Sharpened Visions
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing SHARPENED VISDNS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Alfred Corn's first book of poems, All Roads at Once (1976), left the impression that he possessed almost limitless resources. A poetic...
...we return you the man," the poet imagines his earlier self to be the cadet in the picture: "Unwearying, / Hegoes on/Being about fifteen/Forever, knowing/He will never return...
...Letting some things go—that others come...
...He saves himself from misanthropy through pity for the human lot, where failure is inevitably a part of life...
...As expectations diminish, there is a compensating perception of what is imperfect and unfinished...
...Morris wielded a satiric neoclassical wit in Green Business (1970), and further honed his blade in The Life Beside This One (1975...
...It shines to us, this waste...
...The mapmakers lack immediacy: "If ever you cross the line/ With your luck and skill /Back into their big picture,/Then you'll feel safer./That's natural...
...A poetic Darwin, he explored a rich diversity of experience with wonder and sympathy...
...he wonders, watching scenery from the train window and contemplating alterations in his life...
...What lasts is the failure of skill In a botch of approximation...
...Since a bearer of bad news falls into sameness of tone, these poems are best read singly rather than all at once...
...Observing a New England landscape, he ruminates on how point's of view change as relationships and directions alter, how continuities are broken as high points fade into the background and obscurities become prominent: Our confidence is shaken and our neat ideas must be revised...
...Although he limits himself to a narrow range, he has learned to deliver his austere message with honesty and force...
...Still, when you arrive, / Though you are grateful/For their instruction,/At last you have seen/Something real perfectly...
...He asserts at the end of his journey, "Though I've kept to one spot, the place has changed...
...The older Corn, imagining himself as a boy walking through the empty amphitheater out of season, takes stock of their respective dreams: "Was winter's gift to simplify, cut back, unravel thread/By thread the tissue of what summer knew?/Openings and closings and openings...
...His very titles are topical: "The Will of the Children," "The Way We Live Now," "The Heating Bill," "The Surgeon General's Warning...
...Hard truths make dubious entertainment...
...But so long as he remains in the grimly satirical tradition he has chosen, he will probably never arouse enthusiasm in many readers...
...What remains of them is A good deal of inadvertance...
...In this new volume, he plies a razor's edge while dissecting our unhappy society...
...Taking and giving speech away—the various light...
...The Glass Houses is a devastating metaphor for our vulnerability, to say nothing of our lack of charity toward others in the same condition...
...In "Reading Pericles in New London" (which first appeared in The New Leader of December 4, 1978), Corn asks whether minor Shakespeare contains less of the bard's essence than The Tempest or King Lear...
...On this fixture of his Southern childhood he hangs memories of his first appearance as a poet-performer, and then as a spectator at plays, vaudeville productions, concerts, revival meetings, a beauty pageant—all those rituals of small town life that suggest a broader world beyond...
...To be so chancy, a burden so great...
...Yet, his pity lacerates, it does not mellow...
...Both efforts ranged from flights of lyricism to sociological catalogues and soap-box editorials...
...And that the performance move from strength to strength...
...Light on the water, on trees—a face...
...For Morris, the child is not so much a father to the adult as a victim who dies in the process of growing up...
...His manner is subdued and honest: "Ripeness understood as mostly a tone of voice...
...Certainly, in The Various Light Corn has discovered a deeper, more authoritative voice...
...Has he changed too...
...Compared with the timelessness of the great plays, Pericles strikes the modern reader as a period piece, but Corn has an abiding faith that no matter how different the circumstances, people remain essentially themselves...
...John N. Morris' 77ieG/ess//oHses(Atheneum, 55 pp., $10.00) is also a third book...
...Pondering a military academy advertisement that blares "You send us the boy...
...Still, Morris knows that" It is with our skill/ We live in what kills us...
...Perhaps you will never show them/Your copy of where you have been...
...Though the very air Will make them decay, We may treasure them on paper...
...He still feels the need to reconcile the vagaries of human feeling, and tries to unify and arrange fragments into a mosaic pattern: yet where his earlier works often forced this vision of wholeness, straining for an unjustified triumph, The Various Light makes no more of a situation than what the poet can see...
...You'll have it all/Down on paper...
...Only once does Morris achieve a glimpse of reconciliation...
...In "Archaeology," for example, Morris is struck by the way we use artifacts of past civilizations to discover ourselves...
...But if Corn gently mocks himself for daring to wish that his art could transcend natural limitations, he nonetheless feels he did learn from the amphitheater the hope that "this stage not be the last...
...Sometimes an ancient scene is preserved intact, entombed by a volcanic eruption or a landslide or some other catastrophic natural event: These things we photograph...
...John Morris writes candidly of "The half-life measured in losses...
...If Morris throws a lot of stones in order to hear panes smash, many are consciously self-directed...
...Agreeing with Freud that "Every fear is a suppressed wish," he concentrates on the shadow, ignoring the light that casts it...
...Corn treats his swerve from the cosmopolitan to the provincial symbolically in "Moving: New York—New Haven Line," assuaging his sense of loss when circumstances forced him to move to Connecticut...
...What we chiefly discover is Neglect—the lost or discarded, Each layer a different people...
...Grass is "really monumental" at ground-level, yet from a standing position it is "nothing but a green background...
...How is it possible to be moved in so many ways at once...
...The broken vessel, the imperfect firing...
...Subtle changes become subjects for dramatic insight...
...Nevertheless, the reassessment is benign: If rivers keep their history, They keep it silent, all the liquid knowledge Reworded in one kindly play...
...1 believe from the evidence of this book that he will become more of a regional poet in the future...
...Alfred Corn is obviously in a time of transition...
...Juxtapositions and shifts of perspective haunt Corn's latest poems as he studies a chiaroscuro of shadows and bright patches, savoring slants of light, of feeling, of season...
...The more desperate he finds our modern plight, the more he recognizes archetypical patterns of the human condition...
...With what comfortable strides/You'll inch through that theory...
...Through Shakespeare Corn considers his own styles and purposes, his latest change of heart...
...At the Death of Gulliver" the giant Brobdingnags, with their gentleslow-wittedness, make him "think only of a vast kindness...
...The Eliminations" shows how a degrading, fatal disease becomes something to be desired because it will "make the doctor/Pick you almost alone/ Out of dull thousands...
...Map Problems" contrasts the science of cartography with the satisfaction's gleaned from finding one's own way about an unfamiliar landscape...
...Sometimes less is more...
...Corn's reasons for setting aside his earlier expansiveness can be found in "The Outdoor Amphitheater...
...Morris is clearly aware of the gulf between words and action, theory and practice...
...His second volume, A Call in the Midst of the Crowd, was a song of praise to New York City, rising from the depths of January's bleakness to an autumnal radiance that affirmed: "Best and last lie upward...
...Morris sees little difference, ultimately, between the aspirations of different societies: "They valued what does not survive/Like us...
...Corn's talent reached out in all directions simultaneously, occasionally overreaching his mark but always admirable for the attempt...
...But there is nothing perishable in his treatment...
...Indeed the truest author/Will put little credit in a captive future, / Betraying his age by having none, and all of them at once...
...Now, perhaps, but could I then condemn the wish to mount up,/Up past the holding pattern and wingborne flight to a stage, IA new year, fruit and flower dancing together/In breezes outside any fixed global compass...
...His latest book, The Various Light (Viking, 76 pp., $12.95) finds Corn coming to terms with what he takes to be his limitations, the boundaries of his poetic gift...
...An erotic play staged in a desanctified church prompts a wry inquiry into the true nature of God...
...But such things are rare...
...People rarely come together in Morris' world except through misunderstanding, and even the self is divided...
Vol. 63 • November 1980 • No. 20
