Survivors' Stories
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers &Writmg SURVIVORS' STORIES BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL STANLEY KUNITZ has proved to be the survivor of his generation of poets. Born the same decade as Langston Hughes. Theodore Roethke, W. H....
...Akhmatova" tells how Stalin punished the poet by exiling her only son to Siberia, and how, to protect her child, she put the unpublished manuscript of her great poem Requiem into the kitchen stove...
...The poet holds up the churchman for being willing to face the ambiguities and pain of existence head-on, to forgo the ideal of holiness and make the sacrifice involved in dirtying his hands with a necessary act...
...they crowd the world with their finger-ears/and thorny toes and their broken beaks/ and knuckled hearts...
...The finest of these animal poems, "The Wellfleet Whale," was inspired by a 1966 encounter with one of the gargantuan mammals when it beached itself on Cape Cod...
...While she acknowledges the depression, bitterness and guilt that accompany the loss of people or things we love?There is a sadness older than its texts/that will outlive the language"—her focus is on catharsis and purging, and she finds strength in startling places...
...Along with its social statements, this collection offers much that is appealing on the author's childhood...
...and Robert Penn Warren, Kunitz continues, at 90, to flourish as a writer...
...who was martyred by the Nazis, to exemplify the kind of engagement with real problems Kunitz admires...
...Like his own poems, they show people willing to risk their freedom and the well-being of those dearest to them in order to win a greater liberty, and to speak out for those who cannot or dare not...
...Seven words—order, family, genus, class, phylum, kingdom, and species—recur in each stanza as a background to illuminating musings on how the theories of Darwin, Marx and Freud now shape our outlook...
...Passing Through: The Later Poems New and Selected(159 pp., S18.95...
...written on the occasion of the Whitney Museum's 1974 American Folk Art exhibition) glories in slaves who carved cigar store Indians and little girls who worked intricate samplers, in traveling portrait painters and Shaker artisans, and in the legions of women who quilted, stenciled, embroidered, hooked rugs, or wove...
...This touching pantomime of lives damaged yet still dynamic captures the spirit of Digges' exuberant poetry...
...Around Pastor Bonhoeffer" evokes the heroism of the eponymous German pastor and ethicist...
...She is not always so grim...
...Her rough music is seductively memorable...
...in which we swam with terror and recognition...
...transmigrates, disappears, but not before their cans explode like pistol shots, rain fire...
...The book brims with the enthusiasm and energy we have come to expect from its author...
...Theodore Roethke, W. H. Auden...
...Words for the Unknown Makers...
...Digges plays this figure off against the graffiti a street gang sprays on a viaduct to memorialize a dead comrade...
...The poem concludes with her hair "sweeping" across her lover's naked body...
...This complex, disturbing work mourns these street youths' wasted lives, yet takes a wild pleasure in their defiance, their unquenchable yearnings to leave a visible expression of their perspectives and experiences...
...Even Akhmatova's feat of reconstructing her poem from memory could not have compensated for this personal loss...
...In certain medieval communities, when a member was exposed as a criminal the rest of the village stood outside that person's house banging on pans, tools or whatever made the loudest noise, until the racket drove away the offender—who, according to common law, could never return...
...raccoons at the poet's Provincetown, Massachusetts home...
...It brings to mind others who preached subversion and defiance of a hostile society and its stultifying conventions: William Blake...
...Passing Through opens with Kunitz' brief affirmation of the craft he has practiced for seven decades: "In an age defined by its modes of production, where everybody tends to be a specialist of sorts," he writes, "the [poet] ideally is that rarity, a whole person making a whole thing...
...Helena," who sulks like the exiled Napoleon...
...Just as the dying whale captures the beauty and fear of being alive, Stanley Kunitz' humanism illuminates Passing Through...
...To mark his latest chronological milestone, Norton has published his ninth collection of verse...
...Digges pays homage in her latest poems to the primal energy that keeps us fighting against the odds and snatching at pleasures even in our bleakest moments...
...True, Kunitz' themes can be dark...
...Kunitz similarly transforms an old anti-Semitic music hall song into a paean to Jewish endurance...
...On his 90th birthday he has given us a wonderful present...
...Digges knows, though, that romanticism and rebellion have their limits...
...Amplifying his theme?the telling of the stories of the soul"—Kunitz includes some of his resonant translations of Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova...
...In "The Little Book of Hand Shadows," she and one of her sons play at casting animal shapes on a lighted wall until the creatures they form with their fists and fingers "crowd the ark...
...The poet's sense of connectedness to nature extends to the animal kingdom...
...he confesses...
...My Mother's Pears" chronicles the day Kunitz helped plant a tree that still produces fruit eight decades later...
...What particularly fascinates the poet are their pseudonyms: At last they sign the dead one s tag for him and then, below, their own: Chek, Alert, Sparo, Abuze, Atone...
...The Testing Tree" recalls the imaginative games Kunitz created in boyhood, several of which unconsciously reproduced ancient rituals...
...What most impresses itself on the reader, however, is his imagination: perpetually curious, eager for fresh revelations...
...The poems that follow live up to those pronouncements...
...He resolved to "risk his soul in the streets/...in God's name cheating, pretending./playing the double agent./choosing to trade/the prayer for the deed...
...Dietrich Bonhoeffer joined the plot to kill Hitler even though it meant lying, dissembling, and putting both his family and himself in danger...
...At the end of "An Old Cracked Tune" the speaker asserts, "I dance, for the joy of surviving...
...and fierce-looking tomato hornworms who turn out, at least as Kunitz envisions them, to have more in common with us than one might think at first...
...Rough Music (Knopf, 54 pp., $20.00), is taken from an ancient custom...
...The title of her third collection...
...Emerson's trope for language provides the title and theme for "Tombs of the Muses...
...ANOTHER POET with a strong interest in the elemental is Deborah Digges...
...it should not go unheard...
...each name a tomb in which the spirit rots...
...All "pass from their long obscurity, through the gate that separates us from our history, a moving rainbow-cloud of witnesses in a rising hubbub...
...The State did not relent for many years, and then mother and son found themselves hopelessly estranged...
...Her "Rock, Scissors, Paper"—a reference to the children's hand game—takes the seven categories of the taxonomy scale and fashions them into a sprung sestina...
...for readers of Kunitz' Passing Through, all his anonymous folk artists...
...By leaving us creative expressions of themselves, each tells us something about ourselves, about the human desire to make a splash of color on the drab fabric of the ordinary, to joyously defy adversity, even heartbreak...
...The Magic Curtain" brings back the wonder created by early movie palaces...
...In "The Round...
...I can scarcely wait for tomorrow/when a new life begins for me./as it does each day...
...This sacrifice accomplished nothing...
...Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Rimbaud, the early Beats—or...
...In "Broom," the opening lyric, the speaker searches her memory for a moment of pure happiness to lighten present misery...
...Disturbed "that 20th century American poets seem largely reconciled to being relegated to the classroom," he declares: "It would be healthier if we could locate ourselves in the thick of life, at every intersection where values and meaning cross, caught in the dangerous traffic between self and universe...
...Against the widespread belief that literature is merely self-referential, and "poetry makes nothing happen," Kunitz champions verse as "spiritual testimony, the sign of the inviolable self consolidated against the enemies within and without that would corrupt or destroy human pride and dignity...
...I would call Digges a humanist, except that such an anthropocentric word shortchanges her powerful sympathy for other forms of life, including her children's dying hamster, or her potted amaryllis...
...Some of the most endearing passages in Passing Through concern "Jonathan, the last of the giant tortoises on wind-beaten St...
...snakes mating "in a brazen love-knot...
...She settles on the images of a floor swept clean, and of herself dancing with the broom, "an oar that parted waters, raft-keel and mast, or twirled/around and around on a back lawn, a sort of compass through whose blurred counter-motion the woods became a gathering of brooms...
...Kunitz conveys both the awe inspired by the creature in its agony, and the growing sense of kinship felt by those who stood around it during its slow death listening to its eerie rumblings and wails, helpless to relieve the suffering: Toward dawn we shared with you your hour of desolation, the huge lingering passion of your unearthly outcry, as you swung your blind head toward us and laboriously opened a bloodshot, glistening eye...
...Better we all let go of the lie/that art can save a life," Digges writes...
...A schoolboy terror—that the earth would be destroyed by a celestial object—is remembered in "Halley's Comet...
...She "doused the muse in kerosene, set her afire/burned down the house of poetry...
...He views many subjects with irony, sometimes outright skepticism, occasionally outrage...
Vol. 78 • October 1995 • No. 8
