Paul C. Metcalf (1917–1999)

Genoa-A Telling of Wonders
clubfoot : ahab foot
rolling plains : "roughly like the sea" ... our sacred cow
Attic (greek) : the boat
moving backwards on the stern (walking in chains, feeling of being dragged) : a backwards teleology
ahab's violent thrust reflected (Melville, in the Pacific—the western extreme of American force—untethered, fatherless, the paternity blasted—turning—as Ahab—with vengeance and malice to match the monster’s: turning and thrusting back to his own beginnings: to Moby-Dick, the white monster: to Maria Gansevoort Melville . . .)
twinning/division (explicitly at the end of the third chapter), discourse of Janus in Genoa chapter 2,
brother carl : whale? , vitality? : lameness?
brother carl's hydrocephalus : "ocean in my head" "the headwaters, perhaps"
cetacean head and skeleton : sperm head and flagella : narrator body, It is this—the huge-headed and long-tailed sensation—that I have been experiencing for some time.
trophoblast invading maternal tissue; sharks eating themselves in a frenzy
cetacean head, and eye position (blindness in one eye, flat world) ; embryo wide-set eyes
columbus's gout; island treasures (won as crystals)

Columbus as casuistry: "“During this time I have seen, and in seeing, have studied all writings, cosmography, histories, chronicles, and philosophy and those relating to other arts, by means of which our Lord made me understand with a palpable hand, that it was practicable to navigate from here to the Indies and inspired me with a will for the execution of this navigation. And with this fire, I came to your Highnesses.”" and then the immediate contradiction, though magnanimous “I say that the holy spirit works in Christians, Jews, Moors, and in all others of all sects, and not only in the wise but the ignorant: for in my time I have seen a villager who gave a better account of the heaven and the stars and their courses than others who expended money in learning of them.”


herman melville as if sired from St. Elmo's fire (corpusants): “Oh, thou magnanimous! Now I do glory in my genealogy! . . . thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read my sire.”

(on the paralyzed band leader)
What would I do:

to bring back,

to save,

to return,

a not very talented musician . . .


//from a panting, breathless worship of these works (melville, columbus), to qualified praise/derision, to those who do not even read it except compelled, and who are then, if not bored to death, similarly horrified.

Carib(ian) Charybdis—such, perhaps, as Hart Crane—the ocean already in his head—leaped into . . .

"Columbus at first thought he had discovered India . . .
. . . thereby lopping off, roughly, one-half the globe: a hemisphere gone . . .
Melville, describing Hawthorne: “Still there is something lacking—a good deal lacking—to the plump sphericity of the man.”"


so-so (not so good)
Moby-Dick . . . a great white monster, with “a hump like a snow-hill . . .”
not Leucothea, not a white and winged goddess, protectress, who gave Ulysses an enchanted veil . . .
but moving out from this, from the closed and friendly Mediterranean, from the near ocean shores,
moving out, as Columbus, across the Atlantic, and, through Melville, into the Pacific:
the white gull become a white whale, cast in monstrous, malignant revenge . .

"I recall the cigars I smoked and gave away at the plant on the occasions of Mike Jr.’s birth, our firstborn; and, with the tobacco smoke, I taste again the pleasure, the pride that I enjoyed at that time—pride such as a man might feel at the mouth of the Mississippi or Amazon, sharing in those waters that push back the ocean, the waters they are in the act of joining . . ."

