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Paul Metcalf: Collected Works, Volume I: 1956-1976
The first of three comprehensive volumes to present the lifetime work of Paul Metcalf, one of the Black Mountain Writers.
- GenresFiction
550 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1996
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158 people want to read
About the author
Paul Metcalf
104 books12 followersPaul Metcalf (1917–1999) was an American writer. He wrote in verse and prose, but his work generally defies classification. Its small but devoted following includes Robert Creeley, William Gass, Wendell Berry, Guy Davenport, Howard Zinn, and Bruce Olds. His many books include Will West (1956), Genoa (1965), Patagoni (1971), Apalache (1976), The Middle Passage (1976), Zip Odes (1979), and U.S. Dept. of the Interior (1980).
He was the great-grandson of one of his major literary influences, Herman Melville.
Paul Metcalf was born in 1917 in East Milton, Massachusetts. He attended Harvard but left before graduating. In 1942, he married Nancy Blackford of South Carolina and over the next two decades spent long periods in the South. Metcalf traveled widely through North and South America and these travels figure largely in his work. Among his friends and associates were the poet Charles Olson (whom he met when he was thirteen), the artist Josef Albers, poet and publisher Jonathan Williams and the writer Guy Davenport. Later in his career, Metcalf was a visiting professor at the University of California San Diego, SUNY Albany, and the University of Kansas. He died in 1999, near Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
He was the great-grandson of one of his major literary influences, Herman Melville.
Paul Metcalf was born in 1917 in East Milton, Massachusetts. He attended Harvard but left before graduating. In 1942, he married Nancy Blackford of South Carolina and over the next two decades spent long periods in the South. Metcalf traveled widely through North and South America and these travels figure largely in his work. Among his friends and associates were the poet Charles Olson (whom he met when he was thirteen), the artist Josef Albers, poet and publisher Jonathan Williams and the writer Guy Davenport. Later in his career, Metcalf was a visiting professor at the University of California San Diego, SUNY Albany, and the University of Kansas. He died in 1999, near Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
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July 28, 2024How to Create a Text From Appropriated Texts (After Reznikoff, before Goldsmith)
The book Genoa, included in this collection, is astonishing. Ostensibly, it's a series of quotations from Melville's novels and letters, and from Christopher Columbus's writing and accounts of his voyages. Ostensibly, those quotations are running through the mind of a man who lives in the Midwest, in an old house, pondering questions of writing, travel, gestation, and deformity. (Actually, they're running through the mind of the author, who is Melville's great-grandson and writes at Melville's desk.) Ostensibly, all the man does is think, pace, and smoke cigars. We don't watch him writing, and the quotations supposedly just occur to him. (In this Genoa, is like books by Arno Schmidt, in which characters have outlandish prodigious memories.) Coffee House Press has done a great job designing the pages so that the various quotations are distinguished by indentation, italics, boldface, and font size, looking a bit like a neatened-up scrapbook.
That's the surface. The narrator says that he doesn't know how good a writer he is, but he knows he's a great reader. Normally a collection of favorite excerpts is a recipe for fragmentation and reader's inertia. (For insance David Shields's Reality Hunger, or Goldsmith's Capital.) But Metcalf's sense of tone, metaphor, subject, allusion, parallelism, and allegory are bewilderingly supple. Each page presents some new and unexpected form of coherence. Often, reading a quotation from Melville or Columbus, I would first wonder what the point was, and then realize I was being presented with a new species of connection. Metcalf must have been one of modernism's best close readers, and his articulately shifting sense of how passages can be chained together keeps Genoa going and gives it both analytic precision and a "mysterious" coherence (as a reviewer said).
Some of the links between passages put Walter Benjamin's collections to shame. The Arcades Project is organized by themes, even if Benjamin keeps losing and refinding them. Metcalf is closer to William Carlos Williams's Paterson, but even that book has motivated sorts of segues. Genoa is a master class in the weaving of texts. Another intriguing parallel is Reznikoff: his senses of what comprises poetry are similarly fluid and often surprising. In that sense Reznikoff (1894-1976) and Metcalf (1917-1999) might be imagined together. (It would be interesting to know how a scholar like Wojciech Drąg would incorporate either author into his work; see Collage in Twenty-First Century Literature in English, 2020.)
About halfway through Genoa we start hearing about the narrator's brother, who was in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in China. The brother witnessed the horrors that have been so thoroughly documented outside of Japan, and reading about them brings the book, which was already infused with gender-masculine, mid-century, Melville-style metaphors, into harsher lights. From that point to the end, the narrator's pale life and scattered imaginings are all made to work even harder so they can make contact with the passages on violence.
It is an amazing book, the best of its kind (the "kind" made of appropriated texts), and needs to be known by everyone who practices modernist collage, postmodern pastiche, appropriation, or found texts—what Marjorie Perloff called the unoriginal.
2012, revised 2024
The book Genoa, included in this collection, is astonishing. Ostensibly, it's a series of quotations from Melville's novels and letters, and from Christopher Columbus's writing and accounts of his voyages. Ostensibly, those quotations are running through the mind of a man who lives in the Midwest, in an old house, pondering questions of writing, travel, gestation, and deformity. (Actually, they're running through the mind of the author, who is Melville's great-grandson and writes at Melville's desk.) Ostensibly, all the man does is think, pace, and smoke cigars. We don't watch him writing, and the quotations supposedly just occur to him. (In this Genoa, is like books by Arno Schmidt, in which characters have outlandish prodigious memories.) Coffee House Press has done a great job designing the pages so that the various quotations are distinguished by indentation, italics, boldface, and font size, looking a bit like a neatened-up scrapbook.
That's the surface. The narrator says that he doesn't know how good a writer he is, but he knows he's a great reader. Normally a collection of favorite excerpts is a recipe for fragmentation and reader's inertia. (For insance David Shields's Reality Hunger, or Goldsmith's Capital.) But Metcalf's sense of tone, metaphor, subject, allusion, parallelism, and allegory are bewilderingly supple. Each page presents some new and unexpected form of coherence. Often, reading a quotation from Melville or Columbus, I would first wonder what the point was, and then realize I was being presented with a new species of connection. Metcalf must have been one of modernism's best close readers, and his articulately shifting sense of how passages can be chained together keeps Genoa going and gives it both analytic precision and a "mysterious" coherence (as a reviewer said).
