Our authors have had a busy publication schedule this October! Some of their new books this month include include a mock-epic poem from Sydney Lea, a debut full-length poetry collection from Carlos Andrés Gómez, a series of personal essays from Peter LaSalle, a volume of poetry from Fiona Sze-Lorrain and a collection of essays from Michael Cohen.
Find them and more from the fall on the New England Review‘s new bookshelf at Bookshop.org.
Founding Editor Sydney Lea recalls discovering Herbert Morris’s poem “How to Improve Your Personality,” for NER 1.4 (1979).
The first issue of NER is an anthology of stars, including Robert Penn Warren, who, on seeing it, warned us that such anthologizing should not be our mission. My colleagues and I listened closely: this was, after all, Mr. Warren, about as distinguished a writer as the era knew, and a person, further, who had co-founded the Southern Review. We instantly ceased soliciting submissions and began relying instead on an open-door submissions policy.
The mission on which “Red” Warren had sent us involved a whole lot more work, but I soon learned that the real joy and the real service involved writers previously unknown to me—and in most cases unknown to much of the literary world. There were many such discoveries during those first years: we published the superb fictionist Charles Baxter well before he had a book in print; we anticipated Jorie Graham’s first collection by more than a year; we frequently featured the still first-rate and still under-known Robert Cording; we presented very early English translations of the wonderful Croatian short story writer, Antun Soljan.
And yet to this day there remains a poem that simply grabbed me and that has remained vivid in memory ever since, despite the sad death of its creator in 2001. The poem is Herbert Morris’s “How to Improve Your Personality,” which appeared in summer 1979, just prior to the release of his first book.
In those days, I had a less-than-scientific manner of knowing when I’d hit on something compelling; vague as it was, I know it served me better than any of the tools provided by my training for a PhD. I’d feel a sudden tingle at the very top of my then hair-covered head. When that happened, I knew I had something.
What can I say of “How to Improve Your Personality”? All manner of things were working on me as I first read the poem, and kept doing so as I reread it—just as they did when I reconsidered it this morning, thirty-eight years later. For instance, without my even registering as much, I was surely seduced by Morris’s easy command of the blank verse form. I also clearly observed a social-satiric dimension to the piece, a wry wit, but all that kept being undercut by the poet’s masterful evocation of dread, even doom.
There is also a pervading sense of mystery in the poem, evident right off:
When, in June, you are driven to those suburbs
Where the dark is just beginning to fall . . .
Who is this “you”? Who is driving him or her to which suburbs? Ordinarily such vagueness in a poem that is, after all, quasi-narrative would have put me off; but the obscurity of such details is utterly apt here and only adds to the overarching sense of things, and not especially pleasant ones, somehow closing in on this particular scene.
Herbert Morris, whom I met very briefly once when I was giving my own reading at Penn, went on to a very distinguished career as a poet, winning a Lannan Foundation award, among other distinctions. Though we published him any number of times, our paths never crossed again, which I deeply regret. I scarcely regret, though, that radiating tingle on my head as I pulled “How to Improve Your personality” out of the NER slush pile.
“How to Improve Your Personality” by Herbert Morris
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Sydney Lea founded New England Review in 1978, with Jay Parini, and served as Editor until 1989. He was Poet Laureate of Vermont from 2011 to 2015, during which time he visited 115 libraries around the state. He has published many collections of poetry and prose, most recently the poetry collection No Doubt the Nameless (Four Way Books, 2016) and the collection of lyrical essays What’s the Story? Short Takes on a Life Grown Long (Green Writers Press, 2016). Lea has received fellowships from the Rockefeller, Fulbright, and Guggenheim Foundations, and has taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Wesleyan, and Middlebury Colleges. He lives in Newbury, Vermont, with his wife and founding NER Managing Editor, M. Robin Barone.
Sydney Lea‘s nonfiction piece, “Democracy and the Demotic: Reflections on the ‘lingua franca et jocundissima’ in American Poetry,” appeared in NER 16.3 (1994).
The title of my remarks is high sounding enough, yet in fact I do little more here than muse about a tradition in American poetry that my friend Stanley Plumly describes as “speech barking back at song.” More poet than scholar myself, I offer a kind of reverie.
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In a journal entry for 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson, engaging in a reverie of his own, imagined himself “a professor of Rhetoric–teacher of the art of writing well to young men.” “I should use Dante for my textbook,” Emerson surmised: “Dante knew how to throw the weight of his body into each act, and is, like Byron, Burke, and Carlyle, the Rhetorician. I find him full of the nobil volgare eloquenza; that he knows ‘God damn,’ and can be rowdy if he please, and he does please.” What Dante could teach was that daily surroundings were “the very best basis for poetry, and the material which you must work up.”
Vermont’s Poet Laureate, Sydney Lea, will be teaching a poetry class for 8-12 students at the Renegade Writers’ Collective on Sunday, November 24. This class is for committed writers and will take place in the RWC classroom in the Karma Bird House at 47 Maple Street in Burlington. The class is from 4-6 pm and will be followed by a reading of his work, Q&A, and book signing, which will take place in the first floor gallery in the same building. The reading will take place from 6-7pm, and is free and open to the public. You do not have to take the class to come to the reading. Click here for a full course description and to reserve your spot in the class.
Sydney Lea is a founding editor of New England Review, and his work has appeared in the magazine in recent years.