Books

New Poetry

Educated at Harvard and Cambridge, PETER DAVISON is the executive editor of the Atlantic Monthly Press. He has won the competition for the Yale Series of Younger Poets with his new book, THE BREAKING OF THE DAY AND OTHER POEMS,which will be published in January.

By Peter Davison

BY PETEK DAVISON

POETRY of late has been aiming itself in new directions. With the disappearance from the scene, within the last several years, of most of the senior American poets, an era has ended. Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, Theodore Roethke have died within the last eighteen months, and Robinson Jeffers and Wallace Stevens preceded them by not long. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound have all but stopped writing. Of the veterans only Conrad Aiken, it seems, continues in the full strength of his poetic powers. In the meantime, poets who only a year ago were thought of as “younger" suddenly find themselves, in their forties, the movers and shakers whom the younger poets look up to: Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, Howard Nemerov, Robert Duncan.
Yet this sudden adjustment did not, of course, dawn yesterday. For the past decade the change has been in the making. One sign of it has been the grouping of poets into schools — a symptom of unrest more than of binding alliances. Groupings of this kind perhaps help poets sort themselves out but usually confuse matters. There is only one Muse of Poetry, although there are many ways of serving her; and a traveler who had been thought to be a member of one camp may quietly have packed his tent on his shoulders and wandered away along the slopes of Helicon according to his own impulse and deepest need. Yet, symptom or cause, the coalescence of “groups" is a sign of seriousness, of commitment, of concern. The results of it are before the public. There are perhaps as many good American poets between the ages of twentyfive and fifty writing just now as there have been for a long while.
Like the poets of a generation ago, perhaps of any generation, these younger poets must challenge themselves to seek out a style of their own — a rhetoric competent to register the full range of their inchoate feelings, yet one which will collect these feelings into a clarity. A poet’s style is more than an answer to a question; it is even more than “the man himself.” The interaction between a poet’s style and his subject matter is itself part of what he confronts in the world around him. How does this tree, this grief, this sunlight embody itself in language — my language? I cannot know experience except through language; and if my language is inadequate to my experience, must I change the warp of my language, or must certain realms of experience pass forever into darkness for me? This very dilemma can work its way into the stuff of poetry: the interchange between language and feeling, between sunlight and fog.
Robert Lowell has spoken of the distinction between “cooked” and “raw” poetry. Five years ago it was a just metaphor for the situation, but the distinctions have already broken down, as the best poets of the “raw” school have pushed farther out toward finding forms and styles for shaping naked experience and as the “cooked” poets have broken down the academic forms of verse and diction to suit the kicking, shoving demands of the world around them.
EDWARD FIELD, whose first volume, STAND UP, FRIEND, WITH ME (Grove, $2.50), is this year’s Lamont Poetry Selection, shows the expansion of a meeting ground for taste; for his book of fanciful, amusing, rueful, raw poems was chosen for its award by a committee of the cooked. This poet has settled on one of the hardest solutions to the dialectic between language and experience: utter simplicity.
Field’s simplicity lies as much in his rhythm as in his diction, and it enables him to speak freshly and freely. His verse runs in the rhythms of the beat tradition in verse, but he almost alone has attained a distinctive rhythm. Hear the falling cadences in this passage from a small poem, “The Telephone”:
My happiness depends on an electric appliance
And I do not mind giving it so much credit
With life in this city being what it is
Each person separated from friends
By a tangle of subways and buses
Yes my telephone is my joy
It tells me that I am in the world and wanted
The flatness of this speech is that of a telephone conversation between friends, and so is the speech in most of this book. Yet Field gives it a turn, both for ironic humor and for sadness, that the language has not had before. The danger of this sort of innocence in language, of course, is playing the faux naïf, but Field manages to avoid that trap by the natural sweetness of his feelings, and beneath their limpid surfaces his poems disclose new depths. Three of the poems in this book are as good as anything I have read lately: “Graffiti,” one of the funniest, most romantic poems of recent years, which unfortunately does not bear quoting in a family magazine; “Ode to Fidel Castro,” a nonpolitical sort of celebration, with a marvelous mockheroic style; and “The Charmed Pool,” which tells the story of a prince who, at a charmed pool “swarming with lower forms of life,” kissed beast after beast, only to have them cast off their spells and become bores or disappointments. Prince Charming’s fate echoes the mood and theme of this whole book:
When a man tries the charmed pool and fails
What can he do if he doesn’t die of it?
. . . Did he find the road back to where he came from?
And learn like us to live from day to day
Eating what’s to eat and making love with what’s available?
THE third book by BROTHER ANTONINUS, THE HAZARDS OF HOLINESS (Doubleday, £2.95), is a barbarous book of Christian endeavor, dominated by violence and yet often splendid despite its excesses. Brother Antoninus, a Dominican lay brother and an older poet than Field, has also been grouped with those of the beat tradition, yet he brings to his poems a fierce religious zeal which makes his struggles with language emblematic of his spiritual wrestlings. And what struggles they are! At his worst, Brother Antoninus grabs for the first word at hand — if it rolls rhetorically enough. At other times he reaches clear across the table for the remotest words to be had: “he, the inveterate rapacity/Of the nerve’s conquisitional itch; she, the indominate rigor/Of the martyr’s faith. . . .”
But at his best he is perhaps alone among devotional poets today in possessing poetic fire to light his faith. He can recreate the dramatic moments of biblical confrontation, like those of Jacob with the Angel, of Salome and St. John, of Judith and Holofernes (who are described in the lines quoted above), or of the conversion of St. Paul. Here is the moment of confrontation on the road to Damascus. Note especially the last lines.