Some of the links between passages put Walter Benjamin's collections to shame. The Arcades Project is organized by themes, even if Benjamin keeps losing and refinding them. Metcalf is closer to William Carlos Williams's Paterson, but even that book has motivated sorts of segues. Genoa is a master class in the weaving of texts. Another intriguing parallel is Reznikoff: his senses of what comprises poetry are similarly fluid and often surprising. In that sense Reznikoff (1894-1976) and Metcalf (1917-1999) might be imagined together. (It would be interesting to know how a scholar like Wojciech Drąg would incorporate either author into his work; see Collage in Twenty-First Century Literature in English, 2020.)
About halfway through Genoa we start hearing about the narrator's brother, who was in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in China. The brother witnessed the horrors that have been so thoroughly documented outside of Japan, and reading about them brings the book, which was already infused with gender-masculine, mid-century, Melville-style metaphors, into harsher lights. From that point to the end, the narrator's pale life and scattered imaginings are all made to work even harder so they can make contact with the passages on violence.
It is an amazing book, the best of its kind (the "kind" made of appropriated texts), and needs to be known by everyone who practices modernist collage, postmodern pastiche, appropriation, or found texts—what Marjorie Perloff called the unoriginal.
2012, revised 2024
April 26, 2016
Excellent interview with John O'Brien here: http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/a-conver...
Metcalf is a root-tender, hands deep in loam, feeling out the topology: dichotomous; herringbone; radial. Pulling to the surface quotes as parasitical as mistletoe, or heavy and stagnant as cassava, curled rhizomatically in on themselves.
His work is well-tended, trained through wattle and trellis. It is a grown architecture. Much happens, therefore, beneath the page-surface, in the gaps between line. The blooms, the flowers themselves are important, beautiful in themselves, yet it is the tendrils, the connective tissue behind and beneath that can cause the jaw to drop open in amazement. And this requires preparation, control, patience. The best gardens take more than a season to mature.
Metcalf is a traveler. A trapper and miner, a gatherer and explorer (perhaps, to connect to the rather purple prose above, one of those bringing back rare seeds to Kew Gardens). His home is full of flotsam and, (yes) jetsam (one must never forget the jetsam). We are invited in to peruse shelves flowing over with assorted odds and (yes) sods (perhaps "jetsam and sods" should be a new coinage) - the javan shrunken head, the piece of broken Peruvian pottery, a ship's compass, books with strange titles and well-worn spines, faded photographs of strangers. There is a pre-modern quality to it all.
Whether his work works for you depends, I would suspect, on how interested you are in doing a little work yourself to work your way through the connections.
This edition is lovely too - a well put together hardback, with a great feel to it and a rather fine font.
As a final point, and something I mentioned in an update, there is a connection here to Vollmann's Seven Dreams - as the review I quote below should make clear.
I am interested to see how he developed, this only being Vol 1 of his collected works.
**************
As Metcalf is rather unknown, here is what Donald Byrd (sadly not that Donald Byrd) said in his review:
"Paul Metcalf’s Collected Works, the third and last volume of which will be published in the fall of 1997, constitutes a profound and necessary history of America. If one wants to look up a fact, of course, there are better sources, but for the curious reader interested in the meaning of American history, there are few better places to begin. It is history, on the one hand, of an on-going trauma, a cannibalism, a ruthless squandering of riches, and on the other hand, of a wonder and beauty of highest order.
The story of this contradiction cannot, of course, be told in the usual narrative. Metcalf’s technique is collage and his form is the book. The Collected consists of twenty-two books. The first two, Will West and Genoa, can be called “novels” without doing great violence to the term, but the third, Patagoni, is something else, perhaps a book-length poem. In Middle Passage and Apalache, a unique new form appears—an inspired scholarship, a way of thought. These books belong to a tradition of the peculiarly American art that includes Moby Dick and Clarel, the author of which happens to be Metcalf’s great-grandfather, the music of Charles Ives, Ezra Pound’s Cantos, William Carlos Williams’ In the American Grain and Paterson, Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, the paintings of Jackson Pollock. Guy Davenport writes, “Pervading all of Metcalf’s work is a tragic sense of the past, of a grief for how far wrong we’ve gone, how uselessly bloody our past has been, how ignorant we are of that past, and how inscrutably strange our biological nature is.”
In many of the books, the interest derives directly from unlikely juxtapositions. In Genoa, which is perhaps Metcalf’s masterpiece, he juxtaposes a meditation on Melville, on Columbus, and a famous kidnapping case of the 1950’s; The Middle Passage juxtaposes a consideration of the Luddites, the slave trade, and the whale fisheries. Of Apalache and the later works, which depend almost entirely upon collaged materials, Metcalf says in an interview, “The more disembodied it becomes, the more personal it becomes? This was not a conscious action on my part, but simply something that happened. . . . In other words, there is an overriding consciousness there. . . . It falls or stands on the presence of that organizing consciousness.” Metcalf’s books are the product of extensive research, a kind of archaeology. Most of the books have extensive bibliographies. Metcalf offers some measure of how useful information can be in the hands of one who knows what it is for, of one who takes the responsibility of consciousness.
Perhaps it is possible to think of Metcalf’s books as excerpts from the encyclopedia of some future culture which has learned to use information rather than allowing itself to be used by it."
Metcalf is a root-tender, hands deep in loam, feeling out the topology: dichotomous; herringbone; radial. Pulling to the surface quotes as parasitical as mistletoe, or heavy and stagnant as cassava, curled rhizomatically in on themselves.
His work is well-tended, trained through wattle and trellis. It is a grown architecture. Much happens, therefore, beneath the page-surface, in the gaps between line. The blooms, the flowers themselves are important, beautiful in themselves, yet it is the tendrils, the connective tissue behind and beneath that can cause the jaw to drop open in amazement. And this requires preparation, control, patience. The best gardens take more than a season to mature.
Metcalf is a traveler. A trapper and miner, a gatherer and explorer (perhaps, to connect to the rather purple prose above, one of those bringing back rare seeds to Kew Gardens). His home is full of flotsam and, (yes) jetsam (one must never forget the jetsam). We are invited in to peruse shelves flowing over with assorted odds and (yes) sods (perhaps "jetsam and sods" should be a new coinage) - the javan shrunken head, the piece of broken Peruvian pottery, a ship's compass, books with strange titles and well-worn spines, faded photographs of strangers. There is a pre-modern quality to it all.
