CPR - Thumbnailer's Guide to the Galaxy; Part 2 by James Rother

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Frank O’Hara, who died in a dune buggy accident on Fire Island in 1966, resembled, at least superficially, every freewheeling sandblaster for whom free verse was an instrument even more satisfying than polemical prose for sounding off about not only which aspects of ‘50s and ‘60s American culture rubbed them the wrong way, but why they were endemically and even a fortiori against the grain. In respects that count most, he was less like the other sandblasters than might’ve first appeared in early aerial photographs taken of postmodern stylistics. It is that special difference, both in kind and in degree, which lifts him above the ruck of poetry-and-jazzers who managed to upstage him until Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books published Lunch Poems and made O’Hara’s verse-on-the-go as hip with boppers and Village types as A & W drive-ins with teenagers out for curb servicing.

If O’Hara’s open-shutter verse seems never to get far past skin-depth, it’s because skin deep was where this poet felt most comfortable and creative. It was also where he thought poetry, or at least his brand of it, could best most profitably pitch its tent. Tent, one is inclined to stress—not mansion, townhouse, or, heaven help us, condo. For this confirmed addict of every tremor it is possible to visit upon the epidermis of urban life, poetry was an affair of nomads and rhizomes, of drifters and grifters—the whole kitless caboodle of early and late Rimbaldians who lugged nothing from experience to experience but their own eternally randomizing selves and who preferred to travel light with nothing but the raffish joie de vivre they could muster. If Whitman sang the body electric, O’Hara rhapsodized the body neon, all incandescent and glowing as the corpus of a Manhattan whose byways he knew better (having carnalized them into strung-out lines of verse) than any poet alive, except for maybe Federico Garcia Lorca, whose 1936 wonder, Poet in New York, put its own version of verbal neon on the map. Blinking colored light quickened pathways to the cerebrum, allowing the viscera to calibrate its pulse with the throbs of the techno-pop age; plugging directly into its polychrome wonderland allowed one to wear, McLuhan-style, one’s central nervous system to the party. And it was one endless bash that the twentieth century had thrown for itself, despite the ever-present contusions of the atomic age and its cold-war hysterics. Whitman’s Manahatta had long since dissolved into good gray legend, and little was left of its passing beyond the bobbing flotage coursing between five boroughs incorporated just after the poet’s own leave-taking in 1897, and the furtive beckonings of its ever-insistent erotic passacaille.

For postwar America, the heightened electricity of New York exemplified a wholly new time, if not indeed a new age with an unprecedented passion for urgency; and in O’Hara’s corner of it, even when the blood pressure of his poems slackened, they still could not avoid conveying the sense of being “meditations in an emergency” (his title, his ICU-slanted phrase). Today’s denizen of Manahatta, O’Hara was wont to think, lets contact with the city—his city, New York City—frazzle him like a finger in a live socket. If he’s a true poet, that is. An urban scop of this kind would invite the body electric to sing him, and with a sufficient yawp of current as to leave the unwary poetaster as charred as jerky and as freebased as liquid crack. In such a high and bi-wired state one becomes the electricity that one conducts, the poetic state subsisting in what—being none too safely grounded by human relationships—it can draw down to itself in the way of bolts from the blue. If there is the risk of opening oneself to disgrace whenever the hardcore circumstantial is welcomed into one’s life, there is the less likely but not to be ruled out beneficence of being graced with handfuls of poems falling into one’s lap, unbidden and unexpected. A persistent piece of gossip has it that O’Hara took down many of the poems that notoriously crammed themselves into his head not just on his lunch hour (that is already well known), but on typewriters he would “try out” in retail stores. To live, he strongly believed, is to converse—even if what one is laboring to have intercourse with is, so to speak, vocally challenged, like the heavenly orb warming his favorite retreat in the poem “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island.” “I know you love Manhattan,” he reassures the solar system’s most resplendent fireball, but “you ought to look up more often.” Like the chutzpah-ridden monologue O’Hara intended it to be, the poem culminates in a litany of desiderata (offered ad libitum and in the style of the good Walt in one of his more expansive moods) which add up to the regards he would like to give not just to Broadway but to Fifth, Madison, and all the other tributaries of dreams feeding into a milky way which, by the poet’s time, had morphed into a thoroughfare less great and white than overlit and under-janitored. As for life’s pressing “do”s that even the plexus of the solar system could feel strengthened by, O’Hara includes enough heartening prescriptions to provision an Exulting for Dummies even the most inept pursuer of happiness would find uplifting:

And

always embrace things, people earth

sky stars, as I do, freely and with

the appropriate sense of space. That

is your inclination, known in the heavens

and you should follow it to hell, if

necessary, which I doubt. . . .

O’Hara’s “best poems tend to be the ones that might seem jumbled and aleatory but are in reality, as one critic puts it, “actually . . . quite tough, pretty organized and very difficult to imitate successfully.” His singular “discovery—apart from the paratactic sentences,” he discerns, was the simultaneous or double subject of himself and New York City. That was what he came out from behind his carapace to write: the poetry of the open-eyed, open-minded, open-hearted urbanite; cheerful diversions; the protocols of a consciousness as quick and dazzling, unpredictable and unconnected as neon lights and street noise and traffic. His lunchtime ganderings seem to convert time—and many of the poems give the time—straightforwardly into objects, stimuli, electrical pulses of thought. As [John] Ashbery says, he had “a concept of the poem as a chronicle of the creative act which produced it . . . .”

Hence it is hardly fair to conclude that O’Hara’s oeuvre as a whole adds up to less than the adequacy of its far-flung parts subtends; or to believe that all he should be valued for today is his moderating influence on the neo-Dada-ites who limped after him into the Informalist Follies of ‘80s and ‘90s. Without his recursive passions for free-flowing talk and “sister arts” eclecticism embracing the avant-garde art movements of the ‘50s and ‘60s, the New York School achieving a cohesive identity would be barely imaginable. Yet, as Gertrude Stein was quick to remind Hemingway, gossip is not literature; and a lot of O’Hara is, one must admit, blabbermouthing of the most compulsively loose-lipped sort that gives vent to voices that are not unlike transients cadging rides inside his own head. (Exhibit A—though an entire alphabet of examples could easily be assembled: the pseudo-“Biotherm”: “For the Chinese New Year & for Bill Berkson.”)

