Petrified by Gorgon Egos
RODMAN, SELDEN
On Poetry PETRIFIED BY GORGON EGOS BY SELDEN RODMAN Since the New York Times Book Review tends to assign poetry to the friends or academic colleagues of the poets, the public has damned little...
...Her poems of psychic torment are cruel and ugly in their imagery (she was composing this kind of poem before Sylvia Plath...
...What they mean to themselves or to God is a meaningless question: They to us are quite simply what we must never become...
...an ex-colonial from Trinidad, writing English verse with as much power and conviction as Auden in his prime...
...70 pp...
...If the elitists produced compositions that gave pleasure, it was because they had ears that were good enough to say arcane things sweetly, and sufficient respect for the tradition of poetry to set up echoing resonances between past and present...
...And, upholding the tradition that has given the world more great poetry than any other, there is Derek Walcott...
...He is an uneven poet, and can slip into bathos now and then, but his gorgon ego, manifested in his archaisms and the bumpy connections between hard facts, philosophic saws and hallucinatory affirmations, never "petrified...
...Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 69 pp., $6.95), all colorful animals and ponderous glosses on Walden, produces no such impression...
...The most overpraised of them, the late John Berryman, worries his gorgon ego so relentlessly that even when he is writing out of a religious conversion, as in his posthumous book Delusions...
...in the dead sail of the almond leaf are all of the voyages...
...his poem " 18 West 11 th Street," for instance, starts promisingly with a vignette of the Weathermen involved in the Greenwich Village bomb factory, before that arsenal self-destructed...
...his "I" exists only as eye...
...He is juggling ideas also, but his poetry contains no trace of urgency or involvement...
...And the sea, which is always the same, accepts them...
...Denise Levertov (Footprints, New Directions, 58 pp., $5.00), has a different problem...
...His interminable "masque," accompanied by a Handelian score, makes no concession at all to the reader, however intriguing the poem might be to hear and see...
...you know she means what she says...
...Neither does Frederick Morgan (A Book of Change, Scribners, 160 pp...
...and with as much violence), yet they are always clear and clean...
...F. D. Reeve (The Blue Cat...
...But in 1972...
...Grossman, 242 pp., $12.95), another Poundling, is more original but far less accessible...
...M J^opefully...
...Auden's new book (Epistle to a Godson, Random House, 77 pp., $5.00) is full of good advice, and as much wit as ever...
...The poet comes with his broken wing to teach them flight"such memorable lines keep cropping up in natural poets...
...Richmond Lattimore (Poems From Three Decades, Scribners, 274 pp., $7.95), a felicitous translator, doesn't have it, despite poems that are invariably well made...
...Auden could be giving thanks to both of them when he says: Poet, employ your vocative talent to utter exactly what you were graced to behold: leave us to judge for ourselves...
...Tongues of Fallen Angels, will be published in the fall...
...Morgan (Red Owl, Norton...
...Ammons and Eberhart turn to nature, as Frost did, for sustenance, and two younger poets, Robert Morgan and Maxine Kumin, seem to be neck-deep in it...
...6.95), God comes out second best, overshadowed by the exhibitionist poet ex-Pounding his doubts, fears, alcoholism and arrogance...
...7.95), founder of the Hudson Review, though he has more to write about than Lattimore...
...Is A. R. Ammons a natural poet...
...Winfield Scott never had it either, even if his biographer, Scott Donaldson (Poet in America: Winfield Townley Scott, Texas, 400 pp., $10.00) tries manfully to make a case for Scott's "future...
...Louis Zukof-sky (A-24...
...It is a pity, too, because never has there been so much interest in reading and writing poetry, and never have publishers spent so much money publishing it with almost total disregard for quality...
...But the democratic Frost was really speaking only about his own work, for the most influential poets of his generation were probably the haughty Eliots and Pounds, who had very different notions...
...But the longer Merrill manipulates the ironies, the less he delivers other than cleverness...
...There is enough energy in a single poem by Nicaragua's Ernesto Cardenal in the current New Directions annual (New Directions 25: An International Anthology of Prose and Verse, 179 pp., $3.75) to overwhelm all of the volume's American efforts put together...
...Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...Remarkably, the New Oxford Book of English Verse (Helen Gardner, ed., Oxford, 974 pp., $10.00) largely ignores themAs it ignores almost everything but the obvious from 1250 to 1950...
...And the shore which is always the same, accepts them...
...The impressive poem "Hibernaculum" starts amid the clutter of abstractions I've always associated with Ammons: A cud's a locus in time, a staying change, moving but holding through motions timeless relations...
...Houghton Mifflin, 105 pp., $5.95) appears genuinely compelled to write...
...She strikes me as being sincere to the point of self-righteousness Although her conventional-liberal's outrage over Vietnam ("The Day the Audience Walked Out on Me, and Why") seems more a consequence of her rejection than of the tragedy of Southeast Asia...
...On Poetry PETRIFIED BY GORGON EGOS BY SELDEN RODMAN Since the New York Times Book Review tends to assign poetry to the friends or academic colleagues of the poets, the public has damned little chance of finding out what is really going on...
...that has more Tennyson than Shakespeare, and that represents Kipling with "Danny Deev-er" and "Mandalay...
...And he insisted that a poet must have something to say, and a will to talk about it "with all kinds of men...
...Petrified by their gorgon egos," Auden says in his running battle with today's fashionable little obscurantists...
...Kumin (Up Country...
...In the shallop of the shell, in the round prayer, in the palate of the conch...
...That compulsion, or whatever it is that makes the difference between Selden Rodman...
...The real theme of this overly-detailed study is the late poet's painful awareness of his own limitations, an awareness Apparent on almost every page of his prosaic diary ("A Dirty Hand": The Literary Notebooks of Winfield Townley Scott, Texas...
...Merrill's intellectual game (Braving the Elements, Atheneum, 71 pp., $5.95) is to write brilliantly, without ever revealing where he stands...
...Harper & Row, 82 pp., $6.50), on the other hand, is more human and elegaic...
...For this we should be thankful and not complain that his great poems, savage and soaring, were written before 1939...
...There is nothing like a long hard look at the natural world to shrink a gorgon ego...
...Following the Auden-Dylan Thomas generation the only original poet England has produced is Ted Hughes, so perhaps the New Oxford is simply another symptom of the decline...
...Richard Eberhart (Fields of Grace, Oxford, 64 pp., $5.95) always had it, and happily still does, at least most of the time...
...The truth, in fact, is that since World War I the great poems of the West have been coming out of the Third World: created by Vallejo in Peru and Neruda in Chile, by Borges in Argentina and Paz in Mexico, by Cabral de Melo Neto and Vinicius in Brazil...
...Of course quality is a matter of opinion, depending on what one means by poetry...
...as of center to periphery, core-thought to consideration...
...what is one to think of a collection that includes 18 pages of Matthew Arnold to 8 lines of Langland...
...conversations with authors...
...The original Oxford Book, edited by a Victorian, was predictably stuffy...
...Their epigones do not...
...Nor are the professors, piling up plugs on the backs of dust jackets to push their "prodigious" pupils...
...Another Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 143 pp., $7.95) is a great dithyramb convulsed out of love and hate for the anonymous races that were enslaved in their homelands and spewed forth on Caribbean beaches...
...poetry and verse, talent and good intentions, must be there...
...Among the elitists, onh Anne Sexton (The Book of Folly...
...Soft but not flabby," Robert Frost once defined it for me, "hard but not like nails...
...not merely other poets...
...The bureaucrats who compose the shameless blurbs for these books are certainly no help ("There is no one writing poetry in English who is better than James Merrill . . ." an Atheneum flap begins...
...At least in Merrill's case one has the nagging feeling the poet is trying to tell us something important?if he would only get out of the way...
...161 pp., $4.75)that wrecked his marriage and hastened his death...
...73 pp., $6.95) wonderfully describes the look and feel and smell of a farm...
...I've never been able to convince myself that he is, yet his Collected Poems 1951-1971 (Norton, 396 pp., $12.50)with their freedom from rhetoric and posturing, their honest insights into nature, their unstyled but ever-present style begin to make me wonder...
...Still, "Hibernaculum" ends just the way a long poem should: . . . and into the huge, round yew bush starlings light and go two-thirds under: they peck the frit of snow the wind leaves and drink: I'm reading Xenophon's Oeconomicus "with considerable pleasure and enlightenment" and with appreciation that saying so fills this stanza nicely...
...we are in for a renaissance of nature poetry...
Vol. 56 • January 1973 • No. 2