Whether his work works for you depends, I would suspect, on how interested you are in doing a little work yourself to work your way through the connections.
This edition is lovely too - a well put together hardback, with a great feel to it and a rather fine font.
As a final point, and something I mentioned in an update, there is a connection here to Vollmann's Seven Dreams - as the review I quote below should make clear.
I am interested to see how he developed, this only being Vol 1 of his collected works.
**************
As Metcalf is rather unknown, here is what Donald Byrd (sadly not that Donald Byrd) said in his review:
"Paul Metcalf’s Collected Works, the third and last volume of which will be published in the fall of 1997, constitutes a profound and necessary history of America. If one wants to look up a fact, of course, there are better sources, but for the curious reader interested in the meaning of American history, there are few better places to begin. It is history, on the one hand, of an on-going trauma, a cannibalism, a ruthless squandering of riches, and on the other hand, of a wonder and beauty of highest order.
The story of this contradiction cannot, of course, be told in the usual narrative. Metcalf’s technique is collage and his form is the book. The Collected consists of twenty-two books. The first two, Will West and Genoa, can be called “novels” without doing great violence to the term, but the third, Patagoni, is something else, perhaps a book-length poem. In Middle Passage and Apalache, a unique new form appears—an inspired scholarship, a way of thought. These books belong to a tradition of the peculiarly American art that includes Moby Dick and Clarel, the author of which happens to be Metcalf’s great-grandfather, the music of Charles Ives, Ezra Pound’s Cantos, William Carlos Williams’ In the American Grain and Paterson, Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, the paintings of Jackson Pollock. Guy Davenport writes, “Pervading all of Metcalf’s work is a tragic sense of the past, of a grief for how far wrong we’ve gone, how uselessly bloody our past has been, how ignorant we are of that past, and how inscrutably strange our biological nature is.”
In many of the books, the interest derives directly from unlikely juxtapositions. In Genoa, which is perhaps Metcalf’s masterpiece, he juxtaposes a meditation on Melville, on Columbus, and a famous kidnapping case of the 1950’s; The Middle Passage juxtaposes a consideration of the Luddites, the slave trade, and the whale fisheries. Of Apalache and the later works, which depend almost entirely upon collaged materials, Metcalf says in an interview, “The more disembodied it becomes, the more personal it becomes? This was not a conscious action on my part, but simply something that happened. . . . In other words, there is an overriding consciousness there. . . . It falls or stands on the presence of that organizing consciousness.” Metcalf’s books are the product of extensive research, a kind of archaeology. Most of the books have extensive bibliographies. Metcalf offers some measure of how useful information can be in the hands of one who knows what it is for, of one who takes the responsibility of consciousness.
Perhaps it is possible to think of Metcalf’s books as excerpts from the encyclopedia of some future culture which has learned to use information rather than allowing itself to be used by it."
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May 15, 2016In the penu=beginning, RCF, 1981, v the first #2*, “A Conversation with Paul Metcalf By John O’Brien” among/amongst other scribblings, righteously cnp’d. etc.
Will West (Jonathan Williams 1956)
Genoa (Jargon. 1965)
Patagoni (Jargon, 1971)
The Middle Passage (Jargon, 1976)
Apalache (Turtle Island, 1976)
tbc
…brief intro by davenport, usw. coffee house press at their utter best.
let’s begin. again.
pause. recall and honor the BURIED.
[The first edition being a 500 copy signed limited edition done by another press in 1956]
Job: I am purposely avoiding the word “fiction,” though you are usually thought of as a novelist.
Books by Paul Metcalf and Hubert Selby, Jr.
John O’Brien, “An Interview with Paul Metcalf”
George Butterick, “Paul Metcalf and the Documentary Narrative”
Richard Grossinger, “Notes for a Festschrift on Paul Metcalf”
Tom Churchill, “From Melville to Olson to Metcalf: The Double Play”
Vincent Ferrini, “Local Universe”
Ammiel Alcalay, “For Paul Metcalf”
Joe Napora, “The Body of Knowledge: Paul Metcalf’s Patagoni and U.S. Dept. of the Interior“
Theodore Enslin, “Paul Metcalf–A Very Personal Appreciation”
Alex Gildzen, “Travels thru the Interior: Notes Towards a Structuralist Analysis of Paul Metcalf”
Don Byrd, “Mr. Metcalf and the Savage Mind”
Harry Lewis, “Paul Metcalf Delivers the News”
Charles DeFanti, “The Thrill of Choosing: Paul Metcalf and the Power of Not-So- Blackness”
John O’Brien, “Language and Materials in the Art of Paul Metcalf”
…….by mail for two and a half years, beginning in 1975.
PaulM : i.e., to break a narrative into its particular parts, and rearrange them according to an original pattern. The “rose in the steel dust,” and that must “stand on its own feet as, a force, in, the fields of force which surround everyone of us. . .”
One of 1000 copies.
….drawn into shape through an act of imagination, but retaining their character as particles, distinct from one another. Not brought together, but spreading and shaping in one gesture, as in the “big bang” theory of the origin of the universe, spreading and shaping. “just what are words & what do they do?”—”manipulation of language particles”—”words surrounded by spaces”—and “particles are interesting.” Interjecting particles of cetology, the practice of whaling, etc.—”the ballast of the book.” Has anyone ever made a comparative study of Moby-Dick and Paterson?
Touch of darkening to the edge of the white wrappers still fine. Nicely Inscribed by the author.
Compared to all this, the conventional novel, with its sequential flow of events, seems less “original,” or, more simply, less appropriate to the character and quality of American life today.
1 of 350 copies published by Barry Sternlieb and David Raffeld. Limited to 350 copies. SIGNED by Metcalf on the half-title page.
Is Moby-Dick a poem written in prose? “Flossie is now reading Moby Dick.” No more. “I recommend that you publish it, it’s a labor-saving device-you don’t have to read Melville.”
Linclon's assassination in contemporary quotes.
Job: When you eliminate so many of the conventions of the traditional review (i.e., plot, and sometimes even characters), what becomes the principle of unity? [ie, the PoU]
Minneapolis: Rain Taxi (1998)., 1998. First edition.. [24 pp].
PalM : The PoU is “the rose in the steel dust.” That effecting its transfer, from inside my skin to outside it, is the reason for writing. How to get from A to B—this is best done abruptly. Let them really clang. Tensegrity: when you erect a structure, if all the lines holding it are taut or tense, it will stay up.
