Page  [unnumbered] BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD TARGET Graduate Library University of Michigan Preservation Office Storage Number: 010:: a 67000232 ACT2080 022/1:0: a 0026-2420 035/1:: a (RLIN)MIUG0690-S 035/2:: a (CaOTULAS)175715235 040:: c MUL Id CtY d DLC id NSDP d MiU 042:: I a Ic a nsdp 050/1:0: a AS30 I b.M48 082/1:: a051 222/1:00: | a Michigan quarterly review 245:00: | a Michigan quarterly review. 260:: | a Ann Arbor, I b University of Michigan. 300/1:: a v. I bill. Ic26cm. 362/1:0: I a v.1- Jan. 1962 -500/1:: | a Vol. 1, no. 2- issued as the University of Michigan official publication, v. 63, no. 74 -580/2:: | a Electronic serial mode of access: World Wide Web via ProQuest Research Library. 690/1: 4: | a General Interest and Popular Journals and Newspapers 710/1:2: | a University of Michigan. 730/2:0: a ProQuest research library. 740/3:0: a Michigan quarterly review (Online) Scanned by Imagenes Digitales Nogales, AZ On behalf of Preservation Division The University of Michigan Libraries Date work Began: Camera Operator:

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Page  [unnumbered] Michigan Quarterly Review Volume XXXVI, Number 1 Winter 1997 THE POET'S VOICE (Part Two) Edited By Laurence Goldstein

Page  [unnumbered] Editor: LAURENCE GOLDSTEIN Associate Editor: E. H. CREETH Administrative Assistant: DORIS KNIGHT Assistant Editors: LYN COFFIN TISH O'DOIWD LINDA GREGERSON JOHN KUCICH REI TERADA ALAN WALD Contributing Editors: PHILIP LEVINE ARTHUR MILLER JOYCE CAROL OATES Interns: Paula Berglund, Sheilah Coleman, Ian Twiss MICHIGAN QUARTERL REVIEW (ISSN 0026-2420) is published quarterly (January, April, July, and October) by The University of Michigan, Rm 3032, Rackham Bldg., 915 E. Washington St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1070. Subscription prices, $18.00 a year, $36.00 for two years; Institutional subscriptions obtained through agencies $20.00 a year; $5.00 a copy; back issues, $2.50. Claims for missing numbers can be honored only within two months after publication. Available on microfilm from Xerox University Microfilms, 300 N. Zeeb Rd., Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106, where full-sized copies of single articles may also be ordered. Reprinted volumes and back-volumes available from AMS Press, Inc., 56 E. 13th St., New York, 10003. Indexed or abstracted in Abstr.E.S., Am.Bib.Cent., Ann.Bib., Bk.R.Hum., BK.R.Inc., P.A.I.S., P.M.L.A., Index of American Periodical Verse, Index to Periodical Fiction, American Humanities Index. Editorial and business office, 3032 Rackham Bldg., The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109. Unsolicited manuscripts are returned to authors only when accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes or by international postal orders. No responsibility assumed for loss or injury. Periodical postage paid at Ann Arbor, Michigan. Send address changes to Michigan Quarterly Review, Rm 3032 Rackham Bldg., 915 E. Washington St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1070. Copyright ~ The University of Michigan. 1997 All Rights Reserved ISSN 0026-2420

Page  [unnumbered] EDITORIAL BOARD Ruth Behar, Chair Joseph Blotner Robert Fekety Sidney Fine Susan Gelman Joanne Leonard David L. Lewis Bobbi S. Low Andrea Press Anton Shammas Joseph Vining Charles Witke Published with financial support from The Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies Congratulations Alyce Miller Winner of the $1,000 Lawrence Foundation Prize for the best MQR short story of 1996 Ice Spring 1996 issue The Lawrence Foundation Prize is awarded annually for the best story published in Michigan Quarterly Review. Winners are chosen by the MQR Editorial Board. Persons associated with the journal, or the Foundation, are not eligible for the prize.

Page  [unnumbered] CONTENTS Introduction Laurence Goldstein 1 The Mango of Poetry, Poetry Lorna Goodison 3 Twenty-First Century, Poetry Yevgeny Yevtushenko 5 Tradition and the General Dumbing-Down Lucia Perillo 7 The City of Thought John Hollander 18 At Round Pond, Poetry Mary Oliver 34 The Recoilless Cannon, Poetry S. Ben-Tov 35 The Lover, Poetry C. K. Williams 38 The Trouble with Poetry Charles Simic 39 All Happy Families Ursula K. Le Guin 43 Dreaming in Poetry Maxine Kumin 47 Valentine, Fiction Joyce Carol Oates 52 December 8th, Poetry Carol Muske 67 If That Boaty Pink Cadillac from 1959 with the Huge Fins, Poetry Mekeel McBride 70 Line and Room Marianne Boruch 72 Renshi: A Linked Essay on Linked Poetry Jean Toyama, Eleanor Wilner, Nell Altizer 87 Renshi Round, I and II, Poetry Jean Toyama, Eleanor Wilner, Nell Altizer 94 Faith, Hope, and Danger, Poetry Eamon Grennan 100 Wrestling, Fiction Jim Daniels 103 Tyler Jealous, Fiction Donald Hall 113 The Escorts, Poetry Diane Wakoski 117

Page  [unnumbered] Second Time Around, Poetry A Portfolio of Poets, Graphics Robert Frost Overheard Round-Eyes, Fiction Stresa-1943, Poetry A Conversation with Mary Crow D Boundless Wealth from a Finite Store: Meter and Grammar La Pastorela, Poetry Now Then, Poetry BOOKS The Woman as Icon, The Woman as Poet Koch and Sense Index for Volume XXXV, 1996 Carolyn Kizer X. J. Kennedy Marilyn Chin Mary Crow eanna Kern Ludwin Timothy Steele Alan Williamson A. R. Ammons Brian Henry Mark Halliday 119 121 129 139 146 148 161 181 185 188 203 [221] Cover: Image from"the documentary film, Distant Lives. Photo: Richard Cross

Page  [unnumbered] CONTRIBUTORS NELL ALTIZER is the author of The Man Who Died En Route, which won the Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press in 1989. She is Professor in the English Department and former Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Hawaii. A. R. AMMONS, Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry at Cornell University, has published most recently the book-length poem, Garbage (1993), and a collection of lyrics, Brink Road (1996), both from Norton. S. BEN-TOV is the author of During Ceasefire (Harper & Row, 1985). She has just completed her second book of poetry, The Recoilless Cannon and Other Inventions. She directs the Program in Creative Writing at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. MARIANNE BORUCH's most recent books are Moss Burning (poetry, Oberlin College Press, 1993), and Poetry's Old Air (essays, University of Michigan Press, 1995). She teaches in Purdue University's graduate program for writers. MARILYN CHIN's second book of poems, The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty, appeared in 1994 from Milkweed Editions. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, she is currently on the faculty of the MFA Program at San Diego State University. MARY CROW's career is summarized in the headnote to the interview with her in this issue. Last year she was appointed Poet Laureate of the State of Colorado by Governor Romer. JIM DANIELS'S fourth book of poems, Blessing the House, will be published in the spring by the University of Pittsburgh Press. He is Professor of English at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. LAURENCE GOLDSTEIN, Professor of English at the University of Michigan and editor of MQR, has published most recently a book of poems, Cold Reading (Copper Beech Press, 1995), and a book of literary criticism, The American Poet at the Movies: A Critical History (University of Michigan Press, 1994). EAMON GRENNAN's most recent book of poems is So It Goes (Graywolf, 1995). He teaches literature and creative writing at Vassar College. LORNA GOODISON is the author most recently of To Us, All Flowers Are Roses (University of Illinois Press, 1995), as well as Selected Poems (University of Michigan Press, 1993). She teaches in the English Department at the University of Michigan. DONALD HALL's most recent book of poems is The Old Life (Houghton

Page  [unnumbered] Mifflin, 1996). He also published this year two books for children: When Willard Met Babe Ruth, illustrated by Barry Moser; and Old Home Day, illustrated by Emily McCully. MARK HALLIDAY is the author of two books of poems, Little Star (Morrow, 1987), and Tasker Street (University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), as well as a study of Wallace Stevens, Stevens and the Interpersonal (Princeton University Press, 1991). He teaches at Ohio University. BRIAN HENRY, the editor of Verse, has published poems recently in Poetry Ireland Review, Shenandoah, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. His essays and reviews are forthcoming in Harvard Review, Manoa, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. He teaches in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. JOHN HOLLANDER is Sterling Professor of English at Yale University. His most recent books include Selected Poetry (Knopf, 1993), and a book of criticism, The Gazer's Spirit (University of Chicago Press, 1996). X. J. KENNEDY's most recent book of poems is Dark Horses (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Next season Simon & Schuster will publish his new book of verse for children, Uncle Switch. CAROLYN KIZER has published three books in the past year: 100 Great Poems by Women (Ecco Press), Picking and Choosing: Essays on Prose (EWU Press), and Harping On: Poems 1985-1995 (Copper Canyon). MAXINE KUMIN's eleventh book of poems, Connecting the Dots, appeared from Norton in 1996. Norton will bring out her Selected Poems 1960-1990 next season. URSULA K. LE GUIN is most recently the author of a collection of stories, Unlocking the Air, and a volume of poetry in translation, with Diana Bellessi, The Twins, the Dream / Las Gemelas, el Sueno. She coedited The Norton Book of Science Fiction in 1993. DEANNA KERN LUDWIN's poetry has appeared in ACM, Cimarron Review, and other journals. She teaches creative writing and serves as Graduate Internship Coordinator for Colorado State University's Department of English. MEKEEL McBRIDE's fourth book of poetry is Wind of the White Dresses (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1995). She is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. CAROL MUSKE teaches at the University of Southern California. Her New and Selected Poems, An Octave Beyond Thunder, will appear this year from Viking/Penguin. Her collected reviews and essays, Women and Poetry, is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press. JOYCE CAROL OATES is the author most recently of the novel, We Were the Mulvaneys (Dutton, 1996), and the novella, First Love (Ecco, 1996).

Page  [unnumbered] She lives in Princeton, where she teaches at the university and helps edit The Ontario Review. MARY OLIVER has received both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award for her poetry; her most recent book, however, is Blue Pastures, a collection of essays. She is on the faculty of Bennington College. LUCIA PERILLO's second volume of poetry, The Body Mutinies, appeared last year from Purdue University Press. A former park ranger, she now teaches at Southern Illinois University. CHARLES SIMIC is the author of eighteen collections of poetry, four books of prose, and numerous books of translations. He has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize. His latest book of poems is Walking the Black Cat from Harcourt Brace. TIMOTHY STEELE is the author of several collections of poems,, most recently The Color Wheel (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). He also has written a critical book, Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter (University of Arkansas Press, 1990). JEAN TOYAMA, Professor of French at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, teaches French language, poetry, and fiction. Included among her publications are a study of Samuel Beckett's trilogy, Beckett's Came (Peter Lang, 1991), and a volume of essays, Literary Relations East and West, which she coedited. DIANE WAKOSKI's most recent collection of poems, The Emerald City of Las Vegas, is the third volume of a personal epic of the West published by Black Sparrow Press, The Archaeology of Movies and Books. She is Poet in Residence at Michigan State University. C. K. WILLIAMS's new book, The Vigil, has just appeared from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His Selected Poems came out in 1995. He teaches in the writing program at Princeton University. ALAN WILLIAMSON's most recent books are Eloquence and Mere Life (essays, University of Michigan Press, 1994) and Love and the Soul (poems, University of Chicago Press, 1995). ELEANOR WILNER's most recent books of poems are Otherwise (1993) and Sarah's Choice (1989), both from the University of Chicago Press. Reversing the Spell: New and Selected Poems is forthcoming from Copper Canyon. She teaches in the MFA Program for Writers, Warren Wilson College. YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO, Russia's most eminent living poet, has also served in the Congress of People's Deputies, written an autobiography and books of political commentary, and, most recently,, a work of fiction, Don't Die Before You're Dead (Random House, 1995).

