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Modernist Current
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250 Modernist Current On Michael Anania James Joyce was born in Omaha in 1939. His first book, Dubliners, contained the poem sequence “Stops Along the Western Bank of the Missouri River,” which treated his native Nebraska with the intense realism that could only come about under conditions of voluntary exile. Nostalgia and critical distance combined to make the linkedyet -disparate pieces of the sequence so precise that the river could, if necessary, be reconstructed bend by bend from the pages of the poems. A later and much more complex work, Ulysses, treated the same Nebraskan territory with equal detail. Its central poetic sequence, though, the ten part “Riversongs of Arion,” combined realism with a concern for myth, finding in the quotidian world echoes of a heroic past. The result was a truly modernist synthesis of past and present, the construction of an eternal now along the lines of work being produced by Joyce’s modernist peers Pound, Eliot and David Jones. Put down your copy of Richard Ellmann’s Joyce biography. I know Joyce was born in Ireland. The two points I’d like to make about Michael Anania’s river sequences, though, are made most clearly through an analogy with Joyce. I’d like to say that Anania, like Joyce, is fundamentally a modernist (an unreconstructed modernist, even); and I’d like to say that the relationship between his two major river sequences, “Stops Along the Western Bank of the Missouri River” and “The Riversongs of 251 Poetry in a Difficult World Arion” is like the relationship of Dubliners to Ulysses. The works treat similar material, but the more mature work does so with greater philosophical ambition, a more profound historical sense, and a greater degree of meta-literary self-consciousness. Omaha as Dublin, Buffalo as Trieste Leaving Nebraska made it clear that writing about Nebraska was like writing about Rome or Florence—it was tangible, real, nobody knew it, there were concrete things in it for poems and what was absolute familiarity for me was unknown to others. —Michael Anania (in Archambeau 4) Michael Anania left Omaha in 1961, arriving in Buffalo, New York to pursue graduate studies in English. He’d been harboring literary ambitions for years, writing poems, plays and stories and editing the campus literary magazine at the University of Omaha. But he’d always had some reservations about being a writer: it didn’t seem to jibe with where he came from. Growing up in an Omaha housing project, he’d attended schools where, as he put it, “standing up and saying you were a poet would be a little bit like standing up and saying you were a target” (in Archambeau 4). Literature had felt distant from his impoverished life in a provincial city that seemed antithetical to literature. Enthralled by existential philosophy and the literature of the absurd, he later described himself as “thrilled by anything complicated and remote” (4). Think of him as a Great Plains version Joyce’s hero, the young Dedalus of Portrait who dreamed of Aquinas and Byron from the horse-piss smelling alleys of a Dublin that had yet to acquire any of its twentieth century literary glamour. At Buffalo, Anania had hoped to study Yeats or perhaps Wallace Stevens—both complicated, and both remote—Yeats’ universe of gyres and the non-places of Stevens’ imaginative pagodas being equidistant from the wrong side of Omaha, Nebraska. Buffalo, though, was the repository of a huge archive of the papers and manuscripts of William Carlos Williams, the then-unfashionable patron saint of “a local pride” in American poetry. Working on Williams was one way for Anania to [34.230.84.106] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 13:46 GMT) 252 The Poet Resigns muster the courage to take on the matter of Nebraska. And like Joyce in Trieste, Anania found the distance between his first provincial place and his new provincial place liberating. What had been stuff to humble to tell in verse became as real and particular as Paris, London, or Paterson , New Jersey. Nowhere in Anania’s first book, 1970’s The Color of Dust, is this more evident than in the series that constitutes one of that book’s four sections, “Stops Along the Western Bank of the Missouri River.” The tangible realness of Anania’s descriptions here reflect his newfound local pride, his sense that Omaha had “concrete things in it for poems” and his growing sense that “what was absolute familiarity” to him could...