Turtle Island Foundation, Berkeley, 1976. Hardcover. Book Condition: Very good. Dust Jacket Condition: very good. First Edition. 8vo. [6], 178pp.
Tansy Press, Kansas, 1979. Pictorial Cover.
JoB :: I can see the smile on your face as you came across a passage in Columbus about feet or a line in Melville about heads.
CrossCountry Press, Montreal / New York, 1983. First edition. Softcover. A paperback original.
pAUlm :: And I humbly (proudly?) confess to the many smiles that crossed my face, as the rhymes and reflections emerged.
eaPo :: “There is no greater mistake than the supposition that a true originality is a mere matter of impulse or inspiration. To originate is carefully, patiently, and understandingly to combine.”
[as before] jOb : …a substitute for clumsy metaphors…
n.p.: Privately published, 1983., 1983. Broadside poem. First edition.
withCalf : I am much happier, and always have been, with the word juxtaposition than I am with metaphor. Mosaic**. Immense rhymes. “You pick up these unlikely chunks, and they do slip together, like a perfect tenon mortise joint.”
Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1996. Hardcover. Book Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Good. First Edition. Size=6."x9.". (full book description) Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1996. 1st Edition 1st Printing, Fine/Good+, Hard Cover, w/Dust Jacket. Size=6."x9.", 591pgs.
Instead of words or phrases, I use whole lives, concepts, episodes or epochs.
Pequod Press, New York, 1981
Claude[spellcheck?] :: These activities meet “intellectual requirements rather than or instead of satisfying needs. The real question is not whether the touch of a woodpecker’s beak does in fact cure toothache. It is rather whether there is a point of view from which a woodpecker’s beak and a man’s tooth can be seen as ‘going together’ . . . and whether “[sic]some initial order can be introduced into the universe by means of these groupings”.
The Jargon Society, Charlotte, NC, 1982. Hardcover. Book Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. B/W Photos (illustrator). First Edition. Size=9"x11". (full book description)…. …..Rest of book in Fine condition. ISBN 091233049x 99% OF OUR BOOKS ARE SHIPPED IN CUSTOM BOXES, WE ALWAYS PACK WITH GREAT CARE!. Signed by Author. Book. Bookseller Inventory # CONROY210122I
pm :: which is nothing but names, regrouped; otherwise a flippant book. A new “rose in the steel dust,” based on a renaming and redescribing, was called for.
Jonathan Williams, Highlands, NC, 1965. Hardcover. Book Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Good. First Edition.
Guy :: Make “them touch just when they can speak in concert, disclosing ironies, deepening the intuitive evidence that there is a plot to American history.”
ass=before :: There is a certain fatuous aspect in trying to be primitive in a sophisticated world.
Station Hill, 1979, 1979. First edition SIGNED: Near fine stapled wraps with crisp text throughout. Tucked within the broadside is a typed letter from Paul Metcalf dated December 26, 1979, thanking a local poet for poems sent for Christmas and Metcalf inquiring about a tape of one of his Olson lectures. Fully signed by the poet. The letter and the book priced at. Bookseller Inventory # 18032
jOB :: …among the Luddites. Slaves. Whales. [I reserve the right!!! fuck you.]
Truck Press / Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1978. Loose Sheets.
Paul : “A Triptych of Commodities”. A friend with a Marxist background—and then being surprised… and a little annoyed… when she put a Marxist interpretation on it…. and then suddenly, innocently, realizing, why, of course! …that I didn’t think of it myself.
Providence: Paradigm Press (1992)., 1992. First edition.. Unpaginated.
joHn : …to “languages” that areusually thought non-literary—scientific, anthropological, medical, mechanical, and so on. Such “jargon”….
North Carolina wesleyan college press, Rocky Mount NC, 1989. … Octavo. 69pp A very good copy in blue printed wraps.
Saul : …particularly the way you’ve phrased it.
(As a corollary to this, I would want to say that the subject matter of a work of art matters only in that it be something about which the artist cares passionately.)
…unique bodies of language, representing idiosyncratic modes of thought… more or less isolated from the broad areas of language that are generally drawn into literature. So many of these linguistic organizations are so extraordinarily beautiful. All are there, waiting for admission into poetry. This chemistry of rich and varied language; why we read.
The Bookstore/ Arts Action Press n.p., Lenox, MA. no binding.
JOB: What then for you constitutes a good line of prose?
Number 25 of 43 copies.
Prime Minister : ….would at once enter the textbooks and there after be taught, and I don’t … writing “a good line of prose” can be taught. 1)(this involves both extent and limits) 2)(i.e., what is the music?). Clark Coolidge is a great Moby-Dick fan. “When the man writing is frightened by a word, he may have started.”
…possibly from a food stain, signed by Metcalf in black ink at flyleaf….
O’B :: 1) “voice” 2) “voice” 3) minimizing poetry and prose….?
Hungry Mind, Minneapolis, 1996.
Pow! :: …reason we read him, for his idiosyncratic force. A theatrical mask, on the other hand, properly used, aims at revelation.
Michael as a static movie projector, the novel, disjointed and rejoined, thrown up on a screen—and at times, I, Paul Metcalf, almost ignore my own projector, Michael Mills, and fire my own shots at that screen. The distinction is wearing thin.
First published in 1965, this novel is Metcalf's purging of the burden of his relationship to his great-grandfather, Herman Melville. 300 copies were published by Truck Press on the occasion of the poet's reading at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis on February 20, 1978.
PatagonJOB[sic] : The persona is gone altogether; or mosaics [!]. My whole career is a process of conversion, of attaining some degree of control over prose, and then converting it into poetry.
Announcement of a reading for this title is laid in.
…about whether there is a point of junction, a seam that may be worked, a tightrope that may be essayed for reasons hard to determine.
Quite attractive all around.
As a worker… and I find it difficult, therefore, to work a seam, or tread a tightrope
The poet Howard Moss has wrestled with these definitions: by the clock.…by the metronome ; mirror…totem…window ; love affair…mirrors, windows. And that’s exactly the point.
Dalkey Archive Press, Elmwood Park, IL, 1986.
As though, in walking the earth, I were traversing two vague but powerful geomagnetic fields.
99% OF OUR BOOKS ARE SHIPPED IN CUSTOM BOXES, WE ALWAYS PACK WITH GREAT CARE!.
(get a) J.O.B. :: 2) that this voice makes the style idiosyncratic or personal.
