Word: friendlies
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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LAST CHRITMAS I was in the Coop, looking desperately for a present for an old friend, and I picked up Bill Knott's Naonti Poems. I don't know what I was looking for-I suppose I was expecting another dose of tense, burdened lyricism, or brief, staccato bits of free verse machinery-but what I found was the clearest, purest, most unpretentious voice I'd come upon among younger poets. Knott's images were whole and satisfying: for once words were the things they said they were. I bought the book and never gave it away...
...Monday, 10 a. m. On my way to a possible course, I meet a friend. He is going to a Hum course. Open enrollment. Kismet, I say, and go with...
...writer solves the puzzle, which may account for its continued fascination. Novelist Paul Horgan might almost be playing with another man's board and pieces: a small dusty town in the Southwest; a sensitive young narrator who will live to be a writer; the narrator's friend, an athlete who falls to his death from the town's water tower; a rich widow who befriends the narrator and sends him to college; the town banker, the town's batty spinster librarian, the secret homosexual. So many novelists seem to have lived the same boyhood...
...quality of hazy sadness that finally debilitates Whitewater. The book's tone is almost elegiac. Everything is over. The reader is not told, but knows anyway, that the narrator's friend is doomed, that the present time of the story lies far in the past. It is all beyond changing. Reliving it all gently and ruefully, the narrator makes no discoveries, nor is he changed by the task of reburying his youth...
...called "The Happiness of Others." Then Price has another try in a long rumination called "Waiting at Dachau." The story's psychologizing is murky, but it is less neat, less cautious; it will hold more emotion. Nevertheless, after a series of elegies for his parents and a dead friend that seem a bit too private for publication, Price returns to the parting of the lovers in a moody, troubled story, "Good and Bad Dreams," that is the best in the book. This time the lovers are husband and wife, and the parting is deadly; she slashes her arm with...