Peter Viereck's Ctoss
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing PETER VIERECKS CROSS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Two decades ago, Peter Viereck began writing an epic cycle of poems about man's attempts to come to terms with a confusing world...
...The relentless message of Archer is that art is morality...
...Whether or not this opinion, unpopular enough with the poetry community of the day, had anything to do with it, Viereck's poems did stop receiving the attention they had previously attracted...
...The spirit of the '60s and '70s demanded simple, emotional lyrics, not the ironic complexity of form and thought that typifies his work...
...through the unconventional delicate rhythms of de la Mare, the vigorous ones of Hardy, the agonized iambic pentameters of Charlotte Mew, and the ecstatic ones of Hart Crane and Roethke, with Frost (not the folksy fake but the fierce fox) central rather than peripheral...
...In the second place, long poems were especially unfashionable at the time...
...the latter reduced all complexity to a "howl...
...Once upon a time, august critics, writing in serious journals, may have shaped tastes, but today's poets advertise themselves through readings and workshops...
...he insists that " Whether our biological pendulum (the thump THUMP of artery and lung) is but the split iambic of a song, or vice versa, either way biology and poetry are welded by the same scannable tide...
...This being his creed, no wonder Viereck castigates both the orthodox formalists, such as the Southern Fugitives, and freedom-fighters like the Beats...
...Viereck's second major polemical concern is form in poetry...
...Viereck believes his own poems were unacceptable to the "literary establishment" because of an article he wrote for Commentary in 1950, where he argued that the Bollingen poetry prize should not have been awarded to Ezra Pound on the grounds that Pound's anti-Semitism and treasonable views infected his verse...
...Crying on a tree: Me, father...
...The welding not only throws new light on the odd, obsessive quality of poetry's magic...
...Regular readers of these pages know that I have been calling attention lately to a revival of richness of sound and sense in poetry, qualities that seemed lost after the Modernists...
...they are a force for wickedness...
...A11 because Mary had A little Lamb...
...The four principles put on different hats, or dance out with a new prop to suggest a change of scene...
...Once, You exclaims that the apple pit "has grown a mushroom shape...
...In the fervor of the Freudian '40s, physiological causes were discounted...
...It will promote debate and, one hopes, enrich the terms...
...Viereck concedes that by the early decades of this century, a lot of formal poetry had become dull and predictable...
...The Middle Ages embroidered the redemptive idea with a legend that Eden originally covered the hill of Golgotha outside Jerusalem, and that the tree of knowledge was cut down to make Christ's cross...
...Poems devoid of empathy—lyrics of no content, propagandistic doggerel, verse that promotes antihumanistic attitudes—are not merely defective or incomplete...
...In the first place, the very theme brings to mind the greatest works of Dante, Milton and Goethe— formidable competition...
...Merrill and John Hollander have been defending meter with arguments similar to Viereck's for decades...
...Often, the stage directions call for a song or a soft-shoe routine...
...they wove them into their principal works: The Pisan Cantos and The Ring oftheNibelung...
...Agreeing with both, Viereck insists that art is an exercise in empathy, the greatest good we as humans can know or practice...
...it was a matter of ethics, a metaphysics of evil...
...Rhythm is Time in leotards," the ebb and flow of life as a dance: Intricate measures are worked into a pattern unseen by the performers but visible to anyone watching...
...they spill over into copious stage directions, footnotes, glossaries, and appendices...
...The unexpected success of James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover encouraged further poetic cycles justifying God's ways to man, or vice versa...
...The Crucified must evolve from passive suffering into a dionysiac figure, the Archer who can teach man to shoot back at the controlling Father: "Pierced hands...
...Whew, I should have sired some unobtrusive zoo Like minotaurs and swan eggs...
...Iambs beat in time with the human heart...
...In Viereck's scenario, God created Man to be a toy, but men, by exercising free will, became as gods...
...Evil does indeed fall into the purview of esthetic criticism because it parches empathy and hence the artist's creative imagination...
...Viereck handles his drama as burlesque or revue...
...Even a writer as popular as Robert Lowell found little audience for his History sonnet sequence (republished as Notebooksto sound more spontaneous and fragmented...
...The gnostic struggle between parent and child has been one of the traditional themes of literature—the only one, according to some...
...Viereck has more allies, though, than he acknowledges— perhaps than he knows of...
...We should be grateful, however, for Viereck's provocative statement of his case...
...Writers & Writing PETER VIERECKS CROSS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Two decades ago, Peter Viereck began writing an epic cycle of poems about man's attempts to come to terms with a confusing world and its presiding deity, if any...
...Viereck nevertheless persevered, and fashion is changing once more, so finally Archer in the Marrow: The Applewood Cycles, 1967-1987 (Norton, 260 pp., $14.95) has appeared...
...God the Father whines, Of all the ark's worst monsters, two by two, The apple-biter nearly bit me...
...One can't imagine Viereck's Applewood Cycles attracting serious attention (not to mention a publisher) during the '60s and '70s...
...Orwell wrote in 1949 that the views Pound "tried to disseminate in his works are evil...
...For ears ignorant of regular patterns, chaos becomes the norm...
...This scheme, in addition to offering a subtle and pleasing variation to the ear, makes for less "filler" than when the poet merely has to concentrate on end rhymes...
...Rhyme and rhythm are a strong angel...
...Arguments about the biological roots of rhythm ought to join the disputes about the right and left sides of the brain...
...The Apple wood Cycles are written in a dazzling variety of metrical patterns...
...Some scenes take place outside time, and a few in other universes—where Western Europe lost the Crusades and became Moslem, Lucrezia Borgia was elected pope, or George Orwell's 1984 came true...
...Viereck thinks that the "rebellion" of free verse depended on ears trained to hear the counterpoint of a steady beat, and thus able to appreciate the disruption of theexpected scheme...
...For Christians, the crucifixion of Jesus—the "Second Adam"—wiped out this primal disobedience...
...As for his essay on form, it would have provoked more derision than his views on Pound did in 1950...
...Ultimately, prosody reflects the music of the spheres as well as that of our own bodies...
...Avoidance of form has bred sloppy self-indulgence...
...it re-establishes, in the teeth of current opinion, the dependence of that magic on the continuity of traditional meters and even of rhymes...
...in the present intellectual cycle, biology is again destiny, for poets and critics too...
...What a jam...
...Puns and irony abound...
...Moreover, I have never been able to quite accept the conspiracy theory that authors who promulgate unfashionable opinions are blackballed by the establishment (hardly a united body itself)- In a free market system, editors offer the public what they think it wants...
...Viereck has also invented a new system he calls "crisscross," in which the first and last syllables of each line rhyme with the last and first syllables of the following one: Doubting in a garden When will I climb out...
...By all means read Archer in the Marrow to set your own pulse racing, your own juices flowing...
...Pound, and Richard Wagner before him, did not limit the expression of their hateful views to incidental prose writings...
...The condign reply is a counterquestion: Do human beings move like amoebas, on pseudopods every which way, or on two feet with alternate steps...
...Obviously Viereck's passion play redounds with meanings...
...Nevertheless, he says, "the road-not-taken wouldhave led— can still lead...
...it is in wrestling meaning from such an adversary, Viereck believes, that the poet discovers his true voice...
...Applewood" refers, of course, to the tree in Eden from which Adam and Eve (identified with You) plucked the fruit of knowledge, thus defying the Almighty...
...bending cross into crossbow./Look: goatfoot Jesus on the village green...
...Nietzsche warned that Wagnerian anti-Semitism would engender a "bloodbath...
...Auschwitz figures prominently, together with Pope JohnXXIII's characterization of the Holocaust as "the second crucifixion...
...Why, one gets asked in poetry 'workshops,' why isn't it just as natural for poems to scan every which way as to move along on alternate beats...
...Throughout 18 cycles, God the Father, God the Son (both Jesus and Dionysus) and "You"—a modern Everyman, alternately male and female—circle round one another in a wary battle of wits...
...But Archer in the Marrowis not simply a poem of ideas written in a variety of forms...
...But [Pound's poetry was] not a matter of politics or economics...
...In an appendix looking back to the Pound controversy, Viereck argues that "Unlike the Right and Left totalitarians, we should never judge art by its politics...
...At the poem's end, yet another cycle is about to begin...
...He has, indeed, wrestled against the current, and Archer in theMarrowis the stronger for it...
...To call such a project risky would be an understatement...
...The two represent flip sides of "the same coin: form made sterile or form uprooted.' He charges that the former group made poetry an elite game...
...In an appendix subtitled "Would Jacob Wrestle with a Flabby Angel...
...The galloping rhythms of anapest and dactyl mimic the excitement of a racing pulse, or "the interacting different tempo'd pulsations of two bodies intensely joined, as in love or combat...
...it is a manifesto in defense of formalism as humanism...
Vol. 70 • August 1987 • No. 11
