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 .

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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

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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

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