Long Island Triptych

Lindley Williams Hubbell (1901-1994) received a Yale Younger Poets Award in 1927, and his work afterwards appeared from several major U.S. publishers. Then in 1953 he moved to Japan and liked it so much that he never again left the country, taking Japanese citizenship in 1960. His most significant book, the last to appear in the U.S. before his departure, was Long Island Triptych and Other Poems (1947). In this book - and especially in its title poem separately reissued here - he broke through from his early style of short, finely cadenced lyrical poems to an ambitious and original modernism. In an afterword, editor Paul Rossiter argues that this modernism was inspired by the work of his friend Gertrude Stein, and especially by her writings on Cézanne, Picasso and the cubists.The panels of the triptych focus on three Long Island neighborhoods - Greenpoint, Ridgewood, and Glendale - and each includes a great variety of material contained within a formal structure as rigorous as that of an analytic cubist work by Braque or Picasso. In a late essay comparing Gertrude Stein's work with that of the cubists, Hubbell states: 'as the Cubist painter took an object apart and then reassembled the parts according to a completely autonomous sense of design, so she disintegrated her ideational content and reorganized it into a purely formal design'. This taking apart and reassembling of multiple viewpoints is what Hubbell does with his three neighborhoods. The result is a festival of particulars held in a multi-faceted unity by the overarching poetic form.

Lindley Williams Hubbell (1901-1994) was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and was privately educated. From 1925 he worked as a reference librarian in the Map Room of the New York Public Library. His first two books, Dark Pavilion (1927) and The Tracing of a Portal (1931) were published by Yale University Press, the first of them receiving a Yale Younger Poets Award. He published two more books with major publishers in the U.S. before moving to Japan in 1953, where he taught at Dōshisha University in Kyoto, continued to write and to publish new poetry (with the Ikuta Press in Kobe), and became an afficionado of both nō theatre and Japanese pop music. He took Japanese citizenship (with the name Hayashi Shūseki) in 1960, and remained in Japan for the rest of his life. Paul Rossiter has published eleven books of poetry since 1995. After retiring from teaching in Tokyo, he founded Isobar Press, which specialises in publishing English-language poetry from Japan, and English translations of modernist and contemporary Japanese poetry.

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