Ooosh. Semester has started early for me this fall, in part because of some administrative hoodoo that has moved the term up by a week, and in part because I'm teaching a freshman seminar, and these always start a week earlier than everything else at Lake Forest. So rather than blogging I've been running around prepping two brand new courses and humming one of the numbers from the unpublishable musical comedy about a former college official I've been writing for the delectation of my friends:
Teachin' at the college,
Passin' on the knowledge,
Teach them all the things they ought to know,
Teachin' at the college,
Passin' on the knowledge,
Their tuition is the source of my cash flow...
But that's not why you tuned in. No indeed. No doubt you were wondering when the next appearance of Archambeau secondary literature would hit the newsstands. Well, wait no more: there's a new review of Home and Variations out in issue 165 of my favorite English poetry magazine, PN Review. David C. Ward, the reviewer, says some nice things about the poems, and then claims that "Archambeau is an ambitious (sometimes self-consciously so) and intellectual poet; in the family tree of poetry he would be of the branch of Geoffrey Hill." Ambitious? Got me, at least on good days. Self-conscious? Oh yeah. Influenced by Geoffrey Hill? Yes, but honest to God I thought I'd hidden it so well that no one would ever know.
I mean, old weird Harold Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence has a lot wrong with it, but one thing he gets right is the way many of us want to hide our influences, lest we be held up to some pretty intimidating comparisons. Hill has been a favorite poet of mine since my first year of grad school, but he makes me nervous in the way that only those you admire fully can make you nervous. I was once invited to a dinner where he was the guest of honor and didn't say a word at the time, so awe-stricken was I (when Keith Tuma argued with Hill over some minor point, I half-expected death rays to shoot out of Hill's eyes and vaporize him). Since Hill's always garnering praise along the lines of "Let us make one thing clear: Geoffrey Hill is the greatest living poet in the English language" (Nicholas Lezard, in a review in The Guardian), being compared to him is a bit like being a guitar player and being compared to Jimi Hendryx. On the one hand, you're grateful. On the other, you rather wish you'd covered your tracks a bit better.
So here's a game for you: which of Bloom's six "revisionary ratios" can you find in Home and Variations' Hill-influenced poems? Play as often as you want, but please don't tell me about it — I'm self-conscious enough as it is.