Not that creative schizophrenia is the least useful device for jump-starting a verse medium which, at a time like the mid-to-late ‘50s, with W. C. Williams’s Paterson wearing down and Olson’s Maximus wearing on, plainly required re-energizing if not along the lines of a howling Ginsberg, then at least of the sort the vers highly libre of a Ponge, Follain, Guillevec, Frénaud, Bonnefoy, du Bouchet, Roche, or a Pleynet brought to a French tradition force-fed for years on weak-kneed Cocteau and heavily fortified Sartre. The problem with running off at the mouth in the rather uneven manner of all of the above lies in keeping a vulgarity at bay which threatens to overflow its Louis Quinze spillway and spew surréaliste sewage every which way and loose. If the American Projectivists’ chief flaw was to show how easily the poem with its “face still forming” could fall out of sync with its own flywheels, O’Hara, a rebel sans causerie beyond making sure a supply of Disque Bleus and Gauloises (to which he was hopelessly addicted) kept coming his way from Paris, most assuredly did not. Perhaps he should have: if there was anything be said for vulgarity in poetry, it would have been said by now and with a greater lien on permanence than is to be found in all but that handful of instances in which this inveterate transcriber of frissons is not tempted to confuse spontaneity with coarseness of outpouring.

But what a handful of instances those are! From Poems Retrieved (1977): “To John Ashbery on Szymanowski’s Birthday,” “Tchaikovskiana”; and from the Collected Poems ( 1971): “Biotherm,” “Steps,” “Hötel Transylvanie,” Poem (“Khrushchev is coming on the right day!”), “Joe’s Jacket,” “Ode to Michael Goldberg (‘s Birth and Other Births),” “To the Film Industry in Crisis,” “The Day Lady Died”—maybe there are more than just a handful. But faced with the sheer bulk of everything else, the not so good and plenty of the collected and barely collected verse that make up the whole of this poet’s work, how difficult it is for even the most forgiving to keep from sighing, “O tempora, O mores . . . O’Hara.” No doubt, the slot of poet-suicide manqué à la James Dean had to fall to someone in the New York circle. It’s just a pity that someone else out of Padgett and Shapiro’s Anthology of New York Poets (1970) couldn’t have been found to do the honors. No doubt that dying as he did, O’Hara’s reputation acquired a cult status that did neither it nor the poetry it rubbed off on any good. He deserved better: he was more gifted than his celebrants took him for and not nearly as good as his detractors had to make him seem in order to make their undermining of his seriousness appear credible. Both sides of that destructive argument had their work cut out for them, for O’Hara only really drew near to greatness when he was able to escape the slapdash predictability of the avant-garde and enter the magic circle of performance art unencumbered by “happenings” or anything by which the genuinely extempore might be blighted. He was best at all this unaccompanied by all but his not-so-secret sharer and partner in everything but crime, Bill Berkson. Which drops us at the door of the final “no doubt” in this piquant and pared-down paradigm that must suffice here as the life and times of Frank O’Hara. Dying when he did, American poetry missed having a slew of New York pre-schoolers potty-trained comme il faut by the most singular talent of that galère outside—of course—of the Magister Ludi himself, John Ashbery.

James Merrill

[James Merrill, also born in 1926, is a poet whose Collected Poems I discussed at length in a review published in CPR several years ago. I shall therefore restrict my comments on his contribution to a few buttery obfuscations in my earlier overview which, for one reason or another, I never quite got around to clarifying.]

It is among the great unsolved mysteries of late 20^th Century American poetry, a) how James Merrill managed to snatch the post-Audenian mantle of Most Clever Poet away from so Odyssean a wielder of witty devices as Richard Wilbur, and b) how he avoided becoming the gay pre-eminence of the predominantly gay New York school of ex- and omnipresent temporizers.

By the mid-‘50s, the ducks necessary for this to have happened were all dutifully lining up on either side of the Atlantic. The only thing lacking to convert daydream to fait accompli was a public swearing of fealty to the gods of abstract expressionism by this heir to several fortunes, a hurdle which could have been surmounted by a perfunctory nod given in the direction of that art movement’s two reigning mountain kings, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. Had such come to pass, orthodox no less than fellow-traveling avant-gardists could have exulted to see the gem-encrusted poem à la Eliot, in whose mysterium (sans Christian overlay) Merrill was a notable adept, first consecrated and then elevated as host in a ritual through whose offices the faithful could consume the veritable body of action painting while absorbing the heilige geist of post-Symbolist art, and without so much as a soupçon of heresy’s risk to their affiliations.

But such was not to be—indeed, could not be—given the indifference shown by Merrill to all but the most old-world accommodations markedly unobtainable at either of his American pieds à terre in New York and Connecticut. No poet unable to claim New York as his hub of operations could ever hope to be esteemed the doyen of a New York School, though Merrill largely obviated the force of that question by becoming (with shatteringly quiet resolve) the anti-Stevens of the School’s coterie or maverick wing. If in his most productive years (1919-42) the maître who gave the world Harmonium (1923) and Parts of a World (1942) never traveled to Europe, the wraith-like author of Water Street (1962), Nights and Days (1966), and The Fire Screen (1969) kept America the site of occasional visitations rather than one extendedly visited. For Merrill, any place beyond the call-waiting zone of sirens urging him back to Paris, Rome, or the islands of the Peloponese was subject to Circean layovers with swinish indulgences less conducive to furthering works-in-progress than to hedonistic running in place. Hence the mises-en-scène providing poems like “Violent Pastoral” with laminated and sunstruck hues and tones not to be encountered in the soumises-en scène peculiar to Ashbery’s or O’Hara’s poetic trysts with New York—

Against a thunderhead’s

Blue marble, the eagle

Mounts with the lamb in his clutch:

Two wings, four hooves,

One pulse pounding, pounding,

So little time being given

To feel the earth shrunken,

Gong-tilt of waters,

To be at once helplessly

Aching talon and bleating

Weight, both,

Lest the pact break . . .

Their city might testify to the cleverness with which neutered violence could be gerrymandered, but not even hazards posed to joggers by Central Park can overtop the tooth-and-claw austerities undercutting Merrill’s itinerant pastorale. Where his eclogues draw closest to the New York School’s Alexandrian extravaganzas—and numerous commentators have adverted to this—is in the ratio they maintain between pure style and borderline-impure content (if the last is defined as whatever mere style superintends short of total subordination, as say in the control exerted by a dominatrix with a john): that is, to the tune of about 90%-10%.

Setting is mostly all that “happens” in Merrill poems, the reader having to content himself with drama forgone, forsworn, and with the wave of an unforgiving hand, forgotten. Their piecemeal chromatics dither in and out of pastel trances that lack either a Delacroix’s canvas-stalled heroics or an Ingres’s odalisquerie to give them even muted color. Typically, Merrill’s archness will swallows the meager content of one of his poems whole, relishing what is thus engorged like an anaconda—albeit one having made it through finishing school. As a poet he savors the banquet more than the individual serving of exquisite delicacies doubling also as eye candy. Inducing the slovenliness of brute experience to surround the hill of neatly ranged iambics might always present him with an attractive challenge, but it is one as dicey as betting that the man-eaters in your cage, and flashing your diamonds, will remember correctly who their best friend really is. (The grisly slip-up making news in Las Vegas some years ago merely proved what the smart money always knew in its heart of hearts: that what is up for grabs in acts like Siegfried and Roy’s is no further away the fresh meat represented by Siegfried and Roy themselves.) One would think that coercing the formidable felines of verse to lie down would be reward enough for a poet for whom the act of getting poems up and purring seldom involved more than subjecting the porch swing of surmise to gentle waftings of desire. “16.ix.65” demonstrates how accurate this estimation of Merrill’s effort level is:

Summer’s last half moon waning high

Dims and curdles. Up before the bees

On our friend’s birthday, we have left him

To wake in their floating maze.

