Archive for January, 2022

Hollywood and “high lit” wouldn’t seem to be natural buddies, but they form a piquant alliance in the poetic sensibility of Soviet-era Jewish immigrant and Angeleno Boris Dralyuk, the brilliant and multi-faceted editor-in-chief of The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in The New York Review of Books – and check out two great poems over in the current The Hudson Review here. He is a gifted translator from the Russian, too – see his renderings of Isaac Babel, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and others.

We have written about his poems here, and also here and here. And we’ve collaborated with him on a number of LARB ventures – a Q&A with Russian author and poet Maria Stepanova among them.

But here’s a new reason to celebrate him: his debut poetry collection, My Hollywood and Other Poems, will be out with Paul Dry Books this spring. (Paul Dry also published Dana Gioia‘s Studying with Miss Bishop recently; it’s gone into multiple printings. We wrote about that venture here.) Boris’s brand new collection My Hollywood is dedicated to Dana Gioia, another Angelino.

“My Hollywood features appearances by such cultural heavyweights as Thomas Mann, Laura and Aldous Huxley, and Arnold Schoenberg,” says L.A. poet Timothy Steele. “But Dralyuk also treats us to tours of now vanished landmarks of L.A. like the Garden of Allah hotel and the Bargain Circus discount barn; and he chronicles the careers of some of the many entertaining misfits, including a ne’er-do-well uncle of Isaac Babel, who have passed through Southern California on their earthly pilgrimage. Dralyuk is as well a lively technician—a clever rhymer who is particularly deft at sonnets. Anyone interested in fine verse and Los Angeles will relish this book.”

The collection describes, in formal verse, the experiences of migrants in Los Angeles, as well as the seedy bars, the visiting luminaries, the fading stars – in ballades, in villanelles, in Pushkin’s swift iambic tetrameter sonnets, and more. According to the dust jacket: “… the poems pursue the sublime in a tarnished landscape, seek continuity and mourn its loss in a town where change is the only constant. … honors the vanishing traces of the city’s past, and, in crisp and evocative translations, summons the voices of five Russian poets who spent their final years in LA, including the composer Vernon Duke.”

This, from llya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa: “There is that old concept of the ‘genius of a place,’ which, as it enters literature, makes an atmosphere all its own—impossible to forget. I keep thinking of this as I read My Hollywood and Other Poems, in which Boris Dralyuk, the brilliant translator of Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories, now gives us Los Angeles: a theater of being, captured in beautifully crafted sonnets, pantoums, and hymns full of longing and character and verve. Anyone who has ever visited the Russian immigrant shops and restaurants of Los Angeles, or stopped in parks where old men play cards and grandmas watch kids while spreading gossip, will instantly recognize the music of memory in Dralyuk’s virtuoso performance. The wit and daring of his rhymes and phrasing remind me of that old master, Donald Justice, who dazzled us with the elegance of his forms. Dralyuk carries this high style into the twenty-first century, and I, for one, am thrilled to be in the presence of his marvelous verbal art.”

My memories of Los Angeles are scattershot and brief, but my beloved in-laws lived in Glendale for at least a half a century; it is perhaps the biggest Armenian stronghold west of Asia. So I appreciated Boris’s lovely translation of a poem by Peter Vegin (1939-2007), a half-Armenian poet I didn’t know (Boris has brought so many poets and writers to our attention). Boris describes Vegin on his personal website this way: “a poet and painter who had rubbed elbows with Andrei Voznesensky and other leading figures of Thaw-era Soviet culture in the 1960s. He emigrated to the United States in 1989 and soon settled in Los Angeles, where, throughout the 1990s, he was a major contributor to the Russian-language press. But a series of setbacks in the 2000s — including a fire that destroyed a number of his manuscripts and canvases — plunged him into depression. He passed away on August 10, 2007, at the age of 68.”

He adds: “One of the things my friends (and especially their émigré families) had in common was a reverence for Mount Ararat, whose breathtaking snow-capped peaks rise to roughly 13,000 and 17,000 feet near the intersection of Turkey, Armenia, Iran, and Azerbaijan. Very recently I came across a Russian poem that expressed this reverence with such witty candor, such sweet music that I just had to translate it.” And so he did. See below. And below that, two more original poems of his own from the volume.

