Beacons in the Dark
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing BEACONS IN THE DARK BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL "Cities," wrote George Santayana, "are a second body for the human mind ... a work of natural yet moral art, where the soul sets up...
...Lost in the crowd, he suddenly steps forward at the final curtain to reveal the stage-machinery—to tell us that while we were sympathizing with his passive and bemused hero, the author was working behind the scenes all along...
...A Mobil sign metamorphoses into Pegasus, who flies to Parnassus on winged words...
...Ultimately, though, his fundamental theme is poetry...
...A Call bristles with opinions...
...His symbolism has the power to turn raw material into a mystical perception of life, with the "naked eye become/Prismatic at last," seeing the city "on a new scale: the rainbow is the emblem for this moment filtering through/The body's meshwork nerves...
...Yet while evoking a mixture of terror, repulsion, and even a queasy humor about the pornography of death, the poet's attitude toward both the mummies and us is deeply compassionate...
...We are human/and heterogeneous...
...Give us our imitations...
...An obsession with lists ripens with the year...
...With a great city as his raw material, Alfred Corn has built a poem that beckons readers with "uncommon radiance...
...In five volumes of verse, he has quietly perfected his art to become a master of lyrical prosody, simultaneously sensuous and hard...
...and concludes, "The whole of our art/is to double our witness, and wait...
...Finally, at the close of the poem, dead and living become consubstantial in an eucharistic parody...
...All Belitt's work is animated by dualism...
...In the midst of another catalogue—this one sociological—the poet abruptly breaks off to exclaim: "the adversary/Today is named Random...
...Is this rainbow a sign of "the fire next time," or a symbol of earthiness that will prevent the world from dissolving—At least temporarily into the void...
...His Doppelganger pays a birthday visit as Muse, counseling him to use New York as his text: to resurrect a lost moment when "the people and the place/Were just themselves but more...
...John Keats, whose own work was ignored by his peers, materializes, "here on the underside of the page/writing in water...
...and/nothing will happen today...
...Chaos is showing its hearth-bed of iron/ again, black holes and barnacles, the fiery maws of a starving leviathan...
...The Romantic tradition is experiencing a revival...
...Best and last lie upward...
...The baroque rhetoric seems to fade out like flesh in an X-ray, as the stark skeleton of Belitt's insight is made manifest...
...Since his previous volume, All Roads at Once (justly acclaimed as the most impressive "first poems" to come along in years), Corn's voice has matured both in depth and range...
...The question always present to him is basic to all art: "Suppose just an awareness of the way/Living details might be felt as vision/Is vision...
...Yet elsewhere he preaches fort brightly on Freedom of Speech, bombings, success and failure, or any other topic suggested by a particular scene...
...Marks Place," a bike ride along the West Side Highway, even a river crossing on Whitman's Brooklyn Ferry...
...Already robbed by death, they are robbed of their privacy as well by those who come as Peeping Toms, and who must unwillingly be instructed in the nature of life by these sentinels of the netherworld...
...Water: City Wildlife and Greenery" crustily notes that the fruit of ginkgoes "rot and make the sidewalks slick and hazardous," sees pigeons as "more or less a weed here," records the Hudson's "unpalatable eels," and that the lives of stray cats and dogs are nasty, brutish and short...
...The dualism is most profoundly expressed in the war between light and darkness, which stage one of their perennial battles on "Block Island—After The Tempest...
...In his solitude, Ben Belitt has been working in this mode for 40 years...
...The lists and random details have been transformed into pieces in a radiant kaleidoscope...
...to transcendental joy, which finally resolves into a kind of cautiously hopeful autumnal upbeat For an urban year The old calendar has to be altered...
...The 27 poems here run an emotional gamut from January bleakness, Night swallows up everything but doesn't Alone cast the shadow inside, this sense Of incompleteness, lack Of echo...
...But "Nighttown" raises new images of destruction: "the oceans are drying to peat on their shelves, the peat into cinder/and flint...
...Corn is clearly of that outspoken generation educated during the '60s (but before violence superceded words), and without false modesty or bravado he mounts the Great American Soapbox alongside the likes of Emerson and Whitman...
...Young poets like Alfred Corn show their commitment to a poetry that asserts the power of the mind's creations in the face of chaos, lighting a beacon of the spirit against the night...
...At these moments the language, too, rises to the sublime...
...Landscapes of Mexican gorges and spiny cactuses or Vermont marble grind against still more obdurate ideas, invisibly at war with the world of appearances...
...above all, to make his losses "a bell or beacon" for others, since losing has become almost A lighthouse for its now after ages wasted on Winning in perspective is our peace light By tolling tells us where destruction lies And shows by shining life is still awake Loss translates into gain as the poet takes control to become the creator...
...How capture all this/Without being taken captive in turn...
...Nevertheless, the poem concludes as a Shakespearean comedy whose last scene goes to the drunken clowns: "Big-bladdered, they stand/to the arch of their urine, caryatids supporting a rainbow...
...Writers & Writing BEACONS IN THE DARK BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL "Cities," wrote George Santayana, "are a second body for the human mind...
...pressing the page as I write...
...Yet Corn aspires to be neither scientist nor ethnographer...
...Religious and sexual imagery blasphemously cohabit...
...In his latest book, The Double Witness (Princeton, 71 pp., $7.50), Belitt contemplates morality in the form of "The Guanajuato Mummies," and is struck with the idea that "the covert" and promiscuous life of the newly unburied, the flamboyance their breathing concealed or their body's avidity made poignant and virginal—fountains of semen and spittle, penetrations, erections—we know now, were a gift of the spirit, expenses of grace and election...
...Block Island Crossing," the opening episode, follows the ferry's motion toward the place where "A mountain dries for us...
...The long title sequence (three-quarters of the book) wrestles with timeless dilemmas: loss of the beloved, periodic failure of the poetic gift, seemingly pointless details of daily living—And makes them all part of a quest to wring from the city "a promise/The speaking gift that falls to one who hears/A word shine through the white noise of the world...
...The poet makes his observations from such indigenous settings as a "Midnight Walk, St...
...This passage is built on uneasy juxtapositions...
...Eating out alone, the poet complains, "I feel/The misery that loves company," and adds sententiously, "which may be/A worldwide motive for swarming in cities...
...In part this is a dramatic device—A pathetic (and conscious) attempt to cover feeling with rationalization...
...In his imaginative cosmos of "doublings," twins, opposites, dual existences, there is even "the original man" who lies down in "Xerox" to be copied, exclaiming, "Forgive our duplicity...
...The guides sell Belitt and his fellow-tourist "mummy" candy: "We bite through the skulls in the cellophane wrappers./We burn in the sunlight afraid...
...The equally ambiguous final affirmation that everything has been suspended manages to be oddly reassuring...
...In this powerful and complex sequence, the summer resort has been superimposed over the enchanted isle of Shakespeare's last play, with Prospero, Caliban and the rest present to cheer on the contestants...
...Because the struggle is eternal, the world always finds itself in danger of being unmade again...
...A first suggestion—that life somehow obscures the truth about the body—is glossed by its sequel, which sees the very mechanics of lovemaking not as physically inherent, but as "given" by the will of the spirit...
...Belitt's poems do the same...
...Belitt once characterized this favorite precursor as one who "alone of the Romantics achieved a tension in dread, bringing time to bear upon eternity, delight upon melancholy, possibility upon necessity...
...The poetry of Ben Belitt has long been undervalued—Indeed, is surprisingly unfamiliar to many otherwise serious readers...
...In A Call in the Midst of the Crowd (Viking, 112 pp., $8.95) Alfred Corn has set up his trophies and visionary instruments in New York to scrutinize its life with the meticulous wonder of a Darwin exploring some new Galapagos...
...It is a vision of the Ark approaching Ararat...
...a work of natural yet moral art, where the soul sets up her trophies of action and instruments of pleasure...
...One trusts that the mountain has at last come to Mohammed, and that readers will become increasingly attuned to him, for The Double Witness is a vital witness in our fragmented times...
Vol. 61 • April 1978 • No. 9
