Sherry Chandler » On the Banks of Monks Pond
On the Banks of Monks Pond
from Ron Silliman
Even by such modest standards, the correspondence between Jonathan Greene & Thomas Merton that is at the heart of On the Banks of Monks Pond is not a major correspondence. Jonathan Greene was a young poet, more or less fresh out of Bard College, when he met Merton after moving to Kentucky. Greene signed on as an unofficial contributing editor to Merton’s journal, Monk’s Pond – Keith Wilson & Jonathan Williams did likewise – but appears to have met Merton just three times before the Trappist monk died at the early age of 53. The correspondence as published is just eighteen letters long – ten of them by Merton – written over eleven months.
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What is best about On the Banks of Monks Pond is [that] it places Merton thoroughly within the world of poetry, hoping to meet Anselm Hollo (in those days a British-based translator who worked for the BBC), thanking Greene for passing along an article on Barthes & Lacan, worrying about a contributor’s note for Wendell Berry.
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