Basement Tapes: Chicago Review in the Early 1980s
2016; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 60; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-5804
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
ResumoIn October 1979, I was the least prepared student in Robert von Hallberg's PhD seminar on the poet-critic, the only MA student in the course, new to the University of Chicago. I was in way over my head. Others in the seminar were starting or completing dissertations--including Alan Golding, Lynn Keller, Ellen Stauder, and Harvey Teres, impressive scholars then as now. We met in the Regenstein Library near the poetry collection. We read and discussed poems and essays by Ezra Pound, Yvor Winters, and Donald Davie, and our conversation spun off to other recent poet-critics, including Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, Charles Olson, and Robert Pinsky. Though Wayne Booth was still teaching at Chicago alongside several others associated with the glory days of the Chicago School, literary theory and new modes of literary history were the new thing at the university. I was to get a healthy dose of those discourses in other courses, but for von Hallberg the poet-critics offered a model of literary criticism that emphasized evaluation and engaged with contemporary writing for how it changes our view of the writing of the past. Pound's Renaissance was useful backstory: the university would sponsor literary production, criticism, and scholarship as one enterprise. That was exciting. I was almost twenty-two. That same fall another member of the poet-critic seminar, Maggie Hivnor, co-editor of Chicago Review, invited me to attend a meeting of the poetry staff. If she hadn't done so I might have never come back for the PhD after a year teaching at a city college in Uptown, though von Hallberg had a lot to do with that decision. I came back to study with him; I continued with CR during the year I was out of school. In those days the English department had graduate courses in creative writing, and I think that the English department's limited interest in contemporary literature is one of the reasons many of the people who were part of CR in those days never finished their PhDs. Literary studies seemed headed somewhere they didn't care to go. Some of those who didn't finish the PhD were among the brightest and most creative people I knew in Chicago. As for me, I didn't want to teach at a city college forever, so I thought I'd go back to do the PhD and continue to volunteer at CR to see if the two worlds could be made to coexist. In one of the first meetings I attended of CP's poetry staff, the poem discussed was John Taggart's This Not That. I was impressed by the intensity of the comments for and against this strange poem as the group argued about whether they wanted to give over sixteen pages of the magazine to it. this lily not this not this lily no it begins, establishing its minimalist trance music. The poem appeared in CP 31:3 and was the subject of an angry letter from a reader who awarded the staff Ten Moron Points in the next issue. Michael Sells and Marjorie Pannell were poetry co-editors; they were incredibly erudite. I see that Sells is now the John Henry Barrows Professor of Islamic History and Literature at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Poet and editor Molly McQuade, then an undergraduate, must have been at this meeting, along with the late Michael Donaghy, who had already abandoned his degree work and several years later moved to London, where his poems, some of them written in Chicago and workshopped informally at Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap, are still read. Maybe Fred Gardaphe was there, too, or he was there later; he's now a Distinguished Professor of English and Italian American Studies at Queens/CUNY. I learned as much about poetry from these people as I did from coursework. Later, after I became poetry co-editor with Tom Bonnell (32:4-33:3) and then general editor (33:4-34:2), others who became close friends joined the staff. Alan Waters came on as nonfiction co-editor. He was pursuing a PhD with the Committee on Social Thought. For one question on his PhD qualifying exam, Saul Bellow asked him to write about the ways that Marx is a comedian. …
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