New Sounds, New Silences

Confucius wrote: “Without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know men.” Perhaps the primary social function of poetry—especially in periods of volatile social change, which have a vile effect on language —is to help restore the purity and the force of words.

In such times words, especially abstractions, coined or renewed as fuel for idealism, leap into notoriety, then get dizzy and lose their way. For example, how revoltingly every interested party misuses “peace”: the Soviets in Hungary, the Americans in Vietnam, the Weathermen in post offices. “The free world” includes any country which will take our money. “Law and order” in last fall’s election ceased even to be three distinct words: it was shortened into “lawnorder,” with an unholy suburban overtone reminiscent of Scott’s Catalogue, as though the opposition were crabgrass, to be mowed, poisoned, or edged out. “Racism” and “genocide,” relatively new but useful words invented to describe systematic policies of racial segregation, imprisonment, and mass murder, have been converted into the most casual of sidewalk imprecations. Yet in a pair of lines a poet can instantly reverse the contamination of common speech:

The best lack all conviction, while
the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
(Yeats)
or:
It is dangerous to read newspapers.
Each time I hit a key
on my electric typewriter,
speaking of peaceful trees,
another village explodes.

(Margaret Atwood)

Poets have often turned us back toward simplicity, but at times the effort meets with incomprehension, as it did when Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads after the French Revolution, or when Pound began his Cantos and Cummings strove for precision in punctu-

ation after the Russian Revolution. Simplicity in poetic speech creates discomfort. The sounds are new, but so are the silences, for the rests between the notes fall in unfamiliar places. Poetry, rushing into the darkness of our emotional and spiritual lives, touches nerves and feeds hungers we didn’t know we had, arouses senses so long neglected that we imagined them to be animal rather than human. When poetry strikes up new sounds inside, it leaves new silences outside, where there was once plenty of palaver but where there is now little left to say.

This is not a matter of fashion. Fashion pursues, it does not explore. It invents costumes and makes conversation. True innovation in poetry strips off clothes and has no fear of posing silence in places where fashion, self-conscious, would nervously supply amenities or clichés. To see how one of the best of our younger poets uses silence, compare two passages: the first from Milton, in which the words are arranged with great complexity of temporal and conditional distinction (and with what grammarians call hypotaxis) in order to achieve intellectual discrimination; the second, from W. S. Merwin in The Carrier of Ladders (Atheneum, $3.95), where hypotaxis is sacrificed in favor of evocation and uncertainty. Notice how much Merwin leaves out; but, even more important, what manner of material is omitted: the very elements of time and probability that Milton exerted all his resources of rhythm and grammar to supply. Moreover, Merwin (deliberately and skillfully) omits all punctuation, capitalization, rhyme, and meter.

Milton:

And Merwin:

Time has all but vanished for Merwin, and this is his greatest strength (as well as his weakness). There are no words, like Milton’s when, ere, though, lest, and fondly, to guide the reader from present to past, from actual to conditional, from declaration to evaluation. The technical resources required to omit all that equipment are daunting indeed. Merwin, now forty-three (Milton’s age at the time he wrote “When I consider . . .—), has passed through a series of transformations and self-instruction which have left him with perhaps the most unerring ear and the most formidable technique of his generation. He is a master of sound, as Picasso is a master of drawing, and he uses it to maneuver the rhythms of his poems so that their literal meaning is unmistakable.

That does not make the ninety-two poems in his new collection “easy”— far from it. As Merwin’s title reveals, the man who carries a ladder holds not only the rungs and sidepieces but the spaces between them, and the ladder enables us to use those very spaces to rise. Understanding the silences is sometimes extremely difficult, since these poems inhabit an undifferentiated landscape and are written, even more than most contemporary work, for the ear. They move in the spasmodic rhythms of a speech that is groping for pebbles in the dark and naming what its fingers feel. They almost require reading aloud to be understood.

that I am descended

Merwin’s poems are concerned with the divisions of reality (like speech and silence, rungs and spaces, light and dark) and with bringing these divisions under control in a unity of consciousness. When he faces this unity he can produce tiny poems that have the flavor of the finest haiku:

or:

Men

until they enter that building

Poems like these are as concise and expressive as calligraphy. At the other end of the scale, a long poem, “Fear,” is remarkable as Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo” is remarkable—a tour de force.

Mark Strand, ten years younger than Merwin, has apparently learned much from him, but his tense, spare poems have a more moral and humane content than the chilly spaces of Merwin’s. The poems in his second full collection, Darker (Atheneum, $2.95), contribute to a poetry of the self, not a poetry of existence like Merwin’s. They have an intimacy and a humor which make them handy to quote in short passages:

The title comes from another short poem in the same sequence:

Some of Strand’s best work echoes Christopher Smart, as in the wise, witty poem that opens the collection, “The New Poetry Handbook.” (“If a man publicly denounces poetry,/ his shoes will fill with urine.” Or in two litanies: “Let the great sow of state grow strong./Let those in office search under their clothes for the private life./They will find nothing.”) Most impressive is the closing section of the book, “My Life By Somebody Else,” in which, like so many other artists, he cannot imagine who it is who wrote these poems the world calls his.

