The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets
West, Paul
Young Turkestan THE MORROW ANOMLOGY OF YOUNGER ANERICAN POETS Edited by Dive Smith cod David Bottoms Morrow, $17.95, 784 pp. Paul West ON first looking into these realms of gold. I had an...
...There arc muses in the clouds, and contemporary American poetry, unlike its fictional counterpart, is indeed ''vigorous, rich, and diverse...
...In a mushroom-hunting poem, Michael Blumenthal makes his blunt point in fastidiously wrought cadences: It is so much like life, which is why I love it: the delectable and the deadly so resembling each other, the sexual rise of the false morel a mere flirtation, and the sweet viscosity we'd like to swim in an elegy to movement...
...and have found quite a few...
...Most of them are...
...Ackerman...
...They have browsed through thin volumes in search of '"emotional thunderclap!si...
...as he says, "shockingly welleducated," although more inclined to speech than to song...
...You stare at such disproportion and you wonder...
...The opportunistic eye of Goldbarth links language to hitherto uninspected phenomena that seem quite different from it, but aren't: This is how the page must feel: it doesn't understand God...
...Sandra McPherson, Robert Morgan, and Pattiann Rogers complete my list, extorting from the reader exactly the kind of attention they need, opening up the world to a degree unknown and unimaginable to some of the others, whose poetic passion in some instances extends only as far as naming lunchcounters, intersections, and neighborhood streets...
...and the poets, is the incentive an anthology gives you to go from a few poems to a poet's books, and to do this for some two dozen poets...
...Anthony Hccht's introduction, witty and searching, luminously points out that, for these poets, "performance . takes place on the page " They include an airwoman, a psychotherapist, a lawyer, an editor, a sheepherder, a filmmaker, and a librarian...
...I couldn't be bothered checking, but it does seem reasonable to even out the ration...
...One hundred and four poets into 784 pages ought to yield around 7.5 pages per poet, so it seems that some of these poets must be almost twice as important as others...
...If they're in, they're in, and entitled to equal time...
...a poet in the line of Wallace Stevens, tuned to the finest pitch of lexical precision...
...I feel sorry for the poet mentioned by Hecht...
...The editors too back away from splendor, oratory, magniloquence, selecting even from the poets named above hardly their most radiant work, which is a pity...
...Michael Biumenthal is such a poet too, though he aims at a suaver splendor than she, and so is Albert Goldbarth...
...That they exist at all must be news to many, as well as a tribute to something perdurable in humanity...
...The chimera suggests itself of a generational portrait based on poets' least characteristic poems, as if to prove (in this instance) that the younger poets, all born since 1940, are just plain, down-home folks...
...You have to know these poets already to get the just measure of their weight and dominance, and to see how accurately or not the samples evince them...
...kept out at the whim of her publisher, without a word of explanation...
...The forceful anthologist can always lead you astray and the only thing that saves you...
...Whatever the language on that page, an Eastem script as fine as dendrite, or the harsh Germanic squatting of black retrievers at obedience school...
...Between the extremes here of confident, articulate style and minimalist stuff that knows no recitative of the imagination, there is worthwhile work by the editors, by Garrett Kaoru Hongo, McKeel McBride...
...In other words, an able-bodied visionary with a spell so palpable that the rest of the world falls away...
...someone holistic and original, and above all unafraid of using the full orchestra of language...
...They cost just over seventeen cents each, taken like this at least, but some of them are makers beyond price, and will outlast a book whose very title guarantees to self-destruct by 1995...
...when something angel-faint, ensnared and hairy begins the tussle in rigged silk that can start a greedy eye, make gossamer hum and, at long last, even their slack jams quiver...
...If you count up, the nine poets I have mentioned average 6.7 pages apiece, whereas Dave Smith gets fourteen, as does Larry Levis, while Norman Dubie, William Heyen, and Robert Pinsky get thirteen...
...both observant and formally mimetic, reminds you of Marianne Moore: holding out for that bronchial shudder of the net...
...Alfred Corn, Rodney Jones, Heather McHugh...
...In the space remaining, savor some of the best...
...And, on spiders...
...Diane Ackerman is such a poet, at once a lyrical and metaphysical virtuoso, the first name in the anthology...
...I had an idea of the kind of poet I wanted to find: a rara avis, profound, fluent, articulate...
...The editors speak vividly of poems that "might blow (Continued on page 588) us away with vision as radical as a body scanner or passion as intense as Job's or language as shimmering and indelible as Whitmans...
...Molly Peacock, Alberto Rios, Janet Sylvester, and Shcrod Santos, much of it sharp and eloquent, all of it reminding you that it's no use transcending a cowshed unless you can write about it first of all as a cowshed...
...All credit to Morrow for doing it big, handsome, and cheap...
...although more caustic, more of an annotator than these two...
...David Bottoms gets seven...
...Maybe the older poets get more pages...
...In a way anthologies assume spurious power, exercising a synecdoche Commonweal: 586 function: a part for the whole, a muchthumbed part for an ignored whole, like the survey tomes used in colleges, like the book reviews in the glossy magazines (the reviewed book somehow doing duty for all the books passed over...
...Although the anthology isn't full of such delights, they are there, and no one who lives with it for several months, pondering and savoring, going afield and fleshing out a number of slight acquaintances, will have wasted time...
...Peter Klappert, or Wyatt Prunty...
...At least this anthology has bulk and an abundance of names (though you will look in vain for Emily Grossholz, Pamela Hadas...
...Nothing ages a younger poet faster than something like that...
...William Matthews...
Vol. 112 • October 1985 • No. 18
