fiction Feb/Mar 2011

The Shadow Catcher

In 1959, Norman Holmes Pearson, a friend of the poet H.D.’s as well as her literary executor, asked Robert Duncan whether he would write up something for the older author on the occasion of her birthday. Duncan, who considered H.D. (born Hilda Doolittle, 1886–1961) to be a spiritual and poetic initiatrix of sorts, agreed. Over the next five years, his tribute blossomed, or metastasized, into The H.D. Book, a hefty and digressive meditation on modernism, literature, and esoterica whose twenty-odd chapters appeared individually in a menagerie of mostly obscure literary journals. Given Duncan’s

fiction Dec/Jan 2009

VOICES CARRY

In the summer of 1965, the poet Robin Blaser discovered his friend Jack Spicer lying comatose in the poverty ward at San Francisco General. The forty-year-old Spicer had passed out drunk in the elevator of his North Beach flat a few days before and was wheeled in, without ID, in a torn and befouled suit. When an attending doctor suggested to Blaser that Spicer was just your typical middle-aged alcoholic, Blaser grabbed the fellow’s shirt: “You’re talking about a major poet.” This was certainly true at the time, and it is now. But then, Spicer was a dying poet. After days of fever and mumbling,

print Apr/May 2008

How the West Was Fun

The Drop Edge of Yonder, Rudy Wurlitzer’s first novel in over twenty years, may be the most hallucinogenic western you’ll ever catch in the movie house of your mind’s eye. Indeed, the novel is so saturated with cinema that its considerable pleasures may, I fear, demand from the reader a love or at least admiration for that mightiest and most hackneyed of film genres. For though Drop Edge continues the withering dissection of personal identity that Wurlitzer began with his prickly experimental novels of the late ’60s and ’70s, the book achieves its existential voids and visionary ironies through

culture Winter 1999