If Merwin has mobilized the language to evoke our inner panics and vacancies, if Strand has undertaken to stalk the self in its cave, A. R. Ammons is more austere in his selfimposed limitations than either. Judging from his latest collection alone (his seventh, and he is Merwin’s age), Ammons is as serious about the exploration of reality as Merwin is, but his curiosity isn’t much piqued by the internal world of fantasies and distortions. Uplands (Norton, $5.00) does not deal often with people. Ammons is manifestly and primarily interested in naming and ordering the external world, and the best of his poems engage words directly with the motions of natural processes. Ammons devotes meticulous attention to the names of flowers and geological or biological phenomena, but always as a poet, not a naturalist:

His irony is rewarded with a breeziness of tone which, when his poems are working well and his words are falling into place, makes for a delicious equilibrium between speech and silence, between the understood and the unknown. His title suits his book perfectly: landscape, aspiration, and grammatical structure all echo the drama and motion of high country, mountains, and water, and in such a setting the poems can get down swiftly to their serious work of finding the way the external world works:

Ammons’ is a poetry of process, of the passage of time, of how one appearance turns into another, of the relation between sensations and cognition, between experience and expectation. Such matters are not investigated without stretching the language, but how are we to locate the unity between nature and man in words without stretching the point?

Ammons has that rare combination of modesty and confidence that makes poetry possible, and as a result his language is fully exercised and brings every muscle into play as it moves around in space and time.

The materials are very different in Collecting evidence (Yale University Press, $5.00 and $1.75) by Hugh Seidman, the latest winner in the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Trained as a scientist, an altogether urban man, he draws his images mainly from art, from the city, from scientific disciplines, from the disorder of self-absorbed desire and questioned identity. In his initial book he has achieved the first necessary thing as a poet: faced down his feelings. It is exciting to see someone discovering the essential materials of poetry and, often, mastering them. His work is full of frustration, anger, images of desecration and rebellion. If, too often, he has included poems whose materials have not altogether been transmuted into poetry (it’s a long book, thirtyseven poems, including one of over five hundred lines), he shows immense promise in the courage with which he enters into the streets of his life and in the ingenuity with which he expresses his alienation:

In passages like this, Seidman speaks for his generation. Intelligent, technological in training but psychoanalytical in outlook, he has yet to discover some of the ways in which a poem can transcend, by assimilating into its very language, the chaotic material of the emotions. Frontal assault is not the only tactic. But he is on the very edge of this discovery himself, and one looks forward to the consequences when reading, in his last longish poem, “The Making of Colors”:

The goldbeaters place a thin square at the center of parchment and over this

more parchment and metal — hammered

until the gold spreads to the edges — cut and the process repeated— for the finest leaf, a sheet of ox intestines — goldbeater’s skin.

John Hall Wheelock, now in his eighties, is two generations older than any of these other poets. His latest, collected, poems, By Daylight and In Dream (Scribner’s, $6.95 and $2.45), contains a few poems published as long ago as 1905, and some, perhaps the very best, published last year. His early work evokes that rhapsodic pessimism of the fin de siécle, that threnody of despair that we hear in the work of Trumbull Stickney and some of his contemporaries; but, as the years lengthened, Wheelock’s sometimes facile pessimism deepened into something more valuable, as the gum of trees with the passing of geologic time turns into amber.

The finest of his work is in his long poems, but occasionally its savor can be caught even in a short passage:

Wheelock’s unassuming poetry is one of elegy and mourning; and the newest poems, written in his seventies and eighties, evidence a strength—of mind, of heart, and of language—that more innovative younger poets have yet to achieve. Its strength, ultimately, lies not in its variety, for Wheelock is not versatile; nor in its inventiveness, for he is the most traditional good poet writing; but in its loyalty to the language, which he serves in his own way by nurturing its capacity for compassion, unashamedness, and mystery.

Space does not allow the quotation of examples from his long poems, but Wheelock is unabashed to use elevated speech as it has always been used. He ignites in apparently familiar patterns of language a fire that once more transmutes them into poetry. Poems like “By Daylight and In Dream,” “Morning After Rain,” “Amagansett Beach Revisited” tell something of themselves in their titles. They are composed in long, musical, hypotactic cadences which ruminate on survival, the order of things, loss, and death, and which in their mastery of craft give old words new life. In this he is as true to poetry as any poet can be—less innovative, but just as true and just as unfashionable as W. S. Merwin or A. R. Ammons.