Crash! A brilliance so bright
The noon blanked black
Overhead where the sun was;
Intense radiance unwombed;
One lasting flash,
One fast unfaceable spasm.
The horse uprearing
Outsprung from under,
Forked ears pronged
On the blinding intenseness,
The high-pawed hooves . . .
Crash! The clang of fallen metal, armor
Rang on the road, the flailed scabbard,
That loose-sprung blade, grit-grating,
Steel on stone.
A passage like this shows Brother Antoninus at his best and worst. Words like “unfaceable,” “unwombed,” and “pronged” show how far he tries to stretch the language — and how the language refuses to give. But it is heartening to find a Christian poet who can bring a terrible passion to his writing, particularly since such poets as Daniel Berrigan, S.J., have proved disappointing after a fine start. Brother Antoninus, in his struggle with the inchoate, reaches for the verb and finds his rhythms in incantation. Unlike other poetry of the San Francisco school, his rhetoric operates on substantial subject matter.
On the “cooked” side of poetry, the expansion of technique and subject matter has been no less impressive. It may well turn out that the most influential poetry collection of recent years was Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, that strangely brilliant, curiously unsatisfying testimony to a change of direction. Published in 1959, it brought, in its nakedness, its matter-of-fact autobiographical scruffiness, a dimension into the poetry of the East Coast that had been missing from its tradition since Ezra Pound’s work was as good as ended, lying like a great city in ruins. The rhythm, the tone of voice in Life Studies owe much to T. S. Eliot, but the subject matter lies beyond Eliot’s pale: lust, madness, self-hatred, nightmare, autobiography. Poets who, like Anne Sexton, W. D. Snodgrass, and FREDERICK SEIDEL, author of FINAL SOLUTIONS (Random House, $3.75), have followed Lowell’s lead find themselves in a new, strange, unsettled country (“Between the unreal and the next world, stretched taut”) where heightened perception is its own reward, where there seems nothing reliable except sensation, and compassion is the ultimate, the only act of community.
Final Solutions (the echo of Hitler, Eichmann, and the Jews must be deliberate) has in it the mutter of self-destruction, of self-immolation. Seidel’s remarkable poems will frighten you in their flirtation at the borderline between despair and madness. They are portraits in a dramatic monologue form; but they have about them, too, the air of diagnosis (words turn up like “hebephrenic,” “anosognosia,” “pseudocyesis,” “aphasia,” “leukotome”): they recite agonizing symptoms without comment. These poems are difficult to quote from, since their effects accumulate. The portraits have wide variety: a woman psychoanalyst retired to live in Maine; an old Roman who dreams of a longago love and dies of a heart attack; a young soldier stationed in Germany; a pregnant girl whose young husband is dying of cancer; a Paris concierge; an affair in modern Rome; a young girl going mad. These stories sound at times like the Hardy of Satires of Circumstance; most often and most nearly they sound like Robert Lowell. They are powerful indeed in their probing of the recesses of character; yet they are cribbed, confined, by their refusal — or inability — to find or take a stand anywhere, except to say, “This is it.” The few fleeting moments of acceptance come with the experience of sensuality or else with a shrug of the shoulders:
Coming home,
After a rainy night in Central Park,
Behind his old friend, his old suffering mare,
A horse-cab driver, looking straight ahead,
Smiles quietly, just because it is morning.
Or, again,
Convinced life is meaningless,
I lack the courage of my conviction.
a characteristic half-belief of our time. We cannot, I suppose, be surer of ourselves than this — at least Seidel’s characters cannot.
Yet, for the uses of poetry, Seidel’s concern with personality is life-giving. In the years since the First World War poets have lost touch with the exploration of character as a theme for poems, and the dramatic monologue, except in the hands of Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson, fell out of use. In the work of Frederick Seidel, once he has come closer to finding his balance and his identity, a whole range of possibility is opened up.
In JAMES MERRILL’S third book, WATER STREET (Atheneum, cloth $3.95; paper $1.65), we find poems that, unlike those of Brother Antoninus or Seidel, do not so much grapple with reality as disguise it. Merrill is an intensely visual poet, but his visual sensations come as from trick mirrors, prisms, colored glass, moving pictures, all the artifices of optics. His feelings, his views of himself are “Illumined as in dreams.” “Everything is cryptic, crystal-queer.” Any simple thing is freaked out in forty kaleidoscopic disguises. Yet Merrill, unlike some visual poets, is by no means deaf to sounds, either in sensation or in verse. In a poem about the mixed memories called up by silent home movies, he writes with a perfect command of sound:
My mother’s lamp once out,
I press a different switch:
A field within the dim
White screen ignites,
Vibrating to the rapt
Mechanical racket
Of a real noon field’s
Crickets and gnats.
He is a baffling poet; has always been. With all the versatility of his poetic style, Merrill has never used the punctuations of stanzaic form effectively to his purposes; has never, more important, used punctuation itself as a way of clarifying, but only as a further disguise. Yet his glittering rhymes, the effortless subtleties of his free-verse poems, the plays of sound against sense — all these make up the repertoire of a gifted artist. The disguises of this poet are rich and varied indeed, but for Merrill, perhaps, there would be more enterprise in walking naked. As he says himself,
Goodness, how tired one grows
Just looking through a prism:
Allegory, symbolism.
I’ve tried, Lord knows,
To keep from seeing double,
Blushed for whenever I did,
Prayed like a boy my cheek be hid
By manly stubble.
MAY SWENSON, on the other hand, is a poet who sees singly, and she is, to my personal taste, one of the most ingenious and delightful younger poets writing today (TO MIX WITH TIME: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, Scribner’s, cloth $3.50; paper $1.45). She has, at any rate, probably the best eye for nature. What does she not see? A snake:
Mud-and-silver-licked, his length — a
single spastic muscle —
slid over stones and twigs to a snuggle
of roots, and hid.

