Nothing Doing (New Directions Paperbook) [Paperback]

Cid Corman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 2000 | ISBN-10: 0811214257 | ISBN-13: 978-0811214254 | Edition: First Edition

Corman is one of modernism's enduring masters, a poet of prodigious talent and production whose work, both as poet and publisher, is intertwined with the Objectivists Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen, as well as the Black Mountain poets Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. Among such modern giants, Corman's verse is perhaps the most refined, refusing the temptation of "effect" for the tactile ink of line and "touch." Nothing/Doing presents a vital poetry of zen koan and cognitive conundrum, but also one of uncompromising wisdom, where Corman can definitively declare: "There's only/one poem:/ this is it."

Editorial Reviews

Review

1848
22nd January 1869
29
Admiral
After 'amen!'
Alighieri
All I Had
And If You
Answers Every
The Art Of Nature
Ask Theseus
Babbalanja
Beholden
Beyond Crit
Butterfly
The Cancelled Close
Candle Light
Chances
Childhood Jangle
Cicadas
Cogwheels
Conte Crayon
Das Kapital
Daybreak Reminds Us
Devotion
A Dewdrop World Ay
The Dialogue
Did That Bird Want To
Efficacies
Entered Into It
Enuresis
Every One Makes
Everything Ends
The Exercise
The Father
The Fault
A Few Years Yet
Fire Explains
For Rene
For The End Of It
For Whose Benefit
Froggy
Getting Into The Jazz
Glimpses
Going On This Way
The Goldfish
Greeting Card
Hard Going Way Worn
Harvesting The Sun
He Needed
Headline
The Hungry Ones
I Want The Words
I Will Tell You The Secret
I'm Shitting
If These Words Be Ours
If You Would Step Into The Infinite
In A Moment
In The Shadow Of
The Interest
Is It Every
Is That The Moon
Is That
Islands
It All Comes
It Always
It Isnt For Want
It Isnt
It Was All
It's Never Enough
Jalal-ud-din - Dont
Jesus Put In His
Just Resting
The Kinks
The Lady
Laissez Faire
Late Autumn
Life Is Excessive
Life Is Remembering
Life? Dont Beg
Like Coming Back From
Look. You Are Staring
The Meaninglessness
Metaballon Anapauetai
Moody Mary
Mountain
Mountains In Mist In
Music - Weaving - Computing
My Mistake
N.b.
No Matter How
Now
O Bon
O Venus - Here I
One Breath Says It All
Only The Living Want Life
Orbit
Painting The Music
Pear Being Pared Ah
People Like Rembrandt
Poetry Becomes
Post Coitum
The Posthumous
Praise From Ripley
Primeval
The Principle
Psalm: 24
Psalm: 25
Psalm: 43
A Red Thread
Riva San Vitale
Riverrun
A Rose For Gertrude
The Route
Ruth
Samperi
Seeing Paint
Sir :damnable Proud
So Easily
So What
Socrates
Something Bothering?
Stop Now And
Summer
The Sun Is
Swell
There's No
There's Only
They Find In The Ancient Tomb
They're Children
This Isnt
Though You Say You'll Come
To
To Be Or Not To
To Find Something To
To Sit In The Room
Tough Cookie
Tout D'un Cuyp
We Want To
When America
Who Were We To Die?
Why Are You
Why Should I
With The Birds Singing
The Word
You Are The Divine
You Are
You May Not Want To
You Want To Know
Zzz
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Nobody knows how to do so much with so few words as Corman. And Nothing/Doing is rich with his austerities, poems full of wisdom and tenderness and absurdities. It's a book that seems to have come from every time in the man's life, as if all his times were in his custody at once. It feels to me like the summa poetica of Corman's work, where he stands up to be counted. And shows the power and grace of what he does so well. -- Robert Kelly

The poems themselves are allusive, and beneath their simple phrasing Corman evokes multiple meanings carefully. -- Boston Review, Catherine Daly, October/November 2000

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation; First Edition edition (February 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811214257
• ISBN-13: 978-0811214254
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,981,968 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Cid's Forgetting, June 13, 2004

By 

M. Hori "Jesse Glass" (Urayasu, Chiba Japan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Nothing Doing (New Directions Paperbook) (Paperback)

A tremendously gifted person, Cid Corman wrote scores of poems, translations, plays, and critcism, and produced Origin, one of the most innovative magazines of its time. Cid lived with his wife Shizumi in a small house on the outskirts of Kyoto for most of 50 years and poets visiting Japan would inevitably find their way to his doorstep to share his legendary hospitality. Cid's existence was one that I would call "splendid isolation." Kyoto was Cid's Walden. The post office was Cid's link to some of America and Europe's best writers and thinkers--including Noam Chomsky and Hannah Arendt. Year after year Cid continued to do "the work" as he called it--rising at six or seven and wrapping up at about noon, with another writing session sometimes later in the evening.

For decades Cid did this, honing his poetry until it implied worlds in a very few lines. There are many spendid examples of this kind of writing in Nothing Doing. "Say it straight and say it plainly," was a kind of motto for Cid as he continued to develop and exercise his ear and his eye. However, I believe that Cid began to run into trouble in the middle 1990's when he felt that his mastery of words allowed him to make direct statements tricked out in the form of poetry. Cid, in my opinion, forgot the very basics that he had learned from his friend William Carlos Williams and that had allowed him to write the fine poetry that we see in such volumes as livingdying, and other of his books: in poetry we show instead of tell. Nothing Doing features many poems that simply, and bluntly, state Cid's "philosophy," and these poems are the weakest in the book and the ones I like the least. Still, this book is good to have on the shelf. One amazing poem to Shizumi contains the arc and sweep of a lifetime in the span of seven lines and its virtuosity alone is worth the price of purchase.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Small Moments, Momentous Implications, July 26, 2001

By 

Damon Sauve (Chapel Hill, NC United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nothing Doing (New Directions Paperbook) (Paperback)

Cid Corman has written thousands of poems. He first came into his own in the 1950s, and through his magazine "Origin," defined one of the great Modernists streams woven from the Black Mountain poets and the Objectivists. His subjects--insights into human frailty, feeling, and thought--make poetry prized for its restrained and subtle musics, its gentle yet piercing wit, and its honesty. I can think of only a few other poets whose work will outlive our contemporary biases to rest among the masterpieces of our time. In "Nothing Doing" Corman selects poems from the 1980s and 90s. He proves, once again, that small poems, though of seemingly small moments, can fill with momentous implication.

Writing of such quantity is bound to fall flat every now and again, and very very occasionally Corman's poems do. Emerson once said that "a metre-making argument . . . makes a poem--a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing." The intelligent interiors of Corman's poems breathe wide. "Nothing Doing" contains tender elegies to love, family, and friends, as well as others of ethical, almost Confucian reserve, inhabited by a lithe and Zen-like happiness. ...