Aborted Poetry

...Or this, with the characteristic Howardian verbal wax-modeling: "But I am getting ahead of myself, or ahead of him, for that exact calling of the turn, or of the unreturning, was not to be within James Wright's reach, not even within his range, for a long time...

...It is our claim to have eschewed the Parnassian for the personal, to have abandoned the Parian, as it were, for the paranoid, and even the most generalized-or at least, generalizing?of American poets, the one who so often liked to sound like 'the Peter Pan of the N. A. M.,' is treasured by most lovers of poetry now as a man of jeopardized roots, rotting branches and blasted flowers...

...Or take this: "And surely the ghosts laying claim to Bowers' books are more intimate, more native to his own structure than the militant angels standing guard over Dr...

...some poetry, but no decent criticism...

...Is there any significant difference here between "reach" and "range...

...This kind of allusive gongorism does not make you understand or even wonder-only reach for your axe and start chopping away, no matter whose woods they are...

...What is the good of writing 41 essays of anywhere from six or seven to 30-odd pages, each hermetically self-contained, none including cross references or biographical data except of the most laconic sort (we are not even given the dates of the poets' births), the whole thing arranged in cold alphabetical order...

...And if the central question of these poets' aloneness with America, whatever this might imply of cultural isolation and compensatory identification with a myth, had been thought through, the book would have fulfilled a genuine need...

...Does it help us to fathom Dickey's "Sermon" to be told that its style is "as one might expect, an inflammatory qualification of the poet's late prose disclosures, perforated yet prolonged, which exist within the precincts of poetry chiefly by an intensity of realization, an assertion wilder than any mere music, any measure which might be brought to bear on the segmented, limber phrases, the members...

...To be sure, it may sound admirable in theory: no biography, no sociology, no literary history, no culture-mongering...

...Thus we read apropos of John Hollander: "And ever since-just consider the critical practice of a Sainte-Beuve, an Edmund Wilson!-we have mistrusted works, 'monuments of unageing intellect,' regarding the finished (especially the varnished) as a suspect or trivial facade, the truth, as Henry James once said, being in high fermentation on the other side...

...There are others, like Edward Field and Alan Dugan, who do seem to me to stumble occasionally on a particle of worth...

...one is forced to quarrel not with omissions but with inclusions...

...And I am starved for a morsel of nutrition in the hollow elegancies or clevernesses of a Daryl Hine or Daniel Hoffman...

...or when a discovery is made "coterminously" with another, which is more prestigious but less accurate than "simultaneously...

...Here was a chance to examine the most characteristic process of the period covered, whereby poets as different as Merrill and Wright, or Hecht and Snodgrass, felt obliged to roughen their textures and untune their cadences, sometimes with salutary, sometimes with disastrous results...

...If instead of encapsulation in alphabetic order, these poets had received study as members of Academia, the Black Mountain Group, the New York School, the Beat Generation...

...These agglomerated solitaires are not always correctly displayed as when a tarnhelm is made to change things whereas the tarnhelm or tamkappe of the sagas chiefly made its wearer invisible...

...yet even they, along with a few of their superiors, may ultimately usurp the space and significance Howard accords them...

...Thus in quasi-explicating Hollander's "The Great Bear," Howard will speak of allusions and citations but carefully refrain from identifying them...

...In much the same manner, in a casual aside, Howard equates the novelistic work of Doris Lessing with a mere piece of clever pornography, the pseudonymous Pauline Reage's Story of O. But the failure of Alone with America goes deeper...

...or when Howard traces a "nosography" of his admiration for Denise Levertov's books?though nosography is a catalogue of illnesses, and admiration, even for Miss Levertov, is hardly to be regarded as an ailment...

...if their involvement in politics and history-or their withdrawal from them-had been duly evaluated...

...But his work is, paradoxically, bronze perdue...

...should be indispensable but isn't...

...A typical Howardian sentence goes on for some three-quarters of a page (there is at least one that meanders over twice that stretch...

...In fact, Alone with America is a kind of wax museum where even the air is cunningly made of liquid wax: You enter at the peril of suffocation...

...Howard frequently does not want his meanings to be readily understood, lest his book lose its hieratic, esoteric, cabalistic-Indeed poetic quality, as Howard understands poetry and, therefore, poetic criticism...

...of not giving you a sense of how and why they are more necessary than such able lesser figures as Edgar Bowers, W. D. Snodgrass and Galway Kinnell, or indeed some of the trivial and negligible ones likewise enshrined...

...It seems an extraordinary production," Northrop Frye is quoted as saying on the book's jacket, "it should be indispensable to any one interested in contemporary poetry in America...

...if they had been related to movements in the other arts with which, in some cases, they were closely associated...