"He began telling a story—a wild tale about barbering among primitive Eskimos in Alaska, the natives being confused between haircuts and scalping. The customers seemed to know that he was lying, and this added to it . . ."

triple repetition (funny?):
Seeing me awake, he lit another cigar, handed it to me. I smoked, held my head in my hands, tried to reconstruct the evening. Carl finished SUPERMAN, picked up CLAREL, and
Seeing me awake, he lit another cigar, handed it to me. I smoked, held my head in my hands, tried to reconstruct the evening. Carl finished SUPERMAN, picked up CLAREL, and
Seeing me awake, he lit another cigar, handed it to me. I smoked, held my head in my hands, tried to reconstruct the evening. Carl finished SUPERMAN, picked up CLAREL, and

melville: “Pleased, not appeased, by myriad wrecks in me.” - 'more annihilated than repentant'
Obnoxious Carl, quoting Melville… (lisätietoja)

review of
Paul Metcalf's Will West
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - December 7, 2012

When I found this bk I figured I'd found something genuinely on a small press. The press's name is "The Bookstore Press" & it's from Lenox, MA. The original date of publication being 1956, this 2nd edition is from 1973. Metcalf's name seemed vaguely familiar but I might've just been recognizing the last name somehow. Looking in another bk that I'm currently reading, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side - Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980, I find Paul Metcalf indexed & connected w/ United Artists literary magazine.

Online, a brief Wikipedia bio says that "He wrote in verse and prose, but his work generally defies classification. Its small but devoted following includes Robert Creeley, William Gass, Wendell Berry, Guy Davenport, Howard Zinn, and Bruce Olds." That's quite a recommendation. Then again, it's on Wikipedia where people routinely have their friends or underlings write glowing bios for them that're often little more than bullshit.

On the back cover blurb, Will West is described as Metcalf's "first experimental novel". Given that the bk's only 76pp long, it's more appropriately described as a novella. Is it experimental? Not much so - maybe to someone who only read mainstream pop fiction at the time it was 1st published it might be - but in contrast to Kenneth Patchen, eg, it strikes me as a bit lame. It does alternate between regular & italicized fonts w/ a POV change coinciding & sometimes the prose alternates w/ poetry. That's a little experimental. I suppose. & the namesake main character of the title, Will West, is evocative of both "Wild West" & of the character's westward journey.

West is largely of Cherokee descent & much of the italicized parts are dedicated to Cherokee culture. How accurate any of this is historically, I can't say. If it's accurate, then that might explain Howard Zinn's purported liking of Metcalf's writing.

The narrative has a dramatic drive to it that I found a bit too easy even tho it's, fortunately, not milked for all the misery it can provide. I wdn't really recommend this to anyone, it just seems too shallow - maybe his other bks are more substantial. I wonder what Sherman Alexie wd think of this?… (lisätietoja)

The experience of reading Genoa was disturbing. It wasn't simply the setting, a two hour drive from here. It was a vertigo, the weight borne by the protagonist. There's a Stoner-type grace to the character in his labor. This uphill toil is something palpable. I can relate, along with the anxiety. The whispered doubt. The shudders. I recoil from this awareness and accept it as my own, or at least something similar. I thought the collage mechanic rather effective. I liked the twinning of Melville and Columbus. There's something visceral in their failure: the ache of their arc. It was interesting that as I read this novel, my best friend kept sending me pictures from his holiday in Cuba. There's much to measure in that distance. The crash of waves against a relative silence. Though Metcalf informs us early in the book that where I sit typing was once the floor of an ocean and later just south of an enormous glacier. I carried our rock salt down to the basement last weekend. I never opened the bag and the traces of actual snow this past winter were more of a joke than a hazard. The final insertion of Dreiser and Debs didn't work for me, though it must be admitted that all of my trips to Terre Haute were to see my best friend. I had contemplated a Melville project with various adjacent texts including Olson and Perry Miller. I'm not sure about that at the moment.… (lisätietoja)

While far less disturbing than Genoa, this piece shares the humility of that meditation on Melville and madness. Patagoni is a triptych of the fauna and flora of Iberian America during the time of Conquest, this is followed by a prose poem on the life of Henry Ford and concludes with a travelogue of a trip Metcalf took across South America, constantly aware of being the ugly American. The last element is especially touching and I was rather pleased that Metcalf shared my love of futbol. The Edenic concept of Nature is ran roughshod by Progress, the soft prayer of the indigenous is soon lost to the billowing smoke and incessant roar of the machines as the Amazon is clear cut.… (lisätietoja)