Tongues of Fallen Angels: Conversations with Writers by Selden Rodman
Selden Rodman
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    for readers. Selden Rodman’s  Tongues of Fallen Angels  is a collection of conversations with twelve rank…
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Selden Rodman’s Tongues of Fallen Angels is a collection of conversations with twelve ranking authors, leading men of letters in the Western Hemisphere, with accompanying informal photographs. From Spanish Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, the late Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz. From Vinicius de Moraes and Joan Cabral de Melo Neto. From the poet-playwright Derek Walcott. From the United Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg. Ernest Hemingway, Stanley Kunitz, and Norman Mailer. An impressive list, and all the more so given Rodman’s remarkable power to give human substance to figures whose everyday words have been generally ignored in favor of their writings and other public pronouncements. When Rodman’s Conversations With Artists appeared in 1957, it aroused a storm of controversy, intentionally polemical, it became a storm center in the battles then raging in the art world. Rodman’s journals also contained records of fiery bouts with novelists and poets of stature. He was urged at the time to publish them, but refrained, preferring to wait for a book of a different, more empathic intent, in putting together Tongues of Fallen Angels , Rodman––the editor of such seminal anthologies as One Hundred British Poets and One Hundred American Poems ––forcefully asserts the essential social role of the creator. ’’The minor poet,” he declares, ’’is primarily concerned with form or innovation; the major one uses these tools almost unconsciously to say something he feels he has to say––and which the world will be better for hearing.”

April 16, 2023

Alan Ginsberg: What has man accomplished that the blue whale has not?

Selden Rodman: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony

Alan: Alright, but what is Beethoven saying in the Ninth except "respect the blue whale"?

The one great redemption for a failed writer, an angel who never took flight, is to get great writers to go on record in conversations with him. Selden Rodman spent years in North and South America interviewing the greats of poetry and prose, eliciting scintillating conversation and anecdotes for fans and future biographers. From a chat with Ernest Hemingway in Havana: "I'm just trying to write about some of the worst times humanity has suffered since the Dark Ages". Mixing it up with Robert Frost: Selden: "I thought you might like to pay your disrespects to Wallace Stevens. Tell him he should write only about the insurance business". Frost: "Worse than that. I told him he wrote bric-a-brac, not poetry". Another bout of poet re poet, Alan Ginsberg on Ezra Pound: "Have you read Pound's latest Canto, 'The scientists are in terror/and the European mind stops'?. The poets are not in terror". Flying down South America way Selden brings out the worst from Jorge Luis Borges, not that that was very hard to do. Selden: "I have just come here to Argentina from Brazil". Borges: "Brazil is just an extension of Africa. Do the Brazilians even have a literature?" And in Chile, a brighter note from Pablo Neruda: "I love the lyrics of the Beatles, especially 'Eleanor Rigby', and want to be the first to translate them into Spanish". This is literary conversation at the Samuel Johnson and Vladimir Nabokov level. Not to be missed.