...It seems clear to me that Howard, who is the author of three volumes of verse, has tried in Alone with America to write a 600-page poem about the contemporary poet, an epic poem in prose...

...just esthetics, stylistics, pure appreciation...

...But most distressing of all-and most consonant with his writing lyric poetry in the guise of criticism-Is the essay on Sylvia Plath, in which the critic becomes the protagonist, his earlier failures to comprehend fully his elusive subject becoming the subject of this later, unerring assessment...

...Or he will himself make references of the darkest kind, like this one about Levertov: "After a long time crashing and stumbling up against resemblances, bruised by analogies suggested, if not spelled out, between her 'fronds of wild parsley' and the thickets of our Atlantic poesy, and by the community (call it log-rolling...

...Seldom, I think, have so much brightness, wit and erudition been enlisted in the service of obfusca-tion, and the waste is pitiful...

...Reviewed by JOHN SIMON It is customary in wax museums to sneak in among the famous effigies some waxen spectator or museum guard to delight exploring children who find themselves taken in by the trick...

...or a poet of any kind out of Robert Bly, Kenneth Koch, Gregory Corso, and Paul Goodman...

...Can there really be 41 poets of importance in America in a period of 1.8 decades...

...Even when dealing with the few poets of unquestionable achievement and staying power-james Dickey, James Merrill, Anthony Hecht, and one or two others?Howard has a way of not making manifest their individuality and importance...

...Similarly, I do not feel confronted with poetry when the backwash of William Carlos Williams comes at me, whether it is labeled Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder or Denise Levertov...

...The whole concept of the book seems indefensible to me...

...exhibited, in another part of the forest, with our Big Timber out West, you come to wonder just whose woods these are...

...Hardly, I should think...

...Winters' citadel of decorum, Castle Adamant on the Pacific, their flaming pens forbidding entrance to the flush and flux and flower of experience in favor of its form and formula...

...What emerges, however, is not poets alone with America, but alone with Richard Howard's extremely intelligent yet narcissistic, isolating and manipulative mind, which uses the poets as creative playthings...

...What else but the Night Side of things ransoms the Apollonian toy, keeps the decasyllabic maker from being a regular faker...

...Richard Howard's Alone with America is a 600-page book about the 41 poets Howard considers to have ripened into importance during the '50s and '60s...

...of not revealing their essence in hard, memorable prose formulations...

...It is a need that Howard's subtle mind and devotion to poetry seem eminently suited to filling, but from which his perverse fastidiousness and mania for concettistic obscurity consistently recoil...

...The only way a book about 41 contemporary, but in many cases unremarkable, poets could have been made interesting and valuable is for schools, movements, cross-breedings, parallels and feuds to have been thoroughly investigated and interpreted...

...Though I detect a certain skill in, say, John Ashbery, I can uncover very little substance or even meaning in most of his work...

...Heaven protect the seeker after enlightenment who is offered this stone of inscrutability for the bread of elucidation...

...But a prose that, alas, becomes as impenetrably poetic as Mallarme's...

...if the brief emergence of the poet as a leading figure in American life, be it only on its bohemian level, to be quickly superseded by the rock musician, had been chronicled and analyzed...

...The jesuitically hedged praise proves right: Howard's book seems rather than is...

...what a book this might have been...

...This, indeed, is one of the rare books of its type...

...Not by the wildest stretch of the imagination can I make a poet of importance out of, say, Howard Moss, Adrienne Rich, William Meredith, Frank O'Hara...

...The games played with lan-gauge minimize the meaning...

...it is also a brilliant, showy, garish wax museum in which the author not only presents his exhibits in a soft, waxen, dead imitation of life, but also introduces himself, their custodian, as a clever, almost-alive waxen stylist, writing elaborately trompe-l'oeil prose of shiny yet unnatural hues...

...and carries in its turbid, eddying stream quotations in both verse and prose, italicized statements, abstruse references, ironic interjections, punning plays with etymology, and no less than one expensively jeweled word such as apolaustic, oscitance, cachectic, chatoyancy, idi-ophany, deesis, agnomination, etc., mistaking the oed for a qed...

...Of course, this is the way some poetry is written...

...or even a poet of pleasing unimportance out of Irving Feldman, Donald Justice, Carolyn Kizer, May Swenson...

...his learned, sesquipedalian, allusive, syntactically tortured and metaphorically overcrowded style-not to mention sentences wending on and on past innumerable logical stops?dissolves the poets' solid achievement and leaves only greasy-sticky, unperennial wax...

...Crashaw might have written that, but not even he as criticism...

...Howard, I suppose, imagines that he works in cire perdue: that he melts away the wax from a bronze image to reveal metallic, enduring truths...