Viereck's Puppets
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing VIERECK'S PUPPETS By Phoebe Pettingell For almost 60 years the indefatigable Peter Viereck has honed his wit and offered shrewd cultural judgments in spirited formal...
...Not all Viereck's poems have such an epic quality...
...And the end hard...
...Smelling of urine and roses, clasping a nursing-home garland, Alzheimer'd granny is fabling on her rocker: Tales truer for being garbled...
...Against all odds, Viereck has been inspired by what he wryly calls "those gifts reserved for age...
...By turns irreverently philosophical or laughingly tragic, Viereck's puppets dance the spiraling rounds of historical revolutions and human stages of development...
...They include not merely illness ("the conqueror germ" in Viereck's parlance) and failing memory, but also what T.S...
...In previous centuries, though, major poets employed it for satiric effect, or to convey a homespun quality...
...Hospitals appear as a kind of Hades from which, in common with Persephone, we hope to be freed after a season...
...The two of them are, as the poet has her put it, "Viereck's puppets"—an objectification of his musings about cycles of creative activity and lying fallow, together with apprehensions of his own approaching extinction...
...Eliot identified as "the conscious impotence of rage/At human folly, and the laceration/Of laughter at what ceases to amuse...
...I'm too solid for fluff' romantic props...
...Aboveground, she becomes, according to some versions of the myth, the bride of Dionysus, god of the grape—who is associated with resurrection too, since he was torn to pieces before coming back to life, just as vines must be pruned back to sticks at the end of the season in order to grow more abundantly the next year...
...Not many a belle-dame-sans is also a nanny...
...In doing so, he proves once again its flexibility and emotional resonance...
...Fed up with his attempts to poeticize her, she tells him, "nothing wows me but the commonplace...
...Doggerel's effects are often comic, but they also allow for philosophical musings, mockery and even a species of folksy pathos...
...Among many other matters, the poem contemplates the effect morphine (given as a painkiller) has on the imagination...
...So each new teller of the universal myths of our culture changes the plot a bit in order to highlight an aspect hearers may have missed in earlier recountings, until human voices fall silent and our alphabets become meaningless scratchings...
...Viereck and Garrison Keillor may be the only well-known writers who still love doggerel, and probably no one has put it through more paces than Viereck...
...Halt—can you hear me?—you falling leaf up there...
...Pluto can't keep his mitts off me...
...His partner links herself with everyone from Eve and the Virgin Mary to Joan of Arc, "Madame Ovary," and the girl-who-can't-sayno...
...Writers & Writing VIERECK'S PUPPETS By Phoebe Pettingell For almost 60 years the indefatigable Peter Viereck has honed his wit and offered shrewd cultural judgments in spirited formal verse...
...Viereck is fascinated by this peculiar ménage-à-trois in which intoxicated Dionysus must share his sweetheart (a standin for the poet's muse) with Death himself...
...American poets particularly excelled at doggerel: James Russell Lowell's "A Fable for Critics" sustained it for several cantos...
...In "The Green Menagerie," speakers "include DNA, potato, cactus, stone, and water, as well as occasional human voices...
...he's conned By all that's round...
...The form probably reached its apogee between the final decades of the last century and the early part of this one with the popularity of such newspaper columnist poets as Eugene Field, Gelett Burgess (of "Purple Cow" fame), Guy Wetmore Carryl, and Don Marquis—inventor of the irrepressible literary cockroach, archy, and his pal the upbeat alley cat, mehitabel...
...No wonder the poet has Dionysus complain in one of the Persephone poems that his beloved is "now hooked on wines of entropy booze;/She brews them from poppies, not vines" to become a psychedelic hippie maenad, prone to dark hallucinations and violence...
...The god is now identified with Orpheus and Christ —also with Arthur Rimbaud and his drunken boat...
...Brodsky, like Viereck, knew how effective doggerel can be...
...The poem's Dionysus, "an aging shabby wine salesman and magician, feeling vine's autumn," sometimes breaks into musical comedy-style arias with grace notes of Cole Porter or Noel Coward in bittersweet mode: Poignant: this autumn aura, this afterglow half-shed, No matter which orphaned flora (youth, lust, or primavera) I hoard...
...This is the ancient tale of the three...
...Dionysus Jones"] and Persephone to the old folklore humor of the traveling salesman and the farmer's daughter.'· But gradually the speaker becomes the voice of the scribbler as well, addressing his "'belle dame sans merci' muse...
...Finally, in "Pluto Incognito," the poet concludes that his appropriation of the mythic story is akin to A grandma fabling for children...
...I thought a lyric befits this work by Peter Viereck, perhaps the greatest rhymer of the modern period, a prof of history at Mount Holyoke College famed for its feminists and foliage...
...But harder this poignance, whittled by my rhymes...
...In today's painfully earnest critical climate, though, it can be hard to scrape up an audience for any humorous verse...
...With my glamorless chore of baby-sitting the crops, I'm hard-core no-nonsense ore...
...These riveting poems are always laughing through tears of pain, humiliation, frustrated rage, and fear...
...His declared last collection, Tide and Continuities: Last and First Poems 1995-1938 (Arkansas, 320 pp., $42.00), is introduced by the late Joseph Brodsky in an appropriately poetic Foreword...
...This is the future tale of the trillion...
...Sometimes their puppeteer makes them deliberately artificial, like the stock characters of commedia dell' arte...
...The final section of this volume returns to the Dionysus/ Persephone story, and to even darker observations about the end of life...
...Tide and Continuities (a rather academic title for such a versatile and entertaining book) begins with the poet's most recent work...
...He has displayed resentment because she only gets to spend six months of the year aboveground with him before she must return to Hades...
...I, too, have Xanadus," Viereck remarks, alluding to Coleridge's drug-induced "Kubla Khan...
...In the original, the young maiden was raped by Pluto and forced to live as his queen in the underworld, but her sorrowing mother refused to make the crops grow until her child was restored...
...Other times, he moves their strings in a way that makes them affectingly lifelike...
...Love poems abound, but so do satires with titles like "Now that Holocaust and Crucifixion are Coffee-Table Books...
...In his long career, Peter Viereck has saved his best for the last, and his contribution to this ancient story needs to be heard...
...However, she puts him in his place: "Don't map me as femme-fatale-ing all over the place...
...Sadly, in our own day, we associate its mongrel meter and jangly rhymes with the work of inept poetasters and saccharine greeting-card verses...
...Much of it deals with mythic themes of death and resurrection, and an initial series of poems, including "Dionysus in Old Age," retells the story of Persephone, daughter of Ceres, goddess of the harvest...
...The gods came up with a compromise that returned Persephone to the world of earth and sky for six months of each year, ensuring summer's abundance before her inevitable disappearance to the subterranean land of the dead...
...Nijinsky carols from his Swiss madhouse, Venus in a music hall plays Mary Magdalene as "Maggie Jones...
...The children, bored (they'd rather play soccer), Retell it blurred, with new myth garnished...
...Born in the same decade as Dylan Thomas and Robert Lowell, Viereck has lived through the era of neometaphysical poetry bristling with Donne-ish puns and Audenesque prosodic pyrotechnics, then that of Minimalist blank verse and plain speaking, and into the current return to Romantic expansiveness...
...Thus Vierecks version of the tale begins with an explanatory note: "Not theological nor supernatural in its myth-echoes, the poem relates Dionysus [here "Mr...
...No guild Can build on my quicksilver quicksand base, I dodging your x-rays paraphrase...
...I'm slapdash life, not school...
...Viereck includes elegies for his father and for a brother killed fighting the Nazis in Italy...
...Sprinkled throughout Tides and Continuities are short lyrics in a variety of forms: Sapphics, odes, ballads, almost-sonnets of 13 lines...
...An introduction to a book of poetry must have a look of poetry...
...Doggerel mixes with the sublime to create a thoroughly contemporary poetry...
...Byron and Browning were adepts...
...Science sings antistrophe to Myth's strophe...
...I'm whirls of myth and science Through wheels of song and silence...
...Fall is the heartbreak Her Niobe-heart can't bear...
...The first, and most recently written, section of the book begins with a long poem, "At My Hospital Window," tracing the effects of a critical illness Viereck suffered a few years ago...
...sickness as a condition we yearn to recover from, made whole again like dismembered Dionysus...
...Unimpressed by his sentimentality, Persephone belts out her numbers like Ethel Merman, in "Goat Ode in Mid-Dive" (the word "tragedy' derives from a Greek word meaning "goat song...
...And so forth for 10 more rollicking stanzas...
...Halt in mid-air...
Vol. 81 • August 1998 • No. 9
