Sloganeer and Troubador

...In nocturnal shines they would lock me up 01 else tuck me into then turn coy rails as servitor, scion, and family ghost Do 1 reasonably belong to these pewit-point realigns more than to my own unreasonable...

...The pressures this deadly war exarts are terrible and demoralizing They debase language, as Presidents and generals try to disguise then evil acts in a monotonous laundered jargon The poet, as guardian of life and language, must expose the lies, arouse the sleeping conscience of the people and, perhaps by lighting the flare of protest, let us see in the darkness, in "the stubble of bad years," the possibilities of a new corporate life filled with the serenity and grandeur to peace...

...Broughton's poems do not assault the woild with a rampaging ego, nor do they wear the fashionable hand shirt of anomie and alienation There is no moil exhortation, portentous symbolism, or esthetic clutter He takes his soundings of the sea with modest instruments and hears "the quiet call/of Yes and No singing together " The songs, language games, and legends of A Long Undid seem are a pleasure garden in which children of all ages can stroll with delight...

...to make from outrage/islands of compassion others could build on '. But m the interim Miss Everton and those activists and martyrs who have committed their lives to revolution after resisters, pacifists, demonstrators, self-immolator seek "to change the course of the river " The struggle yields a few moments of "amazing grace,' of communal solidarity and ?¦lan, as when Miss Leveitoy joins with others in clearing the People's Park in Berkeley of rubble She admires the unswerving dedication of the young to their cause, as if they embodied an advanced morality inaccessible to others, though she is both awed and troubled by then almost inhuman absolutism Richard, for example, who tells her that he is "angry/all of the time, not just sometimes," and thinks and works only to smash the state Miss Everton is ruefully defensive about her own lapses from revolutionary zeal She admits that she is not Kali, the Hindu goddess of lager, that "Daily life/is not lava," but she chastises herself and her friends for succumbing to what Jane Addams called "the snare of preparation ". What, then, can the poet's art do politically to influence events9 Compose agitprop poems9 Apart from providing comfort to the lonely and courageous resisters, very little Miss Everton??s despair springs from a near unshakable sense of political impotence Have all choices narrowed to revolution or death, as she repeats in her political liturgy, or is that a simplistic diagnosis (and rheatonic) from which she instinctively, if guiltily, shies away...

...Of whose fantasy am I pusoner9 Whose animal real 01 urea I am then Unicoi n, but who is he...

...The topical plays no part in James Broughton's poetry A Long Un-did seem, his Collected Poems 1949-1969, consists of fables, nursery tales, riddles, ballads, puns, and proverbs At times these poems with their simple lines cross Lewis Car-10II and Blake's Songs of Innocence to produce a native Amen can lyrical speech, as if the didactic rhymes that Puritan children conned in their primers were updated and turned merrily upside down A San Francisco poet perhaps better known as an avant-garde filmmaker, Broughton is a "clever troubadour," taking ballads out of his pack and beguiling children and adults with his goblins "who pierce the ear with needlepoint??s inch by inch," and other material from dream and myth...

...Sloganeer and Troubadour To Stay Alive By Demes Everton New Directions 86 pp $6 50 A Long Undressing By James Broughton The Jason Society 193 pp $8 50 Reviewed by Herbert Leibowitz Author, "Hart Crane An Introduction to the Poetry ' "The purity of a revolution can last a fortnight," Jean Cocteau once remarked Demes Everton would probably deplore Cocteau's attitude as the cynical indifference or moral evasion of an apolitical artist During a period of crisis such as America is passing through, she believes, the poet has no alternative but to engage himself and his art m the struggle against an obscene system and its war making mach me The violence the United States has unleashed in Vietnam is so clear a wrong, so despising of life itself, that To Stay Alive, the title of Miss Lev-ergot??s new volume of poems, one's conscience demands more than mild disapproval of the government's policy, else one stands accused of complicity with the system, of having chosen death...

...Though the kraken that swim in his poems are comical and the monsters that haunt his forests are jolly, all is not pleasant menace In his modern bestiary, ape and lamb contend for control of the flesh He is aware that the mind is also a 'chill and gutted museum," that dread cannot be exorcised, that since absolute clarity is unattainable we must accept the curse and blessing of our enigmatic and mixed natures "True & False Unicorn," a beautiful poem alone worth the price of the book, let ells the travails of that mythological creature, both "savior and scapegoat," "dispossessed and unlooses-able," in a fugue of voices that comprehends the poignant confusions of our quest for identity...

...my diction marks me untiue to my time, change it, I'd be unit use to myself A reflective person driven into the arena of political action, she does not want to be "impaled on the spears of the cult of youth " Yet she is so harsh on herself for those human moments of weakness when she seeks forgetfulness from the agonized consciousness of war that she comes perilously close to violating her own nature One is uneasy in making esthetic criticisms of such obviously sincere and passionately held convictions Unfortunately, the poems of To Stay Alive fail to connect the poet's private life with "the tragic, fearful/ knowledge of present history " Self-righteousness and sloganeering impair the language of her poems ("there comes a time when only anger/is love"), lofty moral injunctions to herself and her readers take the place of a larger vision that would include a plumbing of man's assassin heart In fact, Miss Everton??s imagination is a casualty of the war "When the pulse rhythms/ of revolution and poetry/ mesh,/ then the singing begins," she says in a hopeful mood, but revolution remains antithetical to the poems of To Stay Alive because she only fitfully realizes the sound advice a Miss Simon gives her "Get deep into the well of being...