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Louise Glück

As shrewd a publicist for her own work as Sharon Olds, the irrepressible Louise Glück (b. 1943) has doggedly plied more or less the same millstream since 1968, keeping herself afloat while improving her skills at executing tricky moves without leaning out too far to either side. Her secret strategy—the half-smug, half-canny tack she persists in—seems rooted in the notion that in an age marred by over-production and under-achievement, the only mutually enriching commerce open to poets is the fostering of trade between sovereign states of the soul, and those of “I” and “myself” are as good as any with which to get the ball rolling. Certainly in Glück’s case, the melding of nominal and reflexive has proved a wise strategy indeed. 

Not so much in areas exclusive of career advancement, however. The last few decades have seen an enviable stock of preserves being put up by this poet, the chunky fruit of which, though enticing texturally, often consists of no more than half-ripened thoughts better slathered on issues of contemporary relevance than delighted in for its own sake. So useful in fact has this algorithm to enhance Glück’s feminist-individualist cachet become, that it would be as disingenuous for her to come out against poets who lint their own navels as it would be for those who salt mines to protest the commercial availability of gold dust. Glück’s admirers might well believe that “by screening personal experience through various forms of artifice, her poetry succeeds in bringing us close to piercing feelings of anguish, isolation, and loss”; others less smitten approach such claims with a grain of—well, salt. If anything in the flimflam world of the arts seems beyond question, runs a certain vein of common sense, it is that skepticism should prevail in the face of any kind of artifice which purports to be able to keep separate and apart feelings and things feelings want desperately to cling to. A venerable philosophical tradition teaches us to look upon artifice as an enchanter’s loop that can render subject to the most squamous of fatae morganae anything naïve enough to penetrate its magic circle. Its artful projections can quite convincingly replicate anguish, isolation, and even abjectly experienced loss—but only so long as, distracted by their “realism,” we ignore the shadows flickering darksomely on the funhouse walls of such empiricist palaces as Plato’s cave. Which is not to say that substance, or semblance of same, has been lacking in the veronicas executed by Glück in the bull ring, whether in the course of evading the promptitudes of disintegration that so blithely obsess her; or of exorcising marriages, literal and figurative, that limit her; or of flirting with defeat in this or that hog-wallow refusing to de-swine itself at the whim of this Circe of Circes. Too often, her tactic for staving off impermanence is to build bigger and better ephemera to keep mortality’s coils safely under lock and key. For a time in the ‘70s, she seemed set on turning the plight of children, sick, drowned, or otherwise lost to possibility into a slough of personal despond. Then, perhaps re-energized by the false spring promised by the Great Communicator, with its “aw, shucks” rictus of “it’s morning again in America,” Glück’s verse made a quite uncharacteristic lunge for the wild, the febrile, and the just plain bizarre. As though to cap years of patient waiting, Glück began lavishing whole magnums of shock and rage on inequities that one would have thought already strip-mined to the wall supports in postmodern poetry: togetherness (whether marital or just garden-variety sexual) racked by “the low, humiliating / premise of union—”; the always impending wrench of death—”I’ll tell you something: every day / people are dying. . .”; and personal misfortune, “to survive / as consciousness / buried in the dark earth,” comforted only by a knowledge that “whatever / returns from oblivion returns / to find a voice.” These devolutions into mantra, having advanced with radial force to the forefront of her verse, seemed under no obligation to heed sweet reason or anything reasonably humane. Yet even her detractors had to admit that, though her probings of the unconscionable smacked ever so slightly of exploitation, they did open up for exploration certain fields of dreams which the half-baked surrealists who colonized American poetry in the ‘60s left radically unplumbed.  

In somewhat later collections, her gorge may be seen rising over women trapped in roles specifically rigged to offset feminist victories (as in the often anthologized poem, “Palais des Arts”) and others routinely assigned lower berths in the sexual revolution’s Pullman cars (“Mock Orange”). To mark the final sloughing off of her long-nursed despondency Glück has the feminine persona of “Eros” recount a rosary of satisfactions achieved in bed before performing the reverse sacrament of removing her wedding ring. This is to experience the only grace modern woman disgraced by peremptory déshabille has left to her: to know undenuded nakedness as Eve knew it before the Fall:

                        I had drawn my chair to the hotel window, to watch the rain.

                        I was in a kind of dream or trance—

                        in love, and yet

                        I wanted nothing.

                        It seemed unnecessary to touch you, to see you again.

                        I wanted only this:

                        the room, the chair, the sound of the rain falling,

                        hour after hour, in the warmth of the spring night.

                        I needed nothing more; I was utterly sated.

                        My heart had become small; it took very little to fill it.

                        I watched the rain falling in heavy sheets over the darkened city—

                        You were not concerned; I could let you

                        live as you needed to live.

                        At dawn the rain abated. I did the things

                        one does in daylight, I acquitted myself,

                        but I moved like a sleepwalker.

                        It was enough and it no longer involved you.

                        A few days in a strange city.

                        A conversation, the touch of a hand.

                        And afterward, I took off my wedding ring.

                        That was what I wanted: to be naked. 

A typical sleight of the Glückische hand is to leave the prosodic plan of a poem vague until the final line or two, when the hidden agency of stress emerges from concealment to declare itself at last as an emphasis worthy of being made: That was what I wanted: to be naked. Note how the battery of five accentuals, as marmoreally audible as any hendecasyllabic swatch of Dante’s Commedia, establishes “Eros” in its bed of concupiscence, the abstraction of affection having been totally dissolved in tincture of Ewige Weiblichkeit. 

Glück reached another crisis point of sorts with The Seven Ages (2000). A block-or-tackle moment had been looming ever since same-old, same-old had become in the early ‘90s inadequate as efflorescence-maintenance and began to edge threateningly toward deliquescence. No poet, even one accustomed to squeals of enthusiasm for every verselet she publishes, is immune to the queasiness that wells up when poring over galleys that, year in and year out, sound distressingly like “The Empty Glass”:

            I asked for much; I received much.

            I asked for much; I received little, I received

            next to nothing.

            And between? A few umbrellas opened indoors.

            A pair of shoes by mistake on the kitchen table.

            O wrong, wrong—it was my nature. I was

            hard-hearted, remote. I was

            selfish, rigid to the point of tyranny.

            But I was always that person, even in early childhood.

            Small, dark-haired, dreaded by the other children.

            I never changed. Inside the glass, the abstract

            role of fortune turned

            from high to low overnight. . . . 

Whatever else this might be, it is not poetry; but because this kind of thing so often passes for poetry, a name ought to be attached to what it is, if only to keep critics who ought to know better from slumming in its local habitations and failing to downgrade them for the tourist traps they are.  

