The Man in the Wall

James Laughlin has been called the American Catullus. Like that most Greek of ancient Latin poets, he elevated his everyday subjects with wit and clarity of language. Love and hate, death and aging, politics, literature, travel, the horrors of warLaughlins muse spoke of all these things with a fresh directness that make his poems both timeless and contemporary. The founder of New Directions, Laughlins efforts as publisher and poet had been to prolong and extend the old poetic traditions. Poetry for him was, in Gertrude Steins phrase, a continuous present in all times and cultures. Laughlin developed his distinctive tight metrics with the advice of William Carlos Williams. A longer, comical line is found in the recent poems of Laughlins cheeky doppelganger, Hiram Handspring.