The Nantahala Foundation/The Jargon Society, Highlands, 1965. First edition, first printing.
Paulm ; When I poke about using several different devices to plunge a voice into the writing… in these very processes of combining that “voice” does (or does not) emerge.
How is it … the radio … a concert … a symphonic piece, we don’t … about it makes us say, “ah-ha, that’s Beethoven,” or “yes, that’s Brahms“? …not for me to judge.
North Carolina Wesleyan College Press, (Rocky Mount, North Carolina, 1989. Softcover.
Iohn ::…..
Reprinted from Zip Odes for a reading by the author in 1989.
Our Hero :: I think you would have your answer. …the relentless corporate dictator, and the sentimental, nostalgic rube?
The 1965 1st edition, INSCRIBED BY PAUL METCALF on a pasted-on leaf TO MAXWELL GEISMAR, pre-eminent mid 20th century literary critic and biographer.
Interviewer :: Couldn’t you have “fictionalized” these things? Couldn’t you have “made up” the past?
Granary Books and Chax Press, Minneapolis and Tucson, 1987.
Interviewee : I don’t know if I can answer this (again look at the cetology in Moby-Dick) and of “baring-of-the soul” poetry, were worn out, the richest possible lode, begging to he mined.
There is the old saw: what are facts, what is reality? The natural mode of art is artifice—masks, fiction, indirection—the writer is hobbled when she goes to the typewriter with the intention of conveying pure fact.
….assumes that the writer’s facts are simply another artifice, another mask.
How do you tell the reader that you are not trying to “magic” her? Americans, as empire-builders. Poe set out to con us. Melville occasionally hid plagiarism behind the mask of autobiography; Watergate had to occur, so that we could expose it; hard core porn was inevitable; Truman Capote invented “the non-fiction novel”; and now we have Doonesbury;
John asks about “baring the soul”.
Number 115 from an edition of 236 copies printed on Arches paper with illustrations by Cynthia Miller.
Paul responds the only way he knows how :: Okay, here we go again: putting myself into the work—injecting myself, if you wish. So be it.
One of only 26 lettered copies, signed by the author.
“A depressing sameness ran through most of the poems: solipsism is in the saddle galloping from one bland event and trite epiphany to the next. The massive self-regard was stupefying and finally scary. For the rare reflective poem . . . there were dozens about childhood experiences with grandparents or siblings, the poets rummaging in the attic of memory for tattered bits of nostalgia, of fistfuls in which the poets stood outdoors, in a pasture, watching a mare throw her foal, for the purpose of recording the scene in a poem,” dragging with them wherever they go a trail of personal garbage, like exposed intestines.
This book has 591 pages.
The little Indian boy peeing on the mountaintop in the Andes.
Midnight Paper Sales, Berkeley, 1996. Broadside.
It is the world that concerns me.
A juxtaposition of material concerning Poe and Booth.
Joan again moans : If not the words, then what?
First Edition. Limited to 500 copies, this one signed by the Author in blue on fep.
Pauwl(full) :: My work exists on several levels. It exists in the initial instinct which then becomes a kind of conception; to what extent…and to what extent …may vary a great deal. It may simply be an instinct …together which in the past …I feel have an organic association. I often have something I want to or to look for, and I start. I go through … or a great … until suddenly I hit upon … and say, “Wow! This is…, this is…looking for.” I my nt vn t tht pnt knw wh t s tht gt tht “wow” rspns. All right. The original conception of wanting—present an ideaor present a sense of a place or a people or simply a philosophical Ikea—that is mine[! -editor]. And the material that I choose is an act of choice … at work. And thirdly, the way I associate the materials, order them, the relative…I give them in relation…, juxtapositions—all that’s my own work [!omg! -editor]. And I think that’s a valid creative process [yes, yes it is]. What am I doing differently from a poet who takes words and puts them together in a new way? [nothing, nothing at all different] He didn’t invent the words; the words are common property [I say this very same thing all the time ; even have it posted on my refrigerator]. Likewise, the conceptual material, the scientific material, are common poetry which I have selected. I am using chunks rather than individual words [just like me! Paul, you and I are birds of a feather, coin a cliche]. It’s no different, really, except in the matter of proportion [and possibly occasionally The Law].
North Point Press, San Francisco, 1982. Cloth.
JOB (still incredulous): So there is no difference between a poet or novelist who “makes up” a poem or a story and what you do?
Five Trees Press January 1979, 1979. Limited Edition of 350 copies. Pamphlet. Very good condition.
… : That’s difficult to answer.
Published as Jargon 78. Fine copy, in dust jacket. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page.
joHn (dawn beginning to dawn upon him) : So that, for instance, one might use items from a newspaper in making a poem, such as Williams did?
Chax Press, Tucson, 1985. First edition. Tall thin quarto. Unpaginated. With a few mono-color illustrations by Wendy Osterweil.
(from here on Our Hero’s name is elided) : Why not?
With a few small black and white decorations. Touches of spotting to the edges, else fine in original pictorial mustard cloth and a fine pictorial dust jacket. Signed by Metcalf.
“Wow, that’s something I want to know more about.”
This 1989 edition of Paul Metcalf's poetic baseball tribute is limited to 350 copies in hand-sewn wrappers with ilustrated dust jacket. Signed by the author on the title page.
But to do that in a random way, the way I object to in Bill Burroughs, in his “cutup” novels, where you’re dealing strictly with the accident—the juxtapositions are not intelligent, they’re accidental. [like mine! like mine!]
Laurinburg: Mole Press (1977)., 1977. First edition, limited & signed issue. Three 10 x 7 inch sheets laid into a tri-fold illustrated paper portfolio. Fine.
That becomes uninteresting to me. [I agree ; but you have to admit, they do create a few LOL!=moments!]
Letter 'B' of 26 copies. Fine in a fine pictorial dust jacket. Together with: Tansy 6. Signed by Metcalf.
