'All Writers Create Their Readers, Don’t They?'

Christmas, as usual in my family, was bountiful, embarrassingly so. I had requested The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (Norton, 2022) by Matthew Hollis, and there it was. I also asked for I Remember This Detail (Bamberger Books, 2022), edited by W.C. Bamberger. It includes forty letters written by Guy Davenport to the editor who had republished Davenport’s book-length poem Flowers and Leaves (1966) in 1989. In 2007 I reviewed Guy Davenport and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, also edited by Bamberger, for the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

From my youngest son I got the Complete Blue Note, Riverside and Contemporary recordings of Sonny Rollins – four discs, 321 minutes of music. My oldest son and his wife renewed for another year my subscription to the Criterion Channel.

 

Michael the Marine gave me Robert Pinsky’s translation of The Inferno and Barron’s Italian-English Dictionary. Then came the big surprise: Michael published Anecdotal Evidence in three beautifully typeset volumes. On the cover is a detail from David’s The Death of Socrates.

 

Davenport says in a May 8, 1997 letter to Bamberger: “All writers create their readers, don’t they?”