Byways Cl

by Laughlin,James

• ISBN13: 9780811216173
• ISBN10: 0811216179
• Edition: 00
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-04-17
• Publisher: New Directions

Summary

"James Laughlin, the late founder and publisher of New Directions, was also a poet of elegance and distinction. Upon his death in 1997 at the age of eighty-three, he left unfinished his long autobiographical poem, Byways. It is no exaggeration to say that his publishing house, which he began in 1936 while still an undergraduate at Harvard, changed the way Americans read and write serious literature. Yet the man who published, promoted, and kept in print the work of some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century remained resistant for most of his life to the memoiristic impulse. In the end, he found his autobiographical voice not in conventional narrative but in verse, adopting the swift-moving line of Kenneth Rexroth's booklength philosophical poem, The Dragon and the Unicorn (1952)."--BOOK JACKET.

Table of Contents

Preface, by Guy Davenport	ix
Introduction, by Peter Glassgold	xiii
Prologue-The Norfolk Santa-Dawn	1	(8)
The Ancestors	9	(4)
The Iceman Cometh	13	(2)
My Shoelaces	15	(4)
My Paternal Grandmother	19	(6)
Are-We Too Old to Make Love?	25	(4)
Harvard-Boston-Rapallo	29	(104)
Toni or Nini?	133	(1)
My Aunt	134	(9)
Remembering William Carlos Williams	143	(72)
The Old Bear: Kenneth Rexroth	215	(4)
Tom Merton	219	(6)
The Rubble Railroad	225	(17)
The Wrong Bed-Moira	242	(2)
The Yellow Pad	244	(7)
The Desert in Bloom	251	(4)
In Trivandrum	255	(16)
Melissa	271	(5)
Brown	276	(2)
Epilogue: An Honest Heart...A Knowing Head	278	(7)
Notes	285	(36)
Acknowledgments	321