THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief Poems of New York edited by Elizabeth Schmidt (Ev-Bte A eryman's Library, 256 pp.,$12.50). I've long thought MMlWI the three great subjects for art are faith,...
...What would you think of a magazine that published articles alphabetically...
...What a disaster it is...
...The book includes a selection from Federico Garda Lorca and another, less distinguished, from Wislawa Szymborska, who copped a Nobel Prize several years ago...
...I've long thought MMlWI the three great subjects for art are faith, love, and New York City, so I was eager to open Poems of New York, a small-format paperback in the revived Everyman's Library...
...If the bane of public poetry in this country is sentimental personal prefaces designed to inflate the poem to be read, this anthology is the first to demonstrate the contagious disease affecting poetry editing: "I began collecting the poems in the anthology just after the September 11 attack on The World Trade Center—an attack I witnessed with my family, neighbors, and strangers from the stoop of my building in lower Manhattan...
...Three prologues and an epilogue by various authors sandwich a smattering of essays, interviews, sketches, and an attempted salvage job of his final novel-in-progress...
...As I was reading the selections, most of them from familiar names—Whitman, Melville, Moore, W.C...
...The Salmon of Doubt, however, is a sad attempt to claim Adams as a serious writer...
...Though these fans want to paint Adams retroactively as a novelist of ideas, his whole approach "to life, the universe, and everything" saw seriousness as detrimental to creativity and fun...
...Jeremy Lott...
...Nicholas Wroe insists, "The second Dirk Gently novel can easily be read as being about people who are homeless, displaced, and alienated from society...
...Richard Kostelanetz SThe Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time by Douglas Adams (Harmony, 288 pp., $24...
...Under-edited, Poems of New York was also under-conceived, perhaps because it comes from a series clumsily entitled "Library Pocket Poets," where the other volumes are: Marriage Poems, On Wings of Song: Poems About Birds, Prayers, Poems of the Sea, and Zen Poems...
...Biased to favor famous poets who incidentally wrote about New York, this anthology has no surprises...
...but Poems of New York has nothing in Russian (such as a Vladimir Mayakovsky classic), nothing from the Yiddish, nothing initially in Italian...
...What's also missing from this anthology is nearly all poetry written in New York, about New York, in languages other than English...
...His books are packed with ideas, but he uses them to set up gags, propel the story, and spread a sort of geeky but pleasing veneer over his stories...
...Adams's longtime editor Sue Firestone chimes in that his social criticism "is usually buried by the comedy, but it's there if you want to find it...
...With his five-part Hitchhiker "trilogy" and radio series, two Dirk Gently novels, various journalistic dabblings and multimedia projects, Adams was an enormous success in the field of comic science fiction before his death last year at age 49...
...Williams, Hughes, Hart Crane, Cummings, Ginsberg, Kinnell—I was repeatedly reminded of who and what wasn't included...
...And the large defects reflect deficiencies in details...
...Put in the same class as birds and Zen, New York City barely escapes alive...
...The Hitchhiker series is a genuinely odd, quirky, comic masterpiece...
...If you know that the answer to the question of the meaning of life is forty-two, then you know the works of Douglas Adams...
...The anthology lacks most conspicuously David Ignatow and Harvey Shapiro, who made New York City life their principal subject in classic poems grittier than those included here...
...His atheism could be off-putting, but he wasn't a bigot...
...Eschewing poems more innovative than those associated with the "New York School" of John Ashbery and others, this book reveals a taste that is essentially academic—even though New York City poetry differs from, say, Iowa City poetry in having scant connection to universities...
...Whenever the selections within an anthology are ordered by the alphabet or chronology, you know the book is under-edited...
...Adams didn't suffer from the conceit that people were reading his books because of his ideology, and so, for the most part, he checked it at the door...
Vol. 7 • September 2002 • No. 48
