4/20/2006
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For hopeless George Stanley fans only: you must track down his essay "Beyond the Sublime: Reading James Liddy" Irish University Review 28.1 (1998): 92-109. Liddy's new to me: an Irish poet who landed in SF & took up with the Spicer folks--hence the Stanley connection before they took off for different destinations, one to Canada, one to the Midwest. Is Liddy a neglected neglectarino? He has a few early Irish books, a post-Spicer White Rabbit Book, and since then many publications, including a collected poems and an autobiography. He also pops up in Stanley's recent A Tall, Serious Girl (2004). See the poems "San Francisco's Gone" and "A Trip in Ireland," for instance. I hope to read some Liddy in the coming weeks. For now, the essay is interesting because of what it reveals about Stanley's own writing preoccupations and his collision with history over the last forty years. He introduces argumentative talking points that apply equally to his own poems, like that "postmodern" could be better called "post sexual." Just one quote: "Swift said our love of life is a passion, irrational. But is it both rational and irrational when it is loved in the love of another? That would be heaven."

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