Mysterious Moophy Sweezy

There’s a letter from DeWitt Henry to Paul Hannigan in the Ploughshares archives at Emerson College. Mostly just Henry worrying about what needed doing before issue 3/2, the issue he asked Hannigan to edit could be promised. Some money matters—“…since we lost our $5,000 state grant to Alice James, everything depends on the success of 2/4. I think the prospect is fairly definite that it will earn back enough ($3,500) to publish 3/1….”—and a few notes re. possible contributors. My favorite is this,

I might have had fiction from Gilbert Sorrentino on the line for you, but he sent me an excerpt for 3/1 I couldn’t get anyone to like, and he’s sworn off people who solicit then choose. Enough boring things at his age, he says, then to put up with that, unquote.

Too bad, too—Hannigan liked Sorrentino’s work (read Hannigan on Sorrentino here).

A little later in the letter, “I’m sorry Sorrentino’s out, because I liked the Williams essay he did in Am Rev and that’s the kind of stuff I imagine you’d like.”

The issue happened. There’s fiction by Russell Banks, Paul Metcalf, Harry V. Murphy, and Moophy Sweezy. And Moophy Sweezy was Paul Hannigan, I was right, this confirmed by John Batki. An excellent discovery, as it means Hannigan published two fine short stories in Ploughshares—“The Slot People” and “Boomerang Tears,” and there’s more short fiction, unpublished, including “Badboy,” which I referenced in my introduction to the Selected. About short stories, Hannigan wrote in October of 1994, “...reduced to reading a short story by Joyce Carol Oates. I loathe Joyce Carol Oates—and I hate short stories.” Too bad, that—I love Hannigan’s short stories.

There’s no J. Gladstone, either: the portfolio and the cover art are by none other than Batki himself.

Kiss, May & Jody, and the conspiracy issue of Ploughshares

Arion’s Dolphin, a little press in Cambridge, published Kiss, a collaborative sketchbook by Hannigan, John Batki, and Stratis Haviaras in 1977. The similar style of the three poet-artists is emphasized by collaboration; to identify any one drawing as Hannigan’s for certain is difficult, in spite of my familiarity with his work. (One image, a topless lady liberty made faceless by fetish gear, is Haviaras’—the same image appears on the cover of the Arion’s Dolphin chapbook, Jay Boggis’ Old World Courtesy, and is credited.)

Batki and Hannigan collaborated throughout the seventies. I've seen some of the results, and hope to see more (Batki tantalized me with mention of “the Pelikan book”). “May & Jody,” which we posted here in February, was so like their collaborative work, we worried we’d left out Batki’s due credit. He confirmed for us, however, that it’s pure Hannigan, “Oh that drawing is unmistakably Paul's! How can there be any question about it???”

Hannigan edited an issue of Ploughshares in 1976. Included in the issue is a portfolio of drawings by one J. Gladstone. The drawings are not unlike drawings by Hannigan. The issue presents a number of mysteries, which the bio notes only serve to enhance. For instance, Gladstone’s reads, “J. Gladstone and Harry V. Murphy are blood brothers.” Murphy’s reads, “Harry J. Murphy is a friend of J. Gladstone.” (These notes are consistent with the joke Hannigan makes with/of the bio notes—that he is personal friends with nearly everyone published in the issue (he was), and that the only way to get into Ploughshares is to be pals with the editor.) So what’s with the different middle initial? A typo, or a clue? And Murphy's contribution? It's called "Harry Murphy." Anyway, I’ve wondered if Hannigan was Gladstone.

To go a little further into my conspiracy theory: the issue’s cover is a pen and ink drawing of a woman smoking. In the lower left hand corner is the date 1936. The artist is not credited anywhere in the issue. I originally assumed that meant the artist was Gladstone, but the drawing isn’t quite like those in the portfolio. Could it be by Hannigan? What does the date mean? Hannigan was born in 1936.

