Voyages of Discovery
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Alfred Corn's fourth book of verse, Notes from a Child of Paradise (Viking, 107pp., $14.95), recounts the poet's courtship, marriage and...
...The golden mean Couldn't be kept, it seemed, or not for long...
...Back and forth between Summer-camp prankishness and precocious Gravity, something odd and overdrawn Surely in both extremes...
...Notes from a Child of Paradise is as generous as Corn's talents...
...Telling our story is...
...More painful than...
...Notes from a Child of Paradise reports that he has suffered in reliving his memories...
...It hymns our paradisal landscapes, as well as his own mindscapes—those conscious and unconscious streams the artist must explore to find the headwaters of his creative powers...
...The sun lets down golden pipes To drink...
...One more "confessional poem...
...he "scavenged" relentlessly "in George Sand and Michelet...
...I What's lost, obviously, is really lost...
...Zweig demonstrates that Whitman was an omnivorous reader...
...Actually, he has expanded his territory to include several continents...
...She spent college threading through tables stacked with Maoist pamphlets, or listening to turned-on sermons by Timothy Leary...
...His act of refashioning self and resculpting American poetry proved one and the same...
...Corn has recast his personal drama into the form of The Divine Comedy, giving us his own Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise of 33 cantos each (plus, of course, one extra for Hell...
...Thus this first sight of Chicago's lakeshore: An inland sea, with fair-sized breakers...
...The joyous outpouring of speech that makes up "Song of Myself" owes its power to Whitman's knowledge of what it was like to be pent up inside oneself, incapable of expressing feelings...
...He shared a crashpad in the East Village where Allen Ginsberg, "the guru himself," was pursuing his Buddhist phase, where the actors of the Living Theater's Paradise Now stripped to incite audiences to civil disobedience: "We were all like that...
...Nevertheless, he managed to remake his life into "a kind of street theater" by assuming the character he had created in Leaves of Grass...
...In brief, he seemed another loser in a family of failures—barely able to keep a job, although responsible for the support of his parents and siblings, a commonplace fellow with a taste for popular reading...
...Zweig's portrait is less heroic...
...The third female principal, is America herself, for ultimately this becomes a love poem to the vast body of our continent...
...They are a breed of expansive American Luminists, from Hart Crane to Alfred Corn, still capable of celebrating voyages of discovery...
...Dayfall clouds Compiling colors...
...in the Bible which, despite his respect for Tom Paine's free thinking, he read, if not religiously, at least pragmatically as a quarry for tonal and rhythmic effects...
...In addition, he interweaves his history with that of the Lewis and Clark expedition, producing a luminescent travelogue of American landscapes and adventures: For those voyages of discovery— The slowly unfurling story of Ann and Alfred, Or tracking the sources of the great Missouri, Or Dante's autobiographical A nd catachistic narrative—all strike The keynotes of a cyclic canon...
...Kaplan's impressive study focused on Whitman's conviction, notwithstanding a hostile reception from other writers and critics, that he was the chosen poet of our national spirit...
...Most poets are content to repeat their successes, at least a few times...
...First there is the growing together (then apart) of Ann—the bright, beautiful girl of the golden West, committed to radical causes—and Alfred—who is more concerned with "perception, its portals flung wide/To rainwashed color, texture felt in the gut," who thinks he may be more drawn to men than to women...
...Even after they drift apart, his vision is enlivened by his imagination of hers...
...Each of Corn's books has set off in a new direction...
...He was a listener...
...Zweig's book will, inevitably, be compared with Justin Kaplan's Walt Whitman: A Li/e(1980...
...On Poetry VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Alfred Corn's fourth book of verse, Notes from a Child of Paradise (Viking, 107pp., $14.95), recounts the poet's courtship, marriage and divorce against abackdrop of student unrest in the 1960s at Columbia, Berkeley and in Paris...
...Corn asks himself, laughingly, "how much cross-country observation IA poem can fairly admit," then pleads in his own defense, "Description, though, goes deeper than a bleached-out Xerox, 11 Impicitly dispensing so much pleasure or pain...
...As in The Divine Comedy, the ending trails off into "what will not be written, nor ever said...
...But really we must take it on faith, since Corn seems to cheerfully accept his entire past...
...Not of the sort we associate with Lowell, Berryman or Plath...
...However carefully we examine the writing Whitman published [before his 29th year, in 1848], we find no sign of immature but struggling genius, no aborted trace of any literary adventure," Paul Zweig writes in Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet (Basic Books, 372 pp., $18.95...
...a man who had, indeed, begun afresh with all the mixed blessings of unliterate newness...
...If this sounds abstract, don't lose heart...
...Tapped inwardly, but shared companionably...
...painful as anything/ I've ever done...
...Sometimes, Corn's benignity works against him...
...During his travels, the poet rereads a favorite children's book about their expedition, and finally retraces their steps as he and his wife drive West...
...he confesses...
...aman so undistinguished from the swarm of his colleagues that it is almost impossible to tell how many of the newspaper articles attributed to him he actually wrote, they are so completely expressions of the age itself at its lowest and most ordinary...
...Despite his temperate style, in his sympathies Corn is a true child of the '60s...
...Hardly a prophet of despair, he makes a strange progenitor of the above list...
...In the end he covered his tracks so well that we have come to know him as a purely intuitive poet...
...Again, "Is it useful to ask whether a written text / Restores the best of love or time gone astray...
...No one could be less like Ginsberg...
...in inflated English bards [such as "Ossian" and Martin Tupper] who impressed the popular audience...
...Reviewing The Various Light (1980), I said that he might settle down to become more of a regional poet...
...Corn has characters, scenery, love interest, complications galore to charm any reader...
...We find instead a drab, excitable journalist...
...There is also Saca-jawea, the Indian guide whom Lewis and Clark called " Janey...
...Unfortunately, Zweig's conclusion to this splendid study seems curiously weak...
...No, Walt's sons are not the imitators of his inchoate forms, the Ginsbergs and Sand-bergs...
...He did not take up arms against the prevailing preachiness, as Poe, Melville, and—more subtly—Hawthorne had done...
...What is most notable about Corn's verse is its balance...
...Leaves of Grass was carefully designed by Whitman to sing as spontaneously as the voice of Nature, Zweig observes: "He wrote and rewrote his book to get out all the' stock touches,' all the literary echoes...
...Yet they both share certain characteristics inherited from a common ancestor, Walt Whitman: a tendency to pontificate, a fascination with lists, the casting of personal experience in mythological terms, passionate identification with sociological issues...
...Instead, Whitman breathed a new and grandiose life into it...
...Like a Luminist painter, Corn is especially stirred by landscapes, be they brilliantly lit or overshadowed by celestial action...
...His Walt draws this unquenchable optimism from the tone of the booster journalism of the day...
...Ann is not the only heroine of the poem...
...Remembering how he wrote everything as for her eyes before winning her, he decides that she has always been his muse, his Beatrice...
...That Whitman transformed himself from hack to America's Bard in a few short years remains one of the most astounding phenomena of literature...
...No wonder it fascinates biographers...
...Yet Zweig has just finished demonstrating that Whitman was singularly at peace with the values of his age, not to say indebted to them...
...His most emotionally charged passages describe scenery glimpsed on a transcontinental drive that makes up the "Paradise" section...
...Whitman was truly a self-made man—a remarkable character invented as a mouthpiece: Walt Whitman, akosmos, of Manhattan the son, Turbulent, fleshly, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women nor apart from them, No more modest than immodest...
...at least for me...
...Most of the great literary figures of the day were brilliant talkers...
...Hepostulates Whitman as "the ancestor not only of Henry Miller and Allen Ginsberg, but of Kafka, Beckett, Andre Breton, Borges—of all who have made of their writing an attack on the act of writing and on culture itself...
...But Zweig believes Whitman had a deeper motive for portraying himself as "one of the roughs...
...and plays a silent toccata of water And light...
...The ideal was derived in part from the young workmen the poet picked up and tried to befriend...
...What better way of keeping readers from tracing his farrago of original sources...
...The closing cantos are spoken through her transfigured voice...
...The passage is, I believe, meant to illustrate the bond between Ann and Alfred...
...he is drawn to " all roads at once'' (the title he gave his first collection...
Vol. 67 • May 1984 • No. 9
