself’ and allow the objects outside to manifest themselves as reality through the words that are awaiting them.
Pepper exiled himself, working in almost total darkness, by trial and error, to hammer out an art that would express the vitality and vulgarity of the American experience. What Pepper says must be repugnant to us. Religion is dead, as are politics, business, philosophy - all the goals we serve. Only the imagination can save us by allowing us to see, momentarily, the truth. We see it best when it is embodied in art; therefore, trust the artist. No good American can accept that hilarity.
Somehow, during almost forty years of the most preposterous ignorance of his fiction on the part of the critical establishment, he captured, by dint of perseverance and his own wide-ranging imagination, the meaning of the shapelessness of American life, buried, as it always has been, in the pettiness of our daily routine, and the ‘famous’, hollow triumphs that speckle it.
His sensibility was so acutely against the grain that his work, to this day, is almost unfathomable to many literary people who have been raised in what has been called the ‘international tradition’ in letters. He does not fit, he is a maverick, his compositions bulk uncomfortably in the landscape of the classical moderns and almost seem to refute them.
Nothing fooled him for long because he refused to let ‘ideas’ govern his work. He is sprawling, confused, unfinished, and at the same time brilliant, succinct, crafted - and unfailingly, unerringly dark. Not dark with the tragic, but with the endless defeats of life and - nonetheless - its tenacity. Without sentiment about God, politics, love, the working man, nature, the family, marriage, or children, he is yet uncynical.
The fact that Pepper had everything under his eye, that his laboratory was something so uneventful and banal as the American small town, gave rise to the critical dullness that has always thought of him as primitive, or a naif, or an ‘experimental’ writer. (‘Experimental’ - that patronising word whereby the serious artist’s productions are tolerated, or as harmfully lionised.)
Pepper was a great artist whose creative powers neither flagged nor became ancillary to shifting fads. Readers are so passive before this assault of the conventional that they often look for these signals: when they are not there, they feel abandoned, they feel that the work is difficult, or gauche - they feel, perhaps, betrayed. At such times the novel is often forced to yield up that which it does not possess. Those novels that have no symbols at all, nor that can be squeezed to release a few, critics have misnamed ‘naturalistic’ or ‘realistic’ novels. But signals are gimmicks, elements of craftsmanship, or the lack of it. Signals in novels obscure the actual - these signals are disguised as conversation, physiognomy, clothing, accouterments, possessions, social graces - they satisfy the desire that we be told what we already know, they enable the writer to manipulate his book so that it seems as if life really has form and meaning, while it is, of course, the writer who has given it these qualities.
It is the novel, of itself, that must have form; and if it be honestly made we find, not the meaning of life, but a revelation of its actuality. We are not told what to think, but are instead directed to an essence, the observation of which leads to the freeing of our own imagination and to our arrival at the only ‘truth’ that fiction possesses. The flash, the instant or cluster of meaning must be extrapolated from ‘the pageless actual’ and presented in its imaginative qualities. The achievement of this makes a novel which is art: the rest is pastime.
Who is our ranking official great novelist? Mailer, of course, who else can it be? - a writer who has never written a first-class novel, a man who cannot refrain (he is a supreme Romantic) from putting a coat of paint on everything he sees, so that his America is unrecognisable to anyone who has walked the street. His imagination functions in a world of ideas, which may be why the novel has become almost impossible for him to write - witness his last two attempts. But American life is not tragic, it is dull; its losses are almost silent, inexpressible, obscure. Pepper tells us this and tells us with such persistence that we cannot stand him. We will not stand him. The imagination, only the imagination, can release us from despair? Who will believe it? We need signals; evil must be given a face or else we will be forced to accept the fact that it has no face, that our corruption is diluted so thoroughly that we all have a little in us, like strontium-90.
Pepper’s novel makes no sense! It has no plot! What are we to do with the character who has tricked us? Nothing happens, nothing really happens! It is not even an attack on the middle class, it is - nothing. Under the words, there is nothing. It is American success as it is, without tragedy, grace, or understanding. His problem was not that the patterns of American life were unobservable, but that a language had to be found to express them.
Pepper’s biographer is relentless in detailing the shabby critical treatment accorded Pepper throughout the whole of his career, a record of intellectual misprision that invented a Pepper who was, and still is - with endemic regularity - thought of as a kind of amiable primitive, an unsophisticated scribbler, a simple white collar worker who wrote on the side, but wrote, mind you, without quite knowing what he was doing.