Over at The Los Angeles Review of Books, poet Dana Gioia praises Shirley Geok-lin Lim as “a poet of exile and assimilation, loss and recovery, journeys and explorations.” His friendship with the Malaysian-born poet goes back four decades, when they first met in Katonah, NY. During an awkward conversation, he recalls, “Finally, I asked a polite but banal question about her graduate studies in English. Shirley replied that she had worked at Brandeis with J. V. Cunningham. His was not a name to impress most people, but to me, Cunningham was a gold standard. He was the greatest American epigrammatic poet — ever. He was also a formidable scholar, mordant curmudgeon, and semi-recluse. Tell me more, I said. And she did.”

“A year later Shirley sent me her first book, Crossing the Peninsula & Other Poems (1980). Published in Kuala Lumpur by Heinemann Asia in a tiny format, the book gave the impression of slightness. I always worry when reading a book of poems by an acquaintance, Will I like it? Will it be interesting or awful? In Shirley’s case, I was immediately engaged, though I recognized her debut volume was a very unusual collection.”

Why? He explains: “Most first books have a grab bag quality. Young poets want to show all their steps toward creative maturity — different styles, subjects, and stances. Lim’s book did that, too, but with an unusual economy and panache. The poems had ambitious subjects — Adam and Eve, Christ, shopping, divorce, Cezanne — but they were mostly short. They didn’t waste a word. (Surely the terse Prof. Cunningham’s influence at work.) Few young poets show such control, especially mixed with such an appetite for ideas and experience.”

He soon added her poem, “To Li Po,” to a new edition of An Introduction to Poetry, which he co-edited with X. J. Kennedy. “Since then I have hardly published an anthology which did not include one or more of her poems.”

Dana Gioia recalled the words of literary critic Hugh Kenner, who once described American Modernist innovation as a “homemade world” — “unorthodox creativity free from pomp, precedent, and pretension.” Then he added “Shirley’s best poetry has that ‘homemade’ quality. Like Wallace Stevens, she has put a planet on the table, a ‘homemade world’ of her own experience.”

Lim’s In Praise of Limes, will appear in March from Sungold Editions. Meanwhile, read more about her in The Los Angeles Review of Books here.

It no longer exists in the real world – like Shangri-La, or Valhalla. But now it has a reality all its own. We’ve posted this photo before, in our stories about the notable booklover here and here and here. But now this room – and the book-crammed mansion around it – belongs to the universe.

The polymathic professor who called this place home didn’t achieve Twitter fame in his lifetime. Now he has it. This month, bestselling author Don Winslow tweeted a photograph and, since he has 761.6K followers, it’s gone viral. Kate Dwyer has penned a New York Times article about the twitterstorm, titled “A Library the Internet Can’t Get Enough of,” here.

A few excerpts:

Bathed in the buttery glow of three table lamps, almost every surface of the room is covered with books. There are books on the tables, books stacked on mahogany ladders, and books atop still more books lining the shelves of the room. “I hope you see the beauty in this that I do,” Mr. Winslow wrote in the tweet, which has been acknowledged with 32,800 hearts.

If you spend enough time in the literary corners of Twitter, this image may look familiar. It rises again just about annually, and the library has been attributed over the years to authors including Umberto Eco and buildings in Italy and Prague. As with other images featuring beautiful bookshelves, people go absolutely bananas for it. Mr. Winslow’s post received 1,700 comments, including one from a professor at Pace University who has been using the photo as his Zoom background. … He noted that there’s something comforting about the image, since “it’s a room you could happily get lost in.”

***

The library, it should be known, is not in Europe. It doesn’t even exist anymore. But when it did, it was the home library of Johns Hopkins professor Dr. Richard Macksey in Baltimore. (I was his student in 2015 and interviewed him for Literary Hub in 2018.) Dr. Macksey, who passed away in 2019, was a book collector, polyglot and scholar of comparative literature. At Hopkins, he founded one of the country’s first interdisciplinary academic departments and organized the 1966 conference “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” which included seminal lectures by the theorists Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Paul de Man.

Dr. Macksey’s book collection clocked in at 51,000 titles, according to his son, Alan, excluding magazines and other ephemera. A decade ago, the most valuable pieces — including first editions of Moby Dick, T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations, and works by Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley — were moved to a “special collections” room on the Hopkins campus. After Dr. Macksey’s death, a S.W.A.T. team-like group of librarians and conservators spent three weeks combing through his book-filled, 7,400-square-foot house to select 35,000 volumes to add to the university’s libraries.

