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Biography #1
Biography #1
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612 ARTS AND LETTERS
to Dante, The Romance of the Rose, and even The Dream of the Rood,
and that therefore the development of this kind of poetry has little to
do with that happened in the cultural history of England in
anything
the fourteenth century.
The judge in the Hinckley case did not
grant his jurors access to a
so that could resolve their uncertainties about the es
dictionary they
sential nature of poetry. He knew that even if a
probably dictionary
should give them accurate information the answers they would get
from it would be wrong, for one cannot understand what is interesting
about poetry through simple dichotomies like fiction and fact?or enter
tainment and instruction, oral and literate. Although dictionaries and
cultural history can facilitate themselves can
understanding, by they
easy answers, not true answers.
give only
(Of course this is unfair to Updike. When was satire ever fair?) One
these voices almost as much as one admires
enjoys complex Wright's
mastery of plain English?a flat trajectory with a hint, at the end,
just
of Rilkean curvature:
saw
Light feet I walking
Bewildered by long stems,
She walked away.
And still I sit here talking.
And I still have, it seems,
The east wind to say.
?"This and That"
One can speculate that Wright could have put all his voices and talents
in a book-length poem or sustained sequence. He could not handle
plots, and most of his characters reduce to one persona called "James
Arlington Wright"; but that persona has enough depth and richness,
and his experience takes in enough time (from classical antiquity to this
century's Hardings, Eisenhowers, and Mayor Daleys; from Sappho to
Doris Day and Barbra Streisand) and covers enough ground (China,
Ohio, Italy) to have generated a great we
Hawaii, long poem. Instead
must be content with the pieces that we have. A Collected
Complete
Wright may disclose the lineaments of a unified Poem after all.
Of the seventy poems in This Journey, almost a third are in prose.
Most of these are all right, I suppose, and a few (preeminently "Honey")
are as as of this sort that I know of. But "this sort" in
good anything
itself somehow fails to satisfy. Mixed in with as in This
ordinary verse,
Journey, the prose poems have a chance of pleasing; but, in a work
like Wright's Moments of the Italian Summer (1976), in which all the
so-called poems are prose, the total effect is and
unsettling frustrating.
Unable to account for my own
strong dislike for such halfway forms, I
find myself that Babbitt could come back from the dead
wishing Irving
in order to update that robust in the arts, The New
study of confusion
Laoko?n For that matter can still
(1910). Lessing's original Laoko?n
deliver an analeptic dose of intelligence. One can imagine the deftness
and acidity with which Babbitt could liquidate such dogmas as that
stated in Harold Bloom's A Map of Misreading (1975) : "As literary his
616 ARTS AND LETTERS
as all
tory lengthens, all poetry necessarily becomes verse-criticism, just
criticism becomes prose-poetry." If Babbitt and Lessing for some rea
son are not available to take the stand, we can do almost as well with
some testimony from a most recent book, Mark Harris's
interesting
Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck (1980). "This is a book of nonfic
tion," Harris writes, "a pure category opposed to pure fiction. No such
exists under the name nonfiction novel. No thing exists by the
thing
name
prose-poetry."
Leaving the question of the nonfiction novel in a grey crepuscular
limbo with the TV-movie, songs without words, and that ulcerating
obscenity "and/or," I will say only that the prose poem is just a piece
of prose?either fiction or nonfiction?that is no poem at all and has no
claim to the status of poetry because it lacks one element essential to
make a poem a poem: the line. The line of the poem need not be regu
lar or metrical or
rhythmic
or
metaphorical; it need not begin with a
letter or feature or alliteration or diction. The
capital rhyme poetical
line does not have to be anything in but it does have to be.
particular,
It seems that, in graphic, visual terms, a proper poem must not have a
notorious observation on this
justified right margin. (Jeremy Bentham's
not be so after all.) Poetry may be
subject may simpleminded prosaic,
but it may not be prose. John Ashbery's Three Poems a mis
just has
leading misnomer for a title. Val?ry's pieces called "poems in the rough"
a certain contour of the "creative that grinds and
suggest process"
prose into poetry, but the pieces are not poems. Some poets
polishes
have a more definite feel for the printed word, a better sense
clearly
of the line, than others. Having read Wright's poems and heard him
read aloud, I judge that he enjoyed an uncommonly lucid and potent
sense of the line: pulse, pause, continuity, interruption, enjambment,
silent space and speaking space. Here, perfectly managed and exe
cuted, is the first strophe of "Contemplating the Front Steps of the
Cathedral in Florence as the Dies":
Century
his own language the denotative level of a poem and its physical im
But tonal and textural in the poem are in the lan
agery. peculiarities
it was written.
