Singing About the Culture

...Garrigue's appreciation of the Italian poet Leopardi, "A Life Lived at the Extreme" (October 9,1967), has haunted me since I first read it...

...Melodramatist" fits the romantic writer not always sure of the difference between genuine horror and stage tricks...

...The earliest examples of writing preserve fragments of hymns, epics, even doggerel, scratched on walls and potsherds...

...Yet the earthy, humorous wisdom of these pieces has kept most of them in print to this day because they have continued to enlighten readers long after the ephemera that inspired them has been forgotten...

...A beautiful, somewhat frail woman, Garrigue's polite manner was characterized by James Laughlin of New Directions as that of a jeune fille bien élevée—a hangover from her Midwestern upbringing...

...Any other approach sets up a prison of expectations, he argued, that are bound to disappoint...

...Nothing could be further from the truth...

...Djilas, Hyman, Nemerov, and Garrigue—along with Mike Kolatch, who befriended us all and gave so many writers a place to hone their observations on literature and society— were my mentors, and though the intervening years have added to that company, they still help me see clearly...

...Garrigue examined techniques employed by her fellowpoets— the cadence of their lines, the music of their language...

...well, never mind...

...Ancient poetic forms from Persian and Indian literature gave rise to new hybrids like the English-language "ghazal...

...Milovan Djilas' Conversations with Stalin had just been published and, in the Cold War climate, was being much discussed...

...By how she disposes and arranges the visible, she gets at imponderables of effect...

...Berryman's alter ego, Henry, the voice of these poems, she described as living "in pain and fear and dread, an American in the midst of violence...

...Our obvious bewilderment, though, mollified him enough to direct us to where we finally bought our precious copy...

...What began as a fresh and revolutionary mode of composition and analysis grew stale and constricting, until the words themselves stopped being music, or even making sense, and became wordplay puzzles...

...Eliot" is aimed more against the oedipal influence than the poet...

...Her essay on "Pasternak's Patient Spirit" (May 28, 1968) is similarly memorable...

...It is possible to misread this as the voice of depression talking, but that would overlook Nemerov's prophetic insight that the Modernist movement had hit a brick wall...

...In "Polonius as Polonius" (March 4, 1963), Nemerov dissected one of his own poems...

...For beyond the particular problem of Mr...

...the Whitmania...

...Ostensibly demonstrating the way a writer's mind works during the process of creation, he suggested how to read literature: by avoiding Procrustean critical templates and instead engaging in a kind of dialogue with the author, listening to the case being made before reaching a judgment...

...His shelves were stacked with New Masses, Soviet Life and books extolling the Workers' Paradise...

...It provided me—a would-be writer—with an introduction to a contemporary literary scene not found in school anthologies, led off in every issue by Stanley Edgar Hyman's refreshingly candid "Writers & Writing" column...

...and above all it is not done...

...The Blake-fakery...

...Twenty-five Years with Mr...

...Poet-translators like Robert Bly, W.S...

...Elizabeth Bishop, for Garrigue, "elicits beauty without beautiful words or bountiful sentiments...

...She shrewdly suspected that Henry's "rapidly shifting states of mind" represented yet another movement's dead end—in this case, the brief and (to its practitioners) self-destructive "Confessional" school...

...Her own verse combined the intellectual and the personal, qualities she treasured in others...

...Time winnows out much literary chaff...

...Nor is it done by thinking about something called Poetry as though that existed independently of one poem and another, or something called Greatness as though that were arrived at immediately by fiat...

...She and Berryman both died a mere four years later, but not before Garrigue produced the finest of her poetry...

...The philosophic lyrics of Czeslaw Milosz and his fellow Poles created influential new schools of poetics...

...Garrigue's final column for the magazine, "Rapidly Shifting States of Mind" (December 2, 1968), warily considered John Berryman's-His Toy, His Dream, His Rest...

...Many of Nemerov's columns take note of the confusion that ensued when schools of verse vied with one another to fill the vacuum...

...Cultures have sung to and of themselves from prehistoric times...

...and a criticism developed, which being unable to say anything about the poems, talked largely and rather mysteriously about a 'new idiom'—an epithet whose frequent iteration on dust jackets and in reviews leads me to say that if poems are written by poets, then idioms must be written by...

...Eliot" (December 9,1963), he offered a wry re-evaluation of T.S...

...By that time, the "naked" verse Nemerov confronted was pulling its pants back on, and the "noisy" work Garrigue tartly shushed was being modulated into more dulcet tones...

