Allen Ginsberg and Marie Syrkin were playing the tongue-clucking game. It’s the game where you mention a poem and your surprise that a poetry student — an advanced student — hadn’t heard of it.
It’s a game that people in academics probably shouldn’t play. But if you’re like me, a person with no academic credentials, you can simply enjoy listening to interesting people talk about what people should read. What I learned:
• Marie Syrkin admired Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven.”
• Syrkin said her husband, Charles Reznikoff, liked Wordsworth, but particularly “Resolution and Independence,” which everyone seems to call “The Leech Gatherer.”
• Adelaide Crapsey’s cinquains were discovered by Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch at Reed College in the late 1940s. The students formed the Adelaide Crapsey and Oswald Spengler Mutual Admiration and Poetaster Society.
The tongue-clucking game sent me to the library. I have a blind spot with Wordsworth. I can see why so many people find his poems remarkable, but they rarely move me. I read or reread Wordsworth and Thompson, hoping that my sensibilities had improved through the years and that I would feel them. It just wasn’t to be. Crapsey’s cinquains, on the other hand, were a delight.
• Source: “Allen Ginsberg with Marie Syrkin on Charles Reznikoff,” recorded July 2, 1987, is part of the Naropa University Digital Archives and is available here:
http://archives.naropa.edu/digital/collection/p16621coll1/id/2634/
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