I don’t think of myself now, though I did when I was younger, as an avant-garde or experimental writer. Underlying whatever I’ve done is an essentially conservative artistic structure which is not revolutionary or experimental. [one has to say this]
Item Description: Granary Books, Minneapolis Chax Press, Tucson. Number 4 of 10 special copies, signed by Paul Metcalf., 1987. Hardcover. Book Condition: Fine. No Jacket. 1st Edition. [Partial colophon]: "[-] Paul Metcalf came into the Chax studios every Tuesday to help. Mary Beaton made the cover paper. In the text, Kennerly type is printed on Arches paper. Illustration by Cynthia Miller. Titling with Futura type & woodblock prints. The book was designed & printed by Charles Alexander. 36 copies of this first Chax-Granary collaboration are hand bound in boards by Priscilla Spitler; 10 of these are numbered I to X, 26 are lettered A to Z. [-] This is copy IV" [number 4 of the ten]. 6 3/4 inches x 11 1/4 in., half-title, which is signed by Paul Metcalf, title-pagge with design printed in orange, two-page illustrated map, with hawk design. Unpaginated, [42]pp. + colophon page, includes bibliography relating to Peshtigo Forest Fire, and hawks. Maroon cloth spine and sides, with printed title label on the spine, marbled paper over boards, brown endpapers. Very scarce edition of 10 Roman numeral numbered copies. Loosely inserted is the postcard-size announcement of the publication. Signed by Author(s). Bookseller Inventory # F-125
J.O.B asks about readerly preconceptions, which, well, is sort of a sine qua non.
The above photos, of this copy, are accurate reflections of the book conditions. International buyers should note this would be sent priority express insured, with a shipping charge of $45.00.
[this is a long interview and I know this Review won’t fit into that box, but we’ll see what we can do about it ; maybe use the comment space, maybe the MyWritings space. What do you think, Dearest gr’Er?]
usw :
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
*verteilt met Hubert Selby, no=less.
** This interview took place before the development of the Mosaic hop varietal and thus cannot be an inadvertent reference to this luscious lupulin.
Will West (Jonathan Williams 1956)
Genoa (Jargon. 1965)
Patagoni (Jargon, 1971)
The Middle Passage (Jargon, 1976)
Apalache (Turtle Island, 1976)
tbc
…brief intro by davenport, usw. coffee house press at their utter best.
let’s begin. again.
pause. recall and honor the BURIED.
[The first edition being a 500 copy signed limited edition done by another press in 1956]
Job: I am purposely avoiding the word “fiction,” though you are usually thought of as a novelist.
Books by Paul Metcalf and Hubert Selby, Jr.
John O’Brien, “An Interview with Paul Metcalf”
George Butterick, “Paul Metcalf and the Documentary Narrative”
Richard Grossinger, “Notes for a Festschrift on Paul Metcalf”
Tom Churchill, “From Melville to Olson to Metcalf: The Double Play”
Vincent Ferrini, “Local Universe”
Ammiel Alcalay, “For Paul Metcalf”
Joe Napora, “The Body of Knowledge: Paul Metcalf’s Patagoni and U.S. Dept. of the Interior“
Theodore Enslin, “Paul Metcalf–A Very Personal Appreciation”
Alex Gildzen, “Travels thru the Interior: Notes Towards a Structuralist Analysis of Paul Metcalf”
Don Byrd, “Mr. Metcalf and the Savage Mind”
Harry Lewis, “Paul Metcalf Delivers the News”
Charles DeFanti, “The Thrill of Choosing: Paul Metcalf and the Power of Not-So- Blackness”
John O’Brien, “Language and Materials in the Art of Paul Metcalf”
…….by mail for two and a half years, beginning in 1975.
PaulM : i.e., to break a narrative into its particular parts, and rearrange them according to an original pattern. The “rose in the steel dust,” and that must “stand on its own feet as, a force, in, the fields of force which surround everyone of us. . .”
One of 1000 copies.
….drawn into shape through an act of imagination, but retaining their character as particles, distinct from one another. Not brought together, but spreading and shaping in one gesture, as in the “big bang” theory of the origin of the universe, spreading and shaping. “just what are words & what do they do?”—”manipulation of language particles”—”words surrounded by spaces”—and “particles are interesting.” Interjecting particles of cetology, the practice of whaling, etc.—”the ballast of the book.” Has anyone ever made a comparative study of Moby-Dick and Paterson?
Touch of darkening to the edge of the white wrappers still fine. Nicely Inscribed by the author.
Compared to all this, the conventional novel, with its sequential flow of events, seems less “original,” or, more simply, less appropriate to the character and quality of American life today.
1 of 350 copies published by Barry Sternlieb and David Raffeld. Limited to 350 copies. SIGNED by Metcalf on the half-title page.
Is Moby-Dick a poem written in prose? “Flossie is now reading Moby Dick.” No more. “I recommend that you publish it, it’s a labor-saving device-you don’t have to read Melville.”
Linclon's assassination in contemporary quotes.
Job: When you eliminate so many of the conventions of the traditional review (i.e., plot, and sometimes even characters), what becomes the principle of unity? [ie, the PoU]
Minneapolis: Rain Taxi (1998)., 1998. First edition.. [24 pp].
PalM : The PoU is “the rose in the steel dust.” That effecting its transfer, from inside my skin to outside it, is the reason for writing. How to get from A to B—this is best done abruptly. Let them really clang. Tensegrity: when you erect a structure, if all the lines holding it are taut or tense, it will stay up.
Turtle Island Foundation, Berkeley, 1976. Hardcover. Book Condition: Very good. Dust Jacket Condition: very good. First Edition. 8vo. [6], 178pp.
Tansy Press, Kansas, 1979. Pictorial Cover.
JoB :: I can see the smile on your face as you came across a passage in Columbus about feet or a line in Melville about heads.
CrossCountry Press, Montreal / New York, 1983. First edition. Softcover. A paperback original.
pAUlm :: And I humbly (proudly?) confess to the many smiles that crossed my face, as the rhymes and reflections emerged.
eaPo :: “There is no greater mistake than the supposition that a true originality is a mere matter of impulse or inspiration. To originate is carefully, patiently, and understandingly to combine.”
n.p.: Privately published, 1983., 1983. Broadside poem. First edition.
withCalf : I am much happier, and always have been, with the word juxtaposition than I am with metaphor. Mosaic**. Immense rhymes. “You pick up these unlikely chunks, and they do slip together, like a perfect tenon mortise joint.”
Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1996. Hardcover. Book Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Good. First Edition. Size=6."x9.". (full book description) Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1996. 1st Edition 1st Printing, Fine/Good+, Hard Cover, w/Dust Jacket. Size=6."x9.", 591pgs.
Instead of words or phrases, I use whole lives, concepts, episodes or epochs.