...Whether you are the sort who finds Aiken vatic and emotionally manipulative, or someone like me who willingly throws yourself into his ecstatic, metaphysical bacchanal, Garrigue evokes the heady effects of Aiken's sonorous cogitations...

...From a personal standpoint, Nemerov was reworking his own relationship with poetry in his NL essays...

...The future laureate (1988-1990) clearly overcame his doubts...

...We are comfortable, 40 years on, recalling only such highlights as Sylvia Plath's Ariel, Robert Lowell's Life Studies and the emergence of exciting talents like W.S...

...for these things . . . are ritual dramas played by Time for the malefit of the vulgar...

...Nemerov pleaded for more nuanced readings, less dogma, less bald assertion of What Literature Should Be or, as he titled one piece, "Instant Opinions" (September 2, 1963...

...it did not stifle him...

...Stanley also recruited his Bennington colleague Howard Nemerov to write about poetry for the NL...

...Then in his mid40s, Nemerov was a diffident, shy man with a mellifluous voice—in speaking and in print—and a biting, ironic sense of humor tinged with melancholy...

...the sutras that have come unstitched...

...Despite this, or perhaps because of it, middle age found him struggling with self-doubt...

...For most of the poets who came ofageinthe 1940s and '50s, including Nemerov, Eliot was the supreme mentor...

...Her writing pushed limits to convey simultaneous complex thoughts and emotional impressions...

...That is to say, he worked in the traditional lyric forms and made them his own...

...A fresh rebirth of Romanticism—represented by voices as diverse as Anthony Hecht, Amy Clampitt, Philip Levine, Brad Leithauser, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Henri Cole, Laurie Scheck, and Mary Oliver—broke through Modernist irony with unaffected sentiment and a yearning for the sublime...

...He breathed the better for its demands...

...Sympathizing with the rejection of styles that had become too self-conscious, he nonetheless observed, with characteristic mockery—in "The Local Chinoiserie" (May 13,1963)—that "poets naturally began to cast around for something else, which has often taken the form of a simplicity, or intelligence-defying opacity, of which little or nothing need be said...

...Nemerov delicately implies that Eliot himself might have lost faith in Modernism—perhaps the reason why his poetic voice fell silent after 1942...

...Yet she could be pithy in her assessments, as when she called Robert Penn Warren "a melodramatist of terror and the irreconcilables...

...Just beneath her poised surface, though, lurked a passionate risk-taker...

...In an age of many talking birds, Roethke was a singing bird," she wrote...

...With the tension Samuel Johnson sometimes created in his The Lives of the Poets, she counterpoises his unhappy, stunted life of aristocratic privation with his incandescent writing...

...he exclaims in a review of Naked Poetry (1969), an anthology whose editors tried to replace the cerebral precepts of Modernism with a celebration of anti-intellectual rant that turned out to be more demagogic on the nature of poetry than Papa Tom or Uncle Ezra ever managed...

...His wild originality, rather than being subdued, thrived in form...

...Eliot's work there arises, revealed to us by the relentless efforts of so many clerks and scribes, the general problem that might be thought of as the assault of language upon mind, whereby the much multiplied effort of our age to find 'the meaning' of something leads out time and time again to where the ghostly meaninglessness of everything beckons to despair...

...Garrigue once confessed that she preferred "elaborate structures to functional slick ones...

...Many-layered prose sentences in her reviews sometimes came close to turning into lyric poems in their own right...

...She is a poet whose art is in delicate substantiality, in veracious firmness, the clearness that creates invisible overtones...

...After vision problems in June 1965 forced him to give up the biweekly stint he started in May 1961, he continued, up to his untimely death in July 1970, to write for The New Leader's semiannual book issues...

...Wandering into one dingy shop, we asked for the magazine and the proprietor shouted at us, "Look around you...

...His time at the magazine—1962 to 1964—was cut short by an acute attack of writer's block that took him several years to overcome...

...Thomas Transtromer and C.P...

...Nemerov arrives at the sad but realistic conclusion that most new collections—far from offering 70 or so poems to compete with Shakespeare's sonnets and Keats' best odes—may with luck contain one or two lyrics worth the price of the book: "It takes an affectionate, or at least candid study to get to where you can make up your mind...

...My first encounter with it came, somewhat circuitously, in 1963 when I was a romantic high school student...

...This is no accident— poems are, as Wallace Stevens said, "the music of what happens...

