Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) by Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee Page B

satisfied, not the least bit betrayed. To add to your collection of UNIMPORTANT OBJECTS, I enclose our ticket stubs from the Quad Theater on 13th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues—just in case you want to show them off to your friends.
    You talk about a golden age of American poetry in the fifties and sixties and then a quiet falling off. My first response was to say “nonsense,” but now that I’ve given the matter some thought, I sadly have to admit that I agree with you. Most of the great modernists were still breathing then (Stevens died in 1954, but Pound, Eliot, and Williams all lived on into the sixties, Williams in particular doing some of his best work then), the so-called Objectivists were still thriving (the next generation, including Zukofsky, Oppen, and Reznikoff), Charles Olson was in full flower (how I loved Olson when I was young), and the generation after that (poets born in the 1920s) was emerging: Kinnell, whom you mention, but also Creeley, Ashbery, O’Hara, Merwin, Spicer, Ginsberg, and numerous others. Kinnell, Ashbery, and Merwin are still with us, but they are old men now, and what has happened after them? There are several poets born in the late thirties and early forties whose work I greatly admire and follow avidly—Michael Palmer (published by New Directions), Charles Simic (Harcourt), Ron Padgett (Coffee House Press) among them—not to speak of the somewhat younger Paul Muldoon (born in Northern Ireland, now an American citizen)—but they are all friends of mine, I have watched their work evolve over decades, and perhaps this personal connection clouds my judgment. I would be curious to know what you think of them, any one of them. There is also Susan Howe (New Directions), much admired, much debated, but oddly enough, the book I consider to be her best is a work of prose, My Emily Dickinson , an astonishingly brilliant and original text—in the spirit of Olson’s Call Me Ishmael or Williams’s In the American Grain : the poet as critic, criticism as a form of poetry, wonderful stuff. But no, none of these writers is as strong as the giants from the recent past. We live in an age of endless writing workshops, graduate writing programs (imagine getting a degree in writing), there are more poets per square inch than ever before, more poetry magazines, more books of poetry (99% of them published by microscopic small presses), poetry slams, performance poets, cowboy poets—and yet, for all this activity, little of note is being written. The burning ideas that fueled the innovations of the early modernists seem to have been extinguished. No one believes that poetry (or art) can change the world anymore. No one is on a holy mission. Poets are everywhere now, but they talk only to each other.
    Your reference to “late style” reminded me that I still haven’t read Edward Said’s book. I will try to track it down in the coming days. Tolstoy is a good example, but what about Joyce? It seems to me that his early style is late (by your definition, or by Said’s definition) and that as he progressed from book to book he became more and more ornate, complex, baroque, culminating in a final book that is so complex that no one can read it (alas). But Joyce died at fifty-nine, and perhaps it could be argued that he didn’t live long enough to have entered his late period. In any case, his is the only name that jumps out at me to contradict this theory. No, perhaps Henry James as well, whose final, dictated books are filled with some of the most tortuous sentences in English literature. Other writers, perhaps most writers, strike me as fairly consistent from beginning to end—Fielding, Dickens, Nabokov, Conrad, Roth, Updike, fill in the blanks. Not Beckett, of course, and in parallel with the late Bach, think of the late Matisse and his spare and sinuous cutouts. More stripped down, less stripped down, the same. Those are the three possibilities—which is to say, each person follows his or her