James Laughlin

Published in Laughlin’s centenary year, The Collected Poems of James Laughlin encompasses in one majestic volume all the poetry (with the exception of his verse memoirs, Byways) written by the publisher-poet. Witty, technically brilliant, slyly satiric, and heartbreakingly poignant, Laughlin charted his own poetic course for over six decades, prompting astonishment and joy in fellow poets.

Compiled and edited by Peter Glassgold, Laughlin’s chosen poetry editor, The Collected Poems includes more than 1250 poems—from the early lyrics written in Laughlin’s signature “typewriter” metric, to the “long-line” poems of his later years, to the playful antics of his doppelgänger Hiram Handspring, to the trenchant commentary of the five-line pentastichs that occupied his last days.

Despite all the awards and accolades that James Laughlin received for his service to literature, the honor that pleased him most was his election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1996)—as a poet.

Sparkling and elegant, Christmas Poems is a delightful selection of holiday poems by a wide range of authors such as Chaucer, Herbert, Longfellow, Dickinson, Rilke, Yeats, Paul Dunbar, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, e. e. cummings, Kenneth Patchen, Thomas Merton, Wallace Stevens, Marie Ponsot, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Frank O’Hara, Denise Levertov, and Bernadette Mayer. Beautifully designed, this New Directions gem rings with the deep sentiments of the season and just the right splash of holiday cheer–Christmas Poems comes with French flaps and is the perfect size for a stocking stuffer.

James Laughlin––poet, ladies’ man, heir to a steel fortune, and the founder of New Directions––was still at work on his autobiography when he died at 83. He left behind personal files crammed with memories and memorabilia: in “M” he is taking Marianne Moore to Yankee games (outings captured here in charming snapshots) to discuss “arcane mammals,” and in “N” nearly plunging off a mountain, hunting butterflies with Nabokov (“Volya was a doll in a very severe upper-crust Russian way”).

With an accent on humor, The Way It Wasn’t is a scrapbook loaded with ephemera––letters and memories, clippings and photographs. This richly illustrated album glitters like a magpie’s nest, if a magpie could have known Tennessee Williams, W.C. Williams, Merton, Miller, Stein, and Pound. In “C”: “I wish that nice Jean Cocteau were still around. He took me to lunch at the Grand Véfours in the Palais-Royal and explained all about flying saucers. He understood mechanical things. He would advise me.” In “P”: “There was not much ’gracious living’ in Pittsburgh, where at one house, the butler passed chewing gum on a silver salver after coffee.” And: “The world is full of a large number of irritating people.” In “H” there’s Lillian Hellman: “What a raspy character. When I knocked at her door to try to borrow one of her books (hoping to butter her up) she only opened her door four inches and said words to the effect: ’Fuck off, you rapist.’” Marketing in “M”: “I think it’s important to get the ’troubadours’ into the title. That’s a ’buy-me’ word.” In “G”: “Olga asked Allen Ginsberg if he was also buying Pound Conference T-shirts for his grandchildren. She was most lovable throughout.” In “L”: “Wyndham Lewis wrote ’Why don’t you stop New Directions, your books are crap.’” And we find love in “L”: “Cicero noted that an old love pinches like a crab.” But in The Way It Wasn’t James Laughlin’s love of the crazy world and his crazier authors does not pinch a bit: it glows with wit and enlarges our feeling for the late great twentieth century.

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. 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. The scope of Byways is ambitious, weaving together family history (the Laughlins were wealthy Pittsburgh steel magnates), the poet’s early memories and travels in Europe and America with his playboy father, his student years at Harvard and his first meetings with Ezra Pound, the first decades of his publishing venture and his reminiscences of his close friendships with W.C. Williams, Thomas Merton, and Kenneth Rexroth, and not least, his many early loves. Though unfinished, Byways stands as testimony to the author’s long, influential, and productive life.

James Laughlin was best known as the publisher of New Directions Books, but he had also been a dedicated poet. His work is both modern—rich in technical experiment—and ancient—grounded in the Greek and Latin poets. Guy Davenport called Laughlin ’a very ironic Roman poet, and a very salty Greek one. Which is not to say that he imitates anybody, or offers plaster casts of antiquities. He is the real thing.’ Laughlin described himself as a writer of light verse. He could be witty but underneath the wit there are often pungent truths about the human condition. His work was notable for its range of subject matter, the originality of its invention, his restoration of the classical tradition, his wordplay, his satire, and the intensity of his love poems….’Who else,’ asked the critic Marjorie Perloff, ’wrote such bittersweet, ironic, rueful, erotic, tough-minded, witty love poems, poems that run the gamut from ecstacy to loss?’ This volume collects Laughlin’s poems from 1935 to 1997.

James Laughlin (1914-97) was a poet of distinction as well as the founding publisher of New Directions. A Commonplace Book of Pentastichs, the last book of his own that he helped to prepare, is a compilation of 249 poems composed in a five-line stanza form first introduced in The Secret Room (1997). A note to “Thirty-nine Pentastichs” in that earlier volume explains: “a ’pentastich’ refers simply to a poem of five lines, without regard to metrics. The word is Greek derived, from pentastichos, though few survive from ancient times… The present selection is of recent short-line compositions in natural voice cadence, many of them marginal jottings and paraphrases of commonplace book notations.” Musing on the full collection, Hayden Carruth writes in his introduction: “For the reader it is a survey of literature that will never be found in the classroom––praise whatever gods may be––but indubitably will be found in loving and longlasting proximity on many a bedside table.” Here, then, are armchair marginalia and aperçus to be savored at random.