Light downward strokes of yellow, green, and rust

Render the almond grove. Trunk after trunk

Tries to get right, in charcoal,

The donkey’s artless contraposto.

Sunrise. On the beach

Two turkey gentlemen, heads shaven blue

Above dry silk kimonos sashed with swords,

Treat us to a Kabuki interlude.

The tiny fish risen excitedly

Through absolute transparence

Lie in the boat, gasping and fanning themselves

As if the day were warmer than the sea. . . .

No one can gainsay the gleaming verbal facility stacking up food for contemplation if not really deep thought displayed here. But antipasto of this kind is primarily useful in titillating the appetite, not as anything that sticks to the ribs. Like the proverbial bluebottle buzzing exquisitely in the sun, such elaborately tricked out decadence may wink and wink and wallow in its winking, but its signal effects vanish in a wink as well, its flirty come-on revealed as no more than a show of smoke and mirrors designed to lure rubes into the tent. With our composure thus wrenched askance, we notice what is not so pleasant to observe: the delight taken in marking the death-throes of what will round out an evening’s main course of almondine on which the poet and his guests—fellow decadents all—are ultimately to dine. The bourgeois contempt (streaked with envy) with which we bristle at such delectations better left to a sultan’s (rather than a carny’s) tent amplifies the poet’s egotism as much as ours—especially as it dawns on us that the sense of entitlement the poem directs us to identify with is the poet’s and not our own. (There are of course precedents for salting the mines of irony that way: similar changes rung on schadenfreude may be detected on almost every other page of such “underground” classics as the Satyricon of Petronius.) The traces of that contempt, however, elude all summary description, and so a maggoty glow radiates from the prideful delicacy (or is it delicate pride?) with which Merrill baits the reader with a rictus-faced facsimile of his own vanity.

Yet, to be truly honest—with ourselves, if with no one else—who could deny the disappointment and even dismay felt scanning that appalling waste of time and talent The Changing Light at Sandover (1992)? Morsels, even of such highly privatized and arcanely cerebral rococo as comprise that mostly flyblown jeu d’esprit of Merrill’s middle life, can be diverting, to be sure. But is there really anything to be gained by devoting hundreds of pages to convince readers they’re sitting SAT exams all over again or qualifying for a black belt in MENSA? Merrill’s poetry, despite how good it often is, often leaves wondering, along with the questioner in the perhaps over-candid “Clearing the Title,”

What happens next? Behind the latticework

Of deeds no one has time or patience to undo

We cultivate our little lot, meanwhile

Waiting companionably for kingdom come?

How companionable this wait will be is of course dependent upon just whose kingdom’s come is being anticipated. And one man’s “little” (as a poet perspicacious and keen of wit as Merrill need hardly be reminded) is not always parsable as another man’s “lot.” We don’t all thunder to the promptings of one herd, no matter how green the grazing.

Allen Ginsberg

[Were there space to accord each of them coverage, W. D. Snodgrass, David Wagoner, and Robert Bly, also born in 1926, would also be part of this discussion. But since there isn’t, I will tie off this group of poets with the only American figure to have achieved true celebrity status in the last half-century, that satura of sutras and hybrid clone of P. T. Barnum and Merlin, that howler of a bodhisattva and most hirsute muse of public undress, Allen Ginsberg.]

Anyone reading the lead-off piece in Allen Ginsberg’s Collected Poems (1984) about the time it was actually written—Spring 1947—would have experienced in “In Society” a foretaste of not just the recreational vehicle driving the Ginsberg traveling circus to come, but its decreational tenor as well:

I walked into the cocktail party

room and found three or four queers

talking together in queertalk.

I tried to be friendly but heard

myself talking to one in hiptalk.

“I’m glad to see you,” he said, and

looked away. “Hmn,” I mused. The room

was small and had a double-decker

bed in it, and cooking apparatus:

icebox, cabinet, toasters, stove;

the hosts seemed to live with room

enough only for cooking and sleeping.

My remark on this score was under-

stood but not appreciated. I was

offered refreshments, which I accepted.

I ate a sandwich of pure meat; an

enormous sandwich of human flesh,

I noticed, while I was chewing on it,

It also included a dirty asshole. . . .

Two things are notable about this swatch of anything but blank verse: the civilized—even overcivilized—tone it affects, and the absence of the drum-like trochaics that would later characterize the “platinum hit” phase of Ginsberg’s career that enshrined within the hippie imagination such hyper-bardic effusions as Howl, Kaddish, and “Wichita Vortex Sutra.” These downbeat-first hallmarks of what would later emerge as a Kit Smart revival contributed mightily to the Poundian risorgimento that overtook American poetry after World War II by burrowing deeper into the soft underbelly of Parnassian neo-formalism than any poet had gone since Pound’s own Vorticist contretemps with the Georgian muse in England circa 1915. With every fresh twist of the “open-form” Projectivist blade wielded by the (largely Olsonite) free-versers of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, the grave of poets certain of Edgar Bowers’s approval was more securely dug. Moreover, a different sort of torque was added by the practitioners of a type of irrealism that claimed association with veritable Surréalisme and an American pedigree that went back as far as Robert M. Coates, the author of a much talked about (but now almost never read) cult novel, The Eater of Darkness (1926). (Note: If you want the genuine article in American surrealism, read Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. Almost everything else published in that “vein” after 1960 is not surrealist but either anti-realist or irrealist tout court.)

As a trenchant slice of satire, “In Society” is very much in as well as of its time, and it anticipates in many ways (not all of which redolent of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch) the primal-scream warhorses that fueled Martin Esslin’s Theater of the Absurd. Ionesco’s La Cantatrice chauve hovers over all such “picnicking in the bank,” as does the Arrabal-esque Ping Pong by Arthur Adamov. Given its more venerable provenance, however, it also calls to mind the Latin root of “satire,” which is satura, or “bowl of mixed fruit.” (The goose which that is sauce for is still some distance away from uniting with its gander, so patience is urged.) Ginsberg was soon to seize upon “In Society”’s motif of the animal body metonymized to its orifices and run with it, to Arrabal’s bank and beyond, without ever looking back. Doubtless he was able to convince himself that what opened out to him as rectal epiphany in that poem was no mere butt plug of alienation but the entire anus mundi, in all its gross-out and bourgeois-épater-ing glory.