Pequod Press, New York, 1981
Claude[spellcheck?] :: These activities meet “intellectual requirements rather than or instead of satisfying needs. The real question is not whether the touch of a woodpecker’s beak does in fact cure toothache. It is rather whether there is a point of view from which a woodpecker’s beak and a man’s tooth can be seen as ‘going together’ . . . and whether “[sic]some initial order can be introduced into the universe by means of these groupings”.
The Jargon Society, Charlotte, NC, 1982. Hardcover. Book Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. B/W Photos (illustrator). First Edition. Size=9"x11". (full book description)…. …..Rest of book in Fine condition. ISBN 091233049x 99% OF OUR BOOKS ARE SHIPPED IN CUSTOM BOXES, WE ALWAYS PACK WITH GREAT CARE!. Signed by Author. Book. Bookseller Inventory # CONROY210122I
pm :: which is nothing but names, regrouped; otherwise a flippant book. A new “rose in the steel dust,” based on a renaming and redescribing, was called for.
Jonathan Williams, Highlands, NC, 1965. Hardcover. Book Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Good. First Edition.
Guy :: Make “them touch just when they can speak in concert, disclosing ironies, deepening the intuitive evidence that there is a plot to American history.”
ass=before :: There is a certain fatuous aspect in trying to be primitive in a sophisticated world.
Station Hill, 1979, 1979. First edition SIGNED: Near fine stapled wraps with crisp text throughout. Tucked within the broadside is a typed letter from Paul Metcalf dated December 26, 1979, thanking a local poet for poems sent for Christmas and Metcalf inquiring about a tape of one of his Olson lectures. Fully signed by the poet. The letter and the book priced at. Bookseller Inventory # 18032
jOB :: …among the Luddites. Slaves. Whales. [I reserve the right!!! fuck you.]
Truck Press / Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1978. Loose Sheets.
Paul : “A Triptych of Commodities”. A friend with a Marxist background—and then being surprised… and a little annoyed… when she put a Marxist interpretation on it…. and then suddenly, innocently, realizing, why, of course! …that I didn’t think of it myself.
Providence: Paradigm Press (1992)., 1992. First edition.. Unpaginated.
joHn : …to “languages” that are
North Carolina wesleyan college press, Rocky Mount NC, 1989. … Octavo. 69pp A very good copy in blue printed wraps.
Saul : …particularly the way you’ve phrased it.
(As a corollary to this, I would want to say that the subject matter of a work of art matters only in that it be something about which the artist cares passionately.)
…unique bodies of language, representing idiosyncratic modes of thought… more or less isolated from the broad areas of language that are generally drawn into literature. So many of these linguistic organizations are so extraordinarily beautiful. All are there, waiting for admission into poetry. This chemistry of rich and varied language; why we read.
The Bookstore/ Arts Action Press n.p., Lenox, MA. no binding.
JOB: What then for you constitutes a good line of prose?
Number 25 of 43 copies.
Prime Minister : ….would at once enter the textbooks and there after be taught, and I don’t … writing “a good line of prose” can be taught. 1)(this involves both extent and limits) 2)(i.e., what is the music?). Clark Coolidge is a great Moby-Dick fan. “When the man writing is frightened by a word, he may have started.”
…possibly from a food stain, signed by Metcalf in black ink at flyleaf….
O’B :: 1) “voice” 2) “voice” 3) minimizing poetry and prose….?
Hungry Mind, Minneapolis, 1996.
Pow! :: …reason we read him, for his idiosyncratic force. A theatrical mask, on the other hand, properly used, aims at revelation.
Michael as a static movie projector, the novel, disjointed and rejoined, thrown up on a screen—and at times, I, Paul Metcalf, almost ignore my own projector, Michael Mills, and fire my own shots at that screen. The distinction is wearing thin.
First published in 1965, this novel is Metcalf's purging of the burden of his relationship to his great-grandfather, Herman Melville. 300 copies were published by Truck Press on the occasion of the poet's reading at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis on February 20, 1978.
PatagonJOB[sic] : The persona is gone altogether; or mosaics [!]. My whole career is a process of conversion, of attaining some degree of control over prose, and then converting it into poetry.
Announcement of a reading for this title is laid in.
…about whether there is a point of junction, a seam that may be worked, a tightrope that may be essayed for reasons hard to determine.
Quite attractive all around.
As a worker… and I find it difficult, therefore, to work a seam, or tread a tightrope
The poet Howard Moss has wrestled with these definitions: by the clock.…by the metronome ; mirror…totem…window ; love affair…mirrors, windows. And that’s exactly the point.
Dalkey Archive Press, Elmwood Park, IL, 1986.
As though, in walking the earth, I were traversing two vague but powerful geomagnetic fields.
99% OF OUR BOOKS ARE SHIPPED IN CUSTOM BOXES, WE ALWAYS PACK WITH GREAT CARE!.
(get a) J.O.B. :: 2) that this voice makes the style idiosyncratic or personal.
The Nantahala Foundation/The Jargon Society, Highlands, 1965. First edition, first printing.
Paulm ; When I poke about using several different devices to plunge a voice into the writing… in these very processes of combining that “voice” does (or does not) emerge.
How is it … the radio … a concert … a symphonic piece, we don’t … about it makes us say, “ah-ha, that’s Beethoven,” or “yes, that’s Brahms“? …not for me to judge.
North Carolina Wesleyan College Press, (Rocky Mount, North Carolina, 1989. Softcover.
Iohn ::…..
Reprinted from Zip Odes for a reading by the author in 1989.
Our Hero :: I think you would have your answer. …the relentless corporate dictator, and the sentimental, nostalgic rube?
The 1965 1st edition, INSCRIBED BY PAUL METCALF on a pasted-on leaf TO MAXWELL GEISMAR, pre-eminent mid 20th century literary critic and biographer.
Interviewer :: Couldn’t you have “fictionalized” these things? Couldn’t you have “made up” the past?
Granary Books and Chax Press, Minneapolis and Tucson, 1987.
Interviewee : I don’t know if I can answer this (again look at the cetology in Moby-Dick) and of “baring-of-the soul” poetry, were worn out, the richest possible lode, begging to he mined.
There is the old saw: what are facts, what is reality? The natural mode of art is artifice—masks, fiction, indirection—the writer is hobbled when she goes to the typewriter with the intention of conveying pure fact.
….assumes that the writer’s facts are simply another artifice, another mask.
