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Posted on the New York Times page for Klonsky and Schwartz 

Objection: Klonsky was no one's protege, December 24, 2005
Reviewer: marharrell
Regarding "Klonsky and Schwartz," I give the low rating not as theatre but because the Klonsky portrayal bears no resemblance to Milton Klonsky. Immensely profound and informed, he had "an IQ that could stutter your butter" (Seymour Krim, "Views of a Near-sighted Cannoneer," 1961). Klonsky was a prodigy, a genius. Factually speaking, he first met Delmore with Allen Tate, at 20, residing at a writer's colony, Cummingham School. His first publication had nothing to do with Schwartz, in "Chimera." Klonsky was good friends with Anatole Broyard, Seymour Krim, W. H. Auden. Allen Tate, Dwight Macdonld, Rip Torn, Terry Southern ("Dr. Strangelove"), etc. Besides witnessing much of this first-hand, I point to "A Discourse on Hip." Broyard in his NYT obituary, March 7, 1982, called Klonsky "my closest friend for many years: "There are writers, admittedly only a few, who are so entirely themselves that any utterance one might presume to make about them must seem barbarous." Krim wrote, "the heavyweight pillar of his imagination stood upright in a galactic night all its own without any of the consolations that lesser dreamers could comfort themselves with. . . . possessed a spirital life so grave and proportionate that only the superbest adult utterance could do it justice" (ibid.)He talked about Delmore with affection. Sincerely, Margaret A. Harrell (www.marharrell.com)

In true Underground and time-worn fashion, the Klonsky books are selling, for the growing number who know of him, at prices two-to-four times their original value, as rare and collectibles. On the other hand, one can find some titles and editions, mostly paperback, at very low give-away prices. But for the most part, a Klonsky book is surviving like an art object, with rising value—a real investment. Below is the high side of what some books are selling for. (Remembering that, mostly in paperback, one can find the opposite trend, even to an extreme, while the copies last.) As many samples of the collected-writings anthology (brought out posthumously) were never sold, as they had no advertising or promotion but waited whimsically and confidently to be sought out by word of mouth from the publisher (!), there are numerous of those copies around. But not so, the Blake volumes, as the prices below indicate.

 

Prices, Blake books on the web. 
William Blake: the Seer and His Visions. There were at least 368 copies of this title available at one time. Now there are relatively few copies. Across the web the book, originally priced at $12.95 hard-cover, is selling from low ranges up to $68.82.  At one point on the web there was a very good hard-cover copy on sale for $125. 
Blake's Dante: the Complete Illustrations to the Divine Comedy. Prices on the Barnes and Noble limited-availability extended search range to as high as $79.41; original first-edition price was $30. A used copy without dustjacket now costs more than that. However, the number of this and other Klonsky books on the web is affected by the fact that they are out of print. With this clear, see the print on demand listing below.

Print on Demand. A Discourse on Hip: Selected Writings of Milton Klonsky.
Introduction By Mark Shechner.
Author: Klonsky, Milton.
Condition: Edited by Ted Solotaroff. Detroit, MI c. 1991 Softcover Print On Demand: 2001 black and white facsimile of original book. Charts and graphics may be obscured or resized to fit pages. No cover art (generic softcover binding). pp. 337.
Format: Paperback
Associated Dealer: Pondview Books
Our Price: $141.08 *
However, hard-cover as-new copies are also selling from $35 to $14 on the same listing. 20 copies available.

 

 

Blake. Hecate
... the supernatural. W .M. Merchant, Milton Klonsky and David Bindman relate the scene to sources in Blake's poetry, but the immediate allusion is to Shakespeare. ...

 

American Dante Bibliography for 1980
... Angeles, 1980, 377 p. Blake, William. Blake's Dante: The Compete Illustrations to the "Divine Comedy." [Edited] by Milton Klonsky. New York: Harmony Books. 172 ...
More Results From: www.brandeis.edu

 

The New York Review of Books: John Hollander
... New York City December 8, 1977 : Talkies Speaking Pictures edited by Milton Klonsky. The Renaissance Imagination: Essays and Lectures by DJ Gordon, edited by ...


Speaking Pictures
edited by Milton Klonsky
Harmony Books, 333 pp., $5.95 (paper)

 

The Renaissance Imagination: Essays and Lectures
by D.J. Gordon, edited by Stephen Orgel
University of California Press, 338, 75 illus pp., $22.50

 

Poems are like pictures. But some poems are more like pictures than others. Milton Klonsky's delightful, provocative, but somewhat confusing book is an annotated anthology of what he calls "pictorial poetry," mostly in English, from the sixteenth century to the present. By pictorial poems he means very different sorts of texts. The first and most important of these is the Renaissance emblem poem. Indeed Klonsky's own concept of the pictorial and its role in linguistic texts derives from the emblem poem, which probably partly accounts for his beginning his selection in the sixteenth century, instead of in Hellenistic times.

 

The full text of this piece is only available to subscribers of the Review's electronic edition. Articles can also be purchased singly; if you would like to purchase just this article, please press the button below.
More Results From: www.nybooks.com

 

MOTCO Image Database
... Milton Klonsky, in Blake's Dante, The Complete Illustrations to the Divine Comedy, reports that Linnell claimed the drawings and the seven engraved plates ...


89.02.06: Putting Poetry on It’s Feet
... Klonsky, Milton. Shake the Kaleidoscope. New York: Pocket Books, 1973. Lee, Al. The Major Young Poets. New York: World Publishing Company, 1971. ...

 

"Along the Midways of Mass Culture"; review


2002 O’Neill Playwrights Conference : Summer Schedule

Klonsky and Schwartz by Romulus Linney, July 12 at 8:00 p.m. & July 13 at 2:30 p.m., Barn. In the hot and sultry New York summer of 1966, poet Milton Klonsky struggles to help his friend, the more celebrated writer Delmore Schwartz, come to terms with his demons. http://www.oneilltheatercenter.org/news/0522.5.02.htm

 

 

MA Cultural and Critical Studies : Modernism and Vulgarity

Course Convenor: Dr Esther Leslie

Birkbeck, University of London: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/eh/eng/macc/vulgar.htm

 

In the 1850s the poet Baudelaire bathed in city slipstreams, abandoning himself to Paris crowds, urban stimulations and the market. Some twenty-five years later in the same city, Huysmans’ novel Against Nature told of an aesthete swaddled in his monument to high taste, hiding from the vulgarity of everyday life. These differing responses to the advent of mass industrial society are elaborated in the cultural debates and practices of subsequent years. One strand insists on the autonomy of art, its separation from daily concerns and its pursuit only of its own laws and logic. Art here marks the place of utopia or the idea, or it offers an escape from the grind of the mundane. Another strand of criticism and practice dissolves art into everyday life, enthusiastically propounding anti-art or making culture quite literally out of the debris and kitsch of industrial modernity, or drawing on popular resources (circus, music-hall, boxing, cinema, advertising, magazines, ephemera) in order to furnish an art of the moment.

 

Indicative Reading (abridged): 

Charles Baudelaire, Prose Poems (esp, ‘Crowds’, ‘Let’s Beat Up the Poor’, ‘The Generous Gamester’, ‘Loss of a Halo’) (1860s) 
J.K. Huysman, Against Nature (A Rebours) (1884)  
Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) 
Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) 
(main text) Walter Benjamin: Charles Baudelaire; a Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (1935-9), Verso 
‘The Eccentric Manifesto’ (1922) in Richard Taylor & Ian Christie (editors), The Film Factory; Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896-1939, Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1988 
Leon Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life (1920s) 
Siegfried Kracauer ‘The Little Shopgirls go to the Movies’ (1927) in The Mass Ornament, Weimar Essays, Harvard University Press 1994 
Siegfried Kracauer The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany (1930), Verso, London 1998 
‘Introduction’ and ‘Critical Dictionary’ in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, edited by Georges Bataille  
Walter Benjamin: ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1935-39) in Illuminations, Fontana, London 1992  
[Ellipsis. Includes]:  
Milton Klonsky, ‘Along the Midway of Mass Culture’ (Partisan Review 16:4, April 1949), reprinted in Milton Klonsky, A Discourse on Hip: Selected Writings of Milton Klonsky, Wayne State University Press, Detroit 1991 


MCLUHAN
Pro and Con

Edited and With an Introduction by Raymond Rosenthal.

"Another essay that provides a balanced critical perspective on McLuhan's works is by Hugh Kenner, who persuasively suggests that there are three souls dwelling within McLuhan's breast: a pop artist and thinker of considerable genius, a wildly irresponsible funny-man addicted to inaccurate generalization, and an ultimately sinister oracle whose prophecies may hasten the arrival of the millenial nirvana he contemplates. At this point in his career McLuhan the genius can look after himself; the other two, however, demand radical debunking, for they corrupt us in important ways, and pleasurably.

In this volume the genius has to look after himself, for none of the attempts to identify him are very distinguished. Although cautiously favorable essays by Tom Nairn and Richard Kostelanetz are frequently suggestive, one is exasperated by Father John Culkin's cracker-barrel folksiness (a rebarbative parody of the master's) and it is neither pleasant nor edifying to hear a triumphant professor of communications, Irving J. Weiss, proclaiming that "What is ridiculous about any hope of increasing 'good' programing on TV is that turning the screw of its art tighter nearly always results in the embolism of hallowed triteness."

"McLuhan the charlatan on the other hand is relentlessly pummeled in several essays, the best of which to my mind are John Simon, Christopher Ricks, Milton Klonsky, Geoffrey Wagner, and Theodore Roszak. In the light of these (and a few not in this volume, notably Benjamin DeMott's "Against McLuhan," which appeared in an earlier collection of essays, "McLuhan: Hot and Cool") one feels that the citadel of intellectual respectability has now successfully repulsed this barbarian attacker, and though he's still roaming free in suburbia, the center of town is quiet once more.

"The achievement of these defenders of reason and conscience should not be underestimated, for McLuhan's mask is a complex affair, not easily penetrated by the demystifying pen. . . ."

 

Catalog Report
... Klonsky, Milton. Shake the Kaleidoscope: A New Anthology of Modern Poetry. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1973. 12mo - over 6 " - 7 " tall. Mass Market Paperback ...


BA Essay ...
In his book, The Fabulous Ego: Absolute Power in History, Milton Klonsky treats monarchs as individuals, but views them from the perspective of the outsider, looking in; his emphasis is on how both modern readers and contemporaries viewed these monarchs, rather than on how the monarchs chose to view themselves and on how this affected their reigns. He presents a series of portraits of absolute monarchs, from Sardanapalus to Napoleon, based exclusively on first-hand accounts. His aim is to sweep away the dust of centuries of historiography grounded on over-arching theories, and to leave a closer, more psychologically-oriented picture of individuals who played extraordinary roles on the world's stage. The rulers he chooses, however, are deliberately products of the times when monarchs were superhuman, gods on earth (he includes Catherine the Great and Ivan the Terrible).
http://www.columbia.edu/~kmp30/ba.html

The immortal soul of the divine king Osiris becomes the immortal soul of each and every Egyptian, even as Christ the Savior becomes the Christ-soul of every Christian, the self within us. In the same way the function of the chief, which is to will and decide, becomes the model for all subsequent acts of free will in the ego of the individual; and the law-making function, originally attributed to God...has in modern man become the inner court of conscience.

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