Laurence GoldsteinGoldstein, LaurenceIntroductionVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 1-2http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:01

Page  1 LAURENCE GOLDSTEIN INTRODUCTION This is the second number of MQR's special issue entirely devoted to the writing of poets. The Fall 1996 number offered some 180 pagres, and this one comprises almost a third again as much. Rich as the issue isfull of fine essays, memoirs, fiction, reviews, and poems-abundant good work of necessity had to be postponed to later issues or returned to the author. As every editor knows, any journal that publishes even a tiny bit of poetry and/or prose about poetry will receive more manuscripts of poetry and poetry criticism than any other kind, on any other topic. As if lashed by Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses, poets are driven to practice and discourse about their sacred craft, and no doubt their manic persistence over the centuries in pushing forward their best efforts has kept poetry from drifting further toward the margins of public attention than it already has. The results of so much evangelical fervor have been good for the public imagination, good for the health of the language, good for the welfare of the humanities in every known culture. This is not to say that poets are not skeptical about the writing of poetry, as they are skeptical about everything -else. In the fall number Charles Baxter startled some of his fellow authors by grumbling that "In general, poets do not know where the on/off switch is, anywhere in life. They are usually off unless they are forcibly turned on, and they stay on until they are taken to the emergency room, where they are medicated and turned off aigain." Prose writers,, he hastens to add, aren't much better,, though they work longer hours. Likewise, Charles Simic in this number begins his essay by remarking, "That some people still continue to write [poetry] is an oddity that belongs in some Believe It or Not column of the daily newspaper." He too ultimately finds a way to praise what he begins by dispraising, the poet's quixotic, unremitting devotion to the "inexhaustible... paradoxes about art and the human condition" that make up the traditions of poetry. If the writers in this issue can be believed, there is really only one an

Page  2 2 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW swer to these provocative critiques. Lorna Goodison provides it in her poem, "The Mango of Poetry," when she compares the conceiving of poetry to the sensual delight of biting into a ripe mango and letting the juice overflow "and fall freely upon me." The oral pleasure of such exquisite tasting reminds us of how the voicing of language has its origins in the cooing and suckling of infancy, and the chanting of blithe nonsense in the prelinguistic paradise that poetry constantly resurrects in our deepest memory. When Yevgeny Yevtushenko thinks about the next century in his poem, he imagines it as a "chorus of many young voices" that chant the "poetry of a new age" out of the sheer visceral pleasure of making itself heard in a family of writers and readers extending back into the primeval mist. In the fall number I chose for a cover design a full-color PreRaphaelite painting based on a fantastical text of Shakespeare. For this number I chose something totally different, a black and white photograph of contemporary urban reality. Strangely enough, however, this photo provides an answer to the darker vision of both poetry and experience offered by John Everett Millais's depiction of the deceiving elf Ariel misleading a bewildered Ferdinand. What this photo affirms is that the voice of poetry is so urgent it overflows of psychic necessity into the public realm even in times of civil war-from the barrel of a rifle, figuratively speaking. The street warrior in this photo is Nicaraguan; he has paused to inscribe on an available wall his passionate declaration that "the flowers of his days" are withering while he pursues his political objectives. As a lyric cry analogous to the chorus of young voices Yevtushenko seeks in the new age, this graffito serves the community as a prophetic warning about the irresistible force of fresh language and forceful vision in a conflictive society. Speaking of her political poetry in this issue, Mary Crow remarks that the antidote to the afflictions of violence is the pursuit of "fuller lives, more conscious and more deliberate.... Somehow... we have to find grounds for joy." Because poetry has found artful ways to lead readers around to that joy, often by way of streets full of carnage, it has remained interesting... satisfying... needful to society. Yes, poets can seem a little unworldly, absorbed with artifice to the exclusion of "larger" matters in the world, and well-wrought verse can seem a strange, archaic survivor in the era of video and the Internet. Yet, improbably and irrationally, a soldier stops in the street to write a couple of lines on a wall. Eighteen eye-popping movies are playing at the cineplex, but some significant number of readers like yourself, prompted by a curiosity about the best words in the best order, sit down instead with a literary magazine, and turn the pages one by one.

Lorna GoodisonGoodison, LornaThe Mango of PoetryVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 3-4http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:02

Page  3 LORNA GOODISON THE MANGO OF POETRY I read a book about the meaning of poetry. The writer defines it as silence, then breaks the lines to construct ideas about the building of bridges, the reconciliation of opposites. I'm still not sure what poetry is. But now I think of a ripe mango yellow ochre niceness, sweet flesh of St Julian, and all I want to do is eat one from the tree planted by my father three years before the sickness made him fall prematurely. The tree by way of compensation bears fruit all year round in profusion and overabundance making up for the shortfall of my father's truncated years. I'd pick this mango with a cleft stick, then I'd wash it and go sit upon the front wall of our yard.

Page  4 4 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW I would not peel it all back to reveal its golden entirety, but I would soften it by rolling it slowly between my palms. Then I'd nibble a neat hole at the top of the skin pouch and then pull the pulp up slowly into my mouth. I'd do all this while wearing a bombay colored blouse so that the stain of the juice could fall freely upon me. And I say that this too would be a powerful overflowing and a fitting definition of what is poetry.

Yevgeny YevtushenkoYevtushenko, YevgenyTwenty-First CenturyVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 5-6http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:03

Page  5 YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY I'll come into the new millennium, which needs me not less than the twentieth century. I'll come not to be shredded by quotations but to be reborn into many children, gliding on their swings into rainbows. Secretly winded, pumping with my feet I will rise a new century to the sky, like a child full of hope and joyful cries, just an infant copy of myself. I'll plunge into a new century, unfortunately not like a baby, but neither as an old geezer who invidiously grumbles at youth. I'll reach the twenty-first century, its flabbergasted blue, like the last green branch of the rotted collapsed oak. I'll squeeze into the twenty-first century like a soccer fan with no ticket for a great match, where everyone is Pele, where the world is borderless, passportless, bastardless, where instead of politicians, all are poeticians.

Page  6 6 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIE-W I'll trespass into the twenty-first century. I'll recognize the incomparable features of all my beloveds in the faces of grannies crowned with silver clouds. All my friends are alive in the twenty-first century, in the warm library of human breath, not on the dusty bookstalls but on the shelves of tender lips. The twentieth century was a thief and murderer, but he understood what a book is. Twenty-first century., I'm frightened that you may leaf only through checkbooks. I'm frightened that you will devour yourself with your passionless malaise, and instead of lethal wars you will have only lethal peace. I'm frightened that you're just a haughty snob and will forget all those who won your freedom. I don't want to commit you as an amnesiac. I'll come to you as if to a meadow where once I plowed over the rocks. And into poetry of a new -age, into a chorus of many young voices, I will enter breast-deep, as into shafts of wheat, and they will bow to me. Translated from the Russian by James Ragan with the author

Lucia PerilloPerillo, LuciaTradition and the General Dumbing-DownVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 7-17http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:04

Page  7 LUCIA PERILLO TRADITION AND THE GENERAL DUMBING-DOWN Special knowledge isn't as much as it would seem. The soprano studies for seven years in order to be able to open her mouth and make sounds for three hours on end. -Louise Bogan I Not many weeks into graduate school I went to the library to hunt down "Tradition and the Individual Talent," the famous manifesto that T. S. Eliot wrote when he was thirty. The pursuit and consumption of Eliot's essay was part of an elaborate campaign I'd mounted to camouflage my imposture in academic domains: this involved threeby-five cards and a spiral binder in which I kept notes on authors and books that I thought other people thought I should have read. Maybe you already know what Eliot told me: I have to read, should have already read, everything. All of English literature, for starters. And the major European writers, under which heading I find Homer included. That the essay closes with a passage written in what only years of calculus led me to conclude was Greek remonstrated my question about whether or not translations count. All this was required for me to get the proper "historical sense," which was, Eliot said, "indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year." And I was exactly twenty-five; in less than a month I would turn twenty-six. To make matters worse, I had read T. S. Eliot himself for the first time only a few months earlier, in a night class that I stumbled into at the local state college. Before my return to graduate school, the most formal English study I'd undertaken were these workshops-taught

Page  8 8 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW by a long-haired. young poet with a zenlike demeanor and an ancient Volkswagen (who has since become the nation's poet laureate.) After my day job working as a naturalist at a wildlife refuge, I attended class in my rust-colored ranger uniform with a brass badge pinned over the breast pocket. My alter-ego was no more exotic than anyone else's, however; the classroom housed a mix of college freshmen and recent military decampers, as well as published poets with several books to their names. In particular I remember a city cop who wrote dark and thrilling poems like "God is the Last Drunk Driver." Only now that I've taught for a decade do I recognize the feat in Robert Hass's making a-if not seamless then at least functionalcommunity from that assemblage of people. This is where I learned to keep my head down and let others step on a workshop's many landmines (tears, self-justification, attempts to steer the conversation toward Charles Bukowski) though my learning on this score took no great deal of intuition: I remember the normally placid Hass telling me the first thing I had to learn was how to shut up. But now I also see that shutting up was the easy route: how many times did I silently thank the bold numbskull for asking the stupid question foremost in my own mind? Humility can be merely the failure of courage. This I witnessed most clearly a few years ago at a conference on "Writing and Politics" with a roster of famous speakers. The first panel convened in a large auditorium that was mostly empty, and I remember a young man getting up during the question period to ask why nobody had scheduled readings that would have attracted students-rappers, say, or other poets who pefformed with music? We audience members winced at the naivet6e- of the question, which got stonewalled with a courteous, predictable answer about popularity being no measure of a poem's worth. I noted that he was one of the few black men in attendance, and as the day wore on (and the auditorium remained empty) I also realized the profundity of his inquiry (what kind of a politics is poetry advocating if it is not populist? how can poetry effect political change without an audience to hear it?) By the end of the day I wanted to find this man and apologize for my inward titter and thank him for his question, which was so obvious and sensible that nobody else could bear to ask it. But he was gone, and I felt terrible about having been a part of what might have driven him from the room.

Page  9 LUCIA PERILLO 9 II At present I have what most of my poet-friends would call a real job, teaching in a creative writing program at a university. And now that I am an insider, now when I come back to Eliot's essay with my more seasoned and academically-sanctioned eye, my bone to pick with "Tradition" has mostly to do with Eliot's refusal to apologize for the impossibility of the agenda he set forth. To master poems across languages and centuries-not just reading them but assimilating them into one's being-is made to sound like a surmountable goal, though "cyou must obtain it by great labor,"V says he. Obtain, there's the -rub. When already the lobe of my brain that ought to be devoted to The Faerie Queene is taken up with all that Pink Floyd music I listened to in college. And there is far too much space in there given over to reruns of "I Dream of Jeannie."13 I have long been embarrassed about having a brain crammed with culture's detritus. With totems like Eliot and Stevens, modernism seems to have mandated that poets be the intellectual voices of the herd, and I wonder if poets raised in the post-sitcom age will ever again be equal to that role. I try telling myself that this is not England but America, where forebears like Walt Whitman have given us permission to make a durable poetry out of all that junk. But still I brood over the suspicion that my low culture is lower than everybody else's low culture: how can I hold up next to Whitman's locomotives my dim half-memories of Barbara Eden, if in fact any part of her will be a. worthy addition to the raft of great poetry that Eliot posits as looming up there near heaven's gates? Of course one could argue that there is already plenty of canonized poetry that utilizes the junk culture. Gay writers in particular seem to have been able to swathe even bad Hollywood with an enduring sort of glamour that, like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, aspires not to fade. Look at Frank O'Hara's often-anthologized "To the Film Industry in Crisis,"ýV with its mention of "'Miriam Hopkins dropping her champagne glass off Joel McCrea's yacht / and crying into the dappled sea." Though elsewhere they have turned to dust, in the poem Hopkins and McCrea join a legion of relentless dead, and the junk culture is valorized for its sheer weight and expansiveness, the twin celluloid wheels of the movie projector becoming a twentieth century analogue for the railroad cars that once criss-crossed America's heartland.