Surprise discoveries included an 18th-century Rousseau text with charred covers (found in the kitchen), a “pristine” copy of a rare 1950s exhibition catalog showing Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings, posters from the May 1968 protests when students in Paris occupied the Sorbonne, a hand-drawn Christmas card from the filmmaker John Waters, and the original recordings of the theorists at that 1966 structuralism conference. [Note: The story of that conference is included in The Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard – we wrote about that here.]

“For years, everyone had said ‘there’s got to be recordings of those lectures.’ Well, we finally found the recordings of those lectures. They were hidden in a cabinet behind a bookshelf behind a couch,” said Liz Mengel, associate director of collections and academic services for the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins. Several first editions by 20th-century poets and novelists sat on a shelf in the laundry room.

***

What would Dr. Macksey think if he knew his library had taken on a life of its own? “My dad liked nothing better than sharing his love of books and literature with others,” Alan Macksey said. “He’d be delighted that his library lives on through this photo.”

A few weeks ago, we featured a mind-blowing letter from Czesław Miłosz to Irish writer Adrian Rice. Here’s another great letter, from an older poet to a younger one – the recipient, Leonard Kress, was willing to share it with us. The letter was written by the eminent American novelist Bernard Malamud. And what a letter it is! Some of us are made by praise, and some of us are broken by it. And the same can be said of criticism.

So don’t cry. As you will note in the letter below, the crucial word is “yet.” Kress went on to publish several full-length poetry collections, fiction, non-fiction, reviews, and chapbooks. Here’s how I know him: he has also completed a new verse translation of the 19th century, Polish Romantic epic, Pan Tadeusz, by Adam Mickiewicz.

Some good news on my just-out book, Czesław Miłosz: A California Life, published by Heyday Books in Berkeley: a smashing review and an interview are just out:

Peter Schlachte writes in Zzyzyva that “the biography makes the strong case that Miłosz’s poetry was irrevocably influenced by his experiences in California, from witnessing the social upheaval at Berkeley in the 1960s to spotting deer on his morning walks around Grizzly Peak.” Well, yes. How could he not be?

The publication of the book marks a curious coincidence: both of us had been in California for forty years. The poet died in 2004, but I continue totting up the years I have spent in California. It now stands at 42.

From the beginning of Schlachte’s review:

Czesław Miłosz: A California Life (256 pages; Heyday) is as much as portrait of a place as it is of a person. Cynthia L. Haven’s biography of the 1980 Nobel winner and towering voice in 20^th century literature explores Miłosz’s work not distilled through the lens of his upbringing in Lithuania nor his formative years in Poland, but through his later life, residing on Grizzly Peak in Berkeley and teaching Slavic languages and literatures at UC Berkeley. From the opening pages, Haven writes beautifully of California’s history and landscape. Here she is describing California’s famously balmy weather: “At first, the unrelieved azure sky, the high-noon sun, is oppressive. The newcomer longs for shade, for dusk, for shadow, for stars. But one soon learns to sense the change of seasons not by snow or rain but rather by the difference between the radiant sunlight of summer that gives clarity and sharp relief to everything in its realm, and the lower slant of golden light in autumn, and then our haze-filled days of winter with lingering sunsets that diffuse light and scatter shadows.”

This is emblematic of Haven’s prose throughout the biography—her descriptions, regardless of topic, are not a means to an end. When she writes about California, it’s not merely to draw the connection between the land and Miłosz. Rather, Haven takes space to revel in the “hypnotic monotony” of the weather and the “alien, hyperreal” rocks along Highway 1. Her language is a place of energy, richness, and—fittingly—poetry.

Read the whole thing here.

Also this week, over at the Nob Hill Gazette, Paul Wilner interviews me on “The Americanization of Czesław Miłosz.” An excerpt:

“His formidable wisdom would leave anyone in the dust, but he wore it lightly,” she recalls. “Yet his lifetime of suffering lent him gravity, too. His home life was agonizing, with his first wife, Janina, dying by inches, and a son who went mad. But the suffering kept him searching. He was a restless, relentless learner. He never stopped.’’

Miłosz returned to Poland in 2000, by then an American citizen with a “second, very American wife, Carol,” Haven says. “His Polish friends could see the Americanization — he got more from California than he knew. He must have been haunted by California in his dreams.”

Read the whole thing over at the Nob Hill Gazette here.