Download - Smalltalk: Time's Poetry Papers
University of Northern Iowa
Smalltalk: Time's Poetry PapersAuthor(s): Peter CooleySource: The North American Review, Vol. 256, No. 3 (Fall, 1971), pp. 2-3Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25117220 .
Accessed: 17/06/2014 06:51
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
University of Northern Iowa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The NorthAmerican Review.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 91.229.248.104 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 06:51:16 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Peter Cooley SMALLTALK
. . . the real
W. S. Merwin
TIME'S POETRY PAPERS
During the early '60s, in my second year of
college, my Sunday evening cramming was
always
interrupted by the knocking of Harry at my door.
Entering before an answer, he would flop into the
only available armchair and proceed to read me a
loud my otherwise unread copy of the latest Time. I must have tolerated this ritual as a sort of exor
cism; a Time subscription was sent to college
with me by my parents as a
staple reminder of
what I was desperately trying to forget ?
upper middle-class suburban life, a
background snared
by Harry with the weight of a few more cars and
country clubs on his side. During the college's
Junior-Year-In-Paris, which both Harry and I land
ed in, he spent most of his time racing up and down the Champs-Elysees in those cars or
lunching at the
American Drugstore. Finally, he bought a Jaguar and drove toward Russia. I've never seen him
since, but I'm confident he's still reading Time
puns aloud, perhaps to White Russian princes who service his car in Volgograd. I know I wouldn't
miss a single issue. Not that I subscribe, of course.
But I devour it surreptitiously in drugstores as I once did girlie magazines,
as a housewife must her
monthly Cosmopolitan. Time rarely bothers with the contemporary
poetry scene, so when it does, one can expect a
spicy dish of criticism. This is exactly what A. T. Baker spoons up in the July 12th issue ("Poetry Today: Low Profile, Flatted Voice"). Here, between ads for contact lens cleaner, Time-Life
Books, cigarettes, insurance, and bourbon ?
main
stays of that life Harry imported into Russia ? is
enough bombast to confirm the prejudices of the Time audience that what's happening
in our poetry
right now isn't worth knowing about unless
you're on campus. (And then, hopefully, you'll
lose your interest by the time you start graduate
school.) The arguments, though,
are interesting. Time
claims that the "modern masters" of the cerebral
and the courtly ("Eliot, Frost, Thomas, Auden") are out; they have admirers but not followers.
Probably true. And equally so is Time's acknow
ledgement of Williams as the "enshrined elder" of our poets, though
in their campus surveys it's
not clear if they Galluped commune kids or over
thirty types. But it is hardly justifiable to dismiss Williams'
experiments with language this simply: "[He is] the new chief because he dealt with commonplace objects by using
common speech and he never
rhymed anything!" Williams is filled with off and near-rhymes;
as for "common speech",
take several lines from any period in his poetry and try to use them as conversation: none of us
speaks that compactly. Or again: "Other gurus are Walt Whitman and
Ezra Pound (of the Cantos)." But how? Pound a denier of the cerebral and courtly? What version of the Cantos does A. T. Baker read?
However, the bulk of the article constructs a
sort of department store of contemporary Ameri
can poetry with six inventoried floors cleverly labeled so you can find almost everyone you want,
starting at the top and going toward the "Specials" in the basement. From the roof down: (1) "The Polemical Roarers": Ginsberg, Corso, Bly; (2) "The Confessional Sufferers": Lowell, Plath, Sex
ton, Levertov; (3) "The Tiny Imagists": Olson,
Creeley, Kinnell, Wright; (4) "The Compulsive Reporters": O'Hara, Schuyler, Koch; (5) "The Cult Poets": Snyder, Strand, Brautigan, and (6) "The Specials": Merwin and Ammons.