Page  10 10 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW III Though I now have the rubber stamp of the real job, calling myself a professor still gives me the willies, mainly because when I am called on to call myself something, it's usually in an airport, or a laundromat, and I happen to be wearing a pair of torn lime-green sweatpants with a blue stain shaped like the continent of Antarctica on my butt from where a pen exploded in my back pocket. Professor is just not a certifiable label in my case (have you ever seen a picture of Eliot in leisure clothes?) and usually I find it easier to tell people I am something else. But I never say "poet" either, a word that seems, like sulfuric acid, way too dangerous to inject in casual conversation. This is one of the gems buried in Eliot's essay-and why did it not leap out at me the first time around?-his saying that a poet is like a tiny clod of platinum, which when you put it into a chamber filled with certain gases will produce sulfuric acid. Being told I had to read everything gave me a neurosis that to this day I cannot shake. Better had I first been told that my job was to make sulfuric acid. As someone like me would say: I could have gotten into that. IV The word "professor" gives my parents great pleasure to say, though, and I imagine them practicing letting it roll mellifluously off their tongues. One of my father's dreams was to become a professor, and to this end he completed a Ph.D. (in what was very mysterious: I remember him building models of cities in the basement) though the meager economies of teaching kept him building real houses instead. What appealed to my father was not scholarship, still less the day-to-day mechanics of the classroom, but rather the trappings of the educated life. In his mind his suit coats all had suede elbows and the fat stogie he chewed on was a rosewood pipe. He liked the idea of an ivy-covered anything, and big ideas that could be accompanied by big sweeping gestures with his arms. The idea of ideas: this was my father's ruling passion. I know that nineteenth-century England had a tradition of bluecollar poets, the so-called thresher poets and weaver poets and spinner poets. And here in America both grandma Dickinson and grandpa Whitman were in many ways rustics who made a point of

Page  11 LUCIA PERILLO 11 distancing themselves from their reading ("Creeds and schools in abeyance, retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten," says Whitman in "Song of Myself.") Over and over again, though, Whitman reminds us that part of what puts his rustic self at ease is his having seemingly risen straight from the American dirt: "Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same." I don't think that my own parents, the children of immigrants, had a firm-enough footing here to feel they had a right to wade into the waters of-let alone contribute to-American culture. Also, having grown up during the Depression, they felt that indulgence in potentially frivolous interests had to be tempered with vigilance with regard to serious (read "money-making") work. Adulthood had caused them to drop the hobbies they'd pursued in youth, I suspect because having a hobby signaled a lapse in this vigilance, a lapse of which the world would surely take advantage. Hence my mother's answer was both loaded and cutting, when I first told her I planned to go to graduate school in creative writing: "I think that sounds like a very nice hobby," she said. My siblings and I had been groomed to pursue useful subjects like computers and engineering. That I'd studied wildlife biology as an undergraduate had already caused my parents some consternation; to leave a perfectly good job in the civil service to write poetly smacked not only of future unemployment but of wishywashyness to boot. "Next you'll tell me you want to be a ballet dancer," she groused. Another barrier that stood between my parents and my choice of vocation was their grave fear of going down on record, a fear I seem to have inherited. That is, sitting behind a typewriter has become after all these years oddly comforting, the motions as familiar as sticking a thumb into the mouth. But owning tracts that circulate in the world makes me queasy: I don't like to think about them going unsupervised into other people's houses. And publishing what one writes means having to soil the meditative outpost (where every sentence is profound) with a paper trail that leads back again and again to one's limitations and outright blithering idiocies, those same sentences that had so shortly ago glinted with the miracle of their creation. In fact, I wasn't interested in writing at all until I left college and became profoundly bored by months of illness. No, "wasn't interested" is too mild: I was horrified by the idea of mne being circulated in print. This horror was caused by a primal experience I'd had writ

Page  12 12 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY RENVIEW ing poetry, occasioned by my first published poem, "Anger." "Anger" went approximately like this: Anger burns inside of me like fire, destructive, yet never hurting anyone except me. Note the sophisticated use of an enjambed title, the extended metaphor, the vaguely Eastern tone-not bad for a fifth grader. What happened with "Anger" was everything that a poet is supposed to wish for-it got published in our middle school lit mag, the kind you'd stick your nose into the weepy blue letters of fresh out of the mimeograph machine and inhale deeply and think you'd gone to heaven. Then some few weeks later, during a family argument, my mother repeated "Anger" to my brothers and sister, and smiled (smugly, I thought) in my direction. I cannot do justice to my humiliation. Years went by before I wrote a poem again. V I retell some of my family history here because it's typical enough to serve as an ur sob story for poets of my generation, many of whom I suspect can't locate much common ground between their parents' and Eliot's vision of what their training should have been. My siblings and I were given toys to lure us with the glamour of science-telescopes and life-size models of the human brain-but books were seen as improvident gifts when they could be gotten for free at the public library. In much the same spirit as Eliot but at much greater length, Allan Bloom, in The Closing of the American Mind, opens his chapter on literature by musing: "I have begun to wonder whether the experience of the greatest texts from early childhood is not a prerequisite for a concern throughout life for them and for lesser but important works of literature." In one fell swoop Bloom writes off the possibility of remediation and casts a shade on parents like mine, who scraped to have the many volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia lined up in the house but did not read us the poems of Blake or the

Page  13 LUCIA PERILLO 13 novels of Dickens. What I hate most about Bloom's formulation is the same thing I hate about the kind of new-age therapies that my friends tangle with from time to time, therapies in which they are encouraged to role-play those instances when their parents wounded them as children. It seems both too easy and too seductive a pacifier to blame our deficiencies on our parents-after all, weren't they the ones who let us watch all those episodes of "I Dream of Jeannie" in the first place? Surely we would be better people, finer writers, had they exposed us to something more edifying than Babar books (which we took to be highbrow because they were written in cursive and suspiciously French.) Of course Eliot became a great poet: his mother had encouraged her gradeschooler to read Macaulay. VI But what about remediation? If we can forget Bloom's cutoff in the toddler years, and Eliot's circling the poet's twenty-sixth birthday on the calendar in red ink, there seems no reason why poets who feel disadvantaged by their class or sex or race or era can't commit themselves to a lifetime catching up. I think of Louise Bogan, the New Yorker's poetry critic for almost forty years, who dropped out of college to become a teenage bride and shortly thereafter a mother, and yet (by dint of a great mind, autodidactic personality, rigorous high school curriculum and carefully cultivated friendships with the likes of Edmund Wilson, with whom she spent evenings learning German) came to epitomize the kind of traditional sensibility that Eliot would applaud. Yet I am not so sure that this kind of remediation is as easy or even possible these days. As literature-and the idea of literature-began to diversify in the middle of this century, left in its wake was the infamous and ongoing academic warfare about what should or should not be included in the canon of designated great works that will be handed on to the next millennium. Since there's been more of "should" than "should not," the list of books that writers can feel obligated to have digested grows exponentially each year. Even Bogan fell victim to this phenomenon; by the end of her tenure at The New Yorker in the late sixties, many readers-and Bogan herself-felt her classical sensibilities left her temperamentally unable to judge the worth of emerging genres like Beat, feminist, and confessional verse. Bogan's response to literature's metastasis was to bristle; instead I

Page  14 14 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW find myself burdened with what could be dubbed "reader's guilt." We know we should be glad that obscure women poets are being dredged up and added to the canon, ditto for Jerome Rothenberg's translations of indigenous writers and the hot new slam poets out of the Nuyorican Cafe. And of course especially if we teach we tell ourselves we must read it all, because otherwise we are narrow-minded mastodons trudging dully along in the footsteps of the same ten dead white guys who fill the usual anthologies-though if only we could stop reading to think about it for a minute we might realize that we've never really done justice to the Cantos yet-and meanwhile the pile of books on the nightstand grows until it topples over and becomes not a pile anymore but a heap that also grows until we have no choice but to move out of the room and start sleeping down the hall. VII It seems to me that contemporary theory was born in part to combat the neuroses brought on by the evanescing of the canon. Instead of asking us to worry about the books we should have read, theory creates another set of books (newer, and hence fewer) to supplant the formidable ghosts of Text Present and Text Past. Some English departments have called a truce to the warfare over what is and isn't literature by declaring everything literature, in effect nullifying the term. A few years ago, the graduate school I attended created a separate department of'"rTextual Studies," which grew out of the English department like a sucker shoot. These tactics either help to relieve us of our guilt (literature is an arbitrary construct so don't worry about it) or provide more fuel for our ignorance, I am not sure which. In graduate school I had to take courses and a comprehensive exam in theory, requirements that seemed like institutional models of my own feelings of impostering. I was required to read the structuralists when I'd never read LeviStrauss, the neo-Freudian Lacan without having read Freud himself. The French feminists without De Beauvoir. Louis Althusser's interpretation of Marxism but not Karl Marx. I confess to enjoying these theoretical courses, more as a form of guerrilla training in how to bluff my way through academia than as a contribution to my writerly vocation. Not much of the information sticks, though I find myself returning often to the idea of postmodern philosophy as a subject for poetry. The idea of ideas: see how I've become my father's child.

Page  15 LUCIA PERILLO 15 VIII Is it just me or do other young professors have recurring nightmares about losing control of their classrooms? All night I yell and yell and nobody pays attention to a word I say. Doubtless these dreams stem from my fear-no, my conviction-that I have not read enough, am not wise enough, do not write well enough, am not yet equal to my best self. Or maybe because always on the first day of class students look around the room wondering where the professor is... though I am not so young anymore, thirty-seven, same age as Whitman in "Song of Myself," which maybe should reassure me but does not because it just gets me wondering what I've done yet that can measure up to Whitman. My previous job was at a small Catholic college affiliated with a Benedictine monastery, which is perhaps best known for having briefly housed Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Jr., a.k.a. "The Great Imposter" (played by Tony Curtis in the movie of that name.) Demara was at the time imposting a monk but he also coached the college's abysmal football team to a year of singular success. They qualified for a championship to be held in Yakima, Washington, and Demara somehow forged a pilot's license and rented a plane and landed it on the monastery's soggy field. He loaded the team and flew the boys over the mountains, landed in Yakima, played the game (my sources do not know whether or not he won, but the story works better if I say he won), flew back over the mountains, landed at the monastery again, took off again and returned the plane without detection. All this without ever having flown before in his life. Demara's story reminds me that all my worrying about what I know and what I've read has never helped me write a poem. It seems to me that in writing poems we are all Demaras engaging the throttle of the plane for the first time and trying not to betray the fact that we don't know what we're doing. If we're going to pull this off we need both bravura and belief; above all, now is no time to stop and consult the manual. Demara, by sheer force of will, became adept at those skills he attempted. And poets should take heart from the fact that it is unlikely anyone will be killed by whatever imposture becomes necessary for them to get the poem off the ground.

