I want to rectify some omissions that I meant to get to long ago and I have realized that I never did. When I was first exploring the relationship between Corbin and poetry I was in touch with several different poets who gave me invaluable information and assistance. One of them was George Quasha whose work with and about Robert Kelly on ta'wil and related matters is absolutely central to understanding how Corbin's work made it's way into the poetry of the 60s and 70s. Early on Quasha mentioned three poets who were foremost among those influenced by Corbin: Gerrit Lansing, Kenneth Irby and Theodore Enslin. I never followed this lead and I have I think never posted anything about any member of this fascinating trio and this is an important hole in the account I have provided sporadically on this blog. I here officially acknowledge this lack and add their names to the list.
Gerrit Lansing is the author most recently of Heavenly Tree, Northern Earth (2009).
On his PennSound page "Lansing talks with Charles Bernstein, and guest Susan Howe, at Lansing’s house in Gloucester, Mass. Lansing, a close friend of Charles Olson, discusses the wild of Gloucester, the relation of the magic (and the magical) and the occult to poetic practice, Nerval, queer politics and the poetics identity, New York in the immediate postwar period, parapsychology at Harvard in the late 1940s, Gnosticism versus neo-Platonism, Jewish mysticism, and his connections with Henry Murray, Harry Smith, Alan Watts, Aleister Crowley, Carl Jung, and John Ashbery.
Kenneth Irby is Associate Professor at the University of Kansas and his collected poems was published in 2009 as The Intent On.
His PennSound page of readings is quite extensive, and here he is reading at Berkeley.
Theodore Enslin died in 2011 in Milbridge, Maine where he had lived since 1960. To my mind he was the most fascinating character of all. If I had been paying attention I might well have been able to meet him as Milbridge is scarcely 2 hours from my own homestead in rural Maine. This brief appreciation provides a sense of the man: With Great Respect. Though he lived in relative isolation far outside the mainstream he was extremely prolific, publishing roughly 60 books of poetry including a selected poems Then and Now in 1999. And here is a fascinating interview with Enslin and Robert Bertholf on music and poetry.
[The dated heading for this post acknowledges the fact that I long ago lost track of how many entries there have been in this "series" & I should have dated each entry from the beginning.]
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