09 July 2006

where yr going

Books by Creeley that would make a good name for your car:

1. The Immoral Proposition
2. A Kind of Act Of
3. Away
4. Memory Gardens
5. The Finger
6. Window
7. The Door
8. His Idea
9. The Old Days
10. The Charm

Books by Creeley that would not make a good name for your car:

1. Life and Death
2. Pieces
3. Backwards
4. Divisions
5. Thirty Things
6. Desultory Days
7. Mother’s Voice
8. Echoes
9. It
10. Listen

8 comments:

Jessica Smith said...

um-- good work, ian! valuable, er, research! (??)

Ian Keenan said...

You think? Thanks. This is going to be the first of my Harvard Lectures this fall. I want to give the officers of the Society Against the Lettermanization of Literature something to do. I send them $35 every year and I get a Harold Bloom mouse pad and the Irving Babbitt Quarterly.

That show, which I don’t watch much anymore, seems to be the only one that reports on the electronic voting scandal.

Unknown said...

What about "Dogs of Auckland" (or Auckland Dogs) for good names and "Le Fou" for bad?

'Course one must end somewhere before it gets silly...

K. Lorraine Graham said...

I don't have a car, but if I did it would be called Desultory Days for sure.

Ian Keenan said...

Dogs of Auckland, Le Fou, and Desultorty Days would all make good names for boats.

My first two cars could be called Le Fou, as in..

I drove Le Fou..

Le Fou drove me..

Andy Gricevich said...

Books by Creeley that would make a good name for your dog...

"Away," "It," "Mother's Voice"
...

actually, my mom isn't bark-ey at all.

Ian Keenan said...

It's aptly Creeleyesque to use the name of one's dog to spook out romantic guests, as those names appear to do in ascending order.

Creeley and Silliman both had single mothers and I think that had a formative effect on their poetry and criticism. Silliman was for instance the first critic I read that used 'her' instead of 'him' as the gender-neutral pronoun.

david raphael israel said...

hmmm --
"Memory Gardens" could be a nice name for a number of things, possibly including a window, a rocking chair, and a kitchen sink.
"Life and Death" -- what would that be a good name for?

Perhaps Creeley's work will need to become more commonly known, for some of this to reach critical mass. ;-) I'm partial to his poetry, but realize I'm not familiar with many of these titles.

But thinking on this calls to mind his Eight Bollards (or more) poems, which are installed in Los Angeles as a site-specific poetry-public-art/architecture thingie, quite remarkable. I don't know if it's really been properly written up. I discussed it with him (and with the artist/architect involved) slightly before the internet bloomed and became the way of seeing what is known in the world.

digressing,
d.i.