Taking Chances in Verse

...On Poetry TAKING CHANCES IN VERSE BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL IN Genesis, God-the Father of artists-creates the world and everything in it by speaking Our culture has long since ceased to accept this story literally (apart from the current "creation science" advocates), yet many still cling to the notion that language is the divine right of our species, that the power to name sets us above dumb animals Recent challenges to this view have inspired Donald Finkle's 10th book of poems, What Manner of Beast (Atheneum, 62 pp ,$12 95), dedicated to "Washoe and the rest"—the "talking" chimps Finkle has always flouted barriers For a time he experimented with "found" poems, and even after abandoning that dubious form his verse continues to be sprinkled with lengthy quotations from a ragbag of sources Moreover, his ideas easily jump over hurdles that would trip up lesser writers "Once, maybe, a man could marry a plant," he suggested hopefully in a love song to his avocado tree (in his third book, A Joyful Noise) Though What Manner of Beast is a startling, radical book, Finkle's regular readers will not be surprised to find him consorting with Washoe, Lucy and the other apes, Jane Goodall's chimpanzee communities, Itard's "wild boy of Aveyron", Peter the dolphin, or the singing humpback whales The boundaries between humans and the other creatures, he seems to be saying, grow ever hazier Finkle embarks on his voyage of discovery with "The Strange One,' the account of an Eskimo captured by Martin Frobisher on his first arctic expedition in 1576 The poem begins with one of the explorer's crew wondering at the paltry objects that attract the savage, who strikes him as almost more animal than human The Eskimo scorns wine, precious metals and the opulent furnishings of the captain's cabin, but "for beads, for tiny black fires/without smoke, without heat/he would part with his parka/ for iron that bends without breaking/ that keeps its edge, that holds/ a finer point than bone/for iron/he would part with his life 'Alas, the stranger actually does part with his life Lured by such treasures, he is taken prisoner and carried to England, where he dies of the common cold This pathetic end catapults the poem into Finkle's deeply tender, funny voice in pledge for him I come at last ambassador of sackcloth, envoy of ashes paddling my wobbly conscience, I make for the shore me for the strange one him for me In addition to his other strengths, Finkle can deftly flesh out a bare description Consider "The Garden,' a poem that takes its epigraph from Dr Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard's The Wild Boy of Aveyron (the book that inspired Truffaut's film, The Wild Child) Speaking of his charge, the doctor writes, "in order not to sever him entirely from his country tastes, he was taken continually to walk in some neighboring gardens " Finkle brings the scene to life, the feral child—the survivor of an infancy without human society—is now Galumphing in his clumsy shoes down rational cypress avenues mown paths, raked gravel walks between exemplary boxwood hedges irrepi oachable topiary borders of hollyhock and poppy bedded and weeded, chaste and mannerly the lush geometry of Luxembourg that green decorum delighted and soothed him ravished, tranquilized, enchanted in the garden enclosed, the child set free This picture reverberates with ironies the tidy Eden of the Luxembourg parks must indeed have seemed incomprehensible to Victor, forever suspended between his brutish early days and the civilization that should have been his birthright The chimps are in a similar predicament "Washoe is to be an emissary from humanity, a Prometheus to chimpanzees" wrote Eugene Linden In "The Negative Particle," along with sign language, Finkle sees the apes taking on other burdens of our culture "reaching for the apple, Lana glances/furtively at the technician/sensing the faint aversive tug/at forearm and wrist/caught in mid-flight, the tremulous act/in the talons of thou-shalt-not " And in "Lucy Cat" a chimp experiences a grief akin to what humans feel over the death of her pet cat, "learning in that instant the grammar of loss,' signaling the cat's name upon seeingapictureof it, "stroking with both hands sadly, over and over / imaginary whiskers, to which still clung/the frail dust-mice of recollection " When Washoe, the first of the talking chimps, was reintroduced to her own kind, she did not recognize them and made the sign for "black bugs" to her human companion In the title poem Finkle imagines this moment from Washoe's perspective She has been marooned on an island inhabited by apes ignorant of the language she has been taught what manner of beast, you wonder stares back at you, blank as a cat at the old tellable gimme banana at please gimme berry and stealthily pops another raisin in his mouth Ultimately, humans and animals communicate affection and need—a universal connective according to Finkle He sees all creatures as sojourners in a strange land, wandering bewildered and delighted among half-understood objects, like Victor, being lured into danger by strange treasures, like the Eskimo, struggling to express emotion through a language designed to ask for things, like Washoe A man less sure of his purpose might rely too much on the pathos of this predicament Donald Finkle uses his compassion and humor to poke our sensitive spot sand our loneliness, binding us closer to our tellow inhabitants on this earth A MATURE POET, Finkle can produce a collection of consistently strong poems Such uniform evenness in a young-ci writer, however, often stems from a fear of failure, an unhealthy desire to show only what one thinks will be well received In fact, young poets who are too cat etui sometimes thy up Edward Hirsch is not cautious, and his first book, For the Sleepwalkers (Knopl, 84 pp , $10 95), is uneven Nevertheless, his failures suggest promise, and at his best he speaks with authority The brave opening, "Song Against Natural Selection," proclaims that "The weak survive'"—a sentiment in keeping with Hnsch's willingness to lace up to tailuie This poem, though, happens to be a complete success "Sine," he admits, "losing is haul woik," but he sagelv concludes this hurts us, and yet we manage, we survive so that losing itself becomes a kind of song, our song, our only witness to the wav we die, one day at a time, a leg severed, a word buned, this is how we recognize ourselves, and win The formal structure, making the reader only belatedly aware of rhyme, complements the wrv acceptance of loss I suspect that Hirsch is fond of the French "Homage" (those elegies written at somebody's tomb) because of the chance it gives him to indulge his mimetic gifts, not merely out of an admiration of Baudelaire and Verlaine He is a good imitator, and some of these poems—transposing Lorca to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, or Vallejo to a soup kitchen in Pans—are wonderfully effective Still, it is easy to sound inept mimicking dead poets Hirsch's "At the Grave of Marianne Moore" is prefaced with her famous dictum "Whatever it is, let it be without affectation " Although he copies Moore's quirky style without trouble, smceitisnot native to him he does sound affected He also stoops to an occasional bad pun unworthy of Moore Badgers at the zoo "raced through their cages like perfect athletes,/almost as artful as her beloved Dodgers " And when Hirsch praises Moore because "her scrupulous method/in verse bequeathed us a heritage/the honesty of her intelligence,' he cannot mean this to sound as prosy and patronizing as it does These lapses notwithstanding, it is obvious that Moore's precise eye has influenced Hirsch in the better poems than this one Hirsch's tributes to great poets are merely one manifestation of his preoccupation with the artist's role In "The Acrobat, ' he uses the training of a young circus performer as a metaphor for the disciplines required in mastering anv art The novice acrobat is shocked and frightened by the fall ot a veteran colleague, who was startled on the highwire bv a burst of unexpected applause As he perfects his act, the young man's perspective alters "And it didn't take very long to discover/That the body is a child, or even a house pet/and that house pets need to be trained, children/Aren't born to listen, they have to be taught /And so you learned to twist in and out of yourself / This training had to be done with real seriousness/Like living, like a chipmunk going around and around/In his cage /And you began to understand that even chipmunks /Have dignity Dignity and great courage Following the motions ot its protagonist, "The Acrobat revolves in a spiral from the outsider s admiration of the graceful contortions, to the apprentice's disgust ai the ugliness ot some ot the tricks ot the trade, then full circle to an appreciation ot the dignity and great courage 'required to perfect one's control...

...Finallv, the actobal swings out to merge with his ait "There are whole centuries moving behind you/Fossils cradle in vour bones The deep oceans/Rise in vour bird blood, yes and you can alrcadv' Feel the distance in your lungs and/The stillness spreading its blank wings inside vou I admire Edward Hirsch for his mystical vision, for the mastery he has already attained--and for his daring...