Page  16 16 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW IX In truth, the embarrassing dishabille of my sweat pants (see III) is another anxious half-dream, an outlaw fantasy cathected with what's real. What really stops me from calling myself a professor is the chain of questions that will ensue, ending in my having to admit that I get paid to teach people to write poems, when writing poems is what I feel least capable of teaching. Making something out of words has always seemed to me like herding rabbits with a broom: I consider myself lucky to arrive at any destination with a half-dozen stragglers, knowing that dozens of other, more vigorous specimens have doubled behind my back and gotten away. If the post-sitcom suburban culture in which I grew up was an appropriate training ground for anything, however, it taught me about the alchemy of simulation, my junk culture having been a mirrorhouse of impostures and hoaxes (imagine this: a woman pretending she is a genie pretending she is a woman pretending not to live with an astronaut to whom she is not married in Coco Beach.) In many aspects of life, America in the 60s and 70s institutionalized the mispresented and/or inauthentic: think of polyester, space food sticks, Cambodia and Watergate. Yet the Tony Curtis role that will be remembered as defining this era is not the smooth operator Demara, but instead the unlikely Josephine-the female saxophone player he impersonated in Some Like It Hot. In Josephine we see how the hoax itself eventually becomes a style, both in spite of and because of her five o'clock shadow. I think that when poets of my generation assume Eliot's sort of erudition they will always be unmasked for holding down an artificial pose, unless these poems can somehow find a way to celebrate the masquerade that the times have made necessary. Our parents DPs, our nursemaid the television, our gods obscure, our music rooted in three chords, we have no choice but to let our wigs ride askew and to make an art out of the hoax itself. And if the angel descends there ought to be no attempt to hide her strings-this is something I think I can teach. X Or maybe I am just paranoid. If I am in fact too unlearned for this life in which I've landed, either nobody picks up on it or else they

Page  17 LUCIA PERILLO 17 don't care. Last year I got tenure (some kind of administrative mixup, I am sure, but still I sent the clippings to my parents.) And in reality my classes go along okay. One exception occurred recently when a graduate student who often showed up for workshop drunk and belligerent got into my craw. As our psychodrama played out over the semester, he told me that he'd made a policy of not reading anything; in this way he would ensure that his own writing was untainted and thus as original as it could be. (Eliot: "One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse.") W~hat did I do? What could I do. Ah, betrayal: I told him to shut up and go read the essay.

John HollanderHollander, JohnThe City of ThoughtVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 18-33http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:05

Page  18 JOHN HOLLANDER THE CITY OF THOUGHT Never before has so much sounded so silly to so few. I would like to explore this situation, as part of the atmosphere which intellectual life in America today, both in and out of universities, must breathe. David Bromwich's Politics by Other Means speaks eloquently of our present academic condition; he is concerned among other things with the respective vices of the "two environments, a conservative political culture outside the academy and a radical political culture inside." What has also concerned me is a discursive climate common to both environments. Whether nourished by a naive innocence, or a corrupt cynicism, about what knowledge is and might be for, questions of knowledge and of language in their relation to authority are suppressed in much public discourse today. This our talking America seems to have been overcome by a habit of dissent without actual credence, which, to borrow Hazlitt's remark about Methodism, "at once absolves the understanding from the rules of reasoning, and the conscience from the the restraints of morality, throwing the whole responsibility upon a vicarious righteousness and an abstract belief [and which] must, besides its rant, its vulgarity and its amatory styles, have a double charm for both saints and sinners." This rhetorical condition is now general. It has indeed become a full-time job to inventory the daily collapses of constitutent parts of our discursive structures, if only the tiny but exemplary ones. For example, a New York Times story of some years back contained a story of a prison breakout in which the reporter obviously did not know the difference between the words "perimeter" and "parameter." (We may be assured that the inept writer was not in this case attempting the feeble wordplay on a notion that, for the freedom of movement of one confined there, a prison's perimeter is indeed a heavy contingency, a parameter.) But this confusion, as we sad readers know, is barely worth noticing-it happens every day. In the same 18

Page  19 JOHN HOLLANDER 19 issue, however, there was a photograph of an unfortunate and perplexed Detroit worker holding up a sign denouncing the Japanese statesman who had recently called American workers lazy and illiterate. The wording of the sign was itself misspelled. It was impossible to tell, in the newspaper that allowed "parameter" to substitute freely for "perimeter," whether the trivial but painful irony framed by the sign was known [a] to the photographer (who might well be semiliterate him or her self) [b] to the various other staff presences who ran this photo without a hint of awareness that the sign as it were deconstructed itself. And as in public writing, so in public talk. In broadcast journalism, the spoken vernacular fares even worse, and the horrendously speeded-up effects of what Father Walter Ong called a "secondary oral culture" are everywhere evident in mannered mispronunciations, and not only of names, as well as in an inability to make sense out of the sound of a sentence. This is not at all that vigorous folk tradition of oral transmission that since the later eighteenth century high discourse has ennobled and only middle vulgarity has shunned. It is rather the opposite: the uncritical adoption of a shifting vernacular shaped not by plain talking but by inept writing. We might ascribe this situation to an inability of any discursive institutionwhether a radio station, a newspaper of record, or a major university English Department-to mind the shop. But I don't know whether in any of these cases the proprietors would know either what a shop, or the minding of one, really was. The very idea of a shop to mind depends on a building to house it in, wares to sell, and persons to provide a custom. These-admittedly as figurative as the shop and the minding-are provided by the literal and figurative metropolis. We are all acutely aware of the crumbling of the infrastructure of our cities, and of the unravelling of their entrepreneurial, communitarian and moral fabrics. Twelve years of a national government which has considered large urban centers to be dumping grounds for those irrelevant to their idea of America have produced not only even more uneasy cities, but more easy discursive cliches like the one just uttered. Some of what I am musing about is a weakening of the play of intellectual work, and I am certain that it is related to general problems of American Work today, problems whose consideration may have been repressed by the sexual revolution. Ruskin reminds his "Working Men's" audience in The Crown of Wild Olives that work of the head, too, ought to be honest, useful and

Page  20 20 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW cheerful. As our actual cities get worse, I wonder what has happened to them as centers of the life of the mind which-for all that happened after World War 11 in the absorption of much of it by our expanded universities-has always involved a kind of intellectual street-smarts. My title addresses only indirecdly St. Augustine's paradigm of two cities "that in this world lie confusedly together" [The City of God book 11], for I am perhaps thinking of an unfallen condition in which the urban and the urbane flourished confusedly together. At a time of the winter of our large cities, I would like to reflect on some of our intellectual life by remembering the locus amoenus not as the Socratic grove, nor the site of the peripatetic walk, nor the mental withdrawvals from the busy Stoa, nor even the rolling tub, but rather in the modem city, in what I might call the cafeteria around the corner from the classroom. This is a realm of mental expectation, of knowing and meeting intellgent, observant people who know things you don't (not being in your particular line of work) and of being able to take joy in such conversation-and not only because it Might have bearing on what you know, and how you know it. Having grown up in New York City and gone to Columbia when I did has doubtless arranged the light and seating in my local metaphoric cafeteria, which surely had clones in other great cities as well. But there are locals everywhere, and the regional cuisine is not at issue. I said at the outset that I would not speak primarily of the classroom, save to observe that the vanished cafeteria now seems more necessary than ever. For about thirty years it leant its atmosphere of critical excitement and lively scepticism -to local eateries, faculty clubs and common-rooms. But that is mainly over. As far as the humanities are concerned, we are seeing more and more of what in the past was always caricatured as a stuffy professoriat writing ugly and impenetrable stuff with the ifi-grounded excuse of a necessary professionalized vocabulary. (I don't mean a good pragmatically constituted technical one: that is most often on the level; the slippery slope is from jargon down to cant.) Like the pre-World War II generations of philological professionals, they hate literature, but unlike them, they are ideologues. (The generation that came between these-with the new-critical, anti-romantic modernism of some of my teacherswas also ideological, but they loved literature). The new professoriat also write in innocence of cafeterias-as if they knew not one single person who wasn't in their racket; thus the scientistic term, "the lit

Page  21 JOHN HOLLANDER 21 erature" has replaced literature as what there is to read, and to write and talk about. When certain members of my generation decidedin my case, with Lionel Trilling as one of my models-that a literary life might be led among scholars and theorizers, it became clear that the writerly knee-jerk of a howl against critics was really quite silly. It was not only that Matthew Arnold seemed to be right at least in maintaining that "To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and great proof of being alive, and it is not denied to criticism to have it; but then criticism must be sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, ever-widening in its knowledge." One could answer the blustering novelist or poet who asked "What do Professors know, anyway?" by saying simply "How to read you seriously, and get you right, and tell other people about it better than most, actually." Today this is ceasing to be true, and a time when there seem to be no other institutions to do just that work. In any case, I want to observe something of the discourse of the cafeteria around the corner from the library (and how the dusty stacks of a great library smell more and more like fresh air!). This way of talking defined itself against a notion it had of some sort of insubstantial urbanity marking both commercial, middle-brow, and professional academic culture. That cafeteria-talk itself exhibits a very powerful urbanity, which I would associate with what city-talk in general has for so long meant. One of its most important and characteristic modes is satire, whose near-impossibility has been horribly dawning upon thinking people for some decades. Philip Roth observed this in 1962, in a still funny piece which, in relating the minute details of a domestic disaster that had recently occurred in Chicago--kept demonstrating that the facts constituted their own satiric fiction. The often hilarious grotesque projections of the late Terry Southern faded into banality as satirist Actuality put Terry Southern out of that business, at any rate. From Chaucer through late modernity, it was possible to distinguish poetry from inane jingle: Alexander Pope called false poets "tuneful fools," but that will no longer do, because most of those who presume to poetry not only have tin ears, but don't know what hearing is and all many are left with is sincerity. Given the name of Orson Welles as at least a bourgeois household word, a feeble comic in the 1960s called himself, to elicit amusement, "Orson Bean." Today,with absolutely no sense that he is in higher reality a personage framed and named by Nathanael West, we have Orson Swindle. Nature herself seems to employ the stand-up comic's tired phrase that introduces a new joke:

Page  22 22 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW "But seriously, now..." [Mallarm6's once-celebrated suggestion that if one ordinary bourgeois family were put on stage unknowingly for two hours, it would be the best theatre in the world turns out now to be wrong-in the United States we get that all the time and it is some of the worst theatre in the world.] One feels that when nothing can be shown to be ridiculous-and when we cannot take ourselves to task for failing to see this-then we are in danger of becoming ridiculous ourselves. Satire has been the urban instrument of acknowledgment of such danger, but now a useful mode of serious wit seems to have lost its edge. But is the implement constitutionally dull? Or has it been corroded by what it now has to cut? Satire is of the stuff of urban seriousness. It may be remembered that Hobbes associates, in his answer to Davenant's preface to his heroic poem, Gondibert, tragedy and epic with the court, and pastoral-quite mistakenly and over-literally-with the country. But his making satire a city matter has a resonance for us still-an urban, not necessarily even a cosmopolitan, will get the point of a satiric representation of something that seems to be wrong and that nobody seems to see is there, let alone wrong. A rural will be both too pure and too simple (a) to need satire-perhaps because the urban feels there's nothing wrong for his world in that sort of way-or, (b) to be able to grasp any rhetorical complexity beyond that of open, almost literal, sarcasm. Northrop Frye related literary modes to phases of time when he associated satire with winter; and we might ourselves observe that winter remembers summer, often with enlightening bitterness, but not the reverse. Even so are we reminded of how pastoral is an urban mode: the wintry city imagines, and claims to remember, the summery rurality out of which it grew. If satire seems a conservative, as well as an urban, mode, it may be because winter, regarding its unleaved branches with sadness, distaste, and even indignation, rushes to blame it all on the fall. It may be wondered whether the satirical vision is a function of some urbanlike condition of the spirit, or rather of an urbane knowledge? Harry Levin suggested once that Circe was the first metamorphic satirist. She turned men into the particular beasts they "really" were, or externalized their inner moral conditions (or, it might be added, created the epistemological grounds that made Aesopian fable possible.) Ever since, it has been the mechanism of satire to represent moral truths by means of distorted phenomenal perspectives. The satirist propounds a crazy or ugly representation of form or custom in order