The meteoric nature of Glück’s poetic career has caused some critics to wonder why the work of a poet as modestly gifted as she should have been met with such an outpouring of praise, especially since her work has moved but fitfully from the schoolmarmish inflexibility of her earliest efforts to the supple particularization of experience minimally expected of mature stylists. If there were occasions on which attempts were made to shift the focus of her poetry toward more catholic convergences, Glück cannot be said to have recalibrated her perceptions to accommodate changes on the ground since early triumphs like “The Wound” (1969) inured her to breakouts into monotony and tonedeafness in her own writing. Some of her first poems (those just shy of juvenilia) had a “fare forward, voyager” aura about them, but then, so did a lot of student writing during the ‘60s. Parading her foibles with abandon, Glück gave promise of instructing the male chauvinist pigs of antediluvian pre-feminist times what it was like to be out-truffled by a miniskirt of consequence. And she did it with the class of a Barbara Guest, not the contumely-ridden brashness of a Marge Piercy. 

But even in heady times such as those, Glück could not resist the allure of being a women’s advocate hors-de-tutu and relentlessly au point. A typical case au point ? How about “Labor Day” (1969):

                        Requiring something lovely on his arm

                        Took me to Stamford, Connecticut, a quasi-farm,

                        His family’s; later picking up the mammoth

                        Girlfriend of Charlie, meanwhile trying to pawn me off

                        On some third guy also up for the weekend.

                        But Saturday we were still paired: spent

                        It sprawled across that sprawling acreage

                        Until the grass grew limp

                        With damp. Like me, Johnston-baby, I can still see

                        The pelted clover, burrs’ prickle fur and gorged

                        Pastures spewing infinite tiny bells. You pimp. 

Ah, for the squeakiness of springs less doctrinairely sprung!  

The double-edged sword that flashes when a Yale Younger Poet is named has been remarked on often enough, the cases of subsequent crashing-and-burning being thick enough on the ground to set anyone wondering whether even enough too soon is all that much for very long. Indeed, being singled out for this honor seems not a little like being born a Jew in America: learning early that the gift of Chosenness keeps on giving, one discovers too that the stipend dispensed is tied to expectations that leave the recipient staring down the gun barrel of what is at best a very mixed blessing. 

James Tate 

If anyone can attest to the pistol-whipping premature fame can administer to the young (and not very worldly wise) poet, it is James Tate (b. 1943). Having been at 23 the youngest candidate ever selected by the Yale Committee, Tate got to experience the lumps and bumps of exceptionality when barely past the age of consent. The collection that earned him his coveted prize, The Lost Pilot (1967), was unusual not alone for its subtly undergirding thematic—the trauma of having a airman-father lost in a bombing run over Germany the same year he came into the world—but for the way in which Tate used it to highlight, without actually talking about it, a war very much on the brink of expanding into a much larger conflict. Critics were not slow, however, in pointing to a number of glaring flaws in the book’s handling of its dissimulative subject matter. Some noted that its youthful author was perhaps too much taken with the flashbulb aperçu that made the “glimpse-poems” of W. C. Williams’s Spring and All (1923) so eye-catching, not to mention the patented send-up of wonder that made the “magnesium-flare” verse of Pablo Neruda a watchword for shock and awe, if of the pre-packaged kind. Though the contents of The Lost Pilot lay down a hedgerow of slickly foreshortened doubletakes, a few poems like “Sleeves” do double duty as nettles gracing a poisoned thorn bush of contumelies essentialized by Tate to a spate of folkways by, of, and for equal-opportunity hypocrites:

            The shadow of a bleeding

            defeated lion asleep

            beneath a cedar tree, still

            visibly afraid, confronts

            me. Or no, the way the eyes

            are locked reflects shame.

            He’s not what I had thought.

            This happens. I saw a brute

            at a party. He was going

            to lift a goddess of

            beauty with each glad hand.

            Prefatory entertainment:

            the bully blushed and prepared

            to flex his lauded arms, found

            his sleeves completely empty. 

            Later collections also drew fire down on Tate, mostly for the unwonted “zaniness” of his broadly zapping rhetoric and facile surrealism. Notwithstanding, he continued to emit swatches of verse at regular intervals, showing manfully that little toll was being taken on his time or talent by having to trade precious writing stints for the financial pittance teaching undergraduates threw his way. The most notable success among his early poems is probably “The Wheelchair Butterfly,” a piece which deserves entombment in a time capsule for its title alone. Setting the tone for much of his later work, this homage to the synapse gratuite thrusts American surrealism-lite as far into the reason-deprivation tank of Deep Image as Breton-ese poetry is likely to get:

                        Yesterday was warm. Today a butterfly froze

                        in midair; and was plucked like a grape

                        by a child who swore he could take care

                        of it. O confident city where

                        the seeds of poppies pass for carfare,

                        where the ordinary hornets in a human’s heart

                        may slumber and snore, where bifocals bulge

                        in an orange garage of daydreams,

                        we wait in our loose attics for a new season

                        as if for an ice-cream truck.

                        An Indian pony crosses the plains

                        whispering Sanskrit prayers to a crater of fleas.

                        Honeysuckle says: I thought I could swim. . . . 

            By 1978, the redacted version of The Lost Pilot’s title poem showed continued sluicing toward a distinctly Eluardian floodplain: the relatively placid brooks and streams which had dotted Tate’s early to mid-’70s verse were swapped not just for whitewater, but for rapids as sheer and perilous as could be negotiated without incurring mayday. Gone, too, was the relatively inhibited manner of “Stray Animals” and “The Blue Booby” and in its place appeared an idiom that functioned like the thinnest of membranes separating the possibility of horror from its awfulest realization. Thus, “Intimidations of an Autobiography” (1978) and “The Motorcyclists” (1983) avoid self-puncturing explicitness quite marvelously. It is as if the poet were equipped with intravenous radar that could remain differentially attuned to the clotted rhythms and open-ended fermatas by which madness is simulated by artists who might’ve felt something of its downdraft but know little of its centrifugal pull as the realest of surreal things.  

           Yet despite much audible gear-grinding, nothing very new or interesting marks these mid-career sonatas for defibrillator and kazoo, though by now the stress of meeting publishers’ and tenure committees’ demands for more of the traumaturgy which had made The Lost Pilot magical was beginning to create lines of its own—on the poet’s once youthful-looking face. Forced to meet deadlines with readymade collages like “Moisture spreads across my pillow, / a chunk of quartz thirsts / to abandon my brain trust,” and having to accept from the inspiration mill such run-on bits of improv as “Where Babies Come From” (about which the less said the better), the question was batted around whether the lost pilot in Tate’s legendarium had been replaced by an automatic one. The jaw-dropping gift he’s once shown for corner-shot ballistics seemed to have morphed into the sort of pool-player’s fade that rather than clearing table after table, off-angled cue balls to send them and not target balls careening into the pocket. 

            A shame really, because back when Tate had a pro’s control his game had something the majority of neo-surrealist clones he’d thrown in all too clearly lacked. If it was visible in only somewhat less than half of his published verse, it still marked him as a stylist light years ahead of the “Hello Dali’s” bringing up his rear. In recent years his poems have almost begun to sing again, but there is an ever-present rasp, a decided hoarseness to their lilt and cadence. It seems ages since Dudley Fitts wrote of the prodigious hopeful of The Lost Pilot:

. . . What emerges finally is a body of young poetry, utterly new—James Tate sounds to me like no one I have ever read—, utterly confident, with an effortless elegance of control, both in diction and in composition, that would be rare in a poet of any age and that is particularly impressive in a first book. I do not know who taught him to sing such songs. . . . 

