Forum / THe Great Poets Brawl of '68

Chris Okum
Apr 24, 03:41pm

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/apr/23/great-poets-brawl-68/

I thought some of you would get a kick out of this.

David Ackley
Apr 24, 06:19pm

You're right, Chris. I certainly did. Hostility between poetic factions in those days ran pretty hot in my recollection. The only part I question relates to Alan Dugan, who I knew. Though very agreeable to people he liked, he had a ready tap to belligerence for others. He was scheduled to read once at the alternative college where I taught and nearly got into it with the local sheriff, a swaggering redneck, who'd barged onto campus to arrest a student. I had to restrain Dugan in order to salvage his reading. The idea that he would actually comply, as in Simic's essay, when told to shut the fuck up, seems to me doubtful.

James Lloyd Davis
Apr 24, 06:57pm

That's cool. Thanks. Would like to have seen that. Sounds reminiscent of a bar fight I witnessed in Hong Kong.

Joani Reese
Apr 25, 01:06am

"Chilean poet Nicanor Parra and the French poet Eugène Guillevic. They were delighted by the spectacle and assumed that this is how American poets always settled their literary quarrels; " Nobody's brave enough to punch today. They just make snide comments. I think I'd rather throw a hard left to the jaw...

James Lloyd Davis
Apr 25, 02:23am

Two quick jabs from the left to the face and a right cross hard on the ear is always a fine strategy.

David Ackley
Apr 25, 01:03pm

A left hook to the kidney also has its proponents.

Carol Reid
Apr 25, 02:50pm

I wonder if people would pay to watch poets fight?
All your comments brought to mind a conversation I had a while back about the demise of the "fair fight", eye to eye and hand to hand, with honour and rules and all the rest.

David Ackley
Apr 25, 05:48pm

Watching poets fight has about the same box office appeal as watching fighters ( excepting Muhammad Ali) recite poetry.

Carol Reid
Apr 25, 06:10pm

There goes my new career as a poetfight promoter (out brief candle) :)

James Lloyd Davis
Apr 25, 06:14pm

Depends on the poets involved.

Carol Reid
Apr 25, 06:19pm

Who'd be some good match-ups?

Carol Reid
Apr 25, 07:04pm

Yeah, that could be an incendiary question. Or funny. Okay, I'll get back to work.

Chris Okum
Apr 25, 07:15pm

John Ashberry vs. Aram Saroyan:

Ashberry is constantly bobbing and weaving, shucking and jiving, moving forwards and backwards, throwing hooks and jabs, at times he looks like a fighter from the turn of the 20th Century and at times he looks like a fighter from today, his moves are both archaic and cutting-edge, he's a blur, throwing windmills and taunting Saroyan, who is standing stock-still in the middle of the ring, not moving a muscle, just watching Ashberry doing his thing, and then all of sudden, out of nowhere, Saroyan throws a lightning fast right hand with minimal effort and Ashberry is knocked out, end of the fight.

Chris Okum
Apr 25, 07:16pm

Ted Hughes vs. Robert Pinsky:

Pinksy wins on a forfeit because Hughes is too busy fucking Pinksy's wife in the dressing room and forgets to show up for the fight.

James Lloyd Davis
Apr 25, 08:03pm

Ouch! The mean streets of poetry just took a very dark turn.

James Lloyd Davis
Apr 25, 08:04pm

I can almost feel the whiplash.

David Ackley
Apr 25, 08:11pm

Walt Whitman vs. Emily Dickinson.

Looks like no contest, Whitman simply extends himself in his patented I-contain-multitudes move, absorbing tiny Emily, the entire ring, the arena, the city and is about to move farther out...when, Oops, didn't see that tiny scalpel. Emily, covered with Whitman goop like Carrie, steps out, hails a cab and heads back for Amherst, a nice hot bath, clean linen. Smiling. The bigger they are etc.

James Lloyd Davis
Apr 25, 08:59pm

Darker still...

James Lloyd Davis
Apr 25, 09:10pm

I can't help but think novelists do it better:

http://www.amazon.com/Vidal-vs-Mailer-Norman/dp/1612192661

From the Melville House blurb:

-Mailer preferred more combative and physical exchanges. At the climax of the feud in the late 1970s, Mailer encountered Vidal at a party thrown by Lally Weymouth and promptly flattened him with a punch. At which point Vidal, still on the floor, uttered what is perhaps the most immortally apt literary criticism ever: “Once again, words have failed Norman Mailer.”-

Smiley McGrouchpants, Jr-Esq-III
Apr 25, 09:59pm

My friend Rick, when I was at the Univ. of Chicago (college), being Irish and from Boston, (Catholic too!) and thus having an appreciation for these sorts of things -- as well as an early-'90s adolescent male's "dark" sense of humor" -- used to, for some reason (that I found gratifying), tell me: "Tell me again ... the story about the kids' parties," like it was a bedtime story, or something:
--------------------------------------------
"My relatives, see, all got married and had kids, and they didn't get to go out much. We had a large family -- uncles and uncles and cousins and second cousins -- so, any occasion for a party, like a kid's 8th birthday party, would be occasion to break out the keg, and for the adults to drink. Thing was, though, these people still had unresolved grudges and other sorts of immature nonsense, so, as the day dragged on, 'round about sunset or so, it happened that a couple-three times, fistfights broke out: tables overturned, bloody noses, kids crying, 'Get inside, get inside the house ... '"
--------------------------------------------
It was -- as the main songwriter of Silkworm once said in an interview about reading that Elvis Costello had caused trouble in his personal life just to drum up some subject matter -- "irretrievably lame." (Funny how it's not about shame, or decorum, or anything you could call/ascribe to something like that ... it's just, nakedly: "What the fuck is WRONG with you people?")