Then there’s the question of Moophy Sweezy’s story “Boomerang Tears.” No one has yet been able to confirm that there really is a Moophy Sweezy and her (?) bio note, “que sais-je moi?” certainly doesn’t diminish my suspicion that Sweezy is Hannigan. Certainly, the story bears a resemblance to Hannigan’s fiction.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my “Paul is dead”-esque conspiracy theory. Enjoy “May & Jody,” which is by Hannigan. If anyone has any answers, I'm listening.

Available for Purchase!

     ISBN 978-0-9790888-6-5

     flim forum press

     166 pages, 7x9

     $20 + $4 for shipping & handling

Paul Hannigan, society reporter on safari, sketches serpentine philosophers and corporate baboons, chronicles “these degrading surprises we call our days.” Like a good comedian, he paints these fools on his own face, in othered self-portraits, alternately toothy and toothless, sad saccharine, smothered in “moral sherbet.” Hannigan mumble mumbles a messy subjectivity, all the insecurities of our race, gender, sexuality. He can be rhapsodically self-felicitous in fantasies of self-pity. He can be witty, crude, and brutally cruel. Paul Hannigan, fall-guy, castaway, shackles Milton with suburban shopping malls and maps over happiness with The Bush, that colonial/genital beachhead. Hannigan’s poems are busy napping, bong coughing, constantly undressing, disabling, donning a series of hospital gowns. Perverted lyrics parade from his hopelessly open mouth.

     You have already

     had enough fun

     now you must

     what watch watch

     and listen and

     remember. Sort

     according to subject.

     And cross-reference.

     At your dwindling

     so-called leisure.

New Australia and Holland and the Netherlands

Paul Hannigan's chapbook Holland and the Netherlands is a set of twelve poems, all included in the Selected; they make sense as a group, linked by form and, less concretely, by tone. Holland and the Netherlands was published in 1970 by Pym-Randall Press (the press was named for its founder James Randall and his cat, Pym). We liked the simple design, and aped it for New Australia, a previously unpublished serial poem by Hannigan. New Australia does not appear in The Problem of Boredom in Paradise.

A copy of New Australia comes free when you purchase the Selected directly from us, either at the AWP conference in Boston this weekend, via this page, the Flim Forum blog, or our website (and only while supplies last).

Here's the last stanza of "Buffalo" from New Australia:

Really Jim
But Australia appears to be
deadd a special miscarriage
Uruguay from a distance

It's a rude, slangy thing, not to be missed.

"A snake once flew through the air."

The editors at Open Letters Monthly (OLM) published “That is not Sad, This is Not Funny,” the first result of my haphazard efforts to find out a little more about Paul Hannigan, back in 2007. That essay led directly to the Selected.

OLM is a Boston-based journal (though now its editors work thousands of miles apart); it’s appropriate they would promote Hannigan, who spent most of his life in the Boston area. Today, the new issue is up. The homepage features a pen & ink sketch drawn by Hannigan (click on the image and see how he framed it on a sheet of high quality art paper), and the issue includes a conversation John and I had about the Selected. John’s questions are superb. I struggled to answer them adequately.

John asked, “Where do you see The Problem of Boredom in Paradise fitting into our poetry culture, and what would you like to see?” My answer is a little enigmatic: “When a poet is recovered his recovery reminds that for every name handed down a few are lost. Can we ‘recover’ those hidden from view now? Maybe that’s not possible. Maybe recovery is by nature a project for the generations to follow.”

On my mind as I answered is the ongoing recovery of poetry from the ancient world, how thrilling it is to think another great epic might be found, but also the vast number of literary journals in our world now—the amount of work in journals is as daunting as the desert that buried Ashurbanipal’s library for thousands of years.

I need more time.

The Next Big Thing

[The following conforms to the chain-letter ominously known as The Next Big Thing.] 

1. What is the title of your new book?

The Problem of Boredom in Paradise (Selected Poems by Paul Hannigan).

2. Who is the publisher of your book?

Flim Forum Press. Originally, Pressed Wafer offered me the chance to do a selected. It was to be no more that 100 pages, which at the time seemed reasonable, since I’d yet to uncover Hannigan’s unpublished ms. The Higher Slum, or the hundreds of unpublished poems, or the unfinished novels, etc. Pressed Wafer lost interest in my participation because I was slow to produce a ms. I suggested the project to Matthew, even though Hannigan is not an obvious Flim Forum poet, and expected to be turned down. Matthew asked me if I thought Hannigan’s poetry was good and the project worth doing. I said yes. So he said yes. An act of faith I appreciate.

3. What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry. Sub-genre, the rescue-volume. That is, from obscurity. Hannigan has been out of print since the late 1970s.

4. What is one sentence from your book?

"When, as occasionally happened, a tribesman burst into tears at his own joke, his peers would roar in rebuke: That is not sad; this is not funny." [from “The Bush”]

5. Where did the idea for the book come from?

From Paul Hannigan. (I write about the origin of the selected in my introduction, but, without repeating myself, I can offer a less flip answer than “Paul Hannigan.” When I started the Hannigan project, I did not imagine I would edit a selected; I just wanted to know a little more about who he was. The idea of doing a book gradually grew from that research.)

6. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Not exactly applicable, however—I began typing up poems  (with the help of my wife Amy and the choreographer Nina Joly) that might end up in a book in 2007, shortly after I published an article about Hannigan in Open Letters Monthly; his widow, Caroline Banks, read the article and gave me the go-ahead (and helped fund a research trip to Georgia, where his papers reside).

7. What are your influences for this book?

When writing my introduction, I specifically thought of Michel de Montaigne. John Cotter offered suggestions that helped me to think about the book. Otherwise, and obviously, what of Hannigan’s spirit I could pick up from his corpus, so-to-speak.

8. What else might pique the reader’s interest?

The March issue of OpenLetters Monthly, our Paul Hannigan blog, and the article I wrote for OLM back in 2007.

"Nowadays, the people you see at the Grolier are..."

Elsa Dorfman, in 1968, wrote a piece for the Boston Globe about the Grolier, an all-poetry bookshop in Harvard Square, Cambridge. The shop’s still there. Any poet who ever set foot inside comes out mythologizing the place. Poets young in the 1960s – early 70s especially mythologize Gordon Cairnie, its original proprietor, who opened the shop in the 1920s. He’s either a curmudgeon or a generous true friend of poetry. Dorfman chose to begin her article by portraying him as the latter:

I do remember going in once when I was a sophomore at Tufts. I opened the door and asked the old man sitting on the couch if he had Steppenwolf. No, he didn’t, he replied flatly. Did he know where I could find it? No. He had no idea at all.

I think it’s fair to say he was being an ass, but being rude is often romanticized by artists, and so it was by Dorfman and many Grolier regulars. She was smart enough to know this, and wrote, “Gordon’s irascibility isn’t an act, but it’s only part of the story. There’s also his legendary generosity and kindness.” (Probably just a thoughtless use of cliché, but note “legendary.”)

 “Nowadays,” Dorfman wrote, “the people you see at the Grolier are…” and Paul Hannigan is in the list that follows. She mentions that “[Bill] Ferguson printed ‘The Other End of the Couch,’ a collection of poems by Gordon’s friends.” The title is a reference to the red couch Gordon had in the store, a less enduring bit of the myth. (I’ve not seen the collection—I don’t know if it includes a poem by Hannigan. Let me know if you know.)

Louisa Solano took over the Grolier in 1974. She is the proprietor my generation talks about, often with little affection, though she kept the place going, and was kind to me when I came in ignorant, asking after poets who were names-only to me, but were people she knew. My sister used to go in there and buy me presents. Solano retired in 2004. I’m working with the current proprietors to set up some kind of reading with them to celebrate the Hannigan selected and its Cambridge roots. When I've news you'll know.

[Photograph by Damien Weber, sign for A Sing Economy reading with the Grolier, February 2008.]