Having recently made all of the New Orleans Mystery books written by my late husband, John William Corrington, and myself available as e-books and paperbacks on Amazon, I have embarked on a project to make my late husband\u2019s more serious literary work also available.<\/p>\n
Corrington began his writing career as a poet in the 1960s, publishing many poems in the \u201clittle magazines\u201d so prevalent at the time and in the literary journals published by various universities. In 1962 he submitted a poetry manuscript to a Charioteer Press competition. He won the competition and the reward was the publication of his first book of poetry, Where We Are. The title was drawn from a W. H. Auden quotation: \u201c\u2026Lest we should see where we are,\/Lost in a haunted wood,\/Children afraid of the night\/Who have never been happy or good.\u201d <\/p>\n
As Richard Whittington noted of Corrington\u2019s poetry, \u201c\u2026significant qualities\u2026[link] it with the Eliot-Auden lineage. One is its objectivity\u2026.an ever-expanding, all-encompassing \u2018I\u2019 is alien to Corrington\u2019s temperament, imagination and expression.\u201d While this is characteristic of Corrington\u2019s early poetry, his style changed under the influence of the \u201cGinsberg-Patchen-Corso-Ferlinghetti-Bukowski group\u201d as Whittington termed it. <\/p>\n
In the 1960s, Corrington began a long-running correspondence with Charles Bukowski. On reading Where We Are, Bukowski wrote to Corrington, \u201cA good enough set but not as well as you are doing NOW which is all the more for the good, ya.\u201d <\/p>\n
What Corrington was writing NOW was contained in his second book of poetry, The Anatomy of Love and Other Poem, and his third book of poetry, Mr. Clean and Other Poems, both published in 1964. Ralph Adamo wrote that \u201cOne thing is certain of The Anatomy of Love: it finds Corrington at the height of his powers as a poet, confident of his themes and his moves, brimming with a molten language, forging ideas that burn and melt as they roll onward.\u201d<\/p>\n
Corrington\u2019s last book of poetry, Lines to the South, was published in 1965. Bukowski wrote of the title poem, \u201cThe lines of yours. LINES TO THE SOUTH damn near immortal and if this is overpraise, I am sorry.\u201d<\/p>\n
Corrington\u2019s poetry earned a few favorable reviews but not as much attention as his novels. Writing in The Massachusetts Review, Beat poet and critic Josephine Miles approvingly noted two of Corrington\u2019s poems from Lines, \u201cLucifer Means Light\u201d and \u201cAlgerien Reveur,\u201d alongside poetry by James Dickey, but her comments were more in passing than in depth. Dickey himself, it should be noted, admired Corrington\u2019s writing, saying, \u201cA more forthright, bold, adventurous writer than John William Corrington would be very hard to find.\u201d<\/p>\n
The poems published in these four books total only 61, thus most of Corrington\u2019s poetry which found print in the \u201clittle magazine\u201d and journals has not been collected in book form. The Collected Poems of John William Corrington<\/a> is intended to remedy this. <\/p>\n