Page  23 JOHN HOLLANDER 23 to call attention to the craziness and ugliness of the moral consequences we don't perceive in the easy shapes. This entails an organized representational and rhetorical violence; but our normal insensitivity-not only to our knaveries and follies, but to that very insensitivity-is not so much a callus of the spirit, as its corneal opacity. One of the ways in which the world seems now to have gone wrong is that Culture (looking, as so often, like Nature) has herself taken over Circe's task, and that there is no craziness or ugliness into which we might twist something that isn't there already. Circe, observing a fox leading a bunch of pigs, has no work to do. This may be both symptom and cause of some of our uneasiness. There are several sorts of indication of the weakening of even our most gifted to express savage indignation. Some may be less important than others. The topical grounds for a bit of savage satire from some time in the past may be unavailable or unfamiliar today. History reduces momentary concerns-conflicts of what Finnegans Wake calls "wills gen wonts, oystrygods gaggin fishygods"-to those of Swiftian big-endians versus little endians after all. But most interesting is the question of what has happened to the relation of humanity, its technology, and nature such that-again to invoke Swift-the celebrated shit-extraction process of the natural philosophers in Laputa, propounded to deride not only new-fangled enterprise but what the Royal Society was beginning to construe as knowledge, seems to be an interesting and perhaps useful idea. One need not be an environmental utopian at least to consider it. This case touches on an important rhetorical distinction. Aware readers of the poetry of the past come to realize how the history of technology will literalize and/or institutionalize what is originally a trope. One thinks of Keats's anticipatory deep-freeze in the urn poem, or Wordsworth's apparent invention of superimposed film transparencies at the opening of "Tintern Abbey," or-according to Eisenstein-Milton's invention of film montage in a sequence of his similes. Just as the social scientist of any sort is made uneasy by the tropes of the poet until they have died into institutionalization, Time is always trying to work its Sophoclean irony by literalizing, through subsequent physical or social technology, the fruits of figuration. But what happens when this process cuts to the heart of our moral thought? Take, for example, a couple of gags from Arthur Hugh Clough's "The Latest Decalogue," written in 1847 and published in 1862. It may be remembered that its tone is set by the opening,

Page  24 24 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW "Thou shalt have one God only; who / Would be at the expense of two?"; then follows: "No graven images may be / Worshipped, except the currency." Here technologies of bureaucratic rhetoric contrive to nullify the joke-today in the U.S., the name of some sort of God or other appears on our currency. A parabolic lesson-for those who can read-of the now-failed punch line is still there: the being called the "God" (in whom "we trust") on our increasingly worthless dollar bills is, of course, the highly untrustworthy Mammon. A point of some sort can still be made, and that point is clearly relevant to the one behind Clough's initial gag. Not unrelated is "At church on Sunday to attend / Will serve to keep the world thy friend." Here the allusion to the original decalogue text ("Honor the Sabbath Day, to keep it holy") is brilliantly grating-giving a show of honor to Sunday assures its unholy mundanity-and the diction and syntax of the couplet, with its consciously archaizing tone of pseudo folk-piety make the utterance undo itself as if in the mouth of a naive speaker. This is more interestingly problematic; so many of the contemporary American cloth, aside from the matter of its box-office mentality, might see no irony in this, and, unable to understand it, would affirm it for an agenda of Love-World-Peace, etc. The concept of "world" has of course grown much more complex since England in 1847, but for many contemporary discourses it has grown windier as it has expanded. But now consider a more vexing case. "Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive / Officiously to keep alive." Here it is harder for the critical intelligence to condescend (as I have just done to many of the clergy), for the same view of the world which enables us critically to analyze the previous "commandment" now draws us up horribly short. Here is where all of our ironic pragmatism-and the kind of moral sense we hope we can keep alive by constant testing-leads us to literalize the near-sarcasm, if only in the instructions we may leave in what are called living wills. We now indeed encounter situations in which heroic medical interventions can easily be considered "officious" (although many religious dogmas might be unable to consider this: whatever human intervention could appear to occur would only be an instrument of Divine Providence; and could God be officious? Perhaps for Milton's Satan or Voltaire). Well, then: Can it be that this is merely one more literalization of a fiction? That developing technologies, and the epistemological and moral routines which seem to accrete around them, thereby erase the

Page  25 JOHN HOLLANDER 25 occasions of shame, outrage, or savage indignation in which satirical impulses are grounded? In that case, moral disgust might merely be an indication of the backwardness of the society in which it remained possible to feel it. This is a view perhaps shared by the half-unwitting cynic and the modem utopian. I am not partial to it. The decay of the various fabrics which make an American urban center partake of The City seems to accompany the decay of satire's ability to probe the interesting depths of our shame at what happens around us. Satire is the city's mode of criticizing itself, but it inherently celebrates its own ability to do so. There is no rural analogue of satiric(georgic tradition as a way of coming to grips with the exigencies of farming is almost as much an urban mode as pastoral). From Juvenal's great third satire on, the catalogue of urban horrors can be too easily seen as unchanged: wretchedness, violence, at best unpleasantness embraced with rueful relief that it is not worse. At night (this is Dryden's translation) As many fates attend, thy steps to meet As there are waking shadows in the street. Bless the good gods, and think thy chance is rare, To have a pisspot only for thy share. and generally, one of the benefits of a former age was that One jail did all their criminals restrain Which now the walls of Rome can scarce contain. And so forth. In a mode of urban elegiac, on the other hand, perhaps necessarily associated with modernity, Baudelaire in "Le Cygne" sighs that Paris is changing, whereas his melancholy is immutable; and that the new buildings, scaffoldings, blocks of masonry, old neighborhoods all become allegorical, while his dear remembrances grow heavy as stone: Paris change! mais rien de ma melancolie N'a bouge! palais neufs, echafaudages, blocs, Vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allegorie, Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que les rocs. There is a whole tradition of sadly contemplative gazes at such losses and gains, manifest in every true city's historical palimpsest. The availability of living and even useful ruins is conducive to the development of a historical sense and thus possibly of imagination.

Page  26 26 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Moreover, there are additional layers of past catalogues of past decays. But what happens when the very fabric on which the palimpsest is overlaid seems to disintegrate? I am not concerned with specific catalogues of urban woes here, but want rather to consider how our attitudes toward them seem to partake of the general condition of decline. The city's juxtaposition of styles, its hodgepodge graveyards of fashion, are often as much to be learned from as the rhythms of nature conceived in an urban-sentimental, pseudo-georgic mode. Many senses of history characterize the city of thought. Today we are immersed in the suburban sense that the world was created as it is, every episteme locked in place, about six weeks ago. This is insidiously nonrural-the older country/city question mapped change (and the knowledge of past changes) onto the city, and constancy onto the country. Thus "this is the way we've always done it" confronts the urban "look at the way they used to do things back then"-evidences of which palimpsestic cities have always seemed to provide. The universal suburb enacts an unwitting parody of the country, with all of the veneer of pseudo-urban style. In general, the city of our discourse about many questions seems to be in ruins: about rights and responsibilities-can people who variously use those two words consider themselves to be speaking the same moral language? Or again, the matter of a self as a functioning, originating agent, a locus of what the eighteenth century called genius. This last seems to have given way to palaver about the self as a blessedly wounded infant, bawling out for nourishment. I think it is this notion of the self (Harold Bloom has discussed it in some pages of The American Religion) which has generated the background rumble of insistence that somewhere in the first ten amendments of the Constitution is the right not to have one's feelings hurt. This however, is not as damaging as the corollary conviction that there could be no compensatory acquisition of knowledge in the course of feeling miffed at, say, being shown one had unwittingly perpetuated a common or uncommon error. Swift's description of the morning presents another urbane view of the urban condition. It is one that seems necessarily to entail the engines of satire brought to bear not just on city life, but on city literature about life in general. You may remember what happens, in its opening lines, to the expected literary conventions of acknowledging

Page  27 JOHN HOLLANDER 27 the sunrise with oblique allusions to Apollo's chariot, and Aurora leaving the bed of her withered Tithonus to get the day started: Now hardly here and there a hackney-coach Appearing, shows the ruddy morn's approach. Now Betty from her master's bed had flown And softly stole to discompose her own.... A catalogue of individuated urban activities including a choir of street cries continues, concluding with a jailer seen as an urban shepherd in night-day-reversal and, in the final couplet, glimpses of two surrogate observers of all this: The turnkey now his flock returning sees, Duly let out a-nights to steal for fees: The watchful bailiffs take their silent stands, And schoolboys lag with satchels in their hands. This is not so much mock-heroic as mock rural, but at the differing expenses of both city and country. The dual thrust is not unlike that in Sir Joshua Reynolds's wondefful painting of Cupid as a darkwinged but otherwise contemporary London link-boy, leading lovers to assignations by the light of his torch. We contemplate not only how Time has brought the godhead of love down to this literalized instance but, conversely, how much the power of concreteness, of passion and delight, lurked in the original abstraction and personification. Once again, the discourse of the city can be its own best critic. The city multiplies distinctions. Although some great anti-urban visions have maintained the opposite. For Wordsworth in Book VII of The Prelude the mass of distinctions generated by the complexity of the city seems too great even for its citizens., the 0.. thousands upon thousands of her sons Living amid the same perpetual whirl Of trivial objects, melted and reduced To one identity, by differences That have no law, no meaning, and no endOppression, under which even highest minds Must labour, whence the strongest are not free. For the poet himself., it seems that if we fully felt the human presence of everyone we encountered daily it would be unbearable. But whether of the Wordsworthian ant-hill or Mandevillean beehive, the

Page  28 28 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW urbane mode constructs a contingent personhood of every physical presence: when the city is functioning, the moving body I ignore or brush by can at the drop of a hat lose its mystery-become a person-by being recognized, or acknowledged as needing help, or whatever. This is the matter of civility-of a pragmatic deployment of convention not as a restraint, but as an engine, of civilization. (Today we automatically add that the contingent person may now more than ever shoot or knife you, but, however grudgingly, we continue to acknowledge that it is a person and not a beast.) It also touches on the great matter of privacy. Emerson observes enigmatically in his journals that "A man tells a secret for the same reasons that he loves the country." I think of this as a little poem about privacy as well as secrecy: the "C.open" (as we call it) country seems in itself to rebuke concealment. Parts of our personal lives should be free of encumbering fabric; but parts of them, bare of protective covering, shiver in the cold. Where there is no privacy, there has been secrecy, and it was the city that was marked by the acknowledgment of privacy, when the village, which only had secrets, and in whom "9-concealment, like a worm i'the bud [fed] on her damask cheek." Where there is no privacy there must be secrecy and hypocrisy, and like all tyrannies, those of the sub-urbane loathe privacy. Enthusiastic sectarianism, religious or political, is the enemy of privacy, and it cannot conceive-any more than can the possessed speaker-intongues--of any difference between the private and the secret. In the thoughtful city, another matter was acknowledged, and it did not concern blame, but rather, the opposite. W. H. Auden's celebrated memorial poem for Yeats concludes with a frequently glossedover injunction. Not so much the dead poet, but the continuing voice of poetry itself, is enjoined: "In the prison of his days / Teach the free man how to praise." Aside from the necessary modicum of self-referentiality in these lines ("Teach me, 0 poetical subject about whom I have been working out my ambivalence in this poem, how to praise you and thereby poetry itself, appropriately" ) there is a significant general matter here. The notion that free people needed to be taught how to praise anyone, or any institution, undoubtedly arose for Auden partially from the stink of NMire mberg- rally mass assent, but it resonates for us in the prison of our sub-urbane discursive days. Irresponsible praise can be far more insidious than irresponsible blame. One doesn't need the intellectural city, but only the just State, to deal with the latter: remedies in law and in equity are there for un

