Return of the Epic

...John Bricuth—the pen name that the literary critic John T. Irwin reserves for poetry—also chews on a complex slice of culture...

...Instead of comprehensive, heroic epics on public themes such as those produced by Tennyson, Longfellow and Browning (not to mention the distaff side of the Browning and Rossetti clans), the prevailing schools of verse have favored "fragments shored against [their] ruins," minimalism, stripped-down diction, portraits of psychic turmoil rather than disciplined action...

...He never minimizes the problems involved in trying to convey what is important for one society to another possessing quite different values...

...The more horrifying he reveals himself to be, the more eagerly we hang on his words...

...Whereas Longfellow sought to reconcile the native and colonial societies in America through Christian values, Merwin sadly recognizes that the imposition of a foreign culture must adversely affect the local one...

...The "press conference" at which three interlocutors—Fish, Bird and Fox—try vainly to contain Sir's ever more grandiose self-justifications will first remind readers of modern Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt through the present incumbent, all capable of charming or blustering their way out of awkward questions...

...Small wonder that, in the end, they quietly tiptoe offstage, leaving the old man in full spate, hardly aware of their departure...

...And isn't that when all life's Puzzles fit, its mysteries fall flat...

...Sir's brio springs from an unshakable sense of being on top...

...Sheldon, interested in Hawaiian history, asks the old woman to let him take down her account for a book he is writing: but when he read back to her what he had written about them it sounded like a story about someone else more than like what she remembered of what happened but she could not think how to tell him that it had been not like that and would never have belonged in those words that came front church ...and she thought...

...Despite the true-blue American cadences of the voice that harangues us...

...When I was growing up, Longfellow's "Hiawatha" was taught in grade schools all over the Midwest so that children would learn something of the "prehistory" of their part of the world and remember that it once belonged to another civilization...

...The poet explains him as "either God, the President of the United States, everybody's father, or a combination of the three—someone (either sage or psychoanalyst) to whom one takes one's queries 'as to one who knows.'" Many books have celebrated the multicultural, multiethnic nature of Hawaii's "South Seas Paradise...

...Here Bricuth exposes the monstrous ego of the successful poet, politician, performer, or anyone who has put him or herself above the common herd...

...His poem concentrates on a family of native Hawaiians in those crucial years when the last possibility of the islands remaining independent faded...

...Writers are again exploring the exuberance of the grand vision, the pleasures of storytelling, the incantatory power of meter—in short, the satisfactions of abundance after too many years of leanness...

...The Folding Cliffs is a powerful moral epic, unique in contemporary poetry...

...Now that we have reached another fin de siècle, however, that brave motto "make it new" may be running out of steam...

...By the time of their births in the 1860s, the Hawaiian monarchy had enjoyed its best days...

...That nothing really beats The heady moment of sweet contrast when, To make a phrase, they're laid out like a lox...

...As the poet tells the reader toward the end, a clergyman named Mr...

...His unfolding action makes his points more eloquently than any diatribe could, and simultaneously provides an exciting adventure story that keeps the reader turning pages...

...Her own family attended the Christian chapel and mission school, but also practiced the old religion to some extent...

...Pi'ilani and her husband, Ko'olau—a cowboy for a Scandinavian rancher and his Scottish wife—live on Kaua'i, the island closest to Polynesia and farthest removed from the nation's capital, Honolulu, This is where Captain Cook first landed...

...W. S. Merwin's The Folding Cliffs (Knopf, 331 pp., $25.00) provides, in the words of its subtitle, A Narrative of 19th Century Hawaii...

...Just Let Me Say This About That takes the form of an almost unbroken monologue that is by turns folksy, satiric, sentimental, sadistic, philosophical, evasive, a bit over the top, and wickedly funny...

...The Folding Cliffs is based on the true story of how Pi'ilani, Ko'olau, their child, and some friends briefly resisted the government's inhumane policy of isolating its lepers in settlements...

...Just Let Me Say This About That conveys truths about the contemporary world with a gusto that is positively Victorian...

...And like the 19th-century poet, Merwin's style suggests the flavor of a culture of ceremonial storytelling...

...The heroine, Pi'ilani, is born into a society already beginning to see more and more changes initiated by European and American settlers...

...Hardest of all, the native population was being ravaged by diseases these immigrants brought, including what the islanders called "the Chinese sickness"—leprosy...

...Fox...

...don't you Find that so...

...And they are well illustrated by the written record of Pi'ilani's life...

...Still, he abjures the temptation to preach against the injustices done to his heroine and her people, or lament the fragmentation of their way of life...

...But like Browning's rogues and madmen, Sir knows that an outrageous yam, artfully told, will invariably satisfy its audience...

...Comic always, painfully accurate sometimes...

...So, obviously, is Merwin, since without Sheldon's work, problematic as it may be, his heroine's story would most probably have been lost...

...Similarly, by immersing us in the lives of his characters and imaginatively portraying their understanding of events, Merwin seeks to change our picture of Hawaii...

...John Bricuth's Just Let Me Say This About That, the inaugural volume in the Overlook Press' new Sewanee Writers' Series (128 pp., $22.95), takes the form of an interview that results in three rather clueless reporters becoming the victims of an animated monologue given by "Sir...

...No, nothing quite gives back that special thrill, Seeing we're Americans, like going Out and killing something...

...If nothing else, postmodernism has reintroduced an appreciation of some of the literary virtues discarded by the modernists...

...We suspect even the seemingly benign Walt Whitman of gloating over the losers he pretends to empathize with...

...The Folding Cliffs follows Longfellow in that it takes the form of a semimythic narrative in which gods and mortals, legend and fact draw us inside the story until we begin to see its world from within...

...Such a multifaceted telling avoids the ideological pitfalls of liberal angst over past injustices...

...Through the particularities of Hawaiian history and life, Merwin manages to make the reader think about how so many societies shun the sick and otherwise rejected out of fear and self-interest, trying to avoid any recognition of a vulnerability common to all humans...

...the poem's style evokes Robert Browning, who really knew how to bring rascally narrators to life through their own disingenuous accounts of bad behavior...

...And you are not...

...As the reporters fall under the spell of his blarney they stop trying to catch him out and start pleading with him to explain the most puzzling enigmas of existence—like its ultimate meaning, or why bad things happen to good people...

...Inevitably, they find themselves maneuvered into the thankless role of straight men and are the butt of nasty jokes, patsies of crude stories...

...Sheldon always seemed to be hoping to hear something better Nevertheless, Pi'ilani is grateful for the minister's earnest attempt to bridge the cultural gulf between them...

...foreigners from Europe, the United States and Asia were gradually gaining control of the land...

...If you have seen the transcripts or accounts of Robert Frost in old age taking on a roomful of star-struck college students and their professors, you will recall a similar farrago of pithy sayings, clever metaphors and barely disguised yet often hilarious cruelty to those the speaker feels to be his inferiors...

...Two new, engrossing epic poems are the latest proof of the climate change in American verse...

...At the conclusion of the poem he attempts to win back the most savvy of his captives by announcing...

...It could be said that, at a deeper level, the three questioners and their respondent closely resemble literary critics trying to understand an author whose art, by its very nature, will always evade their attempts at categorization...

...Merwin, by contrast, relates the dwindling of an indigenous culture and race...

...While we wince at the mean pleasure that Sir takes in making monkeys out of his hapless stooges, though, the fact remains that they come across as poor sticks compared to the scintillating charisma of his riffs...

...The hope was that having "walked in another's moccasins" by following the Ojibwa hero's adventures and studying his legends, we would learn to respect, even identify with, the original inhabitants of the Americas...

...Long after the practice had been abandoned elsewhere, Hawaii continued interning the afflicted, partly because this freed the sick persons' properties for use by others...