AddType application/x-httpd-php5 .php .htmlIf anyone notices anything particularly wonky on the blog, or if you wandered in here from the contact page on The Poetry of Henry Reed because you noticed something wonky over there (and I mean Willy Wonka wonky), please drop me a line? Thank you!
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Documenting the quest to track down everything written by
(and written about) the poet, translator, critic, and radio
dramatist, Henry Reed.
An obsessive, armchair attempt to assemble a comprehensive bibliography, not just for the work of a poet, but for his entire life. Read "Naming of Parts."
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Reeding Lessons: the Henry Reed research blog |
5.7.2008 |
Upgrade, Backslide
As promised (or should I say, forewarned), my hosting service migrated from php4 to php5, today. This caused me no end of frustration, as it basically meant none of my pages were being recognized (and therefore, not displayed) due to my .htaccess settings. If anything, you would have seen an error message, or gotten a peek at my raw code. I ended up having to password the whole site for awhile. The magic words, I finally discovered, are:
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1331. Palmer, Herbert. "English Poetry: 1938-1950—I." Fortnightly 1017 N.S. (September 1951): 624-628 [627].
Reed is included in the roll of poets who 'made their first appearance, or chief appearance, after 1937....'
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Travis Bickle Diet
I'd like to start implementing a strict regimen of diet, exercise, and meditation, based on Robert DeNiro's "Gotta get in shape" monologue from Taxi Driver. The Travis Bickle diet plan (YouTube):
Without all the Scorsese movie violence, of course. Travis had plenty of motivation, but lacked a suitably constructive outlet. When I'm finished, I'll push over my television set, rise from the ashes of my abusive disorganization, and someone will offer me my own late night infomercial, so I can help others achieve the same results.
This weekend, I'm going to swap out the limping harddrive in my laptop, which I've been nursing along for almost three whole months. I'm backing up data as I write this. Docs. Mail. Bookmarks. Hopefully, a clean slate will restore my levels of productivity and enthusiasm. Cross your fingers, wish me luck. Organizize!
I gotta get in shape. Too much sitting has ruined my body. Too much abuse has gone on for too long. From now on there will be fifty push ups each morning, fifty pull ups. There will be no more pills, no more bad food, no more destroyers of my body. From now on will be total organization.
Without all the Scorsese movie violence, of course. Travis had plenty of motivation, but lacked a suitably constructive outlet. When I'm finished, I'll push over my television set, rise from the ashes of my abusive disorganization, and someone will offer me my own late night infomercial, so I can help others achieve the same results.
This weekend, I'm going to swap out the limping harddrive in my laptop, which I've been nursing along for almost three whole months. I'm backing up data as I write this. Docs. Mail. Bookmarks. Hopefully, a clean slate will restore my levels of productivity and enthusiasm. Cross your fingers, wish me luck. Organizize!
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1330. Pritchett, V.S., ed. Turnstile One: A Literary Miscellany from the New Statesman and Nation. London: Turnstile Press, 1948. 144.
Collects "Naming of Parts," originally published in the New Statesman and Nation in August, 1942.
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Up to Speed
Just a few updates. The bibliography is looking fairly smart now, in its Noguchi-style open-shelf filing, wouldn't you agree? (Compare with my last filing update, Feb. 2006.)
I actually managed to rid myself of one of the file boxes seen piled on the right. Plastic albatrosses. I think I need to buy a couple of more stackable cubes, too, when I have the spare change. They're cheap, but shipping's a killer.
Also, I've been steadily finishing bringing the Henry Reed pages up to date, even as I'm considering redesigning and upgrading to version 3.0. The site's getting a little tired, and starting to show its age, don't you think?
Most recently, I edited Roger Savage's lengthy chapter from British Radio Drama, "The Radio Plays of Henry Reed," adding page numbers and the all-important appendix, which lists almost all of Reed's radio dramas and their dates of broadcast.
Currently, I'm still waiting for Amazon.com to ship me two copies of the new, paperback edition of the Collected Poems. Their estimated date of shipping is not until October 11th!
I actually managed to rid myself of one of the file boxes seen piled on the right. Plastic albatrosses. I think I need to buy a couple of more stackable cubes, too, when I have the spare change. They're cheap, but shipping's a killer.
Also, I've been steadily finishing bringing the Henry Reed pages up to date, even as I'm considering redesigning and upgrading to version 3.0. The site's getting a little tired, and starting to show its age, don't you think?
Most recently, I edited Roger Savage's lengthy chapter from British Radio Drama, "The Radio Plays of Henry Reed," adding page numbers and the all-important appendix, which lists almost all of Reed's radio dramas and their dates of broadcast.
Currently, I'm still waiting for Amazon.com to ship me two copies of the new, paperback edition of the Collected Poems. Their estimated date of shipping is not until October 11th!
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1329. Sinclair, Andrew. Dylan the Bard: A Life of Dylan Thomas. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. 140.
Mentions Rayner Heppenstall bringing Reed and other writers to the Stag's Head pub.
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Under Siege
Sidney Keyes was a youthful poet killed before he had time to register the impact of warfare; Alun Lewis registered the deadening effect of regimentation and the stimulus of travel, but left no record of the military action it seems it was his destiny to seek. Douglas sought action, found it, recorded it and his fear of its consequences, before he too died. Roy Fuller was excluded by circumstance from action and was able, literally from a distance, to mark the changes that wartime forced on society and the enclosed microcosm of the services. Each is an individual experience, and it is because of the quality of their work that they are accepted as the chief poets of the Second World War. But it is appropriate that none of them wrote the poem of the Second World War. That was written by Henry Reed.
Thus begins Robert Hewison's analysis of Reed's Lessons of the War poems, in the book Under Siege: Literary Life in London, 1939-1945 (Oxford, 1977). Interestingly, Hewison treats the whole sequence as a single work, mentioning, but not lingering on (or even quoting from), "Naming of Parts."
Hewison prefers instead to look at "Judging Distances" at some length. 'In this case the landscape has to be interpreted in formal terms; the distance cannot be judged emotionally, the territory must be seen as a map. But in the trainee-soldier the surviving civilian persists in reading the topography with his own eyes...' (p. 139). Though Hewison has chosen a slightly less famous poem, the resulting commentary is familiar: 'Individuality has to be sacrificed to the needs of the military machine, the landscape reduced to the terms of tactical necessity, but some small item of personality could be retained — the observing eye of the poet' (p. 140).
He then turns to "Unarmed Combat," the last of Reed's Lessons published during wartime, concluding, 'Henry Reed achieves a rare fusion between soldier and poet of the Second World War...' (p. 140).
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1328. Times (London). "Broadcasting." 26 October 1946, 6.
Reed's talk on the poetry of Edith Sitwell is scheduled this evening on the Third Programme's "The Poet and His Critic."
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Love, Release, the Revelation
I recently added, and failed to note here, Alan Jenkins' 1991 Independent review of Reed's Collected Poems, "In Other Men's Shadows." Jenkins notes the poet's debts to Hardy, Auden, and MacNeice (Reed 'pre-echoes' The Movement poets), but points out
'Properly,' Jenkins says, the posthumous collection 'rescues Reed from the two-poem limbo to which the anthologies... have consigned him.'
Also very recently, I discovered a lovely summary of Reed's poetic influence and influences, in The New Guide to Modern World Literature, by Martin Seymour-Smith (New York: Peter Bedrick, 1985):
Additionally, I turned up a very nice exploration of the 'military/poetic problem' in "Judging Distances," in Robert Hewison's Under Siege: Literary Life in London, 1939-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), which I hope to be able to post soon. Stay tuned!
[w]hat is Reed's and Reed's alone is a tonality, an emotional palette, a special feeling for romantic potentiality, the moment before something tremendous happens or after it has receded. The something tremendous — love, release, the revelation of transcendent beauty, all of these at once....
'Properly,' Jenkins says, the posthumous collection 'rescues Reed from the two-poem limbo to which the anthologies... have consigned him.'
Also very recently, I discovered a lovely summary of Reed's poetic influence and influences, in The New Guide to Modern World Literature, by Martin Seymour-Smith (New York: Peter Bedrick, 1985):
Henry Reed (1914) has published only one collection of poems, A Map of Verona (1947), but this is widely read — it remained in print for a quarter of a century. There are a few good uncollected poems. He has earned his living as a translator and writer of radio scripts — including the famous 'Hilda Tablet' series. Reed has written several distinctly different kinds of poem: the metaphysical, influenced above all by Marvell; a narrative, contemplative poetry influenced by Eliot (q.v.); parody — as in 'Chard Whitlow', which was Eliot's own favourite parody of himself; a narrative poem influenced not by Eliot but by Hardy (q.v.) — such as 'The Auction Sale'. Reed's justly famous 'Lessons of the War' sequence is in his metaphysical vein, exploiting double entendre to its limit, varying the tone from the wistful to the broadly comic (as in the third poem of the sequence). The less well known 'The Auction Sale' handles narrative as well as it can be handled in this age. Reed is a poet of greater range than is usually recognized; only his Eliotian contemplative poetry really fails to come off, and even this is eloquent and rhythmically interesting.That single paragraph comes the closest I've seen to placing Reed solidly in any school of poetry, even though it leaves him straddling Hardy's Naturalism, The Romantics, and the Moderns.
Additionally, I turned up a very nice exploration of the 'military/poetic problem' in "Judging Distances," in Robert Hewison's Under Siege: Literary Life in London, 1939-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), which I hope to be able to post soon. Stay tuned!
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1327. Times (London). "Broadcasting." 2 November 1946, 8.
Edith Sitwell's response to Reed's talk is scheduled this evening as "The Poet and His Critic": 2.
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Stand Corrected
A post I made a while back about a (lost) poem Reed wrote parodying the Northwest School of poetry receives a correction from a distinguished visitor.
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1326. Thwaite, Anthony. "On Consulting 'Contemporary Poets of the English Language'." A Portion for Foxes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. 30-32.
Thwaite includes Reed in the course of naming poets listed in Contemporary Poets.
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KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR
If your hard drive has to give up the ghost, I guess this is probably the best way.
Two weekends ago, I was sleepily browsing the internet during morning coffee, when my laptop literally went "Kaflooie!" and started throwing Blue Screen of Death after Blue Screen of Death. It wouldn't boot at all at first, but finally started up again, albeit running impossibly slow, and only for ten minutes at a time.
I did get one excellent streak where it stayed alive for more than an hour, and I managed to copy my email and all my Reed-related documents to CD. I had a recent backup, but I wanted to be absolutely sure I got everything.
With a new hard drive installed, I spent this weekend updating Windows, updating Windows, downloading software, updating Windows, and reconfiguring my wireless. I should be happily posting again, soon!
Two weekends ago, I was sleepily browsing the internet during morning coffee, when my laptop literally went "Kaflooie!" and started throwing Blue Screen of Death after Blue Screen of Death. It wouldn't boot at all at first, but finally started up again, albeit running impossibly slow, and only for ten minutes at a time.
I did get one excellent streak where it stayed alive for more than an hour, and I managed to copy my email and all my Reed-related documents to CD. I had a recent backup, but I wanted to be absolutely sure I got everything.
With a new hard drive installed, I spent this weekend updating Windows, updating Windows, downloading software, updating Windows, and reconfiguring my wireless. I should be happily posting again, soon!
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1325. Times (London). "Broadcasting." 31 January 1947, 6.
Reed's adaptation of Melville's Moby Dick replays this evening on the Third Programme, in two parts.
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Flowers and War
Several weekends ago I made a short excursion up to the state capital, to visit the Richmond Public Library. It was a lazy, rainy Sunday, and I needed, of all things, a 19th-century book on flowers.
The book was the Reverend Hilderic Friend's Flowers and Flower Lore (1883), and I was startled to find that it was not on the shelf. Up and down the folklore section I scanned. A word to the wise scholar: it never hurts to phone ahead.
Luckily, a librarian flew to my rescue, advising that their older texts are kept in closed stacks, downstairs in the basement. Whew! I had Friend's beautiful, leather-bound, two-volume set in my hands, momentarily. In the end, I found that they didn't even contain exactly what I was looking for. Such are the perils of blind librarying.
I consoled myself by browsing the stacks for poetry, discovering that my Dewey Decimals have become almost irreparably rusty. Poetry: 811, yes. English poetry? 821. Oh. They had several anthologies which I had indexed but never seen: notably, Dylan Thomas's Choice (Maud and Davies, eds. New York: New Directions, 1963). Deep into my Ziploc bag of dimes I dipped, to feed the ravenous Xerox machines.
The real boon was a book I had never heard of or seen: War Poetry: An Anthology, edited, and with an introduction and commentaries, by D.L. Jones (1968). This evening, I added Jones' commentary on the Lessons of the War poems to the website.
It also happened to be the last day of the Friends of the Library booksale, and from the pillaged remnants I managed to scavenge a small paperback of English translations of the poetry of Leopardi. They wanted 50¢, but I gave them a buck, and told 'em to keep the change.
The book was the Reverend Hilderic Friend's Flowers and Flower Lore (1883), and I was startled to find that it was not on the shelf. Up and down the folklore section I scanned. A word to the wise scholar: it never hurts to phone ahead.
Luckily, a librarian flew to my rescue, advising that their older texts are kept in closed stacks, downstairs in the basement. Whew! I had Friend's beautiful, leather-bound, two-volume set in my hands, momentarily. In the end, I found that they didn't even contain exactly what I was looking for. Such are the perils of blind librarying.
I consoled myself by browsing the stacks for poetry, discovering that my Dewey Decimals have become almost irreparably rusty. Poetry: 811, yes. English poetry? 821. Oh. They had several anthologies which I had indexed but never seen: notably, Dylan Thomas's Choice (Maud and Davies, eds. New York: New Directions, 1963). Deep into my Ziploc bag of dimes I dipped, to feed the ravenous Xerox machines.
The real boon was a book I had never heard of or seen: War Poetry: An Anthology, edited, and with an introduction and commentaries, by D.L. Jones (1968). This evening, I added Jones' commentary on the Lessons of the War poems to the website.
It also happened to be the last day of the Friends of the Library booksale, and from the pillaged remnants I managed to scavenge a small paperback of English translations of the poetry of Leopardi. They wanted 50¢, but I gave them a buck, and told 'em to keep the change.
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1324. Times (London). "Broadcasting." 25 January 1947, 6.
Reed's adaptation of Melville's Moby Dick premieres this weekend on the Third Programme, in two parts.
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Magnoliaized
I have a folder in my Firefox bookmarks just for Henry Reed-related webpages. Many of these were imported from IE's favorites when I "upgraded" browsers. Most of them are throwaway hits from brute-force keyword attacks in major search engines: '"henry reed" bbc', '"henry reed" translation', and the like.
Unfortunately, once your bookmark folder exceeds the height of your browser, it becomes less and less managable, until it finally becomes impossible to find anything at all. Especially if you're just lazily dumping in webpages with "Bookmark This Page...", and not bothering to edit the titles or descriptions. For shame.
So, onto social bookmarking! I exported my bookmarks to html, and imported them to Ma.gnolia, and spent an hour or so deleting the extraneous, non-Henry, links. Zip zop.
What remains needs some pruning and a lot of editing, but here you have them: my Henry Reed bookmarks (with tags!).
Unfortunately, once your bookmark folder exceeds the height of your browser, it becomes less and less managable, until it finally becomes impossible to find anything at all. Especially if you're just lazily dumping in webpages with "Bookmark This Page...", and not bothering to edit the titles or descriptions. For shame.
So, onto social bookmarking! I exported my bookmarks to html, and imported them to Ma.gnolia, and spent an hour or so deleting the extraneous, non-Henry, links. Zip zop.
What remains needs some pruning and a lot of editing, but here you have them: my Henry Reed bookmarks (with tags!).
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1322. Bishop, Johnathan. "The Individual Thing." Renascence 45, nos. 1-2 (Fall 1992-Winter 1993): 18.
Bishop expresses frustration at trying to find "Naming of Parts" in a modern anthology for his first class.
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Where Are the War Poets?
The question everyone was asking in the late 1930s and early 1940s was "Where are the war poets?" There was no Brooke, no Sassoon, no Owen. John Lehmann asked it. Wilfrid Gibson asked it. Robert Graves asked. C. Day Lewis asked, and answered:
An addition to the Criticism pages: an excerpt on Reed from Linda M. Shires' British Poetry of the Second World War (New York: St. Martin's, 1985). Shires has written one of my favorite lines in summarizing "Naming of Parts": 'The speakers are soldiers, yet the most important feelings in Reed's poem are not spoken, as though the private man has no voice worth hearing compared with man-as-soldier' (p. 82).
It's a fine piece, which I had actually acquired over a year ago but failed to transcribe, time lost to obsessive tinkering with the database, trying to get the bibliography to sort properly. One thing is bothering me, however, and that's the epigraph to the chapter entitled "Where Are the War Poets?" Shires has credited Reed with the line "To fight without hope is to fight without grace."
At first, I thought this was part of the Lessons of the War series — "Unarmed Combat" perhaps — or some draft I had seen but not taken sufficient note of. To fight without hope is to fight without grace. Is it from an article in The Listener? A radio talk? I can't find that line, not anywhere.
They who in folly or mere greedRather, I prefer E.M. Forster, who frankly declared, "1939 was not a year in which to start a literary career."
Enslaved religion, markets, laws,
Borrow our language now and bid
Us to speak up in freedom's cause.
It is the logic of our times,
No subject for immortal verse—
That we who lived by honest dreams
Defend the bad against the worse.
An addition to the Criticism pages: an excerpt on Reed from Linda M. Shires' British Poetry of the Second World War (New York: St. Martin's, 1985). Shires has written one of my favorite lines in summarizing "Naming of Parts": 'The speakers are soldiers, yet the most important feelings in Reed's poem are not spoken, as though the private man has no voice worth hearing compared with man-as-soldier' (p. 82).
It's a fine piece, which I had actually acquired over a year ago but failed to transcribe, time lost to obsessive tinkering with the database, trying to get the bibliography to sort properly. One thing is bothering me, however, and that's the epigraph to the chapter entitled "Where Are the War Poets?" Shires has credited Reed with the line "To fight without hope is to fight without grace."
At first, I thought this was part of the Lessons of the War series — "Unarmed Combat" perhaps — or some draft I had seen but not taken sufficient note of. To fight without hope is to fight without grace. Is it from an article in The Listener? A radio talk? I can't find that line, not anywhere.
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1321. Jones, Robert C. "Not in the Aiming But the Opening Hand." Review of the Oxford Book of English Verse, 3rd ed. Sewanee Review 108, no. 1 (Winter 2000).
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One Thousandth Entry
And the winner is... David Jones, ladies and gentlemen!
It was two years ago this month that I first wrote the code which enabled me to display the Reed bibliography on the web. The code is a heinous mish-mosh of ifelse loops, created to display records in some semblance of order by author, title and date. As it has grown, the database has become less and less useful, at least to those unschooled in the esoteric skill of Ctrl>F or Edit>Find in This Page.
Tonight, I am celebrating the input of the 1,000th record into the bibliography. Entries from the bibliography, you may have observed, are framed in gray boxes between posts in this blog. If you watch closely, you'll be able to see them roll over from nine hundred ninety-nine to one thousand, just like watching an odometer. I'm celebrating this achievement with a lovely red wine from the vineyards of Spain, and after two glasses I am absolutely in no shape for data entry.
(In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that, while this is the 1,000th entry, it is not the 1,000th record. I have deleted about fifty-odd duplications or books which eventually turned out to not actually mention Reed. So it's really the 947th record.)
This evening, I went to a lecture on ancient libraries, given by Professor George W. Houston. The lecture room was standing-room only: apparently, the Roman Civilizations professor was offering extra credit for attending. So, squashed between row upon row of sophomores, I sat and listened about Herculaneum's Villa of the Papyri, Oxyrhynchus' town dump, and the library in the Temple of Trajan.
Professor Houston's presentation was billed as "A User's Guide" to libraries in the Roman world. He has been attempting to discover how private and public libraries functioned in regard to their users in the ancient world, through scant evidence left in fragments of papyrus scrolls and codices. On the handout provided, Houston provided a translation of an inscription found in the Agora of Athens, pertaining to the Library of Pantainos (2nd-century, A.D.):
After the lecture, I actually popped over to the library, since they had emailed me earlier that the book I had requested from offsite storage was ready and waiting. The book was Epoch and Artist: Selected Writings by David Jones (Grisewood, ed., 1959). It seems all the books I need are in offsite storage, these days. I opened it with no expectation of finding anything related to Reed, and after glancing at the title page and copyright, turned to the index. There it was: an entry for "Reed, Henry, 278-79." The indicated pages turned out to be a reprint of a letter to the editor Jones wrote to The Listener in 1953, in response to Reed's essay, "If and Perhaps and But."
"If and Perhaps and But" is a review of T.S. Eliot's critical prose in which Reed argues that, sometime between the early 1920s and 1950s, "something happened whereby it is now possible for the poet to implement a 'formal artistic discipline derived from the outside'" (Jones quoting Reed). Mr. Jones goes on for three paragraphs requesting an elaboration because, apparently, he cannot for the life of him figure out what "something" Reed is talking about.
Neither can I, for that matter, as I have yet to track down a copy of that particular Listener. Regardless, David Jones has the distinction of being the 1,000th record entered into the bibliography. And the 1,001st, too, since thoroughness dictates that I must cite the original letter as well as the reprint! Thank you, Mr. Jones!
It was two years ago this month that I first wrote the code which enabled me to display the Reed bibliography on the web. The code is a heinous mish-mosh of ifelse loops, created to display records in some semblance of order by author, title and date. As it has grown, the database has become less and less useful, at least to those unschooled in the esoteric skill of Ctrl>F or Edit>Find in This Page.
Tonight, I am celebrating the input of the 1,000th record into the bibliography. Entries from the bibliography, you may have observed, are framed in gray boxes between posts in this blog. If you watch closely, you'll be able to see them roll over from nine hundred ninety-nine to one thousand, just like watching an odometer. I'm celebrating this achievement with a lovely red wine from the vineyards of Spain, and after two glasses I am absolutely in no shape for data entry.
(In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that, while this is the 1,000th entry, it is not the 1,000th record. I have deleted about fifty-odd duplications or books which eventually turned out to not actually mention Reed. So it's really the 947th record.)
This evening, I went to a lecture on ancient libraries, given by Professor George W. Houston. The lecture room was standing-room only: apparently, the Roman Civilizations professor was offering extra credit for attending. So, squashed between row upon row of sophomores, I sat and listened about Herculaneum's Villa of the Papyri, Oxyrhynchus' town dump, and the library in the Temple of Trajan.
Professor Houston's presentation was billed as "A User's Guide" to libraries in the Roman world. He has been attempting to discover how private and public libraries functioned in regard to their users in the ancient world, through scant evidence left in fragments of papyrus scrolls and codices. On the handout provided, Houston provided a translation of an inscription found in the Agora of Athens, pertaining to the Library of Pantainos (2nd-century, A.D.):
No book shall be taken out, for we have sworn an oath. Open from the first hour to the sixth.Those, the Professor stressed, are the only official library regulations surviving from the ancient world.
After the lecture, I actually popped over to the library, since they had emailed me earlier that the book I had requested from offsite storage was ready and waiting. The book was Epoch and Artist: Selected Writings by David Jones (Grisewood, ed., 1959). It seems all the books I need are in offsite storage, these days. I opened it with no expectation of finding anything related to Reed, and after glancing at the title page and copyright, turned to the index. There it was: an entry for "Reed, Henry, 278-79." The indicated pages turned out to be a reprint of a letter to the editor Jones wrote to The Listener in 1953, in response to Reed's essay, "If and Perhaps and But."
"If and Perhaps and But" is a review of T.S. Eliot's critical prose in which Reed argues that, sometime between the early 1920s and 1950s, "something happened whereby it is now possible for the poet to implement a 'formal artistic discipline derived from the outside'" (Jones quoting Reed). Mr. Jones goes on for three paragraphs requesting an elaboration because, apparently, he cannot for the life of him figure out what "something" Reed is talking about.
Neither can I, for that matter, as I have yet to track down a copy of that particular Listener. Regardless, David Jones has the distinction of being the 1,000th record entered into the bibliography. And the 1,001st, too, since thoroughness dictates that I must cite the original letter as well as the reprint! Thank you, Mr. Jones!
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1320. Dunnett, Roderic. "The Skilful Anthologist." Choir & Organ 6, no. 1 (January-February 1998).
Bliss's "Aubade," composed for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, is a 'gem.'
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Leaf a Comment
After receiving several emails, but no comment spam whatsoever, I suspected something was brok. En. Why didn't some good web Samaritan mention it?
Commenting should be enabled, fixed, and working. Now, if I could just figure out how to sort my categories by date, then alphabetically.
Commenting should be enabled, fixed, and working. Now, if I could just figure out how to sort my categories by date, then alphabetically.
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1319. Kennedy, X.J. "A London View of Light." Review of The Oxford Book of Comic Verse, edited by John Gross. Parnassus 21, nos. 1-2 (1996).
Mentions Reed's 'takeoff on Eliot,' "Chard Whitlow."
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The Safety-Catch
For over two years now, since the last time I overhauled the look and feel of the Henry Reed pages, I've been caught in a struggle between design and accessibility, form versus function. The problem, in a nutshell, is that many visitors could not recognize the only clickable button on the site as an actual, clickable button.
Since the site was for the author of the poem "Naming of Parts," I tried to have a theme involving various rifle parts in silhouette: an image map on the homepage, random images on the content pages, and a "flickable" safety-catch to use to send in a search query:
But this proved confusing for many users. Last month, for example, out of a total of 321 search queries run, no fewer than 72 were for the word "Search," which appears by default in the search box as an identifier.
Folks were just clicking on the little safety-catch to see what it would do, and then flipping and digging through the search results and landing on whatever looked interesting. But since the word "search" appears on every page, the results were more or less random (except that the Search page was ranked highest), and a lot of people just ended up choosing an item from the header navigation row. I was also seeing far too many blank queries: people clinking in the text field and then sending an empty box home with the safety-catch.
I really didn't want to give up the safety-catch button. Sure, it's gimmicky. But it tied the whole theme together. Flick the safety-catch. Never letting anyone see any of them using their finger.
But an excess of between 50 and 100 users a month, failing to use one of the simplest interfaces on the site? That's just too many. So I finally broke down, let go of my stubborn, tenacious fixation on design, and let myself gently down into the icy current of the lowest common denominator:
A button.
Since the site was for the author of the poem "Naming of Parts," I tried to have a theme involving various rifle parts in silhouette: an image map on the homepage, random images on the content pages, and a "flickable" safety-catch to use to send in a search query:
But this proved confusing for many users. Last month, for example, out of a total of 321 search queries run, no fewer than 72 were for the word "Search," which appears by default in the search box as an identifier.
Folks were just clicking on the little safety-catch to see what it would do, and then flipping and digging through the search results and landing on whatever looked interesting. But since the word "search" appears on every page, the results were more or less random (except that the Search page was ranked highest), and a lot of people just ended up choosing an item from the header navigation row. I was also seeing far too many blank queries: people clinking in the text field and then sending an empty box home with the safety-catch.
I really didn't want to give up the safety-catch button. Sure, it's gimmicky. But it tied the whole theme together. Flick the safety-catch. Never letting anyone see any of them using their finger.
But an excess of between 50 and 100 users a month, failing to use one of the simplest interfaces on the site? That's just too many. So I finally broke down, let go of my stubborn, tenacious fixation on design, and let myself gently down into the icy current of the lowest common denominator:
A button.
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1318. Levy, William Turner. Affectionately, T.S. Eliot: The Story of a Friendship, 1947-1965. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1968. 106.
Levy quotes Eliot as saying in 1958 (of Reed's "Chard Whitlow"): 'Not bad. But I think I could write a better parody myself!"
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Whaddyacallit
There's still a lot to do around here before going live with these pages. I'm still struggling with if-do-while-else loops in php, and the template's not really quite what I would like. I'm also in the process of copying over the relevant posts from the old blog, and some from the defunct "News" page (the old posts made for tasty test data). All posts from before today's date originally existed somewhere else.
More importantly, I have no idea what to call the thing. It's like getting a band together: the best part is dreaming up a cool name. The choices so far:
More importantly, I have no idea what to call the thing. It's like getting a band together: the best part is dreaming up a cool name. The choices so far:
- bibliographomania (Too cutesy.)
- hyperbibliographia (Alternately.)
- Bellum Libellum (Not real Latin? How do you say "Battles with small books"?)
- Vixi Libris Nuper Idoneus (Ibid.)
- Reeding Lessons (Leaning strongly toward.)
- The Piling Swivel
- Henry Reed Research (Dullsville.)
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1317. Homberger, Eric. The Art of the Real: Poetry in England and America Since 1939. Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977. 27, 56.
Compared with Fuller's "Autumn, 1939," Reed's "Judging Distances" 'captures this effect with greater economy.'
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Newest Additions
Added a new audio file of Robert Pinsky reading "Naming of Parts," an insightful letter into Reed's time in Seattle, and an equally revealing review of the Collected Poems.
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1316. Grigson, Geoffrey. Letter to the editor. Listener 33, no. 837 (25 January 1945): 104.
Grigson writes in to lament the absence of W.H. Auden from Reed's article, "Poetry in War Time: The Older Poets."
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Poem Pages Finished
The twelve Henry Reed poems reproduced here have all been converted to the new style. Some long-existing typos have been caught, and conversion to all-British spelling is being considered. The remaining pages and content continue to be updated. A new interactive bibliography should be ready soon, drawing on a database of sources concerning Reed and his work!
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1315. Allan, G.A. Letter to the editor. Listener 33, no. 838 (1 February 1945): 129.
Part of a lengthy exchange of letters over Reed's pair of "Poetry in War Time" articles, published in the Listener in January, 1945.
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Facelift for Henry Reed
The site is currently undergoing significant changes in layout, color scheme, and functionality. Rest assured, however, the content is still all here (and then some)! If things go according to plan, the original pages will co-exist alongside the new until they are replaced, but the transition may seem a bit jarring to the senses. We apologize for any confusion or inconvenience this may cause, and hope you find the update useful!
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1314. Richards, George. Letter to the editor. Listener 33, no. 842 (1 March 1945): 243.
Part of a lengthy exchange of letters over Reed's pair of "Poetry in War Time" articles, published in the Listener in January, 1945.
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