            One further ominous (but not, one hopes, terminal) note: It augurs poorly for Tate’s Hall of Fame prospects that, despite several collections brought out in recent years, the second edition of J. D. McClatchy’s influential The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry (2003), has dropped him from its roster of poets. Not that McClatchy has a direct pipeline to posterity, but as of this moment, the morning-line odds on Tate no longer augur for him a second noon. 

Yusef Komunyakaa 

Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1947) has to be viewed, no matter what one’s standards for thoroughbreds, as not just a horse of a different color but as of a class of zebras utterly foreign to reviewers used to staggering stereoptically between hip-hop black and an only marginally less trendy off-white. Among the most startling ones to appear since Rimbaud hung up his chops and made off to lay groundwork for the rape of Darfur in Abyssinia, Komunyakaa, like Tate before him, sounds like no poet anyone has heard or heard of; and no other poet is likely to begin sounding like him so long as “sound” and “like” stay as cleft-palatably disjunct from one another as string-theoretical universes with only a black hole in common. Jahan Ramazani, editor of The Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry sums up just what it is that makes Komunyakaa’s verse as eminently pronounceable as his surname is not:

Komunyakaa’s poetry also cuts across different levels of diction, from biblical idiom to journalistic reportage. African American vernacular to high-art lyricism. Komunyakaa’s remark in Callaloo about Melvin Tolson applies with equal force to his own work: “he brings together the street as well as the highly literary into a single poetic context in ways where the two don’t even seem to exhibit division—it’s all one and the same.” Syncopating short, jagged lines, emjambing and coiling syntax, building musical resonances through assonance and alliteration, Komunyakaa crafts poems that have mannered elaborations of jazz improvisation, in the long tradition of African American poets who have mined jazz and the blues for poetry, from Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown to Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Hayden, Amiri Baraka and Michael S. Harper. 

            Given the glut of computer-savvy poets roaming the Intel-4 pampas, it’s refreshing to find at least one capable of lithographing the stone age of our current vulnerability in terms beyond those of clip art—as is made poignantly evident in this poet’s “My Father’s Love Letters”—with an acetylene torch, no less:

                        On Fridays he’d open a can of Jax

                        After coming home from the mill,

                        & ask me to write a letter to my mother

                        Who sent postcards of desert flowers

                        Taller than men. He would beg,

                        Promising to never beat her

                        Again. Somehow I was happy

                        She had gone, & sometimes wanted

                        To slip in a reminder how Mary Lou

                        Williams’s “Polka Dots and Moonbeams”

                        Never made the swelling go down.

                        His carpenter’s apron always bulged

                        With old nails, a claw hammer

                        Looped at his side & extension cords

                        Coiled around his feet,

                        Words rolled from under the pressure

                        Of my ballpoint: Love,

                        Baby, Honey, Please.

                        We sat in the quiet brutality

                        Of voltage meters & pipe threaders,

                        Lost between sentences . . . 

What’s hard to believe is that this four-stress line, with beats as solidly studded as though an electric-powered nail driver had riveted them in place, is nearly identical to the one T. S. Eliot used to such powerful effect in Four Quartets. And like that elder modernist, Komunyakaa refuses to acknowledge that such a perfect rhythm for rolling experiences out of memory’s garage on nearly silent wheels should be put up on blocks and allowed to molder there. Why retire a fit and appropriate verse technique when it took centuries to evolve its like and there is no shortage of purposes which such a delivery system can serve?  

Like Bruce Weigl, Komunyakaa seemed almost to have sprung fully formed as a war poet. Having experienced the militant infantilisms of the Vietnam years from the below-curb-level viewpoint of the underclass, he went on from there to obsess about the elaborate booby-trappings of post-traumatic stress (set to randomly explode like shells in defective metal jackets) and how, when conditions are right, they might flower into bullet-poems as efficient in reaching their targets as poems like “Camouflaging the Chimera” prove:

            We tied branches to our helmets.

            We painted our faces and rifles

            with mud from a riverbank,

            blades of grass hung from the pockets

            of our tiger suits. We wove

            ourselves into the terrain,

            content to be a hummingbird’s target.

            We hugged bamboo & leaned

            against a breeze off the river,

            slow-dragging with ghosts

            from Saigon to Bangkok,

            with women left in doorways

            reaching in from America.

            We aimed at dark-hearted songbirds. . . . 

           “Facing It” and “Tu Do Street” lug (in different hands) unlightenable combat baggage to the furthest extremities of purgation, the ballast of their imagery rendered less burdensome only by the weight dropped through time passing and the marking of such transits by the shed light of radium dials casting war in half-life. But there is more rattling around Komunyakaa’s poetic quiver than an arrow or two of shame leaning against a few others of deliverance. Returning home to a less exotic hell than Quang Tre or Khe Sanh, Komunyakaa graduated from memorial reflections on dead Vietnam war buddies to sit-ins in catacombs where only goddesses of the dead call the roll. The ritualized momentousness suspended in his “Día de los Muertos” must be, one can’t help but conclude, closer to the poet’s own hearth gods than to any local spirits left to stew in Southeast Asia. These, though recallable through nightmare in borrowed flesh, lack imprimatur to release anyone from the underworld which they carved from driftwood left by Marx, Machiavelli, and Malraux:

                        Terra cotta shrines for loved ones

                        Who died to hurt us. We rehearse

                        Their tunes & display their favorite

                        Colors in a labyrinth of unwinding rooms

                        Through inner sancta where baroque

                        Gargoyles open their eyes to scare away

                        Evil. Plaster of Paris

                        & papier-mâché dusted with glitter.

                        We season The Last Supper

                        With salt brushed from bodies

                        Temporal & unreliable as amaranth

                        Scenting The Mission District.

                        Halloween skeletons earn the weight

                        Of ivory & façade, resting

                        Like some beautiful accident

                        On a dice maker’s workbench. 

Carolyn Forché 

Transitioning from Yusef Komunyakaa’s poetry to Carolyn Forché’s (b.1950) is like shifting from war burdens trundled from left brain to right to plastic explosives being transferred, with excruciating care, from one hand to another. Each of these two poets has acquired a feel over time for the particular volatility of his or her gelignite—cerebral or hand-held—and has learned how to keep it sealed from the air and cushioned from sudden movement. Forché’s fulminating mix, leaning analytically towards the sexual and political, the gender-honed sticking points of America’s dark side, works exteriorly by focusing on occasions for violence without. Komunyakaa’s, on the other hand, is quite differently calibrated. Sinking an implosive probe into the dead center of American culture, it brings up on a screen of words an emblem of the sort of violence that is bottled up within. 

Forché’s rocket-ride to the ethereal of really high profile began, like James Tate’s, with her being elected to the company of Yale Younger Poets for Gathering the Tribes (1976). And like several such laureates, she broke chrysalis as a shatterer of complacencies, an articulate causative with rebelliousness to share. Evincing disdain for any poetic role exchanging quietude and acquiescence for speedy career advancement made her an inveterate polarizer of unopposed oppositions and someone who would try to disrupt business-as-usual wherever she saw it insinuating itself into literary affairs. This proved unfortunate in the sense that by the mid-’70s, she had become ripe pickings for every huckster of left-wing causes able to coax her name onto a petition, manifesto, or sign-up sheet for bodies to fill out a demonstration or protest march. At a time when looking grubby was still in among ‘60s refugees and refuseniks of various stamps, even her quietly restrained, Lord-and-Taylor-casual way of dressing drew comment, not a little of it unfavorable. The well-scrubbed look that came west with her from Bowling Green State University (her first academic job) to assume her first tenure-track position at San Diego State University—in tandem with the demeanor of a sweet and amiable young scholar not on the make—did not really jibe with the take-no-prisoners, post-colonialist stance she projected in the classroom. Nor did it coincide with the third world-sensitive persona endlessly professing solidarity with the oppressed trotted out in her poetry. Too fresh-faced and girlish to be a credible subversive and not nearly fractious enough to be the armature of rupture her strident vocalics aimed at, Forché seemed a poseuse stranded pathetically between a crock and a hard place set for her at a feminist table d’haute chosen for rather than by her. 

All of this, it should be emphasized, reflects my own personal recollection of having briefly had Carolyn Forché as a colleague in that time and in that place which was hard for more than just the young, the radical, and the poetical. While prepared to grant that the whirr of decades might’ve softened and smoothed out some of the more stubborn creases in my recollection, I stand by my characterization of her as a most ebullient and evanescent contradiction in terms. I might also stress that, barring a same-sex interlude or two in Gathering the Tribes, the feminism embraced in Forché’s first book in no way resembles the strung-out butcheries of a Valerie Solanis or the “all-holes-barred since all intercourse is rape” hysterics that earned Andrea Dworkin a podium on National Public Radio and NOW conventions everywhere. Generally speaking, Forché’s intra-feminine solidarity was of a piece with herself as a person: it was tolerant of a multitude of lifestyles and was no more attracted to agitprop extremism than Isabel Allende’s in her novels or Anaïs Nin’s in those dreams of worlds never grasped she called “diaries.” 

Somewhat later, though, in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s mostly, her airbrushed radicalism took on something of a flinty sharpness not detectable before. A stint with Amnesty International in El Salvador in 1978-80 resulted in a Lamont Poetry Award for her collection The Country Between Us (1981), but not much followed that, at least not in the way of original verse. Her time was largely divided between translation projects (mostly involving Hispanic women poets of strong leftist persuasion) and political engagements that hatched into memoir-producing trips to hot spots like Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Kosovo, all of which served to transform her into the nearest facsimile of Rosa Luxemburg America could fashion without itself turning into Weimar Germany. As her cachet as a liberationist ideologue spiked, her image as a poetic conveyor belt for ideas beyond the pale of UNICEF or of the World Feminist Alliance dimmed to an unhealthy pallor. Despite stints heading up international Writers for Freedom forums, she more and more came to seem a spent force with much of her best writing behind her. All that notwithstanding, there is little in the politically conscious verse of this country which has the soft-spoken power of the much-anthologized elegy, “The Memory of Elena.” Its control of tremolando effects may seem less prodigious in certain European or Latin American poetry but it is rarer than eyebrows on eggs in verse as programmatically uncosmopolitan and chez-nous as our own. Note how the unraised voice of the poem’s last three stanzas manages to speak volumes about untoward noises without ever rising to so much as a hint of stentorian sprechstimme:

                        As she talks, the hollow

                        clopping of a horse, the sound

                        of bones touched together.

                        The paella comes, a bed of rice

                        and camarones, fingers and shells,

                        the lips of those whose lips

                        have been removed, mussels

                        the soft blue of a leg socket.

                        But this is not paella, this is what

                        has become of those who remained

                        in Buenos Aires. This is the ring

                        of a rifle report on the stones,

                        her hand over her mouth,

                        her husband falling against her.

                        These are the flowers we bought

                        this morning, the dahlias tossed

                        on his grave and bells

                        waiting with their tongues cut out

                        for this particular silence. 

            Restraint like this seems couched in the genes of its very language which whispers of hands in the sotto voce of fingers first forced into a fist and then finding absolution in unclenching and eliciting beautiful sounds from a guitar. Forché might all along have wanted to breathe the fire of revolutionaries, but her talent was always more like Hemingway’s: one that breathed easiest and best when all the firebrands had slipped away and become as remote as the smoke and tears of what they had made and made occur. Whatever else this poet might write in times to come, and however much it might serve to muddy the waters, Gathering the Tribes will always be there to turn back what harvests dirt and make those waters clean and clear again. It’s that kind of book.

Charles Bernstein 

Of the so-called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets (and the redoubtable Charles Bernstein [b. 1950] in particular) there is little to be said that others less charitable than I haven’t said already; and since none of it seems to have been in the least effective in making t=h=e=m go away, I’ll make this assessment mercifully short. The undampable simmer of retro-politics in American universities since the ‘60s and ‘70s keeps this particular pot of message amply supplied with kettles to call black and rag dolls of bourgeoisification to smash against treasured memories of the Berlin wall. The complexity of theories spun in movement anthologies such as Bernstein’s Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (1998) notwithstanding, the rationale undergirding L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry is not that hard to toss into its own cocked hat, as it were. 

Among the multifarious demonic powers called upon by American imperialism to do its bidding, these poets claim, is the ability to employ media whose molestation of public discourse is so egregious and corrupt that only language translated back into L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (i.e., discourse properly detoxified) can restore sanity and good faith to the commonweal. The whole harebrained enterprise (whose assumptions closely resemble those endorsed by post-Marxian “New Historicists” of whose probity there is neither new or historical) is summarily executed in Bernstein’s poem, “Have Pen, Will Travel”:

                        It’s not my 

                        business to describe 

                        anything. The only 

                        report is the 

                        discharge of 

                        words called 

                        to account for 

                        their slurs. 

                        A séance of sorts— 

                        or transport into 

                        that nether that 

                        refuses measure. 

            And on that note of declining measure, l suggest we nod in condolence and move swiftly on. 

            As unnecessary as it might seem to ask (so ubiquitous has the phenomenon become): Has anybody not noticed how long poetic lines have gotten to be these days, from the now fashionable “prose poem” first hung out to dry by Baudelaire, all the way to that counter-metric more extreme than even Whitman’s, himself a bard whose take on prosody seemed coined by the respiratory system? I’m referring here to those emphatically non-metrical and even rickety verse contraptions favored by John Ashbery (in his Tatlin-esque moments), or by Susan Howe or Alice Notley (in their Gatling-esque moments). I am not, please note, including C. K. Williams in any of this, a poet whose fourteeners not only foster sensible prosody but make head-clearing prosodic sense. 

             Of late it appears that a full-fledged and even harmoniously arrived at modus vivendi has been hammered out between two erstwhile hostile poetic camps, and we now have a chance to determine not just how current poetry should sound but how it might look as copy in sight of eternity either hard or soft. The “unending design” of “epic” works like the Cantos of Pound, Williams’s Paterson, and Olson’s Maximus long ago broke the mould of the poem readable in one sitting that Edgar Allan Poe declared de rigueur, and experiments to further loosen the “formalities of form” by the New York School, the joint-Black Mountain-and-Projectivist conclaves, and the freer-than-free associations of vers librists in synch with the iso-metricalities laid down in W. C. Williams’s Paterson V and the “variable foot” triadics of Desert Music, Pictures from Bruegel, and Journey to Love (not to mention comparable poets with “populist leanings” such as James and Charles Wright, Robert Pinsky, and yes, C. K. Williams) effectively moved the goal posts of the American verse further and further downfield until what constituted a touchdown in contemporary poetry became just about anybody’s guess.

Jorie Graham

One might be tempted to add Jorie Graham’s (b. 1950) name to this list, were she sufficiently “populist” in either leanings or practice to accommodate herself to any such facile pigeonholing. Fronting an enormous ambition to restore high modernist drama—and daring (if not the methods that go with that tendency)—to American prosody, Graham has progressed relentlessly from the rigid paradigmatics of Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1974) to the sprawling and open-toed syntagmatics of her more recent collections, Regions of Unlikeness and Materialism. And all without much nostalgia being expended on the stiff-necked, rolling-deck walks of their predecessor, now a relatively distant memory. 

Graham’s first poems were musical almost to a fault, obsessing on minute extensions of assonantal patterns in repetitive, almost bulbous stanza forms. (Believe it or not, it is possible to be too concerned with musical rightness and consistency, to be so preoccupied with balancing soughing vowels and coughing dactyls that the point is reached where meaning and continuity collapse into nuclei of pure sound possessing neither atomic weight nor specific gravity. None of this, of course, should ever be confused with the transit of a typical poem by, say, Mallarmé, where sound and sense are absorbed quite seamlessly into an organum of evocations perfectly attuned to its own otherworldly woofers and tweeters.) Note, for example, how the serpentine of indents concaving Graham’s “Reading Plato” provides contour for the short “i”s undulating through the poem’s first stanza:

                        This is the story

                        of a beautiful

                        lie, what slips

                         through my fingers,

                        your fingers. It’s winter,

                         it’s far

                        in the lifespan

                         of man. . . . 

            Or, with even greater ingenuity, how the interleaving of vowel sounds blocks out almost every other sound that might threaten to obtrude in “Tennessee June”:

                        The is the heat that seeks the flaw in everything

                        and loves the flaw.

                        Nothing is heavier than its spirit,

                        nothing more landlocked than the body within it.

                        Its daylilies grow overnight, our lawns

                        bare, then falsely gay, then bare again. Imagine

                        your mind wandering without its logic,

                        your body the sides of a riverbed giving in . . . . 

            Some few years later, Graham was still using the paneled-indent stanza form (by 1980 it had almost assumed in her verse the eminence of a double helix); but she was also drifting toward a more tightly corseted thematics, as in the much anthologized “Luca Signorelli’s Resurrection of the Body,” from Erosion:

                        See how they hurry

                         to enter

                        their bodies,

                         these spirits.

                        Is it better, flesh,

                         that they

                        should hurry so?

                         From above

                        the green-winged angels

                         blare down

                        trumpets and light. But

                         they don’t care,

                        they hurry to congregate,

                         they hurry

                        into speech, until

                         it’s a marketplace,

                        it is humanity. . . . 

            Prepared to risk adverse response from readers holding that poetry is poetry, art criticism art criticism, and never the twain shall meet, Graham refused to cave in to the counterview that verse exhibiting writerly concern with sculpture and painting reeked not only of Richard Wilbur but of an “arch-poetry,” deveined, eviscerated and pseudo-Gothicized by “art” (as opposed to art). She pressed on with her agenda of linking contemporary poetry up with its endangered modernist future, gliding with pronounced slither toward what is now the hallmark of her poetics: a line broken into elisive units by such cinematic techniques as frame-riffling and compound montage, while being open enough in its tensile adhesions to remain nearly ajar. 

            Among the most remarkable of her efforts along these lines is “Fission,” which crosscuts the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 with the poet’s own personal memories of the movie theater in which, with house lights on, what had just happened in Dallas was announced by the management to the audience. Odd details abound in this recollection, such as the continued running of the feature attraction on the screen behind the visibly trembling theater representative who was breaking news having already been fractured by such as Walter Cronkite of CBS News into a thousand razor-sharp slivers:           

                                                                                              . . .

                                    Tick. It is 1963. The idea of history is being

                        Outmaneuvered.

                                    So that as the houselights come on—midscene—

                        not quite killing the picture which keeps flowing beneath,

                                    a man comes running down the aisle

                        asking for our attention—

                                    Ladies and Gentlemen.

                        I watch the houselights lap against the other light—the tunnel

                                    Of image-making dots licking the white sheet awake—

                        A man, a girl, her desperate mother—daisies growing in the

                                                                                                            corner— 

            By the time Graham’s poem begins, its final descent into a vortically controlled tailspin is prefigured by gyres of suggestiveness that widen notably with every new line. Its recurrent dream, double-exposed as nightmare, is developed in situ to a nicety of near-Sartrean imprecision. Little is left to the imagination that the event with all its historic resonance has not sifted with nugget-laden ore:

                                                                                                . . .

                        and aimlessly—what we call free—there

                        the immobilism sets in,

                                    the being-in-place more alive than the being,

                        my father sobbing beside me, the man on the stage

                                    screaming, the woman behind us starting to

                        pray;

                                    the immobilism, the being-in-place more alive than

                        the being,

                                    the squad car now faintly visible on the screen

                        starting the chase up,

                                    all over my countenance,

                        the velvet armrest at my fingers, the dollar bill

                        in my hand,

                                    choice the thing that wrecks the sensuous here the glorious

                                                                                                                        here—

                        that wrecks the beauty,

                                    choice the move that rips the wrappings of light, the

                                                                                    ever tighter wrappings

                        of the layers of the

                                    real: what is, what also is, what might be that is,

                        what could have been that is, what

                                    might have been that is, what I say that is,

                        what the words say that,

                                    what you imagine the words say that is—Don’t move, don’t

                        wreck the shroud—don’t move— 

            If to some it is offensive to see quoted at length what is deplorable straight up, I can only justify citing this much of the poem by saying that to give away any less of how it ends would be to deny it its rightful propensity to sprawl lengthwise as far as it can and breadth-wise as much as it must. What is truly remarkable about it—irrespective of how appealing it might or might not seem as a poem—is its licentious, Rite of Spring musicality. Graham’s cinematic compost manages its frenetic rhythms with brilliance, and the manner in which it keeps to its own wildly disparate and metrically disjunctive time signatures is nothing short of astounding. On record as seeking in her poems “new strategies to by which to resist closure [and its] suction . . . ; [new] forms of delay, digression, side-motions,” Graham goes out of her way to repudiate the armamentarium of reaction uniformly held to by the “strong measures” crowd. Way out beyond Robert Duncan’s and John Ashbery’s “opening of the field” (while not spurning artfulness and discipline), Graham has consistently kept her eye fixed on a field she has herself devised. It is not just ajar but agape at the possibilities a genuinely revitalized American poetry can look forward to. Far from achieving renewal, the present so-called “renascence” in this country’s verse is one that is doubled over with cant and literally gasping for fresh airs. Graham would let open field running in poetry truly be open field running and let policing of the game take care of itself. 

Gjertrud Schnackenberg 

Though as different from a Jorie Graham as any contemporary of that poet could be, Gjertrud Schnackenberg (b. 1953) is also not averse to donning a historical shift every now and then and slumming in neighborhoods that, though traditionally erudite, seem to many to be of less than desirable reputability. When this poet does venture out into such places, her sallies are often carapaced with shards of circumstance whose origins in one or another kinds of literature mock the seriousness of the very Fukuyama-like inevitabilities her poetry seems to be forefronting. “Darwin in 1881,” for instance, compares the Beagle’s near-death voyager-in-chief to Shakespeare’s Prospero “back in his bedroom / In Milan, with all his miracles / Reduced to sailors’ tales,” while at the other end of the island, the much lengthier (18 pages) “Imaginary Prisons—A version of Sleeping Beauty” could almost pass as a sequel to the Donald Barthelme redaction of the Grimms-and-Disney fabula, Snow White (1966), straitened and relaced, rather tersely, into a corselet of, well—tercets. The effect of the latter is not unlike that of Ashbery’s Girls on the Run (1998), which retooled a book written for pre-ingénues with Harry Potter-like pop-ups coached clinically by Abraham Mazlow. 

If history these days is everyone’s bête noire, the King Kong-like misadventures it can incur are in Schnackenberg’s view better steam-pressed into crumps and tucks of irony than teased with in-creasing horror. From her angle of vision the Pandora’s box heedlessly rifled by historians (and historicists) may be filled past crimping with rank and filicidal schmerzerei, but there’s barely a chronicle this side of the Rwandan massacre or the Holocaust without its light-filled moments, even if the source of the gleam is the scholarly auras objets d’art take on as their cultural radiance fades out. This might serve to explain why so little of Schnackenberg goes for some readers such a very long way. Other recent poets have been obsessed with history (consider Joseph Brodsky); but they have not deliquesced it down to the fine powder of illuminated manuscripts or the Bayeux tapestry made exhibit-fodder for a fund raiser’s traveling museum. Schnackenberg sifts the past with an eye to redivining its hidden portents, but often the game and its Colbert Report-like snidenesses go awry. What should bite like Swift merely gums its way through the self-effacings of satire: the bromides are those of Pangloss all right, but the Pangloss is not the Leibnizian monstrosity decanted by Voltaire, he’s the dumbed-down resideratum of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. If the objections most readers take to entrails, tea leaves, or even scallopings on shells cast up by the sea being remain largely negotiable if they’re “read” in the right kind of poem (James Merrill’s poetic career didn’t entirely tank after Changing Light at Sandover), some line should be insisted on between one that eeks while remaining more or less medium-rare and the bifteck tartare of high-culture that is more than an FDA inspection or two past its shelf-life. 

True, as a poet of that kidney Schnackenberg wears her learning lightly—that is to say, with little of the dry-as-dust academicism that seizes an Edgar Bowers or a Geoffrey Hill when the conceit leaves the page and walks abroad as the conceited. What is more important is that she can almost instinctively sense when the bulldog grip exerted on a subject will yield debentures of consistency and when only dividends of laceration are to be expected. Consider, for example, the second of two poems bearing identical titles, “At Dante’s Tomb,” which are part of a twenty-poem sequence titled “A Gilded Lapse of Time (Ravenna).” This twelve-line completion of a diptych follows immediately upon another, somewhat lengthier excursus numbered “10,” which provides a personalized preamble to its second panel. The shorter of the two lyrics doesn’t in the least compound or build upon the tablature set by the preceding poem but instead treats its inscription as something to be overwritten by a palimpsest or pentimento that will ultimately make true what was before merely accurate at best:

            In English world is an isolated sound,

            Which an unmistakable, audible, inward whirl,

            Tilted on a hum that rhymes with itself,

            Revolving when we speak it, then ceasing to spin.

            We may founder before it, stranded before the page

            Where we gaze at it from above,

            Though if we say worldworldworldworldworld

            We can begin to feel it spinning around

            Its axis, then brake to a halt

            When we turn our attention away. You believed

            We intuit the sound of the spheres, Dante,

            When God touches our ears. Ephphatha. Be thou opened. 

            In “10,” Schnackenberg seems content to number the spores feasting on her own pilgrimage’s minutiae, as though to convey the dank immemoriability of the tomb were enough to count, as it were, the constitutive fungi of spirituality’s mildew. In “11,” however, Schnackenberg broaches the mundus of the Commedia itself, from above as well as from within. Keeping an ear out for what Dante might have imagined he was hearing as he tracked his persona through the triune realms of the afterlife, she attempts to pin down just what sort of ethereal sound a soul, triply brushed by wings of the eternal, might emit. Might not such a sound have been the one Dante labored to capture from deep within the grooves of terza rima, the verse form which, for him, best preserved the mysterium of the joyously grave lying just this side of the Holy Trinity’s “Three in One, One in Three”? 

            An obsession with nuance of this sort is what broadly characterizes the miniaturist, though Schnackenberg, in poems like her own impressive tribute to the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (murdered, like so many other notables of the Bolshevist era, by Stalin and his thugs), “A Monument in Utopia,” is not at all your everyday pieceworker given to ransacking the diminutive for snippets of the muse’s largesse. This work, over 30 pages long and among the least rhythmically stilted or constricted of all her poems, is also the most intricately structured of all the pieces gathered in Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-1992 (2000). Readers intent on sampling what is best in Schnackenberg are well advised to reach for it first. Not only do its Escher sketches of fact perspectivally melding with conjectural fissure reflect how webs spun of art, reportage, and journalistic commentary are woven over the centuries, but it manages also to encapsulate through a series of calculated explosions (and lesser episodic flares) how manuscripts, suddenly springing to life, spontaneously combust their own illuminative radiance. 

            Still, in all candor it must be admitted there is little in the entire Schnackenberg oeuvre that seems either genuinely original or of lasting value. As verse, it runs technical circles around much of the competition; but as poetry its circlings of historic anguish, rodomontade, and angst fail repeatedly to penetrate to the deepest maleboges of the postmodern sensibility. 

Mark Doty

Mark Doty (b. 1953), also born just after mid-century, shows fair to be among the most not merely gifted but gift-giving poets of his generation. His meteoric rise during the ‘90s graced an interregnum which, for all its puerile talk of “slams,” Billy Collins, and an unprecedented “poetry revival,” was as parched for real vitality as any since the late middles ages or, to borrow a phrase from the late W. K. Chambers, “the Drab Age.” Like Thom Gunn, a part of the post-Stonewall renaissance that, along with the feminist movement and the trans-ethnic, black-and-brown resurgence, has been about reconfiguring the whole of the American canon, Doty has shrewdly chosen to hitch his wagon to neither the shooting star of explicitly gay themes nor the falling one of gay subculture in excelsis. His poems stay nitpickingly clear of both patronizing gentrification and epicene double-downing on territory that was once belonged strictly to the Quentin Crisps, maintaining rather an uncompromising elegance within a relatively cologne-free zone of forthrightness and vernacular ease. Moreover, they seem so comfortable with their own unpuffed-out chests, and so utterly unstraitjacketed by artistic compacts imposing either formal restraint or rhythmic constipation, that they roll trippingly off the tongue (in the manner recommended to the players by Hamlet) rather than trip rollingly around it like arch phrases in the mouth of such as Carl Phillips. 

              Though not one to plant both feet, or even one, on turf claimed by rhymers and metricists, Doty enjoys reveling in the dopamine-like capacity of words to get human beings over the autistic hump preventing them from communicating freely with others. Realizing (perhaps from early personal unpleasantness) that, lacking an algorithm to help them advance from bud to blossom, the insecure and hesitant invariably presume life’s default setting to be “outer indifference necessitating inner silence.” Doty’s verse works overtime to expose how false the underwriting for this impression almost always proves to be. Like Montaigne—and Whitman—he considers nothing human to be foreign to him, not so much as a green crab’s shell. “Imagine breathing,” he writes, “surrounded by / the brilliant rinse / of summer’s firmament.” What his multitudes-containing self proposes, his lithe and agile poetry enthusiastically disposes. 

             His first two volumes of verse, Turtle, Swan (1987) and Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (1991), broke little new ground but proved nonetheless attractive showcases for a talent unwilling to rest on the laurels that dangle from key chains. Indeed, from the vantage point of seven books having been rung up rather than just two, the early poems seem no more than wanly circumspect fly-castings, their overreaching idiom that of a poet more intent on carving his way through a wilderness than finding it among sand traps and stones. 

            My Alexandria (1992) was the pivot that tilted all that false starting back to a more promising Square One, and coasting confidently on the praise it conferred, Doty found himself heir to the kind of apparency that only poets that cop prizes like the British T. S. Eliot Award can enjoy. But honors of that magnitude—and we’ve been there several times before in this survey—bring with them crushing pressure to ravel out strings of sequels while avoiding bad reviews at any cost. The safest thing to do in situations like that is spread one’s efforts as thinly as possible and hope that stylistic regularity will settle in before the reverse cachet of having been opening act for some greater draw blows one out of the water professionally. Best in show so far as My Alexandria is concerned are its two lengthiest pieces “The Wings” and “With Animals,” which extend with subtly subtensive metaphors the feel Doty has for the zoological as a logic extending considerably further than the purview of zoos. 

              “The Wings,” with its intricate draping of Rilkean folds, begins with a description of an auction at which the poet as a boy acquires a book and his parents a pair of snowshoes. He is given them (with retrospective precocity, they remind him of “angels’ wings”) to carry on his back, and this casual event becomes in later life an Icarian crux for some rather high-flying thoughts about innocence, vulnerability, and the danger of leaving a sense of both behind. On one occasion, the poet speaks of fashioning an angel

            like those Arcimboldos where the human profile

            is all berry and leaf,

            the specific character of bloom

            assembled into an overriding form . . . . 

—while on another, with the time-frame leaping forward from childhood to adulthood, he holds forth as mentor-remembrancer instructing students in a class of his how to fashion an angel seen as:

                                                            that form

between us and the unthinkable,

                        that face we give the empty ringing,

                        and how that form for me appears in a boy

                        with snowshoe wings slung across his shoulders. 

            The unpacking of this morality play concludes affectingly with an italicized envoi in which the poet (now grown into an accomplished pedagogue) leaves his students in possession of a burden miraculously weightless, “willing around you, hard, / the encompassing wings of the one called / unharmed”:

                        A steady fine-pointed rain’s

                        etching the new plantings,

                        and I’m making the rain

                        of the angel. Try to be certain,

                        he says, where you’re looking.

                        If you’re offered endlessness,

                        don’t do anything differently. The rule

                        of earth is attachment:

                        here what can’t be held

                        is. You die by dying

                        into what matters, which will kill you,

                        but first it’ll be enough. Or more than that:

                        your story, which you have worn away

                        as you shaped it,

                        which has become itself

                        as it has disappeared. 

            As shapely as these poems are, Doty’s true voice did not effectively emerge until My Alexandria (1993) and Atlantis (1995), the pair of collections in which his early tendency to play it safe is finally deep-sixed and the confident poet, until then forcibly submerged, races triumphantly to the surface. From their medley of spring and autumnal tunes sprang the even more robustly meditative branles of Sweet Machine (1998), Source (2001), and last year’s School of the Arts. In each of these collections Doty embraces a variety of forms whose rhythmic flexibility is not so much that of stanzaic structures as of pulsing arterials ensuring ease of flow and proper circulation of poetic plasma to where it is needed most. How might a legitimately American poetic voice sound in our time? Very much, I am on the way to being convinced, like this:

                        Of course I know how it ends.

                        I know there’s a precise limit

                        where salt marsh gives way

                        to fogged water’s steel.

                        But from here, from moor’s edge

                        where the tide pond

                        doubles the swallows,

                        it doesn’t seem to;

                        blond acres

                        vanish at the rim

                        into the void,

                        a page on which anything

                        might be written,

                        though nothing is. What I love

                        is trying to see

                        the furthest grassy extreme,

                        that fog-marbled horizontal . . .

                        Rippling strokes, a few high dunes

                        hung on the edges of the page

                        like Chinese brushstrokes,

                        barely there, and out

                        on the far shore

                        the sea gone, a clouded mint

                        gone without edges, horizon erased

                        a single silken exhalation

                        the color of mown grass,

                        unripe persimmon, gooseberry,

                        juniper, sage, green shadow

                        in the hollow of collarbone,

                        love, I know, it ends,

                        you don’t have to remind me,

                        though it seems a field

                        of endless jade. 

Slice it any way you like, but that is poetry—if not for all time, then certainly for this time. And why shouldn’t that be satisfactory until such time as posterity sees fit to dispose things differently? If Mark Doty’s, or some other poet’s version of Ammons-esque artspeech should become the default style for the next 40 years of American poetry—our version of Augustan rock-firmness with a Creeley or a Doty as its Oliver Goldsmith if not Samuel Johnson—I for one would see no cause for despair over where our literature was headed. Compositions like “Jade” (a segment of “Fog Argument”) remain, like that poem’s title, timeless, fathomless, and most honorific of all, vanityless creations. Today’s poets no longer need to show their creative-writing prowess by turning out villanelles or rondeaux or pastourelles to order. And the last poet writing in English who used rhyme consistently while saying something significant at the same time was probably William Butler Yeats. (Auden could riff well enough in that argot, but his changes were always a problem: when tenable, they were often unoriginal, and when original, they were like as not untenable.) 

It’s no use pretending any longer that the age of Ransom, Tate, and the early Lowell will magically reconstitute itself in some renaissance of right-thinking artisans with a Byzantine’s love of tile, symbolism, and the Sainted Sophia. I personally feel (and I know I’m not alone in this) a certain queasiness when confronted by contemporary poems that rhyme or laid out in neatly ranged stanzas harking back to, at the very latest, Thomas Hardy and the Georgians of pre-World War I Vaughan-Williamsland. The hottest quote making the circuit right now (it even adorned the back cover of the September 2005 issue of Poetry) is by Michael Hofmann, author of Behind the Lines: Pieces on Writing and Pictures (2001), who recently said of poetry: “‘I, too, dislike it,’ are the immortal beginning words of Marianne Moore’s poem ‘Poetry,’ and they seem to me to be the only possible credentials for a poet and a reader of poetry. I sometimes wonder if there are any poets who ‘like’ it, and whether I would like them.” 

I don’t know that I would follow Hofmann all the way to Mooreish disdain of the glories of Old Castile and the train that made El Cid the Little Engine That Could. My dis-”like” of the short-winded in literature extends only to stuff of recent vintage that houghs-and-poughs its identity crises in curios of the pseudo-archaic which quite unaccountably still win approval from critics and reviewers who must know better if not that which is good. I have no objection whatever to poetry that rhymes or is laid out in “traditional” forms, provided that these attributes jibe with a historical context that validates them beyond any silly “biological” rationales often proposed today based on nothing less flimsy than misapplied notions of how heartbeats, walking rhythms, and respiratory exhalations subsume poetic conventions. Of late, such backflushing of history has rendered protractive an adolescent romanticizing of “tradition” well into middle age and beyond. In fact, so extreme in its totterage has this counter-counterculture become that, though it might fantasize taking all poetry with it when it goes, there is small chance of that happening in either this life or the next. Imagining virile returns to atavism can be amusing in a mordantly benign kind of way, but such games have clearly outstayed their welcome, outlived their usefulness, and outlasted their own loss-leader appeal as elitist anomalies. Not only does today’s pseudo-classicism not know what it is, it doesn’t even trouble to think whether the prospective readers it exists for themselves exist, and it doesn’t care. It’s a cottage industry that survives as a protectorate of the creative writing establishment and the publishing industry, and it will not of its own volition cease producing cheese until the downgrading of happy cows establishes itself as a priority with more than just the producers of skim-milk. A thriving national poetry should be held up as an indispensable resource, but poetry is becoming increasingly lost to us because the powers that be are far too dependent on cleaning up from, rather than after, the tidal wave of emulation attendant upon the second childhood of W. H. Auden and the groundless investiture of Billy Collins. Finally—and this is addressed to those who might’ve been made angry by what they’ve just read—please refrain from holding up “alternative” anthologies like Douglas Messerli’s From the Other Side of the Century (1991) as proof of how third- and fourth-generation Olson- and Antin-ites have trashed all hope of a respectable American canon. As bad as writers like Robert Grenier, Ray Dipalma, Alan Davies, Diane Ward, Joan Retallack, Peter Inman, and other avant-garde “retros” who appear convinced that mouthing off and having the runs are cut from the same expressive cloth might be, they are no worse, and certainly no more hazardous to American poetry’s health, than the retro-retro bunch that can not only not shoot straight but cannot imagine the jerseys of such as Messrs. Nemerov, Hecht, and Meredith being retired ever. 

It took the combined genius of an Ammons, a Creeley, and an Ashbery to prove that the future of post-Modernist (not postmodern) poetry lay not in the well-crafted singlet or individual masterpiece (as fine and desirable as these might’ve once seemed), but rather in the sustainable idiom of rhythmically heightened speech that over time and across space could elevate all that it touched to perdurable sublimity. Sublimity of that sort would enter our lives as part of a collective monologue whose in medias res we could choose either to tap into from book to book or leave decidedly alone. If we did elect to open ourselves to its “field,” to paraphrase Robert Duncan, it would envelop us, as does Whitman’s best barbaric yawps, with a deeper and more subtly interfused sense of how verve and congeniality might merge inflectively with a species of serious talk that might well send text messaging and other grotesqueries of the brain’s bicameral alternations back to the nerd drawing boards from whence their binarism came.  

But enough of that. Young American poets need to return, and soon, to the business of nurturing responsibly what is worth the trouble of saying and leaving what is not to cultural moguls splendidly equipped to deal in pulp. Not what masters like Hart Crane, or W. H. Auden, or Richard Wilbur have already framed for display in those poetic museums called anthologies, but what constitutes their own best shots at getting our poetry right. We can only hope that the now emerging younger successors of the Mark Dotys, having learned from the Ammonses and Snyders and Creeleys what poetry can do as well as be, will continue going about the business of taking care of business in just that way. 

Finally, there are all the poets, legitimate as well as pretenders to grace, not dealt with in this survey. No opinions of standing or status or should be read into their exclusion; nor should anything be made of most of the poets discussed here belonging to that most vilified and libeled group, white males. I could have gone out of my way to include more women, more African-, Latino-, and Native-American poets. And then I could have counted them into slots until I had arrived at a suitable demographic replica of the last American census. I chose not to do that and I make no apologies for it. Like Randall Jarrell’s honorees of 1962, my “division champions,” though no more equivalent in “rank” or ability than his, each poet merits, whatever his or her deficiencies, a place on the poetic all-star team for the period covered. This judgment is not exclusively mine, for I have in no instance seized upon a poet whose work is not represented in at least three current anthologies of record. Those left out have been excluded for reasons of space alone. Though I could perhaps have devoted space to more poets of deserved repute—the Richard Howards, the Marilyn Hackers, the AI’s, the Leslie Marmon Silkos, the Rita Doves, the Louise Erdriches, the Henri Coles (the list could go on almost indefinitely)—I concluded that such small beer as I could reserve for names off my primary list would seem flatter and more drained of flavor than my honest confession that the boat could only hold so many and a number of exclusions, unpopular in certain quarters, would have to be made. And so they were. But now that the reader has had a chance to acquaint himself with the reasons for the choices thus made, he or she is free, indeed encouraged, to come up with a short list of his or her own.

Back in 1952, in his brief handbook The Background of Modern Poetry, J. Isaacs took to task the Jarrellian approach to reducing huge historical slices of the history of poetry to “winners and losers.” A meaningful history had to fill in those blanks in the record that account for broad sweeps in the three “T”s—taste, tone, and technique—that haven’t yet made it into the textbooks.

What do we mean by the real history of literature? First of all, by literature one means, of course, poetry, and its real history can only be established by separating “poetry” from the poets. Most histories of poetry are just a chronological sequence of accounts of individual poets. What we need is perspective rather than chronology, based on what was really happening in poetry itself, rather than in certain prominent and successful poets—a history of the turf rather than of winners only, of consumers rather than producers. We need a history of the struggle rather than the achievements, of the process of English poetry as seen by the reading public, and by poets struggling for the glory and dignity of their craft. Literary history is ruthless towards the unsuccessful. I think the poetry of our time will have an advantage in the textbooks of the future, because we are so much more aware of what has been going on, and we have preserved the records of our bewilderment and our debates where previous ages have let them vanish. 

I don’t know that I would be quite so sanguine about the poetic security of our own future, lagging a half-century beyond Isaacs’s rose-colored retrospect, but I do hope, sometime in the not too distant future, to give what he suggests a try—that is to say, attempt a “history of the turf” of recent American poetry, of its consumers and not just its major producers. Is such a “perspective based on what was really happening in poetry itself” still feasible? The prospects for corralling that “really” any time soon seem problematic at best, so all I can say for the time being is: watch this space.        

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