I was born in Louisville, Kentucky, the biggest city in which I've spent more than a week at a time. For most of the last twenty years I've either been writing software or framing houses. I've never been at the center of anything. Sometimes even small centers moved when I got near: when I went to Kenyon College because it was an Episcopal school (heh!), The Kenyon Review was on hiatus, and Robert Lowell came back to read the year after I graduated. I read Boston, New York, and Bay area blogs and feel like a hick.
So don't be surprised that, despite intermittent subscriptions to the New York Review of Books and The Boston Review, I'd never heard of Stephen Metcalf before reading his review of the new Larkin Collected Poems in the online May 30 New York Times (no link because the fiends swallow content into their for-pay-only archives). I went looking for more of his work after reading this:
If one starts with "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album," from 1953, and reads through the famous ditties from "High Windows" (1974), the conclusion becomes inescapable: he belongs in the company of Yeats, Frost and Auden as one of the finest poets of the 20th century.
Damn right. And look who—and by implication what—is missing from that list.
Was it a lucky hit by Metcalf? This is from his New York Observer review of Geoffrey O'Brien's Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life:
But the heart and soul of Sonata for Jukebox is autobiography. After all, in an age of recording devices and mass commercial exchange, people don't ask of a piece of music "Is this beautiful?" based on, say, its proportion and harmony. They say "This is me" or "This is mine," because it evokes intense feelings of personal allegiance. About our favorite music, we're essentially saying, "This reminds me of me"—which isn't as vacant as it sounds. The burden of good taste is simply thrown back onto the lives of listeners, about which we can ask the traditional questions: Are they unique, self-examined, full? Or common and unreflecting?
The question is only more vexed in a culture in which every sound can be preserved, high and low hopelessly jumbled, genius and detritus lying so close together.
There's more than one edge to that, and I'm not yet sure where they all cut.
5:28:15 PM 
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