Review: The Unsung Masters Series, Pleiades Press
Prufer presents a valuable corrective for the temptation to make overly broad evaluative statements about a writer’s oeuvre. And, just as it’s tempting to reconcile the early Thompson with the later, so too is it tempting, in reading these two volumes alongside each other, to lend more credence to one poetic voice or style over another. But here (thankfully) the dichotomy breaks down: both Tamura and Thompson bespeak the human condition; neither wastes a single word; both are necessary poets.
The coincidental WWII focus of Unsung Masters’ first two volumes won’t carry through to the next two releases, which, according to series editor Wayne Miller, will render the work of Nancy Hale, a Boston-born fiction writer who began writing in the 1920s, and Russell Atkins, an African-American experimental poet, composer, and musician, very active from the 1940s to 1970s. Miller further explains that Hale’s “eyebrow-raising claim to fame” is that “she contributed more stories to The New Yorker in a single year than any other writer in the history of the magazine.” The poet Russell Atkins is no less intriguing. Miller states that, as Atkins was also a musician and composer, “music had a profound influence” on his poetry. Atkins also “advocated for a poetic style termed ‘phenomenalism,’” and in the 1950s he founded Free Lance, the oldest black-owned literary magazine.
The Unsung Masters Series is distributed for free to Pleiades subscribers. I myself am eagerly awaiting the next edition. I can think of no series doing anything quite like this. Library of America’s American Poets Project series comes to mind, but its featured poets (Berryman, Rukeyser, Fearing, Millay, Zukofsky, etc.) aren’t really forgotten masters at all. It is the Unsung Masters Series’ devotion to illuminating underappreciated writers that makes it truly indispensable.
Dunstan Thompson: On the Life & Work of a Lost American Master. D.A. Powell & Kevin Prufer, eds. Pleiades Press, 2010.
Tamura Ryuichi: On the Life & Work of a 20th Century Master. Takako Lento & Wayne Miller, eds. Pleiades Press, 2011.
