W.R. Baker (San Francisco Poet) Searching for Fertile Ground, 2007 - Kostenloses Hörbuch

San Francisco Poet, Novelist and Historian W.R. Baker reading Searching for Fertile Ground. W.R. Baker is an historian, poet, dramatist, and novelist with over thirty years of continuous productivity, an art collector by trade and an aficionado on postwar New York and San Francisco. Bakerâs Dramaturgy is hyper-real, even everyday, but its social and political content reveals decades of postwar social distortion. It is truly both a nineteenth century and an American Beat reinvention after Spengler, Maugham, and Koestler. Carl Jung, William Burroughs, and those influences somehow fit in alongside Emerson - PARANOIA being a core narrative phenomenon in his published and unpublished works. Paranoia is center stage in much of Bakerâs prose, but his poetry is starkly descriptive, and in many cases undistinguishable from analysis or rhetoric. Starting at an early age between New Jersey, New York and San Francisco in the 1950âs, Baker went from actor to historian to writer, including interesting forays into American politics over the past twenty-five years, only once or twice on the surface of official San Francisco â such as running a dog (âBeauregardâ) for mayor of San Francisco in 1988. Baker contextualizes himself in the period following the rash of suicides of the American writers in the sixties who had become successful in the 1950s â a consequence of their sense and sensibilityâs over-involvement in their experience â in the decadent phenomenology of a hopelessly impotent fictive description: the failure of substance in Modernismâs Coma of the Real. âThink of Brecht himself â he spent his last decades as a Ward of the State in Russia.â Bakerâs fiction is often a truly disturbing narrative that is highly confrontational and indeed non-fictional in its intense descriptiveness. This is, to my knowledge, unique in American literature relative to the evolution of form in fiction and its relation to broader global intellectual history, and above all justifies my proposal that Mr. Baker should be understood. âWhat American thinker or writer would you want to follow?â he asks rhetorically; âMelville created a framework - the Faulkner-Lowry-Melville trajectory - but it was a dry run for me. I tried out the Europeans, whose sense and sensibility have profound ideas behind them â not like ours (Americans) who have only sense and sensibility. I never liked Twain or Hawthorne. I loved them as human beings, but thatâs not what I was attracted to. The great George Oppen (Being Numerous) â his incision of thickets, something made - a wonderfully sculptural minimalism, but itâs got only one idea â the âPopulation Bombâ â ultimately inadequate, not compelling. I love Emily Dickinson and Robert Creeley (with whom Baker studied). But Charles Olson, this Faulkneresque poetry was better in person than on a pageâ¦. Keep in mind all these people were following Pound, also a genius, but look where he ended up doing radio for Mussolini.â