Atsjú!

Otherwise, while concentrating sternly enough – sturdily enough – I read The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry, by Elisabeth A. Frost and Poetry and the Age by Randall Jarrell. Frost’s essay on Gertrude Stein was wonderful – though perhaps I’d gotten to fluish by that point, but I couldn’t connect to her reading of Mina Loy’s “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose”. It might also be ’cause I haven’t read Loy much, and not that poem in particular. Jarrell’s writing about Frost (Robert, not Elisabeth A.) is sweet, if a bit over-indulgent, and his writing of Whitman is good. Ransom and Stevens I didn’t connect with – and the writing on criticism was way-off, snobbish and condescending at once. Arguing for ‘readability’ and scolding those engaging in what I saw as perfectly excusable serious thought – blended with some weird stances towards THE CANON. Or I mean, weird, because they’re from 1955 – perfectly normal back then I guess. “What?!! You’ve NOT read Homer? I’ll skull-fuck …” no, they’d never say skull-fuck, I’m just no good at 1950′s american english. “I’ll slap it silly into you.”

Or sumphin.

Not finished the books though. Many chapters still left.