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.