Poetry Without Hope
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing POETRY WITHOUT HOPE BY PEARL K. BELL One of the curious and significant things about the poetry books being published this fall and winter is that many of them rely heavily for...
...For all his consistently playful elegance, Smith has somehow failed to achieve a perspective that is maturely and distinctly his own, and therefore worth absorbing...
...But that rare, unmistakable sound of originality is almost never heard in this industrious body of work, while the lines of "Prufrock" and The Waste Land, familiar as the face of the bedside clock, can even now produce a frisson of terror and awe...
...I have seen the planes come,/ and the tall hands of their commanders./ But most of all did I see, as their long loads fell,/ Age, in search of his lost sons, climbing there,/ mounting with fevered eyes through those falling stairs,/ seeking, in the dark that is newly come to light./ Hope, Belief, Expectation and Love,/ his maimed irretrievable children...
...Between the scolding posture of Goodman's topical poems--on the atom bomb, corrupt politicians, Kent State, et al.--and the pedestrian self-scrutiny of his more plainly "literary" poems, too few lines or images bite into the mind or enliven the senses...
...Yet, as Howard Moss has remarked, "The idea that one should write as one speaks is attractive but it easily leads to parochialism--and prose...
...William Jay Smith's New and Selected Poems (Delacorte, 96 pp., $5.00) are less angular and spare than Booth's, with occasional humor and a fascinating variety of exotic natural detail that attest to a powerfully intelligent curiosity...
...In pursuing the icy perfection of word and line, Ammons neglects the renewing power of assent...
...in this new volume he has brought together all the work he felt worthy of preservation...
...But they do not put up with him...
...In the extraordinarily powerful "The Dream of the Soldier," Browne makes most contemporary poems about the horrors of war seem puerile...
...This contempt of the young makes him petulant, and petulance is no mood for poetry...
...His range of mood and tone, of verbal and intellectual invention, is enormous--wildly funny in some poems, elegiac and sober in others...
...This is not poetry, it is complaint...
...Goodman's diction is at times amusingly relaxed and colloquial...
...his chilly interior world of words asks for nothing, and receives the same...
...Wheelock has been publishing verse for the last 64 years (and been an editor at Scribners for almost as long...
...This book spans more than 20 years of work, from dark memories of fighting in the South Pacific during the War to middle-aged winter holidays in the Caribbean...
...In Margins (Viking, 98 pp., $5.95), Philip Booth explores a realm of drily ironic observation, moving from the near-nightmare within to the New England coastal harbors and rough waters that identify his world...
...Except for the cases of John Hall Wheelock (By Daylight and In Dream, Scribners, 292 pp., $6.95) and Paul Goodman (Homespun of Oatmeal Gray, Random House, 120 pp., $5.00), however, my disappointment in the group of contemporary poets I will be discussing is not easily explained as simply a failure in craft or a lack of subject...
...Still, I read through the poems with mounting disappointment, detecting so little development in depth of thought or vision...
...I'd like to keep a very physical sense in the observation and atmosphere...
...Writers & Writing POETRY WITHOUT HOPE BY PEARL K. BELL One of the curious and significant things about the poetry books being published this fall and winter is that many of them rely heavily for weight and substance on poems already gathered up in earlier collections...
...What price originality...
...This practice is certainly not novel in the history of American and British poetry (although when Yeats and Auden recollected a poem, they had usually revised it in some drastic way that made it different, if not altogether new), but I cannot remember a time when such retreading of exactly the same poems has been so standard, and utterly without apology...
...Browne is 30 years old, a transplanted Englishman who now teaches at Bennington...
...He has written words for music, and clearly knows the importance of music in words...
...A similar charge can be brought against the poems of Paul Goodman, opposite though he is to Wheelock in temperament and poetic objective...
...Responding to the campus disorders of 1969, Goodman writes: "I can't rest and listen to the hatred/ in these young voices, I stalk off alone/ my spirit sinking...
...In contrast to the tame traditionalism of Wheelock and Goodman, the techniques in the new books of Philip Booth, William Jay Smith, Theodore Weiss, and A. R. Ammons are brilliant examples of poets working close to the bone of modernity, agile pupils in such exacting schools of technical excellence as Pound and Stevens, Yeats and Marianne Moore...
...For Eliot, like Yeats, was giving the permanence of uniquely discovered form to a universal architecture of truth and feeling...
...His work is never amateurish, but never surprising, and his formality often slides inadvertently into both rhetorical and moral sentimentality...The new poems here, though they express considerable rage about the arrogant vulgarity of contemporary life, fail to project this anger with appropriate urgency and freshness in imagery and idea...
...The soldier comes to me/ He is a tenor/ He is a shining bullet/ in a casing,/ a husk of green cloth/ Carve my hands/ they are bread/ Pack my legs in a flask/ they are coffee/ Wrap me up Pour me out/ Feed the earth, I wish it/ wet with my meaning...
...In his poems of the past two decades that Theodore Weiss has favored with new permanence in The World Before Us (Macmillan, 287 pp., $6.95), there are many echoes--of William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, the inevitable sound of Stevens--and, in contrast to the grudging, self-starved austerity of Ammons, an even verbose exuberance...
...Wheelock's themes are the universally traditional "poetic" ones: love, nature, old age and crabbed youth...
...So I morose/ go back where they are beating their tom-toms/ and shouting 'Shut it down!' They do not sound/ like Isaac Newton, more a mob of monkeys...
...Weiss' work is engagingly open, generously lyrical, and soberly attentive to society...
...The Wife of Winter (Scribners, 120 pp., $4.95), renews my badly shaken faith that poetry is not only worth writing, but also very much worth reading...
...Ammons' gnarled, suffocatingly cautious verse will admit no light to guide the stumbling reader...
...And on the stage, which now no hold debars,/ Men and women, in groups, shall masturbate/ In unison, to the rhythm of guitars--/ While confronting each other, the Great Powers sit,/ Armed to the teeth with overkill...
...The adjectives that come most readily to mind in thinking of their craftsmanship are elegant, sophisticated, immaculate, controlled...
...From being the darling of the young rebels, Goodman has more recently found himself something of a despised eminence grise, surely the most demeaning rank an aging bohemian can suffer...
...So he does, with exuberant clarity and fullness...
...Letter from a Distant Land," the most ambitious poem in the book, tries to be outspoken but instead is coldly perfect...
...But to read through By Daylight and In Dream is to feel genuinely bewildered about his lifelong immunity to the profoundly revolutionary changes in language, method, and poetic tone wrought in this century by Eliot, Pound, Yeats, and Auden...
...I think this regurgitation is symptomatic of a larger truth: There is so little illumination, pleasure, or discovery in most poetry being written today that only repetition can achieve the illusion of a substantial body of work...
...Most of his poems begin, he says, "with some kind of event and go out a little into what might surround it...
...no longer do they even care about the dethroned guru who wrote Growing Up Absurd...
...When, unlike some of the poets I've discussed here, Browne makes a literary declaration about his work, he fulfills it in the poems themselves...
...If someone wants to say that it is unfair to measure this group of present-day poets only against the shadows of towering giants, I would agree, and point with delight to the work of Michael Dennis Browne, whose first collection...
...Everywhere in this glorious book, Michael Dennis Browne displays not only the technical virtuosity that has become so tediously commonplace among poets today, but a fiery, sigularly thoughtful joy in the potentialities of language as a form of praise, of poetry as affirmation...
...Let them put up with me as I with them...
...It is characteristic of Smith, and of Booth--and even of the much older Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid in his new volume (A Lap of Honour, Swallow, 69 pp., $5.00)--that their language rises most easily to passion when they are writing not about life or love or death but about the writing of poetry...
...Substance is something else again...
...A similar professional narcissism sometimes afflicts the poems of A. R. Ammons, whose Uplands (Norton, 68 pp., $5.00) bears on its jacket the heavy burden of ornately extravagant praise by the critic Harold Bloom ("the maker of a body of poetry that fulfills Emerson's prophecy by addressing itself to life 'with sufficient plainness and with sufficient profoundness' "), a burden the poems within fail to justify...
...dedicated to Thoreau, it lacks his dense simplicities...
Vol. 53 • November 1970 • No. 23
