Elliott Coleman: ‘I think it may be shown that Proust is more Christian than anything else. And further, it seems to me that in his unflagging and almost undeviating search for meaning, reality, and rightness of interpretation, his work becomes highly moral, judged by any system of affirmative morality: peculiarly so in the Western sense of the truth’s making us free, illumined, whole, and productive. For Proust the process was this: remembrance, contemporaneous realization, then art.’
Martin Sorrell: The translations made by an American octogenarian of a mercurial French adolescent bring us as close as we are likely to get in English to the wellspring of his genius. The distance in age and place between poet and translator is a happy irony. Ashbery’s Illuminations are set to become classic.
This portfolio of work by and about Elliott Coleman contains two of Coleman’s poems, an appreciative essay by poet and essayist Myra Sklarew, and comments from others who studied in the Writing Seminars before the days of the MFA.
By Myra Sklarew. WHAT IS THE LANDSCAPE of a life? Does it drift toward us in delicate blue squares, pages inscribed with a man’s handwriting, the rhythm of his silences between the words so filled with meaning that we are altered by it? And when he is gone, is it as poet Josephine Jacobsen writes [...]
IN 1973, ELLIOTT INVITED me to accompany him to Vienna, where the Seminars’ former Fiction instructor, Michael Lynch, was enjoying a position at The American University, in Vienna. Elliott’s trip was paid under the auspice of his delivering a paper on prosody while there. Since he was somewhat infirm and often needed help, he asked [...]
WHEN BOB ROSENBURG, the publisher of Linden Press, asked me to edit a book of Elliott Coleman’s poetry, I accepted eagerly. I didn’t think that I had the credentials to ‘edit’ Elliott’s poems, so suggested that I choose the ones I liked the best and then have Elliott say something about each of the poems. [...]
MANY PEOPLE SPEAK OF Elliott’s “courtliness,” of his being polite, even to people who did little or nothing to earn it. One late afternoon at the Writing Seminars in perhaps 1968, a seminarian was reading his poems, at the top of his lungs. He bellowed every word, every line, of which there were entirely too [...]
I WAS 20 YEARS old, applying to Johns Hopkins graduate Writing Seminars from a small Midwestern college. I had come to campus to meet Elliott Coleman, the director and founder of the program. He had read my application and invited me to lunch at the Faculty Club. Looking back now and understanding the processes of [...]
IT WASN’T UNTIL JULY of 1969 that Elliott Coleman wrote to tell me that someone had withdrawn from the coming Fall semester and there was a Gilman Fellowship he could offer me. I was thrilled and delighted traveling east from San Francisco, with two changes of clothes in a backpack, along with an overblown post-Beatnik [...]
ELCO I REMEMBER ELLIOTT COLEMAN as a slender, mild gentleman with neatly combed-back white, white hair. He always wore a suit and tie. He was taller than six feet, and it was said that Mr. Coleman, who often sat with his legs crossed at the knees, sometimes had both feet flat on the floor at [...]
from ‘An American in Augustland’ Stumble out of the black and silver water, Throw yourself on the green bank, Fit dripping limbs and belly there, Eyes closed in wet elbow pit, And let the fire-strings of the sun Play down your spine. Go to the world of resolution done, In cloud and wind accomplished. [...]
I WAS WORKING ON the San Francisco docks when a couple of students came to visit and urged me to come to the Writing Seminars. I had dropped out after Freshman year of high school and after roaming in the West, went to a university for a few years not working toward a degree, but mainly to keep [...]
Fr Andrew Louth: We are then dealing with a traditional body of Athonite spiritual writings. Caution is required in understanding what that means, for it is also clear that this tradition was not widespread on the Holy Mountain in the eighteenth century; the tradition of hesychasm had shrunk to a trickle was strong enough to nourish the renewal movement among the Kollyvades, to whom St Makarios and St Nikodimos belonged. So, if a tradition, then tradition as a remnant.
Wilfrid L. Randell: Gifted with the facility in the spinning of paragraphs, with skill in the devising of plots, with a deft and pretty touch in the delineation of men and women, and with extraordinary method and perseverance, what could he not have accomplished with the lovelier gift of inspiration – the power to regard his art as a thing of wonder, mysteriously vital, creative, permanent!
Edgar Mason: While the book is unlikely to aid young emperors in their attempts to maintain power, Mr. Paterson has created something very useful for the rest of us: A way of viewing history as a thing cross-pollinated by itself – and an excellent treatise on the governing of our own, personal empires.
