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Cargo #253.

   I've been interested in the Spasmodics ever since i found a 120-year-old copy of Philip James Bailey's Festus in my college library, & read (most of) it. Years later, i'd been having a recurring dream of a multi-storey bookstore, when i first ventured into one, now closed, in downtown Ft Worth. As i climbed the stairs there, i realized i'd been dreaming about this place, though i'd never before set foot in it. In the uppermost room i found not one but two copies of Festus. He has some great aphorisms sprinkled throughout, but you have to plow through acres of twaddle about angels & poetry & God & Love ktp to find them. Another Spasmodic, "Owen Meredith" (Bulwer Lytton's son), is well represented on the second hand market by his book-length poem Lucile*. (I found a webpage that attempts to catalog all the editions this book ran through...) It has its moments (i've already quoted from it, i think). And i recently acquired another of his book-length poems, Glenaveril... I'm still looking for a book of Dobell [not anymore: found a print-on-demand copy of Balder, not to mention a wonderfully illustrated vintage The Ballad of Keith of Ravelston]. Here's a good overview of the school. Their main characteristics were verbose subjectivity & exaggerated metaphor. I prefer to think of them as proto-Flarfists.

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*footnote. I cannot resist repeating this anecdote, which i found while trying to google a decent bio of O. Meredith, poetaster & sometime Viceroy of India: "There is a legend that every lot or library of books that has turned up in the last eighty years was sure to have a copy of LUCILE in it. The book is, indeed, a drug on the market, and a story is told of how a prominent bookseller of fifty years ago did what he could do to relegate it to a comparatively decent obscurity. The bookseller, who made a trip to England every year, would gather all the copies of LUCILE from his own lots and those of other dealers before a voyage. When he was far out on the Atlantic he would ceremoniously dump them overboard with an oath and add, 'Here are so many copies of LUCILE that will never enter a book store again'."

PS my edition of Lucile appears to be H M Caldwell's "Exquisite" of 1896. (2003; i see there's now a new book out) --And: "Upstart poets continued to write as though inspired and had summarily to be grounded by the critical class."

   more hours looking
at the sky than my fellow
   humans · nor have i
learned to decipher cloud
runes · as their antics harrow

Street Rothko.