Harold Bloom, the Yale University eminence who died in 2019 at age 89, was the most famous, most prolific, and – to use the apt word – most influential literary critic in America from the time he published The Anxiety of Influence in 1973. The title of that book has entered our critical vocabulary, as has Bloom’s thesis that a “strong” poet must overcome the influence of a powerful precursor. To become himself, Wordsworth had to contend with Milton, for example, while John Ashbery had to endure a wrestling match with Wallace Stevens.
Author: David Lehman
David Lehman presides over the "Next Line, Please" poetry challenges that appear on The American Scholar's digital edition. Lehman's new books are Playlist, a poem in multiple parts written on the daily installment plan from Nov 20, 2017 to Jan 15, 2018, and One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir, which Cornell University Press will publish in October 2019. That's a lot of dates for one sentence to bear, but it's worth noting that Playlist (Pittsburgh) is an homage to the late A. R. Ammons, my neighbor and friend in Ithaca, New York. Besides Archie, the subjects of Playlist include love, friendship, and music, in particular the jazz, classical, and popular music to which I was listening as I wrote.
Hurrahing in Hopkins
Each thing says one thing and the same:
I am me; who I am is what I do; my name
is flung like the tongue of a bell
rung, and I, young, le bête in the chill hall, a hell
of fame, pursue you, the belle of the ball.
Myself I speak before the fall,
before the wind with its wanderlust
blows away the leaves like mortal dust,
as fall they must,
the green, the red, the yellow, the rust.
As freedom to a slave, to a nomad is home,
or the scent of escape in the ocean foam
You’re My Thrill
as sung by Helen Merrill (1965)
1.
You’re my thrill,
my joint, my shot, my magic pill.
I dwell in that gaudy den
of smoke and mirrors where, when
you close my eyes,
I take a trip
to paradise:
a casino where I always win
as long as I’m within
the grip
of the labyrinthine dream I’m in.
I may never get wise,
may never disbelieve these lies.
Yet I know I must get high.
2.
Admit it. You’re one of us.
You didn’t miss the bus.