How do you tell the reader that you are not trying to “magic” her? Americans, as empire-builders. Poe set out to con us. Melville occasionally hid plagiarism behind the mask of autobiography; Watergate had to occur, so that we could expose it; hard core porn was inevitable; Truman Capote invented “the non-fiction novel”; and now we have Doonesbury;
John asks about “baring the soul”.
Number 115 from an edition of 236 copies printed on Arches paper with illustrations by Cynthia Miller.
Paul responds the only way he knows how :: Okay, here we go again: putting myself into the work—injecting myself, if you wish. So be it.
One of only 26 lettered copies, signed by the author.
“A depressing sameness ran through most of the poems: solipsism is in the saddle galloping from one bland event and trite epiphany to the next. The massive self-regard was stupefying and finally scary. For the rare reflective poem . . . there were dozens about childhood experiences with grandparents or siblings, the poets rummaging in the attic of memory for tattered bits of nostalgia, of fistfuls in which the poets stood outdoors, in a pasture, watching a mare throw her foal, for the purpose of recording the scene in a poem,” dragging with them wherever they go a trail of personal garbage, like exposed intestines.
This book has 591 pages.
The little Indian boy peeing on the mountaintop in the Andes.
Midnight Paper Sales, Berkeley, 1996. Broadside.
It is the world that concerns me.
A juxtaposition of material concerning Poe and Booth.
Joan again moans : If not the words, then what?
First Edition. Limited to 500 copies, this one signed by the Author in blue on fep.
Pauwl(full) :: My work exists on several levels. It exists in the initial instinct which then becomes a kind of conception; to what extent…and to what extent …may vary a great deal. It may simply be an instinct …together which in the past …I feel have an organic association. I often have something I want to or to look for, and I start. I go through … or a great … until suddenly I hit upon … and say, “Wow! This is…, this is…looking for.” I my nt vn t tht pnt knw wh t s tht gt tht “wow” rspns. All right. The original conception of wanting—present an idea
North Point Press, San Francisco, 1982. Cloth.
JOB (still incredulous): So there is no difference between a poet or novelist who “makes up” a poem or a story and what you do?
Five Trees Press January 1979, 1979. Limited Edition of 350 copies. Pamphlet. Very good condition.
… : That’s difficult to answer.
Published as Jargon 78. Fine copy, in dust jacket. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page.
joHn (dawn beginning to dawn upon him) : So that, for instance, one might use items from a newspaper in making a poem, such as Williams did?
Chax Press, Tucson, 1985. First edition. Tall thin quarto. Unpaginated. With a few mono-color illustrations by Wendy Osterweil.
(from here on Our Hero’s name is elided) : Why not?
With a few small black and white decorations. Touches of spotting to the edges, else fine in original pictorial mustard cloth and a fine pictorial dust jacket. Signed by Metcalf.
“Wow, that’s something I want to know more about.”
This 1989 edition of Paul Metcalf's poetic baseball tribute is limited to 350 copies in hand-sewn wrappers with ilustrated dust jacket. Signed by the author on the title page.
But to do that in a random way, the way I object to in Bill Burroughs, in his “cutup” novels, where you’re dealing strictly with the accident—the juxtapositions are not intelligent, they’re accidental. [like mine! like mine!]
Laurinburg: Mole Press (1977)., 1977. First edition, limited & signed issue. Three 10 x 7 inch sheets laid into a tri-fold illustrated paper portfolio. Fine.
That becomes uninteresting to me. [I agree ; but you have to admit, they do create a few LOL!=moments!]
Letter 'B' of 26 copies. Fine in a fine pictorial dust jacket. Together with: Tansy 6. Signed by Metcalf.
I don’t think of myself now, though I did when I was younger, as an avant-garde or experimental writer. Underlying whatever I’ve done is an essentially conservative artistic structure which is not revolutionary or experimental. [one has to say this]
Item Description: Granary Books, Minneapolis Chax Press, Tucson. Number 4 of 10 special copies, signed by Paul Metcalf., 1987. Hardcover. Book Condition: Fine. No Jacket. 1st Edition. [Partial colophon]: "[-] Paul Metcalf came into the Chax studios every Tuesday to help. Mary Beaton made the cover paper. In the text, Kennerly type is printed on Arches paper. Illustration by Cynthia Miller. Titling with Futura type & woodblock prints. The book was designed & printed by Charles Alexander. 36 copies of this first Chax-Granary collaboration are hand bound in boards by Priscilla Spitler; 10 of these are numbered I to X, 26 are lettered A to Z. [-] This is copy IV" [number 4 of the ten]. 6 3/4 inches x 11 1/4 in., half-title, which is signed by Paul Metcalf, title-pagge with design printed in orange, two-page illustrated map, with hawk design. Unpaginated, [42]pp. + colophon page, includes bibliography relating to Peshtigo Forest Fire, and hawks. Maroon cloth spine and sides, with printed title label on the spine, marbled paper over boards, brown endpapers. Very scarce edition of 10 Roman numeral numbered copies. Loosely inserted is the postcard-size announcement of the publication. Signed by Author(s). Bookseller Inventory # F-125
J.O.B asks about readerly preconceptions, which, well, is sort of a sine qua non.
The above photos, of this copy, are accurate reflections of the book conditions. International buyers should note this would be sent priority express insured, with a shipping charge of $45.00.
[this is a long interview and I know this Review won’t fit into that box, but we’ll see what we can do about it ; maybe use the comment space, maybe the MyWritings space. What do you think, Dearest gr’Er?]
usw :
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
*verteilt met Hubert Selby, no=less.
** This interview took place before the development of the Mosaic hop varietal and thus cannot be an inadvertent reference to this luscious lupulin.
April 14, 2007
Metcalf is another of those eccentric intellectuals I tend to gravitate toward (like Guy Davenport, William Gaddis and Charles Olson). His work is unlike anyone else's. It isn't fiction and it isn't nonfiction, really. It hybridizes diary, historical sources, description, imagination. It reads like a poem, usually, or a dense travelogue, sometimes, and raises literary collage to its own wonderful level. I find myself writing in a similar style to Metcalf's; perhaps this is why I love his work so much. Not sure you can dig it? Start with his short work Willie's Throw which combines a newspaper's baseball game boxscore, a physiological description of a Greek athlete's discus throw (from a medieval text) and a contemporary eyewitness account to create a narrative out of a single throw by Willie Mays from the outfield to homeplate during a game. Masterful and beautiful.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews