Hilda Doolittle (H. D.) was an Imagist poet. I studied her in graduate school at Columbia University. Then I moved into her only daughter’s home in New York City, working as an au pair, waiting to take the final exams for my M. A. Then these many years later there’s a review of Robert Duncan’s The H. D. Book: The Collected Writings staring on the left side of the page, while Keep This Quiet! is reviewed on the right-hand side, in the latest Beat Scene, the fine literary magazine published in the U. K.
In the case of Keep This Quiet! it’s really an interview with me, in which Kevin Ring asks such intriguing questions (I thought) that I could not give short answers. For instance, he asked me about a scene from Keep This Quiet! that takes place in Oxford, MISS. Wondering why he picked out that scene, I started thinking back and realized that “this is the same Oxford as in Dylan’s ‘Oxford Town,’ same time period - even the same month.” I had never quite put together that Dylan recorded his “Oxford Town” in December and I went there the very same month, meeting undercover agents who were guarding James Meredith as he broke Civil Right ground by going to the university there. So the question was, Was I scared? I answered no, because it wasn’t the kind of reaction I would have in the middle of live action.
Even David Bowie sang his version, of not going to Oxford Town. Click here for that.
Fortunately, Oxford is a very different place today. It was also, however, the hometown of William Faulkner, the fictional location of many of his novels, the real-life Yoknapatawpha his characters lived in.
Testing, a new image out of a photo machine:
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