Nothing is served by re-rehearsing here Ginsberg’s rise to Beatification; the erstwhile saga of his over-publicized guru-dom; his on-again, off-again road show involving Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, the two alter-ids of his literary life who rose to volubility in the mindless absence and then the death of one parent (his mother, Naomi) and the absent-mindedness of his poet-Other (his father, Louis); the juncture at brain and groin shared with long-time lover and collaborator, Peter Orlovsky; or the self-rolled Bhagavad-Gitânes that still, even after his death, droop, Belmondo-style, from the lips of hacks laboring to keep the sweatshop of his legend alive for succeeding generations. We need here to be concerned only with Ginsberg’s reign as Maharishi of a (sizeable) wing of that squadron of transcendentally meditative and upscale leftists, a number of whom would later desert him for another, rather less greatful deadhead, Jerry Garcia. It was in the bosom of this groundswell that, following the final fragmenting of the Beat phenomenon loosely coincidental with the onset of the “police action” in Vietnam, Ginsberg found both a comfortable sinecure and a home for his burgeoning ecological concern for the mothership Earth.

To pursue a sidelight of this history for just a moment, one of the things that emerge most strikingly about Ginsberg and his all-too-gratis persona is the unconventional extremity of the poetry he wrote and the sort of gayness he came to embrace. True, a number of American poets, emboldened by the breakthrough at Stonewall in 1966, have departed the closet and assumed a place in the flatland that is public American culture not as poets of gayness, but as poets who in step with others shaped by differing ethnicities and genders happen to be homosexual. But Ginsberg was never by choice of their sodality; for having once declared himself in Howl and other pronunciamentos to be not merely gay but outrageously so, he ceased to be accepting of any but the most unequivocal forms of non-heterosexual demeanor. He had in every waking moment to be more than just out, he had to be out-there out—or, in his own self-description, a “pansy” who by intrepid example would lead the shrinking violets of American queerdom into the sunlight of full acceptance and unapologetic pride. None of this of course had much to do with poetry, and as might be inferred from the numerous give-and-take sessions he shrewdly stage-managed with the media (see David Carter’s collection, Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews: 1958-1996 [2001]), Ginsberg himself was never himself persuaded that much of this sort of proselytizing was of any real value. Nor did the Gay Liberation movement ever become convinced that having him as an “out-there” sponsor of its cause was really in its interest. Consequently, it now seems likely that the eventual outcome of Ginsberg’s many decades in the public eye will be fame not for having pioneered the visionary and prophetic “Smart-bomb” poetics of the hippie generation, but for having inspired the gay movement’s leaders to cease being Camp-followers of Susan Sontag and to come out in force against the imperialist ventures of a gay-bashing America in south-east Asia and elsewhere. (Whether either Blake or Whitman would have approved his way of respiritualizing the country, or his manner of engaging the youth culture of the ‘60s and ‘70s to hammer the America caught in his tongs, is of course another matter.)

For if truth be told, there is much in Ginsberg’s liberty bell-chiming that rings false, just as there was much in his endless OM-ming that, even granting the best of intentions, had less of the Tibetan monk about it than Dirty Old Man character Arte Johnson played on The Laugh-in. “How campy,” his detractors have long chorused, “was all that ranting in faux-Biblicalese about the perfidy of American militarism. How like those imitators of Gandhi who body-slammed an already reeling British Raj it all seems. It is one thing to lash out at an unpopular war tearing the only country that one has apart; it might even be necessary at certain times to do that. But to bounce one’s celebrity as the most photographed and interviewed passive-aggressive Buddhist this side of Calcutta off a wacky and plainly grandstanding ploy like trying to levitate the Pentagon in 1967, is quite another. Such behavior is not just unbecoming to a major poet, it suggests, and rather strongly that the figure in question was not altogether all together.

Few, it should be said, would seriously maintain that Ginsberg was an indictable co-conspirator in that absurd stunt, let alone one with sangfroid to spare. Still, it cannot readily be denied that what he did before the Pentagon (and repeatedly afterwards) does look suspiciously like the very sort of thing that many assumed (fueled by repeated assurances from him) he would never do. Whatever truth lies least, this poet’s Guevara-like mystique remains the bong of choice for a whole lot more people than ‘60s holdovers who can’t accept an expiration date on their adolescence, though the moths to his eternal flame nearly always fall into two very different categories. First, there are his fans, who can no more see evidence of crowd manipulation and hypocrisy in the behavior of their hero than the Never-neverlanders lining up behind the King of Pop can see the face of Captain Hook leering at them from under the mask of Peter Pan; and second, the no less fanatical skeptics of his legend who, if asked to associate him with one or another of history’s fabricating Blakes, would, without so much as a thought, align him with Robert rather than William. Put-downs (like Bruce Bawer’s in the essay “The Phenomenon of Allen Ginsberg”) put in a neat sack just what raises all those hackles when the name of Howl’s author invades polite conversation:

. . . Television and Nazi gas chambers, the mass media and Stalin’s gulags: to Ginsberg, as far as one can tell, they are all equally horrible. He makes no distinctions at all—he is just against, against, against—and this is a significant failing, for perceptive, sensitive distinctions are the basis for all intelligent discourse and all worthwhile art. Such catalogue poems as “Capitol Air” and “Yes and It’s Hopeless” and “Birdbrain!” lump the unpleasant in with the evil, like various phenomena of American popular culture with some of the more hateful manifestations of Soviet totalitarianism. . .

While there may be a smidgeon of validity to some of these charges, only a critic like Bawer could revel in reducing all of Ginsberg to the rubble of hyperbole and flimflam. In fact, much of what was put between covers by this flimflamming hyperbolist is a good deal better than that, and some of it, give or take an angle labored over to make this or that blemish appear minor, even quite good. Often, the prevailing formula of Howl, bastardized to a generic, yields its house brand of unassailable rubbish; but on those rare occasions when the poet (and not his bladerunning replicant, the “poet”) is of a mind to spurn the heretofore with heretofortitude, his dumpster can surprise you with throwaway lines that are in every superior to other poets’ much cited keepers:

In bed on my green purple pink

yellow orange bolivian blanket,

the clock tick, my back against the wall

—staring into black circled eyes magician

man’s bearded glance & story

the kitchen spun in a wheel of vertigo,

the eye in the center of the moving

mandala—the

eye in the hand

the eye in the asshole

serpent eating or

vomiting its tail

—the blank air a solid wall revolving

around my retina—

The wheel of jewels and fire I saw moving

vaster than my head in Peru

Band circling in band and a black

hole of Calcutta thru which

I stared at my Atman

Without a body—

All right, this is relatively unspoiled Ginsberg—the dumpster being datelined “NY January 1961” and not some month in 1975. Even so, “Journal Night Thoughts” shows what howlers he could restrain himself from committing when letting the kaleidoscope taken for a spin speak for itself with only minimal prompting from the peanut gallery he almost always declaimed from when the political stakes seemed high enough to warrant putting the thing on speaker phone. And yes, it is possible to be stunned, to stupefaction and even beyond, “by the oversimplification, the repetition, the self-indulgence, the egocentrism [and] utter inability to develop a theme” of many poems in the fire engine-red omnibus that hit the bookstores in 1984. But has any poet since Rimbaud had the knack of transposing into the people’s key of C psychedelia out of The Ticket That Exploded, and been able to reconstitute at will the pallor of a Laforguean moonwalk—digitally enhanced, no less—with the animated grace of “Spring Fashions”—

Full moon over the shopping mall—

in a display window’s silent light

the naked mannequin observes her fingernails . . .

Only Allen Ginsberg has. How dopey is that?

John Ashbery

John Ashbery (b. 1927), who has published his twenty-fifth book of new poems this year, is a very different show horse from Allen Ginsberg: a Lipizzaner and not a Clydesdale, for one thing, which means that his forte is the weaving of an elaborate filigree of high prances rather than stepping high toward reaches where less angelheaded hipsters would fear to tread. Like the Oz wizard of “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” he too has endured his share of knocks, mostly for being the Doctor Evil behind the “stop making sense” approach to poetry credited—if that’s the right word—with having undermined the return to “strong measures” after its meltdown in the ‘60s. For a relatively thick slice of time—his first book, Some Trees, is now a half-century old—Ashbery has been far more famous for being infamous than for having sent aloft some of the most ravishing verbal music since Whitman and Stevens nudged the self-indulgent crock-poem toward palaver more like soul-messaging than blog-rolling. Much of that ravishment continues to work its spell on a present shaped by such plinths of Ashberian blithe reckoning as Three Poems (1972), Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), and Flow Chart (1991), works that no doubt tickled the ear of the same dingbat muse for whom “Song of Myself,” “The Auroras of Autumn,” and the late Guy Davenport’s Flowers and Leaves: A Long Poem seemed not monstrosities but prodigies of a nature whose sense of scale owed more to mannerism than to the economy of means. Sung in the shadow of his mother’s death (and probably the only verse elixir to have distilled more quintessence from prolixity than Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella), Ashbery’s lengthy meditation on mortality with the unprepossessing title of Flow Chart joins comparable works such as A. R. Ammons Glare (1997) in proposing how best to manage the problem of shrinking liquidity in the redi-reserve account of American culture. Manipulating the system of interlocking conduits linking the sluices and aqueducts that remain open to outsized poems having abandoned the epic modernism of Paterson and The Cantos, works like Flow Chart access large but still portable bundles of that liquidity in such a way as to cover ground inaccessible to either belles-lettristic prose or notational verse medleys like Zukofsky’s inimitable “A.”

As with Ginsberg, the Ashbery phenomenon has long been a bipolar one. Our most valuable poet, his devotees insist. No, not valuable, his detractors shoot back, voluble—in fact, worse than voluble—garrulous, and to a fault he is wont to lay at the door of the previous century’s poetry rather than his own. That said, Ashbery can nonetheless boast that, these days, even his cupholders runneth over, a state of affairs that cuts bilaterally since in recent collections like Where Shall I Wander, there is much wheel-spinning in ruts so trenchant that hope of finding further traction in them seems at best quixotic. Notorious for having spun poem after poem out of what Denis Donoghue has aptly termed “chronic reverie,” Ashbery has made routinized cataplexy as rare in American poetry as popcorn ceilings in new California tract houses. When his current is fully switched on (which, self-echoings aside, it still more often is than not), he can whip out that Flentrop organ of his and make all but the most inveterate disbelievers feel wired by the sheer bravura of the instrument being stroked. In “At the Inn,” to cite but one example, he engages the late spareness of the Stevensian end game in order to speak with posthumous-like grace of a winged and wingy life which, though having flown the coop, has never really gone away:

It was me here. Though. And whether this

Be rebus or me now, the way the grass is planted—

Red stretching far out to the horizon—

Surely prevails now. I shall return in the dark and be seen,

Be led to my own room by well-intentioned hands,

Placed in a box with a lid whose underside is dark

So as to grow, and shall grow

Taller than the plumes out on the ocean,

Granting historically. And shall see

The end of much learning, and other things

Out of control and it ends too soon, before hanging up.

So, laying his cheek against the dresser’s wooden one,

He died making up stories, the ones

Not every child wanted to listen to.

And for a while it seemed that the road back

Was a track bombarded by stubble like a snow.

The drift of this cortège d’esprit remains as difficult to gauge as the precise overhang of the palm which Stevens discerned as looming “at the end of the mind” when all impedimenta keeping self from soul have been brushed away. The inn of the title is but one more way-station in a rootless ellipse which, in Ashbery’s version of string theory, serves as time compacted into, but not necessarily at swim with, mortal space:

Stretching invisibly into the future so as to reappear

In our present. Its flexing is it account,

Return to the point of no return.

Again and again, what is released into the sanctum of an Ashbery poem is made to flit or flicker across timescapes festooned with ribbands that wound with renewed life without in the least redeeming the squandered opportunities that reduced them to mere scapes of time in the first place. What once was cruised, so goes the saw, cannot be cruised again with the quite same thrill of expectation or frisson of imagined delight. Promiscuity does not fund face lifts for those who throw all caution to the winds and frolic one cancer-inducing time too often in the blistering sun. Ultimately, concludes Ashbery in “The Ice-Cream Wars,” what we live through (no less than what we write about), reduces to no more than this:

A few black smudges

On the outer boulevards, like squashed midges

And the truth becomes a hole, something one has always

known,

A heaviness in the trees, and no one can say

Where it comes from, or how long it will stay—

A randomness, a darkness of one’s own.

W. S. Merwin

Sometimes, given the sheer bulk of bland and indifferent verse that has accumulated above his signature like trail-mix strewn Hansel and Gretel-fashion, one is tempted to insert W. S. Merwin (b. 1927) himself into his poem “The Drunk in the Furnace” as the type of inebriate adverted to in its title. One might, were it not that the drunk in question is kept songful by the spirits he imbibes and the poet, if that intoxicated, must have become so on liquors not of this world, for he certainly appears beyond the call of any sweet sounds that cordials known to man can inspire. I should confess here that try as I might, I could never quite get a handle on what the all the fuss made over Merwin was about. To an extent far exceeding any other “major” contemporary poet I know of, his verse has the flat and earthbound indistinction of having consistently achieved the opposite of lift-off not through anything he himself has done, but as the consequence of some hazy determination not ever to try very hard, with the unfortunately result that he has struck out looking more often than any brace of his competitors put together. His seems a verse that has taken an oath never to rise above scrub and aim at heights even minimally deemable as “poetic.” In the main that pledge has been adhered to, no matter how tempting higher ground might occasionally have looked. “The Asians Dying,” inspired by the Vietnam debacle, catches Merwin in his usual comfort zone in lieu of more tempting blandishments made to poets by Mount Parnassus. He always preferred to pitch camp at the base of the sublime, where no Everest or Mont Blanc might threaten to rouse the thoroughly repressed Shelley in him.

When the forests have been destroyed their darkness

remains

The ash the great walker follows the possessors

Forever

Nothing they will come to is real

Nor for long

Over the watercourses

Like ducks in the time of the ducks

The ghosts of the villages trail in the sky

Making a new twilight

Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead

Again again with its pointless sound

When the moon finds them they are the color of everything . . .

This is Merwin, circa 1967. Thirty years later, in “A Given Day,” wisps of experimentaIism still float cirrus-like over the flatland, as do prim demurrals of anything acknowledgeable as Bergsonian durée or time felt as kairos rather than mere chronos:

When I wake I find it is late in the autumn

the hard rain has passed and the sunlight has not yet reached

the tips of the dark leaves that are their own shadows still

and I am home it is coming back to me I am

remembering the gradual sweetness of morning

the clear spring of being here as it rise one by one

in silence and without a pause and is the only one

then one at a time I remember without understanding

some that have gone and arise only not to be here

an afternoon walking on a bridge thinking of a friend

when she was still alive while a door from a building

being demolished sailed down through the passing city

my mother half my age at a window long since removed

friends in the same rooms and the words dreaming between us

the eyes of animals upon me they are all here

in the clearness of the morning in the first light

that remembers its way now to the flowers of winter

One could go on and mine his mother lode for exceptions to his ever-present as-a-rule, but it really wouldn’t alter the complexion of the one-face-fits-all mask Merwin’s verse presents to the world. So far as anyone can tell who’s interested in probing the value of such poetry beyond the level common to claques, blurb writers, and Helen Hennessy Vendler, there’s little in his verse that isn’t preoccupied either with hamstringing what might be creditable if more arduously pursued or pursuing what might otherwise not seem dredged from some travel writer’s notebook. Credit should certainly be given Merwin’s translations published over many years of French, Spanish, Latin, and Portuguese classics, with a very special nod to his superb Poem of the Cid and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Worthy of mention also, is his prose collection The Miner’s Pale Children (1970), whose vignettes waver evocatively between the pellucid and the ethereal, like pieces culled from some newspaper printed in heaven. Reissued in 1994, its contents seem even more impressive now than in the ‘60s when The New Yorker first showcased a selection of them. They appeared inimitable unclassifiables then, and still do, ”The Weight of Sleep” and “The Remembering Machines of Tomorrow” standing out as particularly memorable. But apart from these few fugitive efforts, it’s hard to imagine much from the Merwin sprawl of annuals ever rising to the garden of perennials.

James Wright

Back in 1977, I remarked, preparatory to quoting the first four lines of James Wright’s (b. 1927) “On the Liberation of Woman” (from his collection Two Citizens of 1973), that “only a paid audience finds everything interesting when that everything is rolled out as a prize exhibit; and so wisdom dictates—in poetry, at least—that some things be held back: a dissimulated reticence is preferable to a simulated exhibitionism.” I then invited my readers to share in the mixture of delight and consternation that the lines in question aroused in me by asking them to view in that light “the following décolletage from the boutique of James Wright.”

My point was (if it’s not already clear from the context provided) that easily parodied poets like James Wright were unwise to too ostentatiously flash their goods if the items in question were either undersized or deficient in get up and go. I felt at the time that Wright betrayed his insecurity about the ultimate value of his poetry and that he dealt with this by applying more body English to his mechanics instead of more usefully increasing his lyric involvement with the material he was sculpting. It’s not that he was incapable of producing relatively good, if not superior, verse. His well above average translations of German poetry is clearly demonstrated in his Lowell-like “imitations” of the impishly gnomic verse of Georg Trakl. Here is one of five of those imitations—not a lot to go by, but even these few lines show how apt Wright’s spare declaratives are for firming up Trakl’s filmy moonscapes:

In the farmyard the white moon of autumn shines,

Fantastic shadows fall from the eaves of the roof.

A silence is living in the empty windows;

Now from it the rats emerge softly

And skitter here and there, squeaking.

But such achievements are restricted to that sphere wherein one speaks as another poet might speak, were she disposed to ensilting in an alien language thought and emotion that only become sedimentary in his own. Speaking fervently and with lyrical authority about things rooted exclusively in your own language-world and in your own unique turf requires a very different fluency and ease of accommodation to foreign matter than is usually required of translators border-hopping from one logopoeia to another. Stuck as an Ohioan with a Midwestern patois of padded if not spongy locutions, Wright’s verse cedes what is laudably concrete in that idiom to Buckeye road crews and such, and makes do with the abstractions that foam over whenever the glass isn’t tilted the right way:

P. DOLAN and A. DOYLE

Have scrawled their names here,

You other stupid angels,

They have no wings

Here. Here all they have

Are squalling babies and the leaves

Of the wild strawberries you can still gather

Beside wet roads. . . .

This is about as caressing to the ear as Manhattan traffic is to anyone but Frank O’Hara who would’ve had it on his Walkman if they’d existed in the early ‘60s. The dedication to Wright’s composer friend Marsh and his music that is affixed to “Names Scarred at the Entrance to Chartres” seems oddly reversed: much in the poem might bring marshes to mind, but very little in its presentation smacks of the musical.

As a poet with strong working class roots, Wright usually could sense when something needed to be sent back to the shop to be retooled, and he made the superficies of his style as well as himself as a poet over a number of times in his career. Unfortunately, every time he set out to retool the tolerances got tighter in such a way that the music was squeezed into an ever thinner and scrapier monotone. Introibit Francescatti of sorts, exit fortiter Milstein and Grumiaux. Thus, if early on in the Wright scenario—say about 1953—a poem like “A Blessing” could amble rhythmically and scrupulously avoid self-dug potholes leading up to minor culverts:

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,

Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.

And the eyes of those two Indian ponies

Darken with kindness.

They have come gladly out of the willows

To welcome my friend and me.

We step over the barbed wire into the pasture

Where they have been grazing all day, alone.

They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness

That we have come.

They bow shy as wet swans. They love each other.

There is no loneliness like theirs—

by 1968, unruly buckboards like “The Minneapolis Poem” were raising dust all over the Wright spread, with off-road clatter drowning out almost everything else:

But I could not bear

To allow my poor brother my body to die

In Minneapolis.

The old man Walt Whitman our countryman

Is now in America our country

Dead.

But he was not buried in Minneapolis

At least.

And no more may I be

Please God.

Why the incessant harping throughout this guide on poets needing to show if not an exceptional musical sense, then at least a rudimentarily adequate one? Because I believe that if there was one thing Pound was absolutely right about, it was his insistence that music and literature were not just “sister arts” but Siamese twins joined forever at the ear. (They would be joined at the lip also, did anatomy not forbid a second juncture.) He realized that not only poetry, but prose as well, is intimately conjoined with music of a kind, albeit within a relationship closer to the subdominant than to the tonic. The notion that if figurative language isn’t tied to the rhythmic synapses linking optical and aural responses to the speech-making faculty, it’s not fit to wear the diadem of prose, let alone poetry’s royal crown, is far from outlandish. It thus seems strange that Wright’s verse (along with the equally out-of-favor poetry of Theodore Roethke) should be enjoying a revival right now. While renewed interest in their work may be no more than fallout from books recently published about them, but it does add to the spreading disquiet felt in some quarters over the speed and with which audible song is evaporating from American poetry. The concomitant decline of “serious” music also contributes to this unease; or it might just be that, in keeping with the ever-shrinking attention span of the nation’s 18-45-year-olds, interest is shrinking in all media that failing to transition to “interactive” modes. If something doesn’t come with a controller or X-Box, or doesn’t ladle synthetic music in low-fi out of a can, it’s no longer thought to fall within the category of info-tainment; and if it doesn’t do that, why should it possibly matter if it also happens not to be “art”?

That aside, one hopes the luck of better timing strikes the now posthumous Wright the second time around. His poetry does in retrospect seem a good deal more “interactive” than a lot routinely making the cut, and that does not exclude the verse of poets who exhibit far more control over mechanics than he ever did. The break-dance of the poetry that ended up in print just didn’t swing, and that’s sorrow and the pity of it.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine (b. 1928) almost always appears in anthologies represented by the same two or three war horses. De rigueur among the current crop of anthologists are “They Feed They Lion,” “Belle Isle, 1949,” and “You Can Have It.” (“Drum” is sometimes dragged in along with these, as with rather less frequency are “Red Dust,” “The Life Ahead,” “To a Child Trapped in a Barbershop,” and “Genius.”) Though Levine’s verse is less inherently “tough-minded” than others of the “poetry isn’t for sissies” persuasion, he is not unfairly pigeonholed as a stoic who makes much of having been “schooled in the hard knocks of applied moralism.” What differentiates him from others similarly backgrounded is that he talks the walk of his moralism as well as its talk, thus prompting inevitable comparisons with certain lions of the ‘30s who, having outgrown the naïveté common to those canonized by progressivist historians like Daniel Aaron (of Writers on the Left), refuse to endorse the neocon version of what is right, even as doublethink-tanks proliferate to give employment to literary bottom feeders only minimally less scrupled than the white-only sharks beached at Fox Cable News.

Could it have been the Stanford poetry fellowship Levine received in 1958, with its chance to gauge the clay in Yvor Winters’s feet from floor level, that landed him with that famous “sense of direction” so often mentioned in reviews of his work? Critics (including some not ideally receptive to Levine’s deli-cut tranches de vie) note a Sisyphean resolve asserting itself in his verse, an earnestness perhaps born of having schlepped a weighty backpack up a not inconsiderable slope for quite a number of years before establishing a place for himself in the pecking order of American poets.

Often, this earnestness communicates itself as a dourness not unlike the sour-rye obstinacy undergirding the dramas of Arthur Miller between All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, a grittiness bearing witness to a Depression-spent youth and depression-avoiding maturity. Toughness of that sort might well sprout from blue-collar roots, but its hardness no less than its shelf life evince the heavy lifting required to keep alive one’s faith in the imagination’s power to transform “car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles” into “the slow light of Friday morning in Michigan, / the one we waited for.” At times, the assiduousness needed just to keep one’s shoulder to the wheel proves in itself a little wearing, as when Levine’s poems sound in spite of themselves not unlike Clifford Odets might sound after a severely frowning J. V. Cunningham has shown him the shed. Or is it the other way around? At any rate, an inventive casuist doing double duty as an anthology headnote-writer has dubbed Levine “a master of extraordinarily colloquial diction.” One would think that being an “extraordinarily colloquial” anything would involve at the very least some knots of verbal elegance being tugged loose. But perhaps that headnote-writer was doing no more than anthology-piecing together Levine’s multifarious versions of how “They Lion grow,” which, as scads of his poems in their one-declamation-fits-all style tell us, is “out of”

West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,

Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,

Out of the bones’ need to sharpen and the muscles to stretch . . .

Or take “Red Dust,” in which the speaker, a typical Class-A hard case declares: “I do not believe in sorrow; / It is not American.” Thus is Levine’s reader prepped for the reductio ad horrendum of his poem’s conclusion which is formulated (as Levine’s optimal manner more often than not dictates) in clots not unreminiscent of freeze-dried blood:

And so my mind closes around

a square oil can crushed on the road

one morning, startled it was not

the usual cat. If a crow

had come out of the air to choose

its entrails could I have laughed? . . .

Or, yet again, in “The Life Ahead,” where a dreamer shocked awake is hard put to blink his living nightmares into focus for those lucky enough to be able to sleep through theirs with relative peacefulness, even if their adolescence, like Levine’s own, was spent in a hell’s kitchen much like his Detroit:

There was a river in Detroit

and if you crossed it you

were in another country,

but something always

called me back, a woman

who had no use for me

or a brother who did [. . .] Something

called me back to this life,

and I came home to wander

the schoolyard again

as a lost boy and find

above or below the world

was here and now, drowning

in oil, second by second

borrowed from the clock.

But it is in poems like “Genius” where Levine’s gift comes most triumphantly home to roost—and with a distinctly Yeatsian hold on the barnyard, too. This 1981 poem, brief and for once, only lightly sautéed in motor oil, captures an aging poet’s pride in being able at last to see his romantic illusions surrendered without first having had them pried, like an NRA member’s assault rifle, from his cold, dead fingers.

Two old dancing shoes my grandfather

gave the Christian Ladies,

an unpaid water bill, the rear license

of a dog that messed on your lawn,

a tooth I saved for the good fairy

and which is stained with base metals

and plastic filler. With these images

and your black luck and my bad breath

a bright beginner could make a poem

in fourteen rhyming lines about the purity

of first love or the rose’s many thorns

or the dew that won’t wait long enough

to stand my little gray wren a drink.

One line lacking for a sonnet but none short of a wholly fitting envoi to a life spent abolishing boundaries between the messiness of dogs having commerce with lawns and the thorniness of justifying love’s ways to ardor. Working, one might more colorfully say, to dissolve false partitions thrown up between duty—and duty.

Irving Feldman

The raw, naked genius of Irving Feldman’s verse (b. 1928), has to be one of the best kept open secrets in all contemporary American poetry. Only the rather more obscure one that Louis Zukofsky could outmelodize even Ezra Pound at his own trouvère game was ever played more close to the vest. Feldman’s Collected Poems: 1954-2004, published last year, had to wait for Schocken Books, a house specializing in works by Jewish authors, on mostly Jewish themes, for a predominantly Jewish audience to take it up. Not that there’s anything particularly degrading in this; it’s just that the fate of a poet of Feldman’s stature shouldn’t have to wait upon the narrow priorities of a distinctly sectarian press, even if it’s author list includes names like Kafka, Benjamin, Buber, and Josef Roth among its luminaries. Though Feldman has spent decades tucked away at the Buffalo campus of the State University of New York, an institution that sank from star status in the late ‘60’s and early ‘70s, serious damage done by his having survived residency there is, if to be noted at all, scarcely noticeable. Talent and the ability to compartmentalize alone kept him from devolving into another Alan Dugan, a curmudgeon’s curmudgeon, for whom sharecropping a back corner of the Bukowski plantation (only slightly less incorrect politically than the master’s own) was enough of a sinecure to keep his wits sharp and his brusqueness keen. Had Feldman chosen to go that route he might well have ended up as one-eyed as Dugan, chained to a pathetic strip of Gazan defiance reserved for Samson-wannabes. With this single difference to be drawn: if Levine’s satiric verse has a hint of the smartass about it, the smart half of the composite keeps its ass well to the rear and on an extremely short leash. That way, should either the beastly or the burdensome in his verse feel the need to kick up its heels, it can do so without knocking into its own bumptiousness and injuring itself.

Fortunately for him, Feldman, unlike Bukowski and Dugan, never felt driven to spurn the consciously artful, and we have the cluster of marvels that is his Collected Poems to prove it. Open its 425 pages anywhere and indispensable poems—American poems—pour out of hiding like friends at a surprise party, while still more only slightly less accomplished, gleam like tree ornaments in Rockefeller Plaza at Christmas-time. Feldman, it grows ever plainer each day, did not sidle edgewise into his considerable poetic gifts as if they were stiff new shoes. That exceptional talent of his was up and running from the beginning and as archingly full blown as marigolds in June. To seize upon just one proof of Feldman’s ripeness at point of début, “Man,” the first of the six parts of the long poem “Goya” from his first collection Works and Days (1961), bypasses the young and promising poet’s jejune precocity—

The soldiers bear a sack,

A white sack without a tear;

The soldiers are in black.

For the rest, the plain is bare.

And what else should be there?

They carry the sack,

They do the best they can;

One in his arms, another on his back.

Are these animals? their bag of bran?

No. These are men. This is a man.

—by blooming so radiantly and without glint of rehearsal that blossoming is made to seem a waste of time.

Feldman was done with rhyme (though not with loose-limbed meter) soon after this early collection, but would be as hard to imagine someone doing more with the less brilliantly skeletized in these ten lines as to find a critic of the opinion that this theme might have profited from more voluble exposition. The poem, like Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” is what it is and makes its point by compacting the surety of the homiletic with icy clarity of a lament rinsed with purest hokku. What else should be there?

Some of the later collections would see the Feldman line swirling toward progressively lengthening spirals, their occasional longueurs beginning to wear only when in the course of succumbing to what Yvor Winters’s “imitative fallacy,” they slacken, as here in “The Girlfriend,” into consonantal drift:

It all began when poor messed-up Lara called.

Oh, the same, the same: boyfriend down the tubes;

mother throwing fits; job post-terminal;

biological clock in doomsday mode;

her men shrinks were bullies, the women were,

if possible, worse: critical, envious,

What didn’t shrink was her laundry list

—the slights and frights, sobs, rages, gripes

wouldn’t come clean for all her self-expressing. . . .

The saving grace of such lines (when not too slack) is to permit the expansion of a territorial imperiousness that releases the poet to pursue quasi-novelistic ambitions in verse. (Akin to those given vent to in poem-novels like Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate, they avoid the debilities modern narrative verse is heir to, like the higher phlegmatics fogging up works in this vein by Robinson Jeffers and Robert Penn Warren, to name but two writers so afflicted.) Feldman’s “Jewishness” may hover Shekkinah-like over the corpus of his work, but its there-ness is like the dove of the Holy Ghost in that marvelous painting by Giotto: it obtrudes in order to guarantee the closeness to grace of everything it stalls over, the fallibility of man not excluded. True, the reclusive siren of ethnic identity is a temptress Feldman but infrequently connects with: it remains a hot property he prefers now and then to date rather than take home to meet the family. He is—to give a tired formula yet another jog—a poet who happens to be Jewish rather than a card-carrying Jewish author in the mould of an Isaac Bashevis Singer or Scholem Aleichem. In this, Feldman resembles the late Canadian poet Irving Layton—or would, if he had more of the blood of Catullus or Juvenal and less of Addision in his veins. Still, when need arises he can coax a Singer-like turn on a dime, like this one from “The Dream,” with the best of the Malamud-runners—

And just so daily somewhere Messiah

is shunned like a beggar at the door because

someone has something he wants to finish

or just something better to do, something

he prefers not to put off forever

—some little pleasure so deeply wished

that Heaven’s coming has to seem bad luck

or worse, God’s intruding selfishness.

—and in the very next poem, “The Life and Letters,” return to the secular debate as though the right to muse neurotically was an entitlement not unique to proponents of intelligent design holding forth at the high table:

And then. And then. And then.

And then no letter came back.

And soon no letter went forward.

Why listen now to people talking?

The demon settled into self-consumption.

And everything was still.

Dust silted over the phantom children

he’d never wanted anyhow;

at the end of its rainbow his wife’s hair

came to rest on red—forever;

their house faded in the manuscripts. . . .

In longer pieces given over to “infernal recurrence,” Feldman comes near to rivaling the master of the granitic, Frost, and in “In Theme Park America” the W. C. Williams of Spring and All with its irrepressible idiomizing of “pure products of America [going] crazy.” But for all-around exquisiteness—though there are far too many magnificent, and marvelously heterogeneous, triumphs in the Collected Poems to over-singularize the wonderfulness of any—“The Grand Magic Theater Finale” (if only for the exuberance with which it reunites Stevens and Yeats in corndog heaven), takes the absolute cake. Here, as is usual with Feldman, only the uncut version of the poem will do:

The curse was to claw the earth with their hands

in the dark until every cue was handed up.

And then the liberation of light blazing.

And here, out of their roles, the cast comes back

in costume still—how shy they seem of those rich

stigmata—marking time, shambling their steps.

See, the stars, too, have lined up with the chorus,

at last, face to face. And look at the lot

bust loose, stomp and prance, shake that dyna-mite.

There’s nothing they don’t over-over-over-do.

And what life they must have to be so different

every time we look! Like half-molted metaphors

—at ease in two worlds at once—they ad-lib

and swank their old impersonations for us

as if to say, All that was just kidding.

This happiness is the serious stuff.

. . .

Their exuberance, their soaring

would break our hearts if they weren’t making

everything larger, ourselves immortal,

with laughter. And surely they must know it,

singing out louder, reaching out their arms to us.

And who can say what they are begging and bringing?

Our cheering says, Freedom! Feeling!—from which

they wave, riding high, blowing both-handed kisses,

What wonderful people—you’re all angels.

Not goodbye but hello, folks, welcome to heaven!

COMING UP IN THE THIRD INSTALLMENT OF THE THUMBNAILER’S GUIDE:

Adrienne Rich, Gary Snyder, Mark Strand, Charles Wright, C.K. Williams, Charles Simic, Frank Bidart, Robert Pinsky, Sharon Olds.