Hayden Carruth Books

Hayden Carruth is a poet of distinction who has shown great generosity of spirit in reading and publishing the work of other writers. In this collection of modern American poetry he begins with Robert Frost and comes up until the 1970's including the work of a wide range of poets. My one reservation with the anthology is that for a number of poets who I particularly like, I am thinking of Wallace Stevens especially, the poems here are not the ones I would have chosen.
Nonetheless anyone who wishes to get a real acquaintance with twentieth - century American poetry would not go wrong starting with this anthology.

I am reading the book for the second time, and I like it very much.
You have to read Dennison more famous book The Lives of Children, and
than reading this book, you will undersand him even more.

this book is one worth skimming, and i skimmed most of it, actually read about 1/10th, and felt i'd gotten the essence of the book.

set in 1971. all about this "perfect" family in rural maine (seemed far from perfect to me) and some visitors they had for a weekend, one of whom was a chilean refugee woman (luisa) who'd gotten out of the country only weeks after the coup in which her family (husband and chidlren) were massacred before her eyes. the real essence of the book is how she interacts with this "ideal" and "happy" family, and the interest is in the juxtaposition of their comfort and happiness and her trauma and misery. it's like completely different worlds colliding, and where it gets good is how one man from the maine world, actually a visitor from new york, is able to enter the world of the chilean woman through his emotional piano playing. this part is fascinating...but remember, the fascinating part is just 1/10th of the book - and the rest is long descriptions about dull happy family routines and dogs and cider-pressing and pinecones.

i think this book could (should?) be condensed into a good 30 page short story.

Hayden Carruth, The Bloomingdale Papers (University of Georgia, 1975)

Excerpts from this work are the centerpiece of Carruth's Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991, and rightly so; they are amazing pieces of work with a chilling sense of utter despair. Ever since first reading them thirteen years ago, I have been hunting for a copy of the full text. I finally found it.

The Bloomingdale Papers is a writing-as-therapy (assigned to him by the doctors) depiction of two months of Carruth's stay in a mental facility, after a nervous breakdown aided and abetted by incipient alcoholism. (This is back when the word alcoholism still had its original definition.) He was unresponsive to regular treatment, so the doctors, noting that he was a writer, told him to write things, so that they could get more of a handle on where his head was. (Carruth notes sardonically in the apologia preceding the poems that they didn't help one bit.) Rereading the manuscript prior to publication over twenty years later, Carruth despised it, in the main. He very rightly points out the effects that mental treatments (both shock therapy and drugs) have on the creative mind, and depicts the effort taken into getting each word on paper while in such a state. Unfortunately, in much of the collection that didn't make it into Collected Shorter, it shows. A good portion of this book is best described as workmanlike, almost devoid of emotion, with stultifying rhyme without any attempt at enjambment whatsoever; it's mindful of high school teen angst poetry, though Carruth has a far better eye for detail than most poets (and it is in evidence throughout this collection, which, had it been published at the time, would have been his first book).

Those pieces that work, however, are pure magic. The best portions of The Bloomingdale Papers are looks into the genesis of, arguably, the finest American poet of the twentieth century. They are worth the price of admission on their own (and with this book out of print so long that price is likely to be rather hefty). The argument against spending thirteen years of your life seeking it out is that much of the best stuff was taken for Collected Shorter, which should still be readily available. *** ½

Hayden Carruth, If You Call This Cry a Song (Countryman Press, 1983)

This collection, written over the course of thirty years, contains material published in magazines and then, for all intents and purposes, forgotten about. Carruth tells us in the introduction that when he stumbled upon it he recognized some old favorites, and thus the birth of this collection.

As seen in The Bird/Poem Book, Carruth is a far better writer than he is a selector of poetry. When he is good, he is very very good, and many of the poems here reflect Carruth doing what he does best. Some of them, on the other hand, are quite simply bombs. Too much politics, not enough poetry, the epidemic that has swept the world since Robert Service and likely before. The best material here is well worth reading, though, and very enjoyable. *** ½

Hayden Carruth, North Winter (1964, The Prairie Press)

North Winter, a long poem in fifty-seven parts and a poetic afterward, is something of an unexpected delight in the Carruth corpus. One assumes one is going to get the usual nature poetry, and for the most part one does. But something always seems a little off in this one. It is. But figuring out what it is is impossible until Carruth broadsides you at the closing of the postscript (at which point it all makes sense).

There's no real use in pontificating on the poetic merit; this is Hayden Carruth. The poetic merit is unquestionable. In the fifty-seven small pieces that make up the whole, Carruth veers from formal poetry to calligrammes to free verse and just about everywhere in between. Might as well just sit back and enjoy the ride.

"The dog flies with his ears
across the snow carrying a
deer's legbone in his jaws
the bone flops threejointedly
and the little hoof dances
delicately in the snow." (--"21")

If anything, it could probably have been distilled a little better. But it's still vintage, and good, Carruth, and well worth seeking out. *** ½

Hayden Carruth, The Sleeping Beauty (Copper Canyon, 1990)

The Sleeping Beauty is a long (125-section) poem from Carruth, one that seems fragmented at first but gradually pulls together; mythology, dreams, jazz, all worked into something that could equally be a poem of love or hate, depending on the reader's perspective. As is usual with Carruth, the language flows, but often with the speed of cold molasses; Carruth's work goes from being accessible to being thick, sometimes within the same poem.

Not a good place to start with Carruth (the best place is Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991, also released by Copper Canyon), but definitely worthy for established fans. ***

Hayden Carruth, ed., The Bird/Poem Book (McCalls, 1970)

First and foremost, please note the ed. after the name Hayden Carruth. Why? Because it stands for "editor." Online booksellers (and libraries) who list a book as being by, instead of edited by, a particular author set people up for disappointment, especially if it's a book that's been out of print for decades and the person has been tracking it down for years.

The Bird/Poem Book suffers from the same major problem as most anthologies of its type; there simply aren't enough quality poems written on any very specific topic to come up with a top-quality anthology of that sort. And this one was very specific; poems about birds, but that don't pretend to be about anything BUT birds. (In other words, no Gerard Manley Hopkins' wonderful "Windhover" here, which would have increased the quality of the collection tremendously.) And, really, the only poem that lives up to the quality one would hope for from an anthology that is so small (one assumes they kept it to slightly over fifty pages because they couldn't find enough of quality) is Carruth's own piece. Note that being up to the quality hoped for from an anthology of this sort is not the same as being up to Carruth's usual quality (this is decidedly inferior to many of the pieces in Asphalt Georgics, Collected Shorter Poems, etc). The rest of the collection ranges from the good and famous (Whitman) to the overrated, awful, and famous (Emily Dickinson, with yet another poem that can be sung to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas"). Included are a number of now-obscure poets of various quality; some of them it seems a crime to have let fade into oblivion, but that could well be the company they're keeping here; for all we know, they sucked.

I'm sure that my disappointment in finding this not to be a Carruth book, as advertised in multiple places, affected my rating. But such is life. Now, Amazon, and Lakewood Public Library, please, strive for accuracy in reporting. **