Juggler of Ideas
GLAZE, ANDREW
Juggler of NEW AND SELECTED POEMS By Peter Viereck Bobbs Merrill. 176 pp. $6.00. Reviewed by ANDREW GLAZE Author, "Damned Ugly Children" It is hard to imagine a poet more out of style at this...
...That is a formidable percentage, especially considering what they undertake to do...
...He watched me from the sky...
...To quote from the ending: Then with a final flutter, Philomel?How mud-splashed, what a mangy miracle!?Writhes out of owl and stands with drooping wing...
...If something did not attract him by its unlikelihood and near-impossibiUty, it didn't attract him at all...
...I like "Why Can't I Live Forever," which begins: Death is a blind flamingo hunting fishes or "Game Called on Account of Darkness" which commences: Once there was a friend...
...Considerable material is repeated from his earlier books—often rearranged, retitled and rewritten...
...In "Nostalgia" an ancient God returns to earth to find his worshippers have forgotten him...
...And yet, all that doesn't matter...
...Nothing does, not even the poet's own revisions and re-revisions of his work—most of it confusing, unnecessary and destructive—which will be troubling anthologists and editors for years...
...For more than 10 years now the thundering procession has been galloping in the opposite direction...
...But that is one of the hallmarks of Viereck...
...He continues to take many of the old risks...
...Moulted, naked, two-thirds dead...
...And why else read poetry...
...In his best and most daring metaphors he does things that dizzy and delight...
...And so he can get away with saying "we are the satraps of a sinking season, our year's a ferns wheel," which violates every known rule for mixing figures but nevertheless works—particularly within the context of the poem...
...It was to arrive in a minute, with a vengeance...
...One caution: Viereck's lightheart-ed verve and slapstick technique are mostly used for serious purposes...
...One poem, entitled "An Owl For a Nightingale" in the new book, first appeared as "Some Lines in Three Parts" and in at least two earlier versions...
...No one has created more wonderful poems out of near-doggerel rhythms and unlikely rhymes, as though from the pure pleasure of barely skirting disaster...
...It will make little difference over the long run, but wouldn't it be pleasant if he were recognized right now for what he is: one of our best living poets...
...In an era overpowered with self-revelation and interiorness, Viereck's fascination with ideas and the fun of ideas is blessed...
...Maybe he never lived at all...
...Look away fast, you are watching the birth of song Which are the best of these poems...
...According to his introduction, the New and Selected Poems includes about 20 percent of the poems in his five earlier books...
...Still, whirling mirrors and all, he is basically a lyric poet...
...Maybe too much friendship made him die...
...What sets Viereck apart from most modern poets is that he does not despair of understanding the world...
...He has damaged some of the poems in the present volume by continuing to tinker with them when his style and point of view have changed...
...At 52, Viereck is still the unreconstructed jokester, fiddler, acrobat, and juggler of ideas...
...We find trees which think of themselves as moving —perambulating—that is, while everything else is still...
...Just stands there...
...What about the "Six Theological Cradle Songs," with their strange mixture of the burlesque and the macabre...
...This baffles the cult of know-nothing...
...Even when his poems fail, they are rarely as dull as the poetry we have had to grow accustomed to...
...It is not Viereck's best poem...
...By no means all of it—some is trivial, even maddening, and a lot more fails...
...And yet, like some of the people of Bach's generation in a similar situation, he goes on in his baroque way turning out complicated, interesting and old-fashioned pieces in the midst of triumphant, new, alien styles...
...His ideas and pyrotechnics aTe merely the stage machinery within which he is going to sing (upside down, perhaps, from a trapeze...
...I must confess I prefer the simpler, less pretentious earlier versions of this undoubtedly fine poem...
...He has never made points with moderation and safety...
...He has been neglected for over a decade...
...He has always been unpredictable and difficult...
...Trailed fawning by lascivious lean-ribbed cats, What child will scoop me up, what pudgy hands...
...Why is the first in most anthologies...
...When he succeeds, which is more often than we have a right to expect, his poems go off like bombs...
...Of the 100 poems in the book, perhaps 25-30 succeed at a very high level...
...The Poet" is perhaps the best modern poem on the importance of poetry...
...A sudden wistfulness for August Tugged me—like guilt—through half a cosmos Back to a planet sweet as cane-brake, Where winds have plumes and plumes have throats Where pictures Like "blue" and "South" can break your heart with sweet suggestiveness It is time Peter Viereck came into his own...
...I also like "Dolce Ossessione," with its description of the restless imagination: A flame scaled trout, I'll shimmer through your nets, Like lies...
...We are told of monks who orgasmioally sow the clouds, and incidentally the angels, with lust for God...
...His earlier poetry has been out of print for years, it has never been published in paperback, and his new book sells for $6.00, a price likely to scare off any but poetry fanatics...
...If "A Walk on Snow" was really written when the poet was only 17, it is the most remarkable poem in the language by a poet of that age...
...Never have we needed relief more from skilled heartfelt dreariness and fervent amateurism...
...Viereck has been poorly served by publishers...
...Reviewed by ANDREW GLAZE Author, "Damned Ugly Children" It is hard to imagine a poet more out of style at this moment than Peter Viereck...
...Howl was just around the corner...
...Let me assume that most people who read poetry will know at least three: "To A Sinister Potato," "The Poet" and "A Walk on Snow...
...For a good deal of his work has the qualities of permanence and greatness...
...Personified towns long for inhabitants of a superior life-style...
...Part of the irony is that in the early 1950s he published an article sharply attacking the "New Criticism" and asking for "a new 1912...
...This seems to me misleading...
...Like truth?—and gasp on fatal sands...
...It has always been one of Viereck's best...
...From shock and pain (and dread of holy dread) Suddenly vomiting...
Vol. 51 • April 1968 • No. 8