Page  29 JOHN HOLLANDER 29 just personal or even product blame, etc. But there are no legal remedies for unjust, corrupting, inane yowls, empty standing ovations, and fashionable garlands (admittedly, I except product claims). The use of the word "great" is, alas, not-self-descriptive: that of the word "rare" still is. And the currency of the disapproving neologism "judgmental" implies that praising and blaming are perhaps the exercise of some vicious faculty. There is something wrong with this. That great standing ovation, the celebrated Cane Ridge revival of 1801, was of the country (an ad hoc tent city is a temporary fair or carnival) as was its avatar in Woodstock, but that is not to say that a heavy metal rock concert in Madison Square Garden is a breath of fresh rural air. Becoming part of a crowd is a necessary consequence of city life; being part of an assenting mob is not an urbanizing experience, even if it remains true that the mountains or the forests do not teem with thousands unless they are there for one of these exurban encampments. Urban observation can see bad faith itself unwittingly turn choral praise into blame: Satan's legions, in Book X of Paradise Lost in a half- (but only half-) deluded victory rally are, in the midst of praise of their leader, metamorphosed into serpents, and "Thus was th'applause they meant / Turned to exploding hiss, triumph to shame / Cast on themselves from their own mouths." Our literal reenactments of this scene have great consequences for values. Today, the word "quality"-not the serious noun but rather as the unpleasant huckster's adjective-assures one that it will mean almost the opposite. Responsible praise always involves issues of knowledge and acknowledgment, if only of the value of the institution or term of praise itself that must be protected in, and by, its use. Serious artists of all sorts know this: a painting or poem or piece of musical composition will usually be praised for something that is not praiseworthy about it. Artists take what they can get, of course. But if they take bad praise with anything other than a shrug-even faintly seriously-it will poison them as artists. And as with poems and pictures, so with our arguments, our protests, our claims, our judgments. Perhaps our City of Thought has lost some of its voice because of first losing much of its sense of shame. Modernity was so zealous in its discrediting "good taste" and, particularly, "erotic pudeur," that the healthy baby was thrown out with the dirty bathwater. Perhaps this is merely our human lot. We are not totally shameless-we citizens avert our gaze from what clearly cannot be repaired, given the

Page  30 30 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW democratic tools we have (because too many of us are not sure we want the repairs made), and at least some of us do so with shame, rather than with distanced distaste. Following the usual Gresham's Law of culture, false satire drives good satire out of circulation, and it is possible that the Kitsch of the outrageous hardens the sensibility and blunts satire's most powerful thrusts. '"When cloth of gold is very cheap / Up goes the price of shoddy," of course; but worse, if anything goes it's harder to deploy what pointedly and interestingly won't go. A contemporary Lenny Bruce-the saint of letting it all hang out-might not be tolerated by his conceptual progeny. For example, he would not shrink from ridiculing the pious authority of recent secular conversion narratives, seen to be as trite and standardized as the most banal sentimental reveries of the born-again soul's sudden infusion of "Jesus." I also wonder about the relation of a sense of humor to an ability to feel-even as a limiting case-not only some shame, but even some sympathy. Oscar Wilde's magnificent observation that one would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell is deeply urbane: it does its own end-run around trivial falseurbanity, which could only see the observation itself as naughty. But Wilde really means it-if you can't find contrived sentimentality ridiculous, you can't feel real sympathy. This may relate to a sense of humor as a sense of the possibility of one's own ridiculousness. One wants to ask, "Why is it that, for example, the academic nihilistic ironists of a once-fashionable sort were so glum?" What they were never apparently to deconstruct was the notion of solemnity, or even to acknowledge the Nietzschean view that the solemn and the frivolous are not opposed, but rather frequently aligned, against the conjoined forces of the deeply funny and the really serious. Again I think of Ruskin in The Crown of Wild Olives, rearranging the common and erroneous rich-idle / poor-working distinction, and of his matter of the "cheerful." This trait of joylessness marked the linguistic nihilists early on, but was no necessary consequence of the theory--one can deconstruct some rhetoricity or other in delight or sorrow, rather than, as was almost always done, as a painful duty. But it was the young citizens of the crumbling city of thought who brought the joylessness to the occupation, thereby providing a paradigm for all the other subsequently fashionable self-marginalizing professorial sects. And thus perhaps the impossibility of satirizing what goes on in many parts of most universities today may be partially traced to a new

Page  31 JOHN HOLLANDER 31 solemnity which is imaginative death. A learned and imaginative younger scholar and poet was taken aside after a talk at a conference at Harvard a few years ago; she told me that several older women had admonished her for using the word "wisdom"-presumably, in a professional context-and warned her never to do it again. Many paper topics at MLA meetings have seemed sick jokes for over a decade in good part because most people either cannot or will not acknowledge their possible ridiculousness. And thus to parody such a paper topic would merely be to provide one. You might find oneself uncomfortable with the new cliched use of "colonize" to denote any movement of one conceptual category into the realm of another: this doubtless accounts for itself as coming from some sort of gauchiste theoretical zeal. It may or may not be fair to think it born of igorance, terminological poverty and rhetorical sloth. In any case, were satire not impossible, you might jokingly propose that somewhere someone is writing of how, in romantic paradigms of cognition, each of the categories imperialistically imprisons and sucks up the surplus value from nature; or that in set theory, a set with subsets as members is cannibalistic. But alas, there are probably some glum fools somewhere writing, at this very moment, just that, in the belief that it is somehow professionally serious to be ridiculous in just such a way. And at best, too many of the glum would take frivolously solemn issue with you. But as well as losing a good deal of academic seriousness in the humanities, the intellectual life has lost something else, something it never valued because it never missed. With the decline of literacy generally, there has been a drooping of the middle and high middlebrow, for which "the intellectuals" had so much scorn (e.g., Dwight Macdonald on James Gould Cozzens), but from which they were exacting a kind of spiritual surplus value. The more big magazines, the fewer and better "little" ones. The oppressive intellectual ceiling of the middle-brow nonetheless stood above a threshold of knowledge-linguistic, historical, geographical (if, seldom scientific)which has now fallen away. (Indeed, the notion of "little magazine" has become a hideous travesty: in my corner of the shrinking literary world, there are piles of nasty "little magazines"-I think of them as "petty magazines"-which contain nothing but wretched verse accompanied by occasional reviews of fifteenth-rate writers. These are unwitting travesties of the earlier paradigm of littleness in magazines, referring to format and circulation, but not to intellectual range and aesthetic ambition. When the slick magazines published

Page  32 32 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW some verse, and even The New York Times regularly published a poem at the foot of the left-hand column of the editorial page, then the notion of publishing poems that were not just too long, but too interestingly problematic to glide along a reader's gaze, seemed appropriate to accompany fiction and, particularly, criticism-literary, social, cultural-that aspired to be strongly and usefully heterodox. Most little magazines have no room for "intellectual marines" and have become suburbane. Actual cafeterias have all vanished the way the movie palaces did, yet that is part of the life of cities over time. Something is preserved in our memories and metaphors of them, and this follows one of the rhythms of civilization. But the discursive cafeteria of serious urbanity is harder to internalize, or otherwise to preserve in trope. The city of thought was always metropolis within us, happier far than the actual one with which it coexisted. It is in the life of the mind and of books and of readerly talk and speakerly writing that it could survive, and we all must wonder about the future of reading, by which I do not mean a sectarian academic agenda of interpretation, but sheer literacy (again, a high ceiling needs a strong threshold.) For seriousness to have gone metaphorically underground, and perhaps soon to resort to a version of samizdat, is a moder heroic story, but a sad condition with perhaps sadder consequences. It may be that a quest for the locus of a new city-the subject of one of our older stories-may emerge as the consequences of trying to wait out all this inanity. It is hard to imagine what that quest would be like. I am reminded of the end of a verse essay I wrote twenty years ago, as part of an extended imitation-cum-retraction of Juvenal III about New York: Then, as our science fails and our arts rot, Instead of huddling in some minor spot On the torn outskirts of a little town (Where, more than here, old buildings are torn down And metal siding fronts for honest wood) We'll see the ending out from where we should: With nothing working, services gone slack, Mushrooms on the abandoned subway track, Telephones silent between ten and two Thousands of cats reclaim an empty zoo... Our losses are of gardens. We create A dense, sad city for our final state.

Page  33 JOHN HOLLANDER 33 The melancholy of these last lines resounds strangely now with an implicit assurance now hard to feel: that with the material city crumbling, thought and language will still be around to contemplate, project, sing or argue, and to give and receive appropriate praise and merited rebuke. To this degree, satire was always as deeply hopeful as elegy, and its absence makes its element of winter seem less cyclical and even more chilling. What was once the city of thought could slowly succumb to the condition of a Gertrude Steinian Oakland, and there could be no here here.

Mary OliverOliver, MaryAt Round PondVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 34http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:06

Page  34 MARY OLIVER AT ROUND POND owl make your little appearance now owl dark bird bird of gloom messenger reminder of death that can't be stopped argued with leashed put out like a red fire but burns as it will owl I have not seen you now for too long a time don't hide away but come flowing and clacking the slap of your wings your death's head oh rise out of the thick and shaggy pines when you look down with your golden eyes how everything trembles then settles from mere incidence into the lush of meaning. 34

S. Ben-TovBen-Tov, S.The Recoilless CannonVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 35-37http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:07

Page  35 S. BEN-TOV THE RECOILLESS CANNON Israel, 1995 Nature devised me for remembering. I am escorted to this secret Ministry of Defense Museum, illumined room where six slim missiles finned with X are ranged, war by war, on wheeled frames, and share one striking angle as though hypnotized. I halfkneel, and rap the russet iron barrel of a cannon. "Your father never told you?" asks the unnameable curator. "All his life he never told me." The old voice descends, embarrassed, "Some need to forget. We found this cannon in a weedy field." I feel inside the hollow bore as smooth as five feet of river water. It lacks that spiral groove through which the shell flies spinning out-like death's negative DNAso I, whose DNA is wound up with the State's defense, discover my father's cannon was a water-pipe 35

Page  36 36 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW until its end, shaped like a flower-pot, was welded shut, then pierced with apertures like cruel smiles. I have learned how in 1948 the darkening sea pounded underneath the sun's dazzling-down. Like a pendulum strung above tramped sand, a cannon hung. Generals watched grayly. The Old Man's clenched face reflected off their brows. Then, Father, you released the forward thunder-the backward blast blew a stopwatch from your palmthe rope and the suspended barrel forgot to move. Waves turned maroon but only the city in its electric haze trembled a little.... ("You really understand," says the curator. I nod in my flowery postwar synthetics.) Action has no reaction, pretends the recoilless cannon. If recoil is nature's memory of a shot, then you devised this weapon to forget. I touch ten azimuth adjustment holes, covet, on its short chain, the key belonging to the middle-aged State. Are you only memory? The change in the air to enchantment when you laughed, your lighter-than-fire atmospheresomewhere you must be passing seventy, the compass clipped to the dashboard a small well prisoning the star of will

Page  37 S. BEN-TOV 37 that all inventions have in common. Wind glitters across the windshield, stung by time's dust, and you're singing in what was your only tongue for singing; your eyes, though, are nettled red, shadows compress your olive cheeks; your voice scrapes high notes-notes I inherited like a personal frequency: I sing to know and not to know what is, I make believe the dead are listening. And some leave their truth in a weedy field. You ask, Curator, am I proud? Say that, as truth with fact, my DNA is wound up with the State. I touch bolts steadfast for half a century, because this bastard sister will outlast me, passing no judgment on fragile hands, this iron mouth calling for water and fire.

