somewhere in my papers is a review I wrote in the early 1970s of a book Putnam publishd in 1937: The Bulls of Spring: The Selected Poems of Jake Falstaff. Falstaff was the psuedonym of Herman Fetzer a burly newspaperman whose friends included Hart Crane & William Sommer. altho he spent some time in NYC most of his 36 years unwound in Ohio.
I remember trying to make the case that in the poem "Interludium in Modo Antico" that Fetzer/Falstaff was the literary grandfather of Frank O'Hara. that poem begins:
At Luchow's in Fourteenth Street
On the evening of Saturday, July 27, 1929,
Having eaten a dinner of sauerbraten, weinkraut and kaskuchen,
Having smoked two cigarettes and the half of a cigar,
Having made a mental note to have my shoes shined
And buy the Everyman edition of the Paston Letters . . .
I showd the piece to John Ashbery who paid as much attention to it as he did to my poems. but I recall Paul Metcalf taking it seriously.
it's been some years since I've read Fetzer but with the recent blog interest in forgotten poets he came to mind.
2 comments:
where might we find some of his poems, alex? the partial poem does indeed seem to prefigure an i-do-this-i-do-that lunch poem!
I guess someone who has the book mite be able to do a pdf but my computer skills are as proficient as my Japanese.
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