I'm reading a newsletter from New Directions, the storied publishing house that just about every writer I know dreams of one day publishing with. The latest novel by one of my acquaintances is, actually, about to be published by them. I wonder what it feels like—-thrilling, joyous, terrifying?—to know that your book will be in the company of writers including Hanif Abdurraqib, Anne Carson, Clarice Lispector, Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luís Borges, and James Agee (a personal fave whom no one seems to know about), all of whom were published by New Directions. Oh and the guy who founded it in 1936, James Laughlin, at the venerable age of 22, did so because Ezra fucking Pound told him to. If I’m ever published by New Directions (a profoundly unlikely chance), I’ll be psyched, but probably also deeply insecure.
Laughlin, as a young man in the 1930s, was actually pretty cute—Josh O'Connor vibes but more mopey, and a poet. I wonder if he too felt overwhelmed, in that latter capacity, by the company he kept and whose work he published. What must it be like to write poetry when you’re saturated in an atmosphere of groundbreaking, beautiful poets and authors and essayists and novelists and short story writers and experimentalists? Even if the people he published weren’t famous at the time (Dylan Thomas, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Denise Levertov… the list goes on), their work must have cast a long shadow over his own pen.
But then again, maybe they didn’t. Maybe all those groundbreaking, beautiful words made their way into his blood, and then into his heart. Something about Laughlin’s poems that I’ve noticed appears to confirm this: What he wrote about, more often than other theme, was, in all of its varieties, love.
-Eugenie Dalland