The poetry of the late James Laughlin (1914-97) spans a period of over sixty years, from the first verses written in his signature “typewriter” metric to the most recent pieces that open his Poems New and Selected. Laughlin reveals himself in his poems as a master of concision, of the well-placed word that penetrates the human heart. Over two hundred and twenty-five poems included here show his technical brilliance as well: in short- and long-line poems; in the three-stress verses of his autobiographical “Byways”; in “Epigrams,” amatory and otherwise, and “Pentastichs”; in idiosyncratic “(American) French” poems and their translations of his own devising. For readers coming to Laughlin’s work for the first time, this collection will be a sea of undiscovered riches, and for longtime devotees, a chance to ply once again the well-chartered waters of his poetry.

James Laughlin, poet and publisher, is known in Italy as Il Catullo americano, the American Catullus. Like the Latin poet whom Laughlin has long called his master, the subject at the heart of his work remains ’’love/… & the lack of love./which is what makes evil,’’ but seen now from the wry, often poignant perspective of old age. In his newest collection, The Secret Room, he has gathered nearly 150 poems that address his mature theme in a variety of ways. The philosophical lyrics of “Looking Inward” and the satirical jabs and invectives of “Epigrams and Comic Verses” employ short-Iine forms, including Laughlin’s signature ’’typewriter metric,” originally devised with the advice of William Carlos Williams. “Byways’’ continues his autobiographical work-in-progress, in a three-stress line borrowed from Kenneth Rexroth. And with “39 Pentastichs,” Laughlin introduces a five-line stanza in a natural voice cadence suited to casual observations.

A lifetime of memories, a lifetime of writing, a lifetime of publishing (since 1936)––what to do, how to say it, what is the organic form? If you are James Laughlin, founder and publisher of New Directions, poet and friend of poets, you adapt the narrative metric of one friend (Kenneth Rexroth) to tell the very personal stories of your other friends with verve, compassion, and a shrewd eye to the emotional truth of complex relationships. You call the whole memoir Byways, parts of which have begun to appear in literary journals. But one part stands alone in your affections. The section “Remembering William Carlos Williams” grows of its own accord and captures a relationship so perfectly that you decide to do it up as a little book and share it with a few friends who, like the late James Merrill, are enchanted: “I have been so delighted by your little book on Williams. The charm of the presentation, the counterpoint of narrative, anecdote and illustration, could not be greater. It seems to be a perfect model for books that might follow it, while I cannot think of any precedent for what you’ve done.’ To reach a wider audience, Remembering William Carlos Williams is now available in this New Directions Paperbook Original edition.

As a poet, the late James Laughlin (1914-1997) was perhaps best known for his love lyrics. Marjorie Perloff has written, “Who else…writes such bittersweet, ironic, rueful, erotic, tough-minded, witty love poems, poems that run the gamut from ecstasy to loss?” Andrei Codrescu wrote, “Under deep cover as Godfather of Modernism, James Laughlin has secretly raised and made himself into the Poetry Chieftain of Sane Eros, the Catullus of fin-de-siècle America.” This small paperback edition of his finest love poems is a perfect memorial to one of the twentieth century’s most important men of letters.

James Laughlin has been called the American Catullus. Like that most Greek of ancient Latin poets, he elevated his everyday subjects with wit and clarity of language. Love and hate, death and aging, politics, literature, travel, the horrors of war––Laughlin’s muse spoke of all these things with a fresh directness that make his poems both timeless and contemporary. The founder of New Directions, Laughlin’s efforts as publisher and poet had been to prolong and extend the old poetic traditions. Poetry for him was, in Gertrude Stein’s phrase, a “continuous present” in all times and cultures. Laughlin developed his distinctive tight metrics with the advice of William Carlos Williams. A longer, comical line is found in the recent poems of Laughlin’s cheeky doppelganger, Hiram Handspring.

“Who was Samuel Greenberg?” editor Garrett Caples asks: “The short answer is ‘the dead, unknown poet Hart Crane plagiarized.’” In the winter of 1923, Crane was given some of Greenberg’s notebooks and called him “a Rimbaud in embryo.” Crane included many of Greenberg’s lines, uncredited and slightly changed, in his own poetry. Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts was edited by James Laughlin, who first published it in 1939. As well as Laughlin’s original essay, Caples includes a new selection of poems from Greenberg’s notebooks, along with some of his prose. Now the work of this mysterious, impoverished, proto-surrealist American poet, who never published a word in his life, is available to a new generation of readers.

The macabre but beautiful work, Les Chants de Maldoror, has achieved a considerable reputation as one of the earliest and most extraordinary examples of Surrealist writing. It is a long narrative prose poem which celebrates the principle of Evil in an elaborate style and with a passion akin to religious fanaticism. The French poet-critic Georges Hugnet has written of Lautréamont: “He terrifies, stupefies, strikes dumb. He could look squarely at that which others had merely given a passing glance.”

Little is known of the author of Maldoror, Isidore Ducasse, self-styled Comte de Lautréamont, except that he was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1846 and died in Paris at the age of twenty-four. When first published in 1868-9, Maldoror went almost unnoticed. But in the nineties the book was rediscovered and hailed as a work of genius by such eminent writers as Huysmans, Léon Bloy, Maeterlinck, and Rémy de Gourmont. Later still, Lautréamont was to be canonized as one of their principal “ancestors” by the Paris Surrealists.

This edition, translated by Guy Wernham, includes also a long introduction to a never-written, or now lost, volume of poetry. Thus, except for a few letters, it gives all the surviving literary work of Lautréamont.