...Looking back, I am particularly thankful that the "On Poetry" column was a place to record some evidence of how America sang to and of itself over more than half a century...

...by avowing that X is a great poet and then trying to read his poems on that basis...

...Eliot's work has had both the advantage and the related disadvantage, all in a very few years, of the kind of attention that even Shakespeare and the Bible might presently, after centuries, be exhausted by...

...theriggish vedantics...

...On the contrary, American poetry has found refreshment by exposure to international tastes and influences that aided us in reassessing our traditions...

...Whereas Nemerov meditated on the art of reading...

...IN 1968,1 began reviewing occasionally for The New Leader...

...and Mr...

...When my young self finally got her hands on that copy of The New Leader, she sat down to read, hoping to understand the confusing world of Cold War politics, and to learn about how "the unacknowledged legislators of the world" make sense of it...

...On a quest for a copy, another Slavophile and I snuck around sections of Chicago our parents would not have let two sheltered suburban girls explore...

...The mid- 1960s were marked by startling transitions in poetic tastes, spurred by the passing of writers like Eliot and Frost...

...Nevertheless, his essays were the genesis of the magazine's "On Poetry' column...

...They began by imitating him, struggling to say something of therr own while remaining faithful to his magisterial precepts...

...Not that the waning decades of the 20th century marked any literary retrogression...

...Reading Warren at his most Southern gothic, the reader suspects, even while shivering at his invocations of evil, that the unspeakable may be no more than the author in a white sheet impersonating the bogeyman...

...Success came early to him, and by the mid-1960s it was common to hear speculation that he might be heir to the late Robert Frost as the Great American Poet...

...Full disclosure: Stanley and I met in 1964 at Bennington College, where he taught literary criticism, and were married in 1966...

...Garrigue's language of praise is equally judicious...

...Poetry has sometimes been dismissed as simply an aesthetic exercise...

...Eliot's Collected Poems: "It is natural enough that if you use language, you will sooner or later use it up...

...Enthralled by all things Slavic myself—I pored over translations of Aleksandr Pushkin, Adam Mickiewicz, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Osip Mandelstam the way many teenagers today soak up rock lyrics—I spent my allowance on the book...

...Cavafy opened eyes to new horizons...

...In "Twenty-five Years with Mr...

...Eastern European émigré writers like Joseph Brodsky (who first gained widespread attention in this country through The New Leader) brought a deeper appreciation of Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva...

...Merwin, Elizabeth Bishop and Philip Levine...

...The Language of Praise: A Review of Some Distinguished Poetry Blurbs" (December 10, 1962) quotes generously from the hype by other poets that gets slapped on dust jackets...

...John Ashbery and James Merrill crooned lyrics that harmonized postmodern observations with the high camp patter of Cole Porter and Noel Coward...

...Mike Kolatch invited me to try my hand at "On Poetry" in 1976...

...He was distressed by the increasingly crude puffery publishers resorted to in marketing poetry to a dwindling readership...

...The Author's Note mentioned that Djilas was a contributor to The New Leader, but the magazine was not available on our local newsstands...

...His final piece arrived on the editor's desk the day he died...

...Do you think I would carry"—he almost spat the name—"The New Leader...

...Discussing the Preludes for Memnon of Conrad Aiken, she declared that to read them is to "experience an agonizing sense of the cosmos, on a course that reels from pole to pole and reels, moreover, from the heights without to the depths within, from self and its 'multitude of the self to the vastitudes that enclose it, from the mind that is its own eternity and cosmos to the vertigos, the abysses of space and time that it is its own power to conceive of...

...Jean Garrigue'S initial "On Poetry" column, "A Mountain on the Landscape" (December 7,1964), was a poignant tribute to Theodore Roethke, who died the previous year...

...Merwin and Mark Strand introduced English-speaking readers to "the other America" of the Southern Hemisphere, where Pablo Neruda's shadow stretches as broad as the Andes...

...The magazine satisfied my hunger for East European dissident writers, but I was also intrigued by the back of the book...

...A perceptive reader might have glimpsed from Nemerov's criticism the demons he was trying to exorcise from his poetry...

...In Nemerov's reviews, however, the bad stuff, rightly forgotten, comes screaming back with shrill ideological slogans against rhyme, meter, anything remotely suggesting an idea...

...I was at once absorbed in the Yugoslav writer's gritty evocation of life under Marshal Tito, and his vampire-like portrait of Josef Stalin...

...Her description's teetering between compliment and criticism is part of its deftness...