Autumn:

Then hearse-horns
of macabre crows
sweep over; gibbet-masks
they cut on blue. I wade in husks,
in broken shafts of arrows.

A bird:

And a grackle, fat as burgundy,
gurgles on a limb.
His bottle-glossy feathers
shrug off the wind.

A cat:

Not a hair
in the gap of his ear moves.
His clay gaze stays steady.

Her attention to nature gives May Swenson’s poems a directness of gaze that is sometimes lacking when she turns to other, apparently broader subjects. She needs, perhaps, the concreteness of things close at hand in order to see deeply; it is as though language, in her hands, responded naturally only to the actual and palpable. She has a staggering poetic equipment: visual acuity, a sense of form, a fine ear for rhythm and the colloquial. Among her recent poems there are too many with high pretensions, in the shapes of arrows or zigzags or earthquakes, dealing with the Scheme of Things. A series of travel poems — with the exception of one about a bullfight—strikes me as terribly selfconscious, as though someone had been Taking Notes. But even if, in her straining for fresh ways of saying things, this poet’s sureness sometimes deserts her, she just cannot go wrong with her nature poems. They are seen; the husks and kernels of nature are there. And sometimes, at moments of great simplicity, her poems go almost as far in eloquence as poems can — as in a favorite of mine called “Question”:

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen
Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt
Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead
How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye
With cloud for shift
how will I hide?

A poem like this, in its simple lyricism, makes us forget all questions about the direction of poetry, about schools and generations. It is, after all, a song; and songs hold their own secrets. This one may hold the secret of long life.

About the Author

Peter Davison was The Atlantic's poetry editor from 1974 to 2004.