Classics for the Present

...Writers & Writing CLASSICS FOR THE PRESENT BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL As we count down the 20th century s final years, certain common traits in its poetry become clear Whether written in a time of social optimism or gloom, peace or war, faith in science or fear of technology—or under socialism, capitalism or fascism—the major works of the 10 decades drawing to a close have for the most part been dark in tone Then primary themes concern such disagreeable matteis as the instability of human life, cultural decay, violence, lust, and the psychological disease that has marked the era depression (Atheism, too, has strongly affected the period s thought but poets have tended toward a spiritual perspective, albeit not one organized religions would necessarily sanction ) Most often the century's lyricists have talked about their unhappy subjects by evoking ancient myths From William Butler Yeats to Edna St Vincent Millay to the Modernists, from the Georgians to the Beats, from the Freudian dithyrambs of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton to the bittersweetjazz rhythms of Philip Larkin and James Merrill, Amy and Robert Lowell, Langston Hughes and Ted Hughes (or any other principal English-language writer or school you choose to name), the linking thread is allusions to ancient folktales Two recent examples of the use of myth to examine chthonic impulses m ourselves and society generally are Laurie Sheck's The Willow Grove (Knopf, 69 pp , $21 00) and C H Sisson's Selected Poems (New Directions, 94 pp , $9 95) Sheck's title alludes to the Grove of Persephone, sacred to the Queen of Hades, according to the ancient Greeks As a young woman, she was abducted by the Lord of the Underworld, and during the three months she thereafter spent in his kingdom each year the earth was blighted by winter When she returned the growing season resumed Scattered throughout The willow Grove are 12 lyrics "From The Book of Persephone —a monologue in which the goddess as a contemporary woman traces her emotions of isolation and loss through stages that culminate m her dream of a return to health m the spring Instead of the traditional entrance into Hades, Sheck pictures a descent into depression and feelings of worthlessness, betrayal, contamination, and hopelessness Writer's block factors m here "The crossed-out words/ that haunted the white page, and the syntax clamping down/ too hard, like a locked box " In later poems, memories of grief and alienation well up Reliving a childhood memory, the nanator recalls the moment when she lecogmzed that adults tend to ignore the problems they can't resolve I thought of the laws they had made, (they had told me there were laws) and how those laws hadn't rescued the shivering ones from their cardboard homes in winter, or the ones who wandered babbling through the park conducting an invisible orchestra with a stick Watching her parents in the light of this revelation, the girl feels they have turned into alien beings, "owners of a language I couldn't understand " Their outer complacency seems "a form of armor," though she imagines that "secret sorrows/ wandered like gold threads beneath their skins " It has often been suggested that, unlike other psychiatric illnesses, depression does not so much distort the world as leave the patient naked to disturbing stimuli so-called "healthy minds" self-protectmgly screen out Consequently, the sufferers' sense of separation from others intensifies with the understanding that most of us deliberately ignore their pain, or at least try to keep from getting caught up in it Lacerated by compassion, the speaker of the Persephone sequence is overwhelmed by the misery around her, and her anguish is not lessened when she considers that healing would probably mean joining the company of the indifferent Such realizations make for a private, interior hell Yet on emerging from this darkness, some feel stronger for having been educated by vulnerability This notion forms the plot for "From The Book of Persephone " Sheck emphasizes the point at the outset with an epigraph from Simone Weil "The upward movement in us is in vain (and less than vam) if it does not come from a downward movement" Watching a fawn, Persephone asks, "Is it its fear that makes it beautiful, how it must turn/ its extremest attention toward each sound?/ How easily startled it is, how easily/ the world can hurt it Is that why its smoothness/ seems to me so much like rapture...

...Here Sheck's argument recalls Emily Dickinson's "I like the look of agony/ Because I know it's true " Surrounded by pretense, the wisdom of depression teaches one to perceive value in signs of weakness, and to learn that elation and terror are intimately related The other poems in The Willow Grove examine similar themes In everyday phenomena such as radio waves, TV screens, glass skyscrapers, and department store mannequins, Sheck sees symbols of communication failing to bridge the gap between interior and exterior experience What our culture devises to illustrate connectedness frequently (and unwittingly) betrays thwarted desires and alienation "I am lying in a city that is a text unwnting itself," she tells us in the opening poem, and her words describe exactly the way we have come to regard the decay of our metropolises—once gallant metaphors for our dreams of socially engineered perfection A presumably autobiographical reminiscence explains how her father taught her to spot junkie shoplifters in their Bronx store, though sometimes she couldn't bear to report them because they seemed so damaged and needy Although the verses in the collection owe their insights to depression, they were composed in a healthy state "If this is the world," Sheck affirms, "we must find some way to belong to it," not withdraw into a private Hades of defeat In "February Morning," she takes up 14th-century theologian William of Occam's discourse on angels (the one everybody knows of for its question about how many can stand on the head of a pin) We can no longer take such conundrums seriously Rather, we are likely to wonder, with Sheck, whether the incorporeal beings of Judeo-Chnstian-Islamic myth might not envy the ability of mortals to suffer change She imagines them flying down to witness the ordinariness of human experience, including drudgery and loss, "until they felt the smallest fissure/ begin to form withm their wholeness/ to make a path where earthly love might enter" British poetry in our century has relied more heavily than its American counterpart on traditional forms like rhyme and meter For that reason, U S publishers have tended to look upon many fine English poets as if they were like certain European wines excellent in situ, but too fragile for export Thus readers with access to Carcanet Press' admirable poetry series have followed C H Sisson's work for many years—he is now in his eighth decade—but many people here cannot easily get hold of British books So it is especially good that New Directions has put out a Selected Poems In common with many of his countrymen, Sisson was trained in the Classics to a degree that has been rare rn the United States Latin poetry therefore remains an influence It seems unlikely that someone ignorant of Martial would have described men in the following epigrammatic fashion, even if the precise image comes from Darwin and the mythic conceptions of 20th-century science Ape-like in that their box of wires Is shut behind a face of human resemblance, They favor a comic hat between then ears And then monkey s tube is tucked inside their pants The contemporary perspective and consciousness of ancient models shown here are two legs of the tnpod on which Sisson's verse rests, the third is his Christianity These supports might seem an unstable combination They are—and the poet exploits the incongruity as he probes the tension between Classical and Christian views, as well as current doubts about each One of the book's most fascmatmg pieces, "Metamorphoses," begins by echoing Ovid with a modern twist But it rapidly moves from Roman myths of divine transformations to the central Christian mystery—God becoming fully human Ovid called his era the Age of Iron, postulating a fall from a golden period when culture was in harmony with nature The Incarnation of Jesus would erase all that "And yet there must remain a doubt," says Sisson, since in our time we have seen brutalities Ovid could not have imagined Perhaps the closest we can come to Christian hope is to say "A death in spring-time is the best," he suggests, thereby wedding the salvific death on the Cross to the vegetation rituals we know through the Attic and Roman literature that is the foundation of the Western poetic tradition Sisson's perspective generates some compelling images A poem to "Marcus Aurehus" pictures Freud as "the beetle under the ruins of an empire" that was not only Europe's old order, but also the traditional way of understanding human behavior His psychological theories, the poet implies, undermined a society that once seemed as secure as the Roman Empire in its prime "Money" discusses what has become the kind of nexus of addiction and indecency that sex once was for Victorians At first, it seduces us with promises of security and pleasure, but "Suddenly you are in bed with a screeching tear-sheet" who compels you to serve her needs with little regard for your own (The Middle Ages saw Fortune as a similar whore-goddess) Ovid reappears in the book's closing lyric This time, though, the poem invoked is the last known work from his banishment, the "Tristia " Sisson's own exile is the interior alienation brought by old age—scarier, in truth, than the barbaric Serbia described by the Roman Yet even out of this adamantine condition, as the brain and arteries ossify, Sisson hopes "to find the quartz within the stone " Modern, even postmodern he may be in his thniking, but it is the eternal mythic hope of new life that keeps him and other poets of our century singing through the hard times...