In the Hub of the Fiery Force: Collected Poems of Harold Norse 1934-2003

Rating:
Summary: The Difficulty of Harold Norse
Review: Harold Norse was an exceptional poet as can be seen from his first two collections, The Undersea Mountain and The Dancing Beasts, both of which are collected here. Yet with the influence of W. C. Williams and the Beats, his work went down in quality. His later work is sloppy and easy. Much bad Beat poetry is fast and easy to produce, which Norse obviously did. Not, of course, to say that all Beat poetry is bad. When Ginsberg was at his best he was great-the first hundred lines of Howl, Kaddish, "America," "A Supermarket in California," etc. And Norse has at least one great Beat poem, "I am in the Hub of the Fiery Force," from which this Collected takes its name. It is driving and is as great as much Ginsberg. Yet Norse like Ginsberg and many more poets like Lowell, Berryman, and Eliot got sloppy with success and produced more and more third-rate poetry (The Dolphin, Love and Fame, The Four Quartets). Norse produced too much, as can be seen by this collection's hefty six-hundred pages. The first seventy are great and worth buying-poems like "An Episode from Procopius," "On the Steps of the Castillo," "Evocazioni di Roma," and others are exceptional and worth having. But be aware, however, that the other five-hundred and thirty pages are nothing. Those seventy pages are well worth the price of the book.

Rating:
Summary: As many as there are stars in the sky
Review: If he lived anywhere else but in America, he would have received the Nobel Prize by now. But we in the USA have a way of depreciating our best writers, especially if they do not fit into one or another accepted movement, or if they do not conform to government-approved standards of patriotism and "decency." Harold Norse has the enormous range of his mentor, William Carlos Williams, and the verbal dexterity and flip amiability of his compadre, Allen Ginsberg. But in spirit he is perhaps closer to the world poets rather than to any particulat American model--poets like Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Reverdy, Ungaretti, Marina Tsvetayeva. Only among these international figures, whose work argues with and deranges the ideological concerns that pre-occupy our best writers, can we finally rank Norse. Many have spoken of his facility and technical mastery, but I think, after reading the whole of this volume, spanning an incredible seventy years, that the impression you come away with is not primarily admiration for a squeaky-clean "line," but you're blown away by the vision--of language and society--displayed by this unique poet. If we can't get him the Nobel Prize, at the very least we could try to secure him the Poet Laureateship of his adopted city--San Francisco. He's already the Pope of Albion Street.