C.K. WilliamsWilliams, C.K.The LoverVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 38http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:08

C.K. WilliamsWilliams, C.K.The LoverVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 38http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:09

Page  38 C. K. WILLIAMS THE LOVER for Michel Retiveau Maybe she missed the wife, or the wife's better dinner parties, but she never forgave him, the lover, not for having caused the husband to switch genderpreference, but for being, she must have said, or sighed, a thousand times, so difficult to be with, so crude, so tiresome. But it was she who began to bore, the way she kept obsessively questioning his legitimacyso arch he was, she'd say, so bitchy-and all after the rest of us had come to appreciate his mildly sardonic, often brilliant bantering, his casual erudition in so many arcane areas. It's true that at first he may have seemed at least a little of what she said he wasobstreperously, argumentatively, if wittily, abrasive,-but we assigned that to what, considering the pack of friends' old friends with which he was faced, was a reasonable apprehension about being received into a society so elaborate in the intricacies of its never articulated but still forbiddingly solidified rituals of acceptance: he really handled it quite graciously. What after all did she expect of him? Shyness? Diffidence? The diffidence of what? A bride? 38

Charels SimicSimic, CharlesThe Trouble with PoetryVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 39-42http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:10

Page  39 CHARLES SIMIC THE TROUBLE WITH POETRY The only thing poetry has always been good for is to make children hate school and jump with joy the day they no longer have to look at another poem. The whole world is in complete agreement on that subject. No one in their right mind ever reads poetry. Even among the literary theorists nowadays it is fashionable to feel superior to all literature and especially poetry. That some people still continue to write it is an oddity that belongs in some Believe it or Not column of the daily newspaper. When they praised the tribal gods and heroes and glorified their wisdom in war, poets were tolerated, but with the emergence of lyric poetry and the poet's obsession with the self, everything changed. Who wants to hear about lives of nobodies while great empires rise and fall? All that stuff about being in love, smooching and having to part as the day breaks and the rooster crows, is at best laughable. School teachers, clergymen, and other policemen of virtue have always seen eye to eye with the philosophers. No model of ideal society since Plato has ever welcomed lyric poets, and for plenty of good reasons. Lyric poets are always corrupting the young, making them choke in self-pity and indulge in revery. Dirty sex and disrespect for authority is what poets have been whispering into their ears for ages. "If he writes verses, kick him out," a new father was counseled two thousand years ago in Rome. That hasn't changed a bit. Parents still prefer their children to be taxidermists and tax collectors rather than poets. Who can blame them? Would you want your only daughter to be a hostess in a sleazy night club or a poet? That's a tough one. Even true poets have detested poetry. "There are things that are more important beyond all this fiddle," said our own Marianne Moore. She had a point. Some of the most idiotic things human beings have ever uttered are to be found in poetry. Poetry, as a rule, has embarrassed both individuals and nations. 39

Page  40 40 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Poetry is dead, the enemies of poetry have shouted happily for centuries and they still do. Our classic poets, our trendy professors have told us, are nothing but a bunch of propagandists for the ruling classes and male oppression. These same ideas, once promulgated by the jailers and murderers of poets in the Soviet Union, are now a big hit in American universities. Aestheticism, humor, eroticism and all the other manifestations of the free imagination must be censored. Poetry, that foolish diversion for the politically correct, has mostly ceased to exist for our educated classes. Nevertheless,, as if to spite them, poetry keeps being written. The world is always looking to reward conformity. Every age has its official line on what is real, what is good and what is bad. A dish made up of dishonesty, ignorance, and cowardice served every evening with a serious mien and an air of highest integrity by the TV news is the ideal. Literature, too, is expected to go along with that. Your tribe is always trying to reform you and teach you manners. The poet is that kid who,, standing in the corner with his back turned to his schoolmates, thinks he is in paradise. If that were not enough, poets, as everybody knows, are champion liars. "'You got to lie to stay halfway interested in yourself," says the novelist Barry Hannah. This is especially true of the writers of verse. Every fool one of them believes he perjures himself only to tell the truth. If we can't see the world for what it is in reality, it's due to the layers of dead metaphors poets have left around. Reality is just an old, peeling poetry poster. Philosophers say that poets delude themselves when they dwell lovingly on particulars. The identification of what remains untouched by change has been the philosopher's task. Poetry and fiction, on the contrary, have been delighted with the ephemeral-the smell of bread, for instance. As far as poets are concerned, only fools are seduced by generalizations. Heaven and earth, Nature and History, Gods and Devils are all scandalously reconciled in poetry. Analogy says that each is all, all is each. Consequently, the best religious poems are full of the erotic. Subjectivity, so the poets claim, transcends itself by the practice of seeing identity in far-apart things. In a good poem, the poet who wrote the poem vanishes so that the poet-reader may come into existence. The "I" of a total stranger, an ancient Chinese., for instance, speaks to us from the most secret place within ourselves and we are delighted.

Page  41 CHARLES SIMIC 41 The true poet specializes in a kind of bedroom and kitchen metaphysics. I'm the mystic of the frying pan and my love's pink toes. Like every other art, poetry depends on nuance. There are many ways to touch a guitar string, to kiss and nibble someone's toe. Blues musicians know that a few notes rightly placed touch the soul and so do lyric poets. The idea is, it is possible to make astonishingly tasty dishes from the simplest ingredients. Was it Charles Olson who said that myth is a bed in which human beings make love to the gods? As long as human beings fall in love and compose love letters, poems, too, will get written. Most poems are fairly short. It takes longer to sneeze properly than to read a haiku. Still, some of these "little" poems have managed to say more in a few words about the human condition than centuries of other kinds of writing. Short, occasional poems have survived for thousands of years when epics and just about everything else have grown unreadable. The supreme mystery of poetry is the way such poems cast a spell on the reader. The poem is perfectly understandable after one reading, and yet one immediately wants to reread it. Poetry is about repetition that never gets monotonous. "More!" my sleepy children would nag after I had finished reading them some nursery rhyme. For them, as for all the lovers of poetry, there was only more, and never enough. It is the paradoxical quality of poetry, precisely, that gives poetry its flavor. Paradox is its secret spice. Without its numerous contradictions and its impertinence, poetry would be as bland as a Sunday sermon or the President's State of the Union address. It's due to its many delicious paradoxes that poetry has continuously defeated and outlived its sternest critics. Any attempt to reform poetry, to make it didactic and moral, or even to restrict it within some literary "school," is to misunderstand its nature. Good poetry has never swerved from its purpose as an inexhaustible source of paradoxes about art and the human condition. Only a style which is a carnival of styles that would bring out its irreverence seems appropriate to me today. A poetry, in short, that has the feel of a cable television with more than 300 channels, facts stranger than fiction, fake miracles and superstitions in supermarket tabloids. A poem which is like a sighting of Elvis Presley on Mars, the woman with three breasts, the picture of a dog who ate Shakespeare's best play, the news that hell is overcrowded, that blackest sinners are now being settled in heaven.

Page  42 42 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Here, for instance, comes a homeless fellow whose bald head once belonged to Julius Caesar. Didn't I see you holding up a Live Sex Show sign on Times Square yesterday, I ask him? He nods happily. Will Hannibal again cross the Alps with his elephants? is my next question. Watch out for the lady poet, is his reply. If she comes wheeling her shopping cart full of old books and old clothes, be ready to hear a poem. That reminds me. My great-grandfather, the blacksmith Philip Simic, died at the age of 96 in 1938, the year of my birth, after returning home late from a dive in the company of gypsies. He thought they would help him fall asleep, but he passed away like that in his own bed with the musicians playing his favorite songs. That explains why my father sang gypsy songs so well and why I write poems; like my grandfather I can't sleep at night.

Ursula K. Le GuinLe Guin, Ursula K.All Happy FamiliesVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 43-46http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:11

Page  43 URSULA K. LE GUIN ALL HAPPY FAMILIES I used to be too respectful to disagree with Tolstoy, but since I got into my sixties my faculty of respect has atrophied. Besides, at some point in the last forty years I began to question Tolstoy's respect for his wife. Anybody can make a mistake in marriage, of course. But I have an impression that no matter who he married Tolstoy would have respected her only in certain respects, though he expected her to respect him in all respects. In this respect, I disapprove of Tolstoy; which makes it easier to disagree with him in the first place, and in the second place, to say so. There has been a long gap between the first and second placesyears. But there was a period of as many years even before the first place, before I achieved the point of disagreement, the ability to disapprove. During all those years, from when I was fourteen or so and first read him, till I was in my forties, I was, as it were, married to Tolstoy, his loyal wife. Though fortunately not expected to copy his manuscripts six times over by hand, I read and reread his books with joy and zeal. I respected him without ever asking if or wondering whether he, as it were, respected me. When E. M. Forster, in an essay on Tolstoy, told me that he didn't, I replied, He has that right! And if E. M. Forster had asked, What gives him that right? I would have answered simply, Genius. But E. M. Forster didn't ask, which is just as well, since he probably would have asked what I meant by Genius. I think what I meant by Genius was that I thought Tolstoy actually knew what he was talking about- unlike the rest of us. However, at some point, around forty or so, I began to wonder if he really knew what he was talking about any better than anybody else, or if what he knew better than anvbody else was how to talk about it. The two things are easily confused. So then, quietly, in my private mind, surrounded by the soft, sup 43

Page  44 44 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW portive mutterings of feminists, I began to ask rude questions of Tolstoy. In public I remained a loyal and loving wife, entirely respectful of his opinions as well as his art. But the unspoken questions were there, the silent disagreement. And the unspoken, as we know, tends to strengthen, to mature and grow richer over the years, like an undrunk wine. Of course it may just go to Freudian vinegar. Some thoughts and feelings go to vinegar very quickly, and must be poured out at once. Some go on fermenting in the bottle, and burst out in an explosion of murderous glass sherds. But a good, robust, well-corked feeling only gets deeper and more complicated, down in the cellar. The thing is knowing when to uncork it. It's ready. I'm ready. The great first sentence of the first chapter of the great book-not the greatest book, but the second greatest-is, yes, we can say it in unison: "All happy families are alike; unhappy families are each unhappy in their own way." Translations vary, but not significantly. People quote that sentence so often that it must satisfy them; but it does not, it never quite did, satisfy me. And twenty years ago or so, I began admitting my dissatisfaction to myself. These happy families he speaks of so confidently in order to dismiss them as all alikewhere are they? Were they very much commoner in the nineteenth century? Did he know numerous happy families among the Russian nobility, or middle class, or peasantry, all of them alike? This seems so unlikely that I wondered if perhaps he knew a few happy families, which is not impossible; but that those few were all alike seems deeply, very deeply implausible. Was his own family happy, either the one he grew up in or the one he fathered? Did he know one family, one single family, which could, over a substantial period of time, as a whole and in each of its component members, honestly be called happy? If he did he knew one more than most of us do. I'm not just showing off my sexagenarian cynicism, proud though I may be of it. I admit that a family can be happy, in the sense that almost all the members of it are in good health, good spirits, and good temper with one another, for quite a long time-a week, a month, even longer. And if we go into the comparative mode, then certainly some families are very, very much happier than others, on the whole and for years on end-because there are so many extremely unhappy families. Most people I have talked with about such matters were in one way or another unhappy as children, and most people, though they stay deeply attached to their relatives and recall joyous times

Page  45 URSULA K. LE GUIN 45 with them, would not describe their family as happy. "We had some real good times," they say. I grew up in a family that on the whole seems to me to have been happier than most families; and yet I find it false-an intolerable cheapening of reality-simply to describe it as happy. The enormous cost and complexity of that "happiness," its dependence upon a whole substructure of sacrifices, repressions, suppressions, choices made or forgone, chances taken or lost, balancings of greater and lesser evils-the tears, the fears, the migraines, the injustices, the censorships, the quarrels, the lies, the angers, the cruelties it involved-is all that to be swept away, brushed under the carpet by the brisk broom of a silly phrase, "a happy family"? And why? In order to imply that happiness is easy; shallow, ordinary; a common thing; not worth writing a novel about? Whereas unhappiness is complex, deep, difficult to attain, unusual; unique indeed; and so a worthy subject for a great, a unique novelist? Surely that is a silly idea. But silly or not, it has been imposingly influential among novelists and critics for decades. Many a novelist would wither in shame if the reviewers caught him writing about happy people, families like other families, people like other people; and indeed many critics are keenly on the watch for happiness in novels in order to dismiss it as banal, sentimental, or (in other words) for women. How the whole thing got gendered, I don't know, but it did. The gendering supposes that male readers have strong, tough, realitycraving natures, while female readers crave constant reassurance in the form of little warm blobs of happiness-fuzzy bunnies. This is in fact true of some women. Some women have never experienced any glimpse of happiness in their whole life better than a stuffed fuzzy bunny and so they surround themselves with stuffed fuzzy bunnies, fictional or actual. In this they may be luckier than most men, who aren't allowed stuffed fuzzy bunnies, only girls in bunnysuits. In any case, who can blame them, the men or the women? Not me. Anybody who has been privileged to know real, solid, non-fuzzy happiness, and then lets some novelist or critic buffalo them into believing that they shouldn't read about it because it's commoner than unhappiness, inferior to unhappiness, less interesting than unhappiness,-where does my syntax lead me? Into judgmentalism. I shall extricate myself in silence. The falseness of Tolstoy's famous sentence is nowhere shown more

Page  46 46 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW clearly than in Tolstoy's novels, including the one it's the first sentence of. Dolly's family, which is the unhappy one we are promised, is in my opinion a moderately, that is to say a realistically happy one. Dolly and her children are kind and contented, often merry together, and the husband and wife definitely have their moments, for all his stupid skirt-chasing. In the greater novel, the Rostovs are about as close to being happy as a family can get-rich, energetic, healthy, generous, kind, full of passions and counterpassions, full of vitality, affection, respect, and love. So, then, "happy families are all alike"? Yes, they are-in the long run. The old Rostovs die, Moscow burns; Natasha falls in love with a cold fish, nearly runs away with a cretin, marries and turns into a mindless broodsow; and Petya is killed pointlessly in the war. Jolly good fun! Fuzzy bunnies everywhere! Tolstoy knew what happiness is-how rare, how imperiled, how hard won. Not only that, he had the ability to describe happiness, a rare gift, which gives his novels much of their extraordinary beauty. Why he denied his knowledge in the famous sentence, I don't know. He did a good deal of lying and denying, perhaps more than many lesser novelists do. He had more to lie about; and his cruel theoretical Christianity led him into all kinds of denials of what in his fiction he saw and showed to be true. So maybe he was just showing off. It sounded good. It made a great first sentence.

Maxine KuminKumin, MaxineDreaming in PoetryVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 47-51http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:12

Page  47 MAXINE KUMIN DREAMING IN POETRY "Subduing the Dream in Alaska," a poem I wrote some years ago, opens with a statement in which I have implicit faith: In the visiting poet's workshop the assignment is to write down a dream. The intent, before the week is out, is to show how much a poem is like a dream set straight, made rational. A dream scrubbed up and sent to school. I've had good luck with this assignment in my own classes eliciting far-ranging and unexpected material. The results in the prison workshop led me to make a statement about our role in the native American culture, a statement I had not foreseen as the subject of the poem. The wonderful thing about starting with dream content is the unpredictability of the outcome. While many of my dreams are too bizarre (sexual, scatological, or fragmentary) to serve as springboards, a goodly number have announced themselves as wanting further waking work, and several have risen up into completed poems. Risen up, as mushrooms do, I have written, in "The Dreamer, the Dream," searching in my frustration to recapture an elusive dream's content: After the sleeper has burst his night pod climbed up out of its silky holdings the dream must stumble alone now... in search of some phantom outcome while on both sides of the tissue the dreamer walks into the weather... 47

Page  48 48 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW.. and in fact he comes upon great clusters of honey mushrooms... lumbering from their dark fissure going up like a dream going on. How often do we carry around with us the setting, the situation, the encounter, unable, it seems, to break free from it? This was precisely what happened to the dream encounter in "My Father's Neckties." In hopes of coming to terms with this ghostly reunion that nagged me through an entire day, I sat down to write it out: Last night my color-blind chain-smoking father who has been dead for fourteen years stepped up out of a basement tie shop downtown and did not recognize me. Twenty lines later, the significance of our meeting "where we had loved each other, keeping it quiet" announced itself. The giant father of my childhood was indeed "... a man who wore hard colors recklessly / and hid out in the foreign / bargain basements of his feelings." To this day I re-experience that sense of closure, even of liberation, upon seeing the metaphor that had driven both the dream and the poem. While my brother was dying of ALS-Lou Gehrig's disease-I had a succession of vivid premonitory dreams about him, the early ones rich with denial, the later, horrific in their acceptance. Just after his doctor had arrived at a definitive diagnosis (a death sentence), my unconscious recreated my brother: Tonight he strides in rosy-cheeked and eighteen in the pectorals to announce he has six months to live and plans for every hour... Further, he means to kill time with a perpetual-motion cell. That last detail is both tragic and funny. My brother, a skilled engineer, had from early childhood been a lively tinkerer, taking clocks and toasters, electric shavers and vacuum cleaners apart, sometimes reassembling them for their betterment. It was logical for the dreaming mind to envisage a way out, a perpetual-motion cell that would arrest time and with it the inexorable forward movement of the disease.

Page  49 MAXINE KUMIN 49 As his condition became more evident, my dream self began to come to terms with the inevitable. "Listen! I love you! / I've always loved you! / And so we totter and embrace /... saying our goodbyes.." in a downtown parking garage, this far a direct account of an evening all four of us, with our spouses, had spent together at dinner and theater. But I was in no way prepared for the content of the dream that followed what I intuited was to be our final outing as a family: At 3 a.m. I'm driven to such extremes that when the sorrowing hangman brings me your severed penis still tumescent from the scaffold yet dried and pressed as faithfully as a wildflower I put it away on my closet shelf and lie back down in my lucky shame. My immediate association, odd though it seems, is to John Crowe Ransom's "Piazza Piece": "But what grey man among the vines is this / Whose words are dry and faint as in a dream? / Back from my trellis, Sir, before I scream!" In this perfect Petrarchan sonnet, youth and age, the life force and death are represented as the "lady young in beauty" and the "gentleman in a dustcoat." The latter emblem emerges in my dream as the actual killer, the hangman. I can't defend against the image of the tumescent penis, except to say that folklore holds that the hanged victim experiences an erection upon strangulation. (My brother was at that time having difficulty in speaking and swallowing. It was plain to see what was coming next.) In the dream I am awarded this token of the life force. I put it away as one would any other treasure "and lie back down in my lucky shame," ashamed to be still alive, lucky with the treasure of my own existence even as his is taken from him. Reading through my early poems I am taken aback by the presence in them of so much dream material, so much detail "scrubbed up and sent to school" to make, for better or worse, the whole poem. My reverence for the unconscious is with me still, although I remember fewer dreams and am pricked less often by the re-collected fragments into working them into poems. Almost invariably, the dreamsinto-poems have involved family members or very close friends. "The Longing to Be Saved," a series of recurrent nightmares while

Page  50 50 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW I was housed in a motel in Fayetteville, Arkansas, one February, began: "When the barn catches fire / I am wearing the wrong negligee." The next segment dealt with rescuing my children, then my mother, and lastly my husband, who was home on the farm in New Hampshire during this wintry season when house fires are an everpresent threat ("I hold the rope as you slide from danger"). The poem ends with this curious reversal: "Now the family's out, there's no holding back. / I go in to get my turn." Although the resolution seems appropriate to the poem and solves the puzzle of the title, it baffles me as much now as it did during the composition. How could I dream myself running back (much as the horses do, in the opening stanza) into the flaming house? And are we allowed to astonish ourselves with a poem's closure? These questions must go unanswered. But no dreams have been as vivid or lingered as long as the ones that haunted me after the suicide of my best friend and fellow poet, Anne Sexton. For seventeen years we communicated daily, if not face to face then by local or long-distance telephone. From "Splitting Wood At Six Above"- "... I'm still / talking to you (last night's dream); / we'll split the phone bill. / It's expensive calling / from the other side"-through "Progress Report"-"Dear friend, last night I dreamed / you held a sensitive position, / you were Life's Counselor / coming to the phone in Vaud or Bern, / some terse one-syllable place, / to tell me how to carry on..." the loss is acute and the desire to reestablish contact (unsurprisingly, by phone) is urgent. These dreams, and others unrecorded, occurring in the first year or two following her death, find me not so much bereft as bewildered, not so angry as made desolate by the loss of our daily exchanges. As time passed I was gradually able, I think, to express anger as well as sorrow. In "Itinerary of an Obsession," written perhaps a year, perhaps two years later than "Progress Report," Sexton turns up in a series of dream montages. In the first of these, "... here you come / leaping out of the coffin again, / flapping around the funeral home / crying Surprise! I was only fooling!" It's a bizarre scene that refers, I think, to the numerous half-hearted suicide attempts Sexton made before the actual event and seeks to reflect the mixture of relief and helpless fury that the rescuer feels in this situation. In the next frame in Rome at St. Peter's Square "when the pope comes to the window... / you turn up arranging to receive / extreme unction from an obliging priest / with a bad cold. You swivel your head / to keep from inhaling his germs."

Page  51 MAXINE KUMIN 51 The association to Catholicism is not accidental; Anne was drawn to the Church, strongly attracted to its ritual and longing for faith and absolution. She treasured her connections with local priests, one of whom aborted a suicide attempt when she called him (the phone again!) seeking forgiveness before taking her own life. This ongoing ambivalence-wanting to die, wanting to stay alive-surfaces in the dream of the priest with a bad cold. Even as she pleads for death, Sexton turns her head to avoid catching it, as it were. I am aware of my own ironic stance in this fragment, and inside the irony my anger. While I went on to write several other poems about our relationship, they are more direct, less revelatory, even, in one instance ("On Being Asked To Write a Poem in Memory of Anne Sexton"), written in the third person. The final stanza of "Itinerary"o~ contains what I think is the final dream I built on: Years pass, as they say in storybooks. It is true that I dream of you less. Still, when the phone rings in my sleep and I answer, a dream-cigarette in my hand, it is always the same. We are back at our posts, hanging around like boxers in our old flannel bathrobes. You haven't changed. I, on the other hand, am forced to grow older.... The old relationship, grown bittersweet over the decades of her absence, recurs but now it contains a new element. Vivid, overt and unmysterious, these fragments cohere to remind me of our separate mortalities. Sexton remains static, forever 45. I am assigned to go on with my life: Now I am almost your mother's age. Imagine it! Did you think you could escape? Eventually I'll arrive in her abhorrent marabou negligee trailing her scarves like broken promises crying yoo-hoo! Anybody home? Virtually every dream example I call up out of my poems teeters on the border between life and death. This seems quite apt to me, for I feel that poetry is essentially elegiac in its nature. We hold hard to those we love even as they die away from us and we continue to pursue them., through dreams into poems.

Joyce Carol OatesOates, Joyce CarolValentineVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 52-66http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:13

Page  52 JOYCE CAROL OATES VALENTINE In upstate New York in those years there were still snowstorms. So wild and fierce they could change the world, within a few hours, to a place you wouldn't know. First came the heavy black thunderheads over Lake Erie, then the wind hammering overhead like a freight train, then the snowflakes erupting, flying, swirling like crazed atoms. If there'd been a sun it was extinguished, gone. Night and day were reversed, the fallen snow emitted such a radium-glare. I was fifteen years old living in the Red Rock section of Buffalo with an aunt, an older sister of my mother's, and her husband who was retired from the New York Central Railroad with a disability pension. My own family was what you'd called "dispersed"-we were all alive, seven of us, I believed we were all alive, but we did not live together in the same house any longer. In fact, the house, an old rented farmhouse twenty miles north of Buffalo, was gone. Burned to the ground. Valentine's Day 1959, the snowstorm began in mid-afternoon and already by 5 P.M. the power lines were down in Buffalo. Hurriedly we lit kerosene lamps whose wicks smoked and stank as they emitted a begrudging light. We had a flashlight, of course, and candles. In extra layers of clothes we saw our breaths steam as we ate our cold supper on plates like ice. I cleaned up the kitchen as best I could without hot water, for that was always my task, among numerous others, and I said "Goodnight, Aunt Esther" to my aunt who frowned at me seeing someone not-me in my place who filled her heart with sisterly sorrow and I said "Goodnight, Uncle Herman" to the man designated as my uncle who was no blood-kin of mine, a stