McClatchy's Passionate Pursuit

...It thrives on the tension between what is said and not said...

...Is he really talking about literature here, you ask, or about himself...

...His essays would be less lyrical, his verse would probably have a different form were he not so shrewd both at analyzing and creating...

...In pointing out that the word "musing derives from the Latin musum, meaning 'snout,'" McClatchy declares that readers ought to "nose around in a text, like moles or pigs, sniffing and tunneling, following a trail of evidence through the past, or rooting for dream-truffles...

...McClatchy sometimes enjoys framing his apercus as epigrams, scattering them like four-leaf clovers or rare and lovely wildflowers to capture our attention...

...when it speaks, it wants you to lean forward a little to overhear...

...Tea With the Local Saint" calls sainthood "a fate/Worse than life, nights on call for the demons...

...There is a counterpoint between the "Thou shalt nots" of the commandments and the poet's gradually unfolding autobiography—what he calls in one poem, "my sideshow"—where, one by one, the divine commands are violated...

...Since the story is told to illustrate the way writers who have influenced us continue to speak out of our own works after their deaths, McClatchy might have made it up as parable for all the reader knows...

...Although Twenty Questions, consisting of occasional essays and reviews, lacks this overriding organization, it works well as a companion to the poetry...

...McClatchy's critical acumen knows the drawbacks of diffuseness, so he completes the hook...

...But it might not be entirely off base to describe the poetry of the 1990s in similar terms...

...And days spent parroting the timeless adages"— like the seraphic sounding homily he once heard from Pope John XXIII that translation revealed as an admonition to wear a seatbelt when driving...

...Had it not been for the [Mosaic] law, I would not have known sin,' says Paul in the Epistle to the Romans...

...In the midst of our millennial countdown, while other poets and critics are moaning about the decline of poetry's audience, he is out there vigorously wooing new converts...

...Such vivid observations can be found throughout both the poems and the essays...

...Only years later did it make sense...

...Readers learn to pan the gravel carefully, searching for the flash of authentic gold...

...A parable about one of the great Modernist masters autographing a book for him, by asking the young man to bend over so he can use his back to write on, appears in the poem "Auden's OED": To write in the book, he required a desk...

...Although there are many fine poets currently writing, most lack the manic energy, self-destructive brilliance, intellectual heft, or lyric optimism of previous decades...

...You won't find a more heartfelt reading of Alexander Pope's "Epistle to Miss Blount," and may even be moved to tears by it, as I was...

...The pieces on James Wright and Seamus Heaney, while detecting problems in some of the poems, are suffused with a charity that makes their truthfulness seem more of a tribute than any whitewashing praise possibly could...

...Rarely is an author equally competent in two genres, though poet/critics are slightly more common than, say, poet/novelists or playwrights who also excel (as opposed to dabbling) at short stories...

...In a poignant autobiographical meditation in Twenty Questions, "My Fountain Pen," he talks about his own homosexuality and early crushes...

...The phrase "literature of the '90s" still calls to mind century-old images of The Yellow Book, of "music falling with a dying fall," of Art Nouveau wistfulness...

...A clever touch—almost too clever, I thought, as I settled down to read...

...It needs secrets...

...For all his considerable intelligence, McClatchy is a Romantic who sees through mere pigeonholing (like the distinction between "serious" and "light" verse) and insists on the primacy of emotional connections...

...McClatchy demonstrates that the same law structures the way we perceive our psychological makeup, and gives shape to our art...

...Writers & Writing McCLATCHY'S PASSIONATE PURSUIT BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL It's hard not to wax valedictory about 20th-century poetry with the millennium staring us in the face and pundits summing up the tenor of our times...

...But the incident happens to be authentic, as we discover upon encountering it again in an autobiographical essay...

...Even a superior book of new verse usually contains only a few really good poems...

...Like some minor god in an old myth, I've changed them back into secrets...

...it prefers the oblique, the implied, the ironic, the suggestive...

...Proust in Bed"—grimly set in juxtaposition to the commandment, "Honor thy father and thy mother"—places its hero in a male brothel...

...This partly explains why J. D. McClatchy is so refreshing...

...I do not mean to imply that McClatchy's gift lies principally in one-liners...

...By then I'd figured out that he'd been writing on me ever since that encounter, or that I'd unconsciously made of myself a desk so that he could continue— the common imagination s dogsbody and ringmaster—still to speak up, however halting or indirect the voice...

...relatively few do so today...

...A poem needs disguises...

...Variations on Lines Canceled by Dickinson"] Another comes in the critic's discussion of Tin Pan Alley, when he allows that "Without their musical settings, most song lyrics are as lusterless as pebbles carried home from the beach...

...If one feels passionately about verse, he keeps saying, then the compulsion to learn as much as one can about a poem one is attracted to has parallels with the pursuit of a beautiful person...

...Take Ten Commandments...

...His account of coming out to his parents is one of those acutely embarrassing adolescent comedies of errors—emotion recollected in anything but tranquillity...

...It underlines the vicious undercurrents often found in familial love, and what, elsewhere, McClatchy calls "The Dialogue of Desire and Guilt...

...But all are part of some compelling poem or argument about the nature of a poet or poetry itself...

...Much of it sounds muted, filled with echoes of the more heroic sounds it pays nostalgic homage to...

...Another poem, "Three Dreams About Elizabeth Bishop," is explicated in "Dreaming," a piece devoted to the relation between the action of poems and the action of REM sleep, an '"internal storm' of nearly hallucinatory sensations on which both our psyches and our bodies depend...

...One of the principal differences between those Gay '90s and our own fin de siècle is that back then literate people read poems...

...My back would do as well as any Tree trunk or cafeteria tabletop...

...Their mild dissent is taken in stride, Part of the rag-tag march of convictions circling Every town hall in New England today...

...Through these essays, we experience his deep emotion for the works of Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, W S. Merwin, and yes, Stephen Sondheim...

...McClatchy does not indulge in hand-wringing about this, but I think his awareness of the problem contributes to the urgency with which he discourses on the charms of his beloved art...

...The poet has organized a miscellaneous selection of poems written over a period of years by filing each one under an appropriate injunction from the Decalogue, from "Thou shalt have none other gods but me" to "Thou shalt not covet...

...McClatchy belongs in this select company, and his skills in one mode complement his gifts in the other...

...My suspicions, though, soon gave way to admiration...

...Incest fantasies mixed with sadism comment on what the author of In Search of Lost Time doesn't spell out about his erotic tastes...

...For McClatchy, the difference is minimal...

...another halfdozen have their moments, and the rest are ephemera to pad out the requisite number of pages...

...T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Allen Tate, Howard Nemerov, Louise Bogan, and Randall Jarrell all commanded admiration for their essays and their verse...

...In two new books, one a collection of verse, Ten Commandments (Knopf, 104 pp., $21.00), the other critical essays, titled Twenty Questions (Posed by Poems) (Columbia, 196 pp., $22.50), the fall force of his probing intelligence and emotional insight catches us up with infectious gusto...

...His own description of a Fourth of July parade in a village in Maine is such a reward: An antinuclear family with their PEACE poster, His gray-shot beard and serious pothead eyes, Her bovine sweetness gently switching flies From their month-old son in his stroller Wreathed with a strung-out daisy chain...

...The "crucial moment in anyone's reading life [is] to fall in love with a text, to feel its sexual heat, to sense it unbuttoning your shirt...

...it wants you to understand things only years later...

...His memorable images can sometimes be quoted out of context, as I've just done...

...This striking poem is too complex to excerpt, nor will any summary convey more than a whisper of its visceral impact...

...McClatchy touches on many of the same topics in prose as in verse...

...Ten Commandments provides both an ironic commentary on the strictures of religion (the poet is a lapsed Catholic) and a romantic elucidation of the thrill of the forbidden...

...In his title essay he tells us, tongue in cheek, that Modernism in verse is often taken to refer to "the heroic generation of poets, from Yeats and Eliot to Williams and Frost, who had braved the thorny perils of the Great War and Freud and Marx in order to kiss poetry awake from its languorous Victorian spell...

...Of those beloveds who changed his life McClatchy notes: "Each of these men I have disguised in—or really, transformed into—poems in order to keep hold of them...

...The essay contains and comments upon a Horatian ode about lost loves he wrote at 50 (this same lyric concludes Ten Commandments...