Democratic Voices

...Looking back, Hongo realizes that his fellow students were all, in a sense, losers: '"Free, white and twenty-one' is the formulaic./ Cynical and exclusive, it doesn't mean/'Emancipation,' that freedman's word/signifying unlimited potential, an open road/like Whitman saw, a view from the prospect/of Democratic Vistas, a sense of magnificence/and of election...

...Levine's Tom Jefferson exhibits that same strain of "Resolution and Independence...

...Hongo's verses become an elaborate ritual of atonement for leaving behind his culturally ambiguous background...

...These words might stand as the epigraph for the title poem from Philip Levine's 13th collection, A walk with Tom Jefferson (Knopf, 64 pp...

...Moto or Charlie Chan...

...of a schoolboy terrorized by monstrous dogs, "fanged masters of the avenues...

...The latest to appear is Garrett Hongo's The River of Heaven (Knopf, 67 pp., $16.95...

...Cogs in the machine themselves, they never were told what part it was they were supposed to be making...

...Rather, Levine's style has provided a vehicle for the disciple to release his own pent-up cries of cultural loss and longing, from the opening "Nostalgic Catalogue" of Hawaii's ethnic diversity to the oriental simplicity of the book's final elegy for a victim of random street violence: Let the night sky cover him as he dies...

...Instead, awash with homesickness, he fancies how his drowned corpse might be borne by the current back to "Hilo Bay/fused in a posture of supplication/...as a fan is folded...

...This newest book carries on that emphasis...

...Just as our pioneer forebears ploughed farms out of wilderness, this old man cultivates a fecund garden in the urban jungle, having preserved his sharecropper's heritage—a green thumb...

...Whitman never claimed that the melting pot had already dissolved every boundary of race or economic class...

...Levine's poetic ramble takes place in late autumn, a dying time for plants whose withered browness mirrors the city's decay...

...A Japanese-Hawaiian veteran of the Korean War, hereturns to alife of gambling and pimping, then emigrates to Japan, hoping "to drift, guiltless,/on the aspic of Tokyo's squalid human sea...

...The author, of Japanese descent, was born in Volcano, Hawaii...

...The grounds of this are virtue and talents...

...Yet they are really nothing like that: " I have no story to tell about lacquer shrines/or filial ashes, about a small brass bell,/and incense smoldering in jade bowls...

...From the first, Levine has written poetry that speaks for the inarticulate victims and survivors of a harsh society: a little tenement girl who becomes a grafitti artist, martyred anarchists of the Spanish Civil War, American blacks who affirm that "from Bow Down come Rise Up...

...Levine's persona associates this desolation with the meaningless assembly-line jobs he and his coworkers once performed for the local auto manufacturers...

...When the young man went into the Army, Tom resumed planting: A father puts down a spade, his son takes it up, "That's Biblical, " he says, "the son goes off, the father takes up the spade again, that's Biblical...

...In this sense, Philip Levine and Garret Hongo prove to be genuine descendants of Tom and Walt...

...Jap or Sheenie/hawking rags in the New York streets/nothing matters under corrosive skies,/the burdened light that bears down on us/with the tremulous weight of guilt and outrage...

...Writers & Writing VOICES OF DEMOCRACY BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL THOMAS JEFFERSON, our pre-eminent American democrat, once wrote that "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue...

...Pinoy at the Coming World," based on a true account, tells of a sugar cane cutter who has risen to plantation bookkeeper...

...Levine makes no such claim for the Detroit riots...

...What could be more truly democratic than to acknowledge shortcomings, while at the same time preserving faith in the Ideal...

...The sentiment is not exhausted resignation, but a wise acceptance born of working "this poor earth good for so much giving and taking...

...Not that Hongo lacks a distinct voice...

...Hongo's tale, in fact, concerns what it feels like to grow up as the child of unassimilated immigrants, to be soaked with values incompatible with those of one's ancestors, yet not fully accepted by the new culture...

...Undefeated by a life of privation, injustice and grief, he still combines the "fierce spirit of independence and originality of his namesake" with the spiritual humility of another famous Tom, the protagonist of Harriet Beecher Stowe's manifesto for the freedom of all human beings...

...Levine has already established himself as the bard of Detroit, his native city...

...The exotic places he describes—seedy Chinatowns, Pacific ports with their international jumble of peoples and customs—might sound, in paraphrase, like backdrops for Mr...

...Through his endurance, we too become believers...

...There is a natural aristocracy among men, " Thomas Jefferson insisted...

...A pair of historical monologues narrate the tragedies of men trapped between two ways of life...

...Let the weaver girl cross the bridge of heaven and take up his cold hands Hongo chooses his memorable images to illustrate the cruel paradox that those outside the mainstream must purchase success at the price of estrangement from their own peoples...

...He admirably evokes the intellectual ghetto the " AP" system can create, and the ambivalence of the mostly Japanese whiz kids in it toward the casual lives of those tracked for a more limited education...

...He sets himself above his former fellows, boasting of children "born, not smuggled here...

...An equally sad story belongs to Jigoku, who declaims "on the glamor of Self-Hate...

...The poet and his Tom stroll through panoramas of "ice boxes yawning/at the sky/their breath still fouled with years/of eating garlic sausage/and refried beans, /the shattered ribcages/of beds that couldn't hold/our ordinary serviceable dreams...

...Each year the Academy of American Poets sponsors the publication of the Lamont Selection, a promising writer's second book of verse...

...To my mind, however, Tom Jefferson is Levine's most heroic individualist to date...

...This hubris is punctured when his offspring become victims of the 1919 flu pandemic...

...Some burned/to the ground, some/hung open, doorless, wide-eyed/until hauled off/by the otherwise unemployable/citizens of the county/to make room for the triumphant/return of Mad Anthony Wayne,/Pere Marquette, Cadillac,/the badger, the wolverine,/the meadow lark, the benign/long toothed bi-ped/with nothing on his mind...

...But Tom believes/the roots need cold,/the earth needs/ to turn to ice and snow so a new fire/can start up in the heart of all that grows./He doesn't say that./He doesn't say the heart/of ice is fire waiting./he doesn't say the new seed/nestles in the old,/waiting, frozen, for the land to thaw/...he doesn't/say all this is alost land,/it's Biblical...

...There are none of us elect...

...The neighborhood he grew up in and its myriad little houses used to exemplify the melting pot in which European immigrants were supposed to take advantage of equal opportunity to prosper, to assimilate the American Way...

...While Tom served in the Seabees during World War II, his son had planted and harvested their garden...

...The punks disappeared into the small time criminal world of the West Coast's oriental slums, and even the bright students remained outside the Anglo establishment they had been ostensibly groomed to enter...

...Do these two books signal aloss of faith in Whitman' sDemocratic Vistas...

...He did believe that "The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem," continuously writing itself, resolving its failures along the way to an eventual apotheosis...

...16.95...

...Neither a lifetime of dehumanizing work interspersed with unemployment nor the death of his only child during the Korean War have embittered him...

...Its hero—christened in a hopeful spirit with the name of our third President —is an elderly black man who as a child moved north to Detroit from a hardscrabble farm in Alabama...

...I don't think so...

...The steadfastness of this poor man's sacrificial vocation inspired Wordsworth...

...No, it is up to the poet to speak these words, to retrieve them out of the eloquent silence of the downtrodden...

...One of the most effective poems here tells of Hongo's experience as a student in a California high school, where he was put in "advanced placement/segregated from the rest of the student body...

...Yet he has not succumbed to cynicism: "Tom Jefferson/is a believer./You can't plant winter vegetables/if you aren't,/you can't plant anything, except/maybe radishes...

...He writes of "the old woman named Ida Bellow," murdered for $5 in front of her 18-month-old granddaughter who "can't tell because she can't speak...

...There he met a "leech gatherer," an old Scot who stood barelegged in pools hoping to attract those nasty animals, then used for bloodletting...

...The modern Tom is nature's noble man...

...In one of his best-known poems, William Wordsworth described how he had once walked across a moor to try and dispel the depression he felt at having to pursue his calling in a society that often destroys poets by its indifference...

...But "after the town exploded/in '67 these houses/were plundered for whatever/they had...

...Despite his ironic fantasy of burnt-out urban neighborhoods reverting to primeval forest, prepared to receive fresh explorers of our continent, he really perceives the vacant lots as a monument to failed promises—the junkyard of our civilization...

...The 18th-century Jefferson held that revolution must periodically renew Liberty...

...Given Hongo's themes, it is understandable that his method has been powerfully shaped by the poetry of Philip Levine...

...The old saw that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery never seemed more applicable...