This reminded me of that. Obviously.

Chris Okum
Apr 25, 11:23pm

Philip Larkin vs. Anne Sexton:

Larkin sits cross-legged in the corner of the ring, smoking a cigarette that he's holding with his boxing glove, and watches with intense indifference as Sexton punched herself into a coma. As Sexton is carried away on a gurney, Larkin stands up, brushes the ashes from his tweed shorts, and says, "What a daft cunt."

Chris Okum
Apr 25, 11:36pm

T.S. Eliot vs. Mark Strand:

Ever the gentleman, Strang touches gloved with Eliot and wishes him good luck. Strand has no interest in hurting Eliot, only scoring points, so he tries to connect with some solid body shots. Eliot keeps his gloves squarely in front of his face, accepting the body blows, and then, when he feels as if he can take no more, he waves to someone in the crowd. Within seconds Ezra Pound is in the ring. Eliot excuses himself and leaves. Pound announces that he doesn't need any gloves and then calls Strand a "dirty Jew." When Strand politely tells Pound that he is fact not Jewish but Canadian, Pound jumps on Strand, bites off the tip of his opponent's nose, spits it high into the air and screams, "Tastes like Jew to me!"

Chris Okum
Apr 25, 11:56pm

Allen Ginsberg vs. Wallace Stevens:

Ginsberg enters the ring totally naked. There is a fresh bindi in the middle of his forehead. He grabs the microphone from the ring announcer and tells the audience that he has just gotten back from India, where he learned a system of self-defense invented by Gandhi. He then says that he also learned that had Gandhi lived he would have thrown off his robes of non-violence and turned into the equivalent of a Hindu Malcolm X. Ginsberg points at Stevens and tells him he’s going to hit him so hard that his wife and daughter are going to die to. The bell rings and Ginsberg immediately starts clinching and does not let go for the next three minutes. Ginsberg will sustain this clinch for every round, holding onto to Stevens for dear life until the fight is over. Ginsberg somehow wins the fight. Stevens leans over the ropes and asks to see the Judges’ cards. After a thorough inspection Stevens says that he intends to sue.

Chris Okum
Apr 26, 12:03am

Sylvia Plath vs. Charles Bukowski:

Plath is ferocious, coming straight at Bukowski with a series of uppercuts and right crosses that dazzle and damage the soused Bard of San Pedro. Bukowski tells Plath to hist him harder, tells her that his face couldn't get any uglier, to which Plath replies with a guttural cry of, "Daddy!" After losing on a TKO, Bukowski is so impressed with the petite poetess that he invites her back to his dressing room to share some ripple. Both are surpised (Plath not so much) when they enter Bukowski's dressing room to find Ted Hughes fucking Bukowski's second wife, Linda Lee.

Chris Okum
Apr 26, 12:05am

Sorry for the typos but I'm doing this on the sly.

David Ackley
Apr 26, 12:30am

Creeley vs Dickey et al

In the ring, Dickey regards his raddled, one-eyed opponent with contempt, knowing that in every manly pursuit bowhunting, poker playing, sexual harassment etc he is without peer. When they touch gloves, Creeley says, "How about a drink first." Dickey, smirking, accepts. They adjourn to a nearby bar. Three days later, Dickey collapses from his barstool with acute liver failure. Applying the same tactic, Creeley dispatches every major poet of his generation and with his steel liver intact, retires undefeated to be crowned by TIME The Greatest( and only) Living Poet of his Generation.

David Ackley
Apr 26, 12:38am

(I'm just doing this to egg Chris on.)

Joani Reese
Apr 26, 12:41am

Pretty sure Anne Sexton would have liked to kick Sylvia Plath's ass and poke out Robert Lowell's eyes afterward. She was a bit envious, though a fine poet in her own right.

James Lloyd Davis
Apr 26, 02:38am

I love this places and its penchant for periodic and strange, though brilliant, distraction.

James Lloyd Davis
Apr 26, 02:56am

Dylan Thomas vs Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Long standing grudge match over Ferlinghetti's use of "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower," calling it "Outright theft, ya bloooody beatnik!" In the first round, the drunken Thomas takes a wide swing, loses his balance, goes down for the count. Ferlinghetti, ever the inventive performance artist, wraps the snoring Welsh poet in a gauze cocoon and while the poor lush struggles and squirms, he recites "Constantly Risking Absurdity #15".

Gary Hardaway
Apr 26, 03:50am

There are far too many poets anyway. Let us kill each other off until just a fabulous few remain.

James Lloyd Davis
Apr 26, 05:19am

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the poets..." Billy Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part II, act IV, Scene II.

Joani Reese
Apr 26, 01:38pm

Plato said that (well, at least he wanted to banish them from the state), but I like Shakespeare's version about lawyers better.

James Lloyd Davis
Apr 26, 02:38pm

It's quite possible that, in America today, there are many more poets than lawyers.

David Ackley
Apr 26, 03:32pm

No chance, lawyers have a built-in mechanism for proliferation and prosperity. In the local small towns the saying is , One lawyer in town: she/he starves; two lawyers in town, they both prosper.

James Lloyd Davis
Apr 26, 06:01pm

I thought I knew all the lawyer jokes, but no. Thank you, Barry.

David Ackley
Apr 27, 12:45pm

This one isn't new, but I heard it for the first time the other day.

What's 400 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?

A good start.

Ba-da-bum.
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