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In an interview Eli Mandel gave in 1978, shortly after returning from Saskatchewan where he worked on the poems for his collection Out of Place, he described his poetic method as follows:
I don't know what I'm doing at any given time, I only do it. Having said that, I'll say I am fascinated by process, and what I worked hardest at in Out of Place is to make things happen in poetry. I think a poem should be a happening, that something should be happening in the poem.
Mandel develops his poetics of process-the notion that a poem is about its own making-in a rather bewildered response to his interviewers' attempt to relate his oeuvre to the literary trends of the late 1970s:
I've been writing for twenty-five years or more and here's a history of a sensibility which is part of the culture of the time, which has changed over those twenty-five years so that people say, he was mythopoeic, and then ironic and social in his concerns, and then projectivist, or whatever terms you want to put to it. Well, how much change can your sensibility endure?
With Mandel dead, it is his reputation-his readers' ongoing interpretation of his sensibility-that endures continued change. In Andrew Stubbs's Myth, Origins, Magic: A Study of Form in Eli Mandel's Writing, the terms for discussing the poet's work are distinctly Freudian and deconstructionist. This...