Time's classification isn't even arbitrary: it's
absurd. How can Bly be in the same "school"
with the "once and future guru" (there's that
word again) Allen Ginsberg because he is "visible and vocal"? How is Denise Levertov to be lumped
with the Confessionals when, by her own admis
sion and the opinion of every critic and antho
logist, she derives from Williams and the Black Mountain Poets? If poets are fish to be herded
into schools, let's at least put them where they be
long. Or again: What does Kinnell, whose work
bears such strong affinities with Roy Harvey Pearce's Adamic tradition and with the Rilke
Whitman-Roethke spirit-in-nature as microcosm
influence, what does he have in common with
Creeley s Puritanesque minimalism? Or: Even if one parses poets by their attire,
why is the natty Mark Strand (he was my teacher and stepped into each class out of a New Yorker
ad) walking through the door of Time's Aber crombie & Fitch with Gary Snyder in his "buskin vests and beads"?
One could go on and on. For the record, Mer
win's latest book of poetry is The Carrier of Lad
2 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW/FALL 1971
This content downloaded from 91.229.248.104 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 06:51:16 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
TIME'S POETRY PAPERS
ders, not the Carriers (plural) as Time would have it, and Merwin does not look like Kinnell. For another kind of record, it's interesting to ob
serve how many British critics Time quotes on our
new poetry and how vengeful they
are ? perhaps
an admission that there's really nothing going on in
English poetry for them to pick on?
# * #
Time's summary maintains that the level of
poetic output (nota bene, the "Books" section in
Time follows "Business") in our country now is
great but the quality low. This is, they stress, be cause of the flattened voice our poets assume, an
unmemorable language unable to "change man's
thinking and the sound of the language in his ear." Yet glancing over the middle of the article, Time has explicitly discussed Ginsberg, Corso,
Bly, Plath, Sexton, Koch, and Merwin as any
thing but flat; if nothing else, further, the silly categories argue for the diversity of our poetry.
And, more importantly, the memorable verse
Time demands seems that of limerick or epigram,
or the instantly recitable Tennysonian apothegm on God, Mother & Queen. Surely Koch's finer
moments in "Sleeping with Women" are highly memorable, as are Wright's epiphanies ("Suddenly I realize/That if I stepped out of my body I
would break/Into blossom.") and, forgive me, but whole clumps of Merwin stick to my ears:
Every year without knowing it I have passed the
day When the last fires will wave to me And the silence will set out Tireless traveller
Like the beam of a lightless star
("For the Anniversary of My Death")
But that's only one test in any case.
Why shouldn't the poem be considered for how it works
upon us while we read it? Perhaps its intention is to create a transparent medium where language is
immediate but deliberately unmemorable. Brauti
gan works that way. Or to immerse us in social
outrage by an imagistic appeal to the collective unconscious as
Bly's poems do. If I know any
thing about the poetry of our time it's that ? to
reverse the words of one of our non-gurus ?
good fences don't make good neighbors; and I need
every breath of openness and innocence to get
through our poems now and keep writing my own.
And I need Time, too, for gossip on Jackie Onassis, for the triple sexual puns of its movie
reviews, for the Medicine section which I can't
understand in any other magazine, and for those
Milestones which make Divorce and Death a sort
of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. But not for
poetry. Or consider this, Time. With the excep tion of that former advertising
man now turned
poet who is conspicuously absent from your ar
ticle, the words of Pound s Mr. Nixon (I see your ears prick up) in "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" are
applicable, not for our current poets, but for
you: "as for literature/It gives no man a sine
cure . . . And give up verse, my boy,/There's
nothing in it." []
Coming in the NAR:
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING (OR NOT BEING) MARRIED?
Short stories on the perplexity of it all, by
George V. Higgins William Kittredge
Erlene Hubly David Hoskins
Robert Fox
and others
and
Gail Godwin on Joyce Carol Oates
and
"The Spirit of [Interstate] 76"
Some thoughts on what America is getting for her 200th anniversary
THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW/FALL 1971 3
This content downloaded from 91.229.248.104 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 06:51:16 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions