Book Review
Title: The Bandshell Project
Author: Hal Steven Shows
Publisher: Black Bay Books
Date: June 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1514264546
Collections of essays are among my favorite kinds of books. Hal Shows’ The Bandshell Project is a great example. The essays span from about 1979 to 2015 (year of publication). Shows is primarily known as a poet (and a musician), but now he has extended his reach to that of a first-rate essayist.
I would describe myself as a lukewarm fan of poetry. When I am curious about a poet, I look for prose—fiction or nonfiction—that they have published in addition to their poetry. Some of my favorite books are Ezra Pound’s Selected Prose, T. S. Eliot’s Selected Essays (although I thoroughly enjoyed his poem the Four Quartets), Edgar Allen Poe stories, Wordsworth’s Preface, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Gather Together in My Name, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, etc. Hence, my particular interest in The Bandshell Project—essays written by a poet.
I was struck by many associations while reading this book. What first hit me, was that I thought I could’ve been reading Truman Capote. The first few pages, especially 3 & 4, felt like Capote’s travel piece on New Orleans, the style and texture and imagery all reinforced this impression. Capote’s travel collection comprises some of my favorite writing, so this was a very positive reaction. The ultra-careful æsthetic crafting of words and sentences yields a delightful artistic effect that I look for—and very much appreciate when I find it. I found it in this book by Hal Shows.
Some essays are specific to the geographical area, such as highlighting artistic talent in the Tallahassee, Florida area where Shows lives. Having lived in Tallahassee in a previous life, long ago, I enjoyed the references to musician Del Suggs and poet P. V. LeForge. (Hey, there’s another poet who I have investigated via his prose. I read and reviewed LeForge’s short-story collection The Principles of Interchange.) I also noticed in the copyright page that some material previously appeared in the International Quarterly magazine. That’s another memory from a past life—I was the senior editor for the International Quarterly magazine in the mid-1990s.
Hal Shows’ “Magic” essay (31) explored characteristics of the long poem, and the poet as “mage.” It reminded me of the book Time of the Magicians, although that book was about philosophers. But it rang true—Shows’ essay blurs the line between poet and philosopher, expanding the epistemology of the reader. The poem must achieve what epistemologists seek to achieve—to learn something more about our relation to the world. The drama of a long poem requires an “enveloping context” and an “identifiable world against which particulars can mean.” I like this, again, because of an association. It reminds me of Henry James’ dictum, before writing a single word of a new novel, to have thoroughly worked out the world (sort of a figurative “tableau vivant”) in which the novel will happen.
Staying on the theme of long-ago authors: The essay Hawthorne for Gamers (51) provides a good example for literature instructors who are looking for new ways to present old novelists. Shows tells a good story in this piece as well. I don’t know anything about gaming, but it sounded like it had some good ideas.
I enjoyed further delving into the philosophy of poetry in the Short Notes, Long Poems essay (85). Discussed are what makes structure, and why to not analyze/objectify individual poems. The experience of the poem is the poem, is the structure, is the meaning. There is nothing more to analyze. I like the distinction of the “phenomenal reality of the poem” (91) versus the notion that poems do not have an ontological status. I could insert another association here—Abstract Objects, Ideal Forms, and Works of Art: an Epistemic and Æsthetic Analysis—for more on the epistemological status versus ontological status versus metaphysical status of a work of art.
This theme is further worked out in a later essay in the book, “Objectivity and Others: Notes on the Epistemological Function of Poetry” (107). The first page cites Dylan Thomas. Hey again! Another poet who I primarily know and like because of the poet’s prose writings such as Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Dog and Under Milk Wood. Hal Shows takes issue with T. S. Eliot’s “objective correlative.” When I studied poetry under poet Ron Bayes, he advocated an inverted “subjective correlative,” which might be more or less what Shows is getting at here as well (but I wouldn’t swear to it).
I liked Shows’ way of putting the chief task of the artist: to “embody in his work the delicate, intuitive knowledge of the underlying unity and integrity of experience in the world.” I believe this is another way of saying to “expand the epistemology of the reader” quoted from the earlier essay. To learn more about the underlying unity and integrity of experience in the world, in my view, is also the chief task of the novelist, the scientist, and the philosopher.
Shows’ excellent review of P. V. LeForge’s book of poetry (183) felt like the perfect book review (and here I am reviewing that review). After reading it, I felt like I knew LeForge. Actually, I had met LeForge many times, when he owned the Paperback Rack bookstore, and around the Florida State University milieu. But I didn’t actually know him. Getting back to Hal Shows—my favorite quote in this essay is “I suspect that a lot of memorable and cherished English verse was composed in the mind … during a long walk in the weather” (185). I think of great walkers of London such as Charles Lamb (also an essayist) and Charles Dickens; also a book I enjoyed, Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City. Their walks may have led to other non-verse compositions, but same idea. My own ideas come when I am doing something active, walking, exercising, vacuuming the carpet, etc. And so, “Again and again, these poems by P. V. LeForge connect physical activity to the crystallization of our thought” (185).
In the D. H. Lawrence essay, “For Lawrence, the moral function of the work of art lay not in any didactic advocacy of a given morality, but … to deliver us beyond ‘moral schemes of any sort” (197). But rather, literature is to give us “new understandings of ourselves in relation to our world” (197). How Henry James would agree! James, himself a fantastic essayist, wrote an essay “Art of Fiction” in response to a didactic essay written by Walter Besant who asserted that art must always convey a moral message and reinforce the moral structure of the day. In essence, Besant wanted artists to “rearrange” the facts of the story to fit the dictums of morality, instead of what would actually happen in the world. James, being a purist in the value of “truth in art,” wrote his response in the “Art of Fiction”: He says, “In proportion as in what [art] offers us we see life without rearrangement do we feel that we are touching the truth; in proportion as we see it with rearrangement do we feel that we are being put off with a convention” (405). Emotion evoked from sympathy with a human character, one that corresponds to real-world experience, to “truth in detail” (“Art of Fiction” 399), is central to James’ own view of character development. [“The Art of Fiction”. The Portable Henry James. Ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel. New York: Penguin Books, 1981: 387-414.]
Finally, I must pay special homage to Hal Shows’ essay on poet Van K. Brock’s book, Hard Essential Landscape. It is a very informative piece that should be read before reading Brock’s book. It helps with both insights and organization of the book. Brock is a poet whose poetry I actually liked, a lot. I didn’t need to look for his prose to learn more about Brock. In fact, I should mention, I knew Van Brock well at one time. Rather than go into that here, I’ll link out to a brief bit about “My Friendship with Van Brock.”).
There’s a lot more to tell about Hal Shows’ Bandshell Project, but I have already exceeded my normal character limits (somewhat kidding). There are many provocative and enjoyable references to familiar names and works throughout the book. I enjoyed references to F. O. Matthiessen, for example, who was perhaps the foremost Henry James scholar in his time (before Leon Edel came along).
Hal Shows’ Bandshell Project should be circulated among all lovers of literature and epistemology. It’s a must for those who especially enjoy essays, like me. So do go out and buy this book (that is, go out to amazon.com and buy it). I highly recommend it.
—Robert Rose-Coutré, author of Screenformation.