guage?we might almost say of the language?in which
can't be detached from it." Then Matthews makes an assertion
They
that is either erroneous or "In we indicate
incomprehensible: English
whether a construction is subjective or by word
genitive objective
order; in Romance this is done by inflection." Whatever
languages
is
Matthews's point may be, it is tiresome and irrelevant. James Seay
another of my favorite poets, but his "A World Immeasurably Alive
and Good: A Look at James Wright's Collected Poems79 suffers from
such poverty of vocabulary that its force and clarity are weakened. In
a few sentences he must say focus, thematic context, attitude, tone,
aspects, and other zilch-words; and then he talks about "Wright's senti
ments in the entire thematic context of loneliness and its related
themes." This is prose that gropes. It seems to lack faith in itself and is
unwilling to say "theme" or
"technique" when "thematic context" or
"technical aspect" is available through the Buddy System of pleonasm.
attention to the persistent and pervasive im
Seay does pay passing
portance of women and horses inWright's poetry. The elegance and
Secrets" can convince and enter
learning of Stephen Yenser's "Open
tain a reader. Yenser drops all the big names: Thoreau, Apollinaire,
Rilke (the title of whose "Archaischer Torso Apollos" is misspelled),
Eliot, Ortega y Gasset; but this heavy referential metal is largely wasted
on jackhammering one very simple point?that Wright sought bare
ness, nakedness, in A mountain of discursive argu
transparency poetry.
ment labors and brings forth a mouse of superficial observation.
Leonard Nathan's "The Tradition of Sadness and the American
An of the of James Wright" is an
Metaphysic: Interpretation Poetry
other laboring mountain, but this one brings forth not even a mouse.
This case of false pregnancy reads like a sympathetically written but
and shallow of a low-level survey course. "The melan
glib summary
as such, first appears in English poetry in Milton's II
choly character,
Penseroso," says Nathan, unaware of the much older psy
apparently
tradition of "humors." Nathan continues: "It was the
chophysiological
romantics who first, at least in theory, aimed to merge man and poet,
and make
poet and speaker, and speaker and speaker's deepest feelings
those feelings the subject of many of their poems"?as though Shake
and Donne never wrote their sonnets, as never
speare though Pope
his great epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. Along the way?making
composed
me think that he missed class for a couple of weeks and had to borrow
some moron's notes?Nathan secretes a echoic sentence that,
weirdly
to my ear, reverberates with its own essential emptiness: "That these
were often sad is no if one understands the
feelings deeply surprise
dialectic of romantic poetic. . . ." Ic ic ic: Like other essayists in
yuckl
The Pure Clear Word Nathan misconstrues the pattern of
radically
ARTS AND LETTERS 621
career and the recent verse. Nathan sum
Wright's history of English
marizes the survey of the Tradition of Sadness and comes by and by
to our in some revolution of sensi
century and the "next logical step"
"If the man with the and the poet was
bility: merged poet speaking
with the utmost sincerity, then formal patterns like rhyme, traditional
meter, symmetrical line and stanza, surely had to go, and go they did
for many a poet. First we got vers libre and in our own time, the 'open
or naked' poem which attempts to represent, both in its diction and
cadences, actual The comma after "time" is wrong, the place
speech."
ment of "both" is wrong, and the whole idea is wrong. Nathan is a
and I am at his to such a tissue of
good poet, dismayed ability produce
error. Nothing he says about vers libre is quite true, and very little of
what he says in general applies toWright in particular. (This Journey,
I ought to point out, contains a 1979 Inscription on Belli's
"Reading
Monument," which is a fine mean poem and also a perfectly regular
Anglo-Italian sonnet.) Vers libre, as Eliot pointed out about sixty-five
years ago, is an oxymoron and a misnomer. No vers is libre; in fact,
in a language is libre. Even if all you want to do is goof off or
nothing
be iconoclastic, when you commit yourself to language you commit
to of relations that are so that it
yourself complex systems confining
matters what you may decide about such incidental properties
hardly
of language as rhythm and rhyme. Once you have made the commit
ment to language?even in the absence of any commitment to com
or sense or may as well
municating making expressing anything?you
take advantage of such rhetorical and prosodie help as your language
can be coaxed into If you have any aptitude for writing,
furnishing.
the of measured verse?grace so much under pres
probably discipline
sure that with the there is no be much more liber
pressure grace?will
as "free"
ating and much more genuinely expressive than art posing
when in fact it is suffering and enjoying conditions of determined im
The prison of nakedness is much more than the
prisonment. confining
prison of wearing clothes.
In his introduction to The Pure Clear Word and in "That Halting,
Stammering Movement" Dave Smith repeatedly essays arguments that
are undermined his unfortunate prose. This prose is
repeatedly by
a chronic . . . had" clauses: "As Dickens
plagued by problem with "as
had, Wright's language croons, curses, stings, whines, giggles, fawns,
shouts, demands, coos, and drones as is strategic." Later Smith says of
a certain sort of
poetry: "It might, as it had for the Chinese, be a kind
of powerful and direct statement, such a statement would
though
have to recognize the simultaneous beauty and horror which truth is."
One of Smith's bad sentences, which says the opposite of
manifestly
what it is evidently trying, latently, to mean, made me exclaim in an
to the language itself "O
apostrophe perfidious Albionese!" "Only when
as vital as life itself," Smith writes,
language has turned "could James
622 ARTS AND LETTERS
Wright also quotes a parody of his own most celebrated poem, "Lying
in a Hammock at William
Duffy's Farm
in Pine Island, Minnesota."
Wright's poem ends "I have wasted my life"; the parody, sent toWright
a Ron Smith of Richmond, ends in a prismatic line that
by Virginia,
shows classical economy of means: "I have wasted my wife." I do not
care for The Pure Clear Word as a whole, but the interview,
bespeak
a man with a
ing the presence of good capacious mind, a big heart, and
a
great sense of humor, makes the book worth having.
JAY PARINI
Although the English may still believe that the center of poetry in
their language lies in England, the evidence has been accumulating
that the real vitality has shifted to the Celtic Fringe?Ireland, Scot
land, and Wales. Scotland can boast of Brown, Nor
George Mackay
man MacCaig, and Iain Crichton Smith; Wales has its severe lyrical
clergyman R. S. Thomas; Ireland possesses an embarrassment of riches
Eavan Boland, Introducing Eavan Roland: Poems. Ontario Review Press, 1981.
72 pages. $10.95, $5.95 Anthony
pb; Bradley, editor, Contemporary Irish Poetry:
An Anthology. University of California Press, 1980. 430 pages. $17.95; Ciar?n
Carson, The New Estate. Wake Forest University Press, 1976. Illustrated. 42 pages.
$3.25 pb; Austin Clarke, Selected Poems, edited by Thomas Kinsella. Wake Forest
University Press, 1976, 1980. 208 pages. $12.95, $6.95 pb; Seamus Heaney, Field
Work. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979. 66 pages. $8.95, $4.95 pb; Thomas Kinsella,
Peppercanister Poems: 1972-1978. Wake Forest University Press, 1979. 160 pages.
$9.95, $5.95 pb; Thomas Kinsella, Poems: 1956-1973. Wake Forest University
Press, 1979. 192 pages. $10.95, $6.25 pb; Derek Mahon, Poems: 1962-1978. Ox
ford University Press, 1979. 118 pages. $8.95 pb; John Montague, The Rough
Field. Wake Forest University Press, 1979, third edition. 84 pages. $4.95 pb; Paul
Muldoon, Mules. Wake Forest University Press, 1977. 60pages. $4.25 pb; Paul
Muldoon, Why Brownlee Left. Wake Forest University Press, 1980. 48 pages. $4.95
pb; Eil?an Ni Chuillean?in, The Second Voyage. Wake Forest University Press,
1977. 54 pages. $4.25 pb.