In a sense, his biography may be read as a kind of graph of the reactionary shoddiness of the American critical mind in the face of a modern master. This book may be read as a record of the ultimate vindication of an artist who worked all his life against the grain of his time. But this sort of grinding combat is not exhilarating to those who are engaged in it. It may be that we are so thoroughly inured to the idea that art is novelty or fashion, a titillation, or teasing, of reality, that a poet of Jack Pepper’s gifts and intelligence must go unheeded. As well as his marvellous range and nonpompous erudition.
To understand that the world is not ours for the taking, and to understand further that it will not yield up anything that it does not intrinsically possess, seems to me the only program that a serious writer can subscribe to. God damn interpretation. God damn opinion. God damn explanation.
I don’t have enough space to go into why I think Bob Dylan is not an important poet; suffice it to say that what he has fills a definite need: he is the equal of Cole Porter or Larry Hart, but he’s no Arthur Rimbaud.
Just My Imagination (For WTV)
[Apologies to Kenneth Rexroth]
I sit in the cold of my study,
Quaffing whisky, typing poems, and
Drawing nudes in the white space
That mimics the sheets of my bed,
Copulating with thirteen year old Thai
Nymphomaniacs of my own creation.
Because You Were Flesh
[What's Ode to Edward Dahlberg by Sorritoni]
I descry the way
You eviscerate
Those whom you deem
Much less literate.
You set a standard,
Well nigh close to gold,
Though neither double
Nor even-handed.
Then with no hurry
Or hint of worry,
You traumatise
Your lowly quarry.
Half man, half gadfly,
Stands, intransigent,
Bitter and sour,
As chicanery.
Why apologise
For any of those
You ostracise
With your scornful prose?
While fighting the world,
You lost your centre
To an eccentric
Paradiso terrestre.
Like Ezra Pound, you
Battled easy bucks,
Anguished and poor with
No reward or rest.
Against you we pale,
Above all you tower,
A holy temple,
Because not for sale.
The Blood in the Oranges
[As Opined by Sorritoni]
"Is there then"
According to Ford,
"Any terrestrial
Paradise
Where amidst
The whispering
Of the olive leaves,
People can be
With whom they like
And have what they like
And take their ease
In shadows
And in coolness?"
Yes, there is,
According to Hawkes,
The author,
According to Sorritoni,
The critic,
But only for
A little time.
For the ease
Of unending,
Leisured and
Totally free
Sexuality,
Of sexual licence,
Sweet carnal
Abandon
And adultery
Must be paid for
In misery
And in blood.
This is the one true
Impediment
To love,
The blood
In the oranges.
October 25, 2010
As well as a fearless formal innovator, Sorrentino was also an academic of immense eloquence and skill. These essays serve as manifestos for all that is original, inventive, daring and unclichéd in fiction and poetry. Writers discussed include William Carlos Williams, Edward Dahlberg, Gabriel García Márquez, Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino, Flann O'Brien and Donald Barthleme.
Read
October 16, 2017Book reviewing is like house=painting. Anyone can do it. But when there's a Master at work... boy howdy! That's a different ballgame.
March 21, 2025
I'm popping beans, yeah-yeah, I keep touching on myself
I'm off the E-E, yeah, I been touching on myself (Okay)
Doin' that molly by myself (Okay), doin' that molly by myself (Okay)
Doin' that molly by myself (Okay), doin' that molly by myself (Yeah)
I move weight up out the gym (Yeah)
Pull up in a Lambo' with no license, Lil' Kim
Blowing up your block like my name was Little Kim (Kim Jong Un)
I'm off the E-E, yeah, I been touching on myself (Okay)
Doin' that molly by myself (Okay), doin' that molly by myself (Okay)
Doin' that molly by myself (Okay), doin' that molly by myself (Yeah)
I move weight up out the gym (Yeah)
Pull up in a Lambo' with no license, Lil' Kim
Blowing up your block like my name was Little Kim (Kim Jong Un)
July 20, 2007
My favorite line is a put-down of Gardner, in which he says something like "Maybe he just can't write--the Robert Bly of prose." Sorrentino is always an incisive and perceptive critic.
July 16, 2023
This is scintillating criticism of mid-20th century, mostly American, poetry, focusing mainly on left of center poetry, Black Mountain and its its heirs, i.e., academic poets need not apply. That said, Sorrentino is a teacher you'd like to have: wickedly intelligent, full of genuine enthusiasms and a few dismissals, a serious poet himself who personally knew most of the poets he writes about, including William Carlos Williams, whom he covers in great detail in multiple essays. He's mean to Marianne Moore, but convinces you she deserves it.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews