My 3-volume set arrived today and looks even better than I could have imagined. A really great effort, I just wanted to note here that it's now available!

Here's a link to the Hippocampus Press page:
[www.hippocampuspress.com]

roger

Tomorrow I'll finally get back home so I can find out whether it's waiting for me at the post office...

Great to know that it looks nice, though (although a correspondent of mine was a bit concerned over the limericks...)

Got an e-mail from Hippocampus Press yesterday: there are only 25 copies of the set left. Get them while they last!

Oh, how I would love to own this full set. But I'm afraid I'll have to content myself for the time being with my treasured copy of The Last Oblivion.

With all due respect and appreciation to Hippocampus Press, I had hoped that another, more academically oriented publisher would publish CAS's complete poetical works. The only chance for CAS's poetry to evolve beyond the tiny fantasy fan base and to survive in the world of serious literature was to have his poetry marketed to academic libraries and reviewers, and not to be published by a niche publisher in an extremely limited edition. A search on WorldCat today reveals that the following libraries throughout the entire world own a copy of The Complete Poetry and Translations:

US,CA ALIBRIS
US,DC LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
US,NC BAKER & TAYLOR INC TECH SERV & PROD DEV
US,OH BAKER & TAYLOR
Australia UNIV OF WOLLONGONG

Don't misunderstand me: I am very grateful for these works, in whatever form, but having Hippocampus publish these works was all but an overt admission that CAS's poetry will never be read or accepted by more mainstream readers, or taken seriously as literature, at all.

P.S. Do I sound like a snob? Mea culpa. In my view, poetry that was once compared to the works of Shelley and Keats ought to be read by more of those who actually read Shelley and Keats, and not merely by aficionados of the likes of The Metal Monster.

Perhaps a better way for CAS's verse to be more widely disseminated would be to set some to music. "Resurrection" in my view would lend itself particularly well to being set to music; one might even try rock music.

There are several reasons, in my opinion, why CAS should be studied in a more scholarly manner. Considering California history, one can see at this moment in time that the California literary scene has had a definite impact on US poetry in general. It is, as it seems now though, a somewhat different species in that it has begun trends that other states would later follow: we have the Beats and then if one looks, there is this developing strain of nature poetry that is very particular to California (Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder, and now Robert Hass). Among these latter poets, there is also a strong interest in Buddhism and "asian" forms of poetry.

Although I do not think some of these poets read CAS (maybe Jeffers), I do think CAS anticipates some of the things they do. For instance, his assistance to Kenneth Yasuda in the 1940's translating Haiku's to English predates Snyder and Hass' own preoccupation with this form. This leads to the question of where did these forms come from? Was it innate to California with its strong trade with the Japan and China or is it coming from a strain of modernism (like from Ezra Pound) and the increasing availiblity and movement of things like Japanese prints to the local museums?

These are just some of the scholarly questions that CAS' poetry brings up for the larger poetic picture...

I hope to investigate some of it in more depth in the not-to-distant future,

~A



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 1 Sep 08 | 01:55PM by NightHalo.

It's been 96 years or thereabouts since those reviews that compared CAS to Keats and Shelley, and 37 years since the last major collection of his poems (Selected Poems). Academically oriented publishers have had all the time in the world to pick up CAS, and neglected to do so. George Sterling was, AFAIK, a bigger frog in the pond of Californian literature than CAS, and even HIS collected poetry won't be appearing from an academic publisher -- again it'll be a small press that will take the lead. But with HPL appearing from Penguin and in the Library of America, there's finally hope for CAS too -- and I seriously doubt that a limited edition will matter one way or the other.

I waited 14 years for this edition; I wouldn't have wanted to wait until my great-grandchildren drop dead from old age.

If Clark Ashton Smith's work is ever to gain what might be considered a more academic readership, publications like those from Hippocampus Press are necessary steps in a journey that is almost certain to be a good deal longer and harder than most of us would like.

I know for a fact that the California State Library, the Bancroft Library, and Brown University have copies. And while the hardcover editions are limited and will soon be out of print, Hippocampus will undoubtedly keep the set available in trade paperback format indefinitely. I too would have preferred to have seen CAS' poetry published by someone other than a small speciality publisher, but many fine poets have been published at first by their admirers before breaking out into the wider literary world; Walt Whitman comes to mind. Smith won't be read so long as there is nothing of his to be read. Fred Chappell, a fine poet and gen-u-wine literati, had not read much Smith until the publication of The Last Oblivion because all of his collections, Arkham and otherwise, were o.p. and expensive. It would be nice if someday there was a retrospective of CAS' poetry published by a "mainstream" publisher, just as the University of Nebraska has reissued the first two Arkhams, but for the time being HP does the job admirably. I can't really see anyone doing a better job than Schultz and Joshi did anyway.

Scott

J.B. Post:

The suggestion of setting CAS's work to music as a means of increasing its visibility is an interesting one. In fact, I have entitled an electronic music piece of mine after a work of CAS's, but, of course, what I do has a minuscule audience.

In any case, I wouldn't like to see the settings done to rock music, because my point is precisely that the poetry of CAS needs to be lifted out of the ghetto of pop culture, to at least some degree.


Nighthalo:

I agree with you that there are many bases upon which serious studies of CAS may proceed besides the "weird tales" angle. For instance, have you read Jack London's novel The Star-Rover? While it is not poetry, it reeks of the influence of Sterling's and CAS's poetry, and it is one of the most obvious instances of CAS's literary influence, in particular, on mainstream American literature. (Of course, many London scholars tend to think of The Star-Rover as an aberration, which I can well understand).


Martinus and DarkReader:

I feel that you miss my main point, which is simply that it would have been better for the future reception of CAS's poetry if it had been issued by a more mainstream academic publisher at this time. Did Joshi and Schultz attempt to find such a publisher, I wonder? At any rate, I do not mean that it would have been better that they never be published.

I am afraid that I must respectfully disagree that limiting the edition of CAS's poems will not negatively influence their dissemination in libraries. After all, how can a library collect a book that is unavailable? Also, as you can see here, the entrepreneurial vermin of the collectors' market are already at work in exploiting scarcity--even before scarcity has actually become a fact! These types' vulture-like skills are fascinating, if repellent.

I hope, however, that Scott is right, and that at least the volumes will remain in print as softcover editions. That format, however, may well dissuade academic libraries from collecting the material.

In the end, the issue is, will the fact that a specialty publisher made CAS's poetry available help or hinder CAS's critical reputation in the future? My hope is that it will not; my fear is that it shall.

P.S. As for Sterling, his "friend" H. L. Mencken seems to have been almost single-handedly responsible for sabotaging serious posthumous literary critical attention to Sterling's life and poetry. At least there exists a (quite good) Twayne's authors series volume devoted to Sterling. I would love to see one for CAS, as well.


Scott:

First, as I hope my post made clear, I much prefer that the poems appear via a publisher such as Hippocampus than not at all. You are also quite right that their publication at least lays the foundation for future work, although, given the state of poetry in general in the 21st Century, I cannot pretend to have much hope for this.

A WorldCat search, such as the one I performed, really should have uncovered the books in the libraries that you mention. To be certain, I double-checked the online public access catalogs ("OPACs") at both Brown and the California State Library. My searches (author: "Smith, Clark Ashton") failed to uncover the Selected Poems and Translations at either library. Since you are certain that these libraries own copies of the work, I hope that the volumes' absence from the OPACs simply means that the libraries are slow to catalog them.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 4 Sep 08 | 07:46AM by Kyberean.

Kyberean Wrote:
[snippage] Since you are
> certain that these libraries own copies of the
> work, I hope that the volumes' absence from the
> OPACs simply means that the libraries are slow to
> catalog them.


They are.

Scott

Quote:

They are.

Hope they get around to it sometime before the next millennium, then! ;-)

Those of you who could not make up your mind can cry now...

Sold Out!!!

If you like this series, you should check out the Atlantis Fragments! Like CAS's Poetry, it is an amazing collection and I just can't stop raving about it! It was a risk, I'd never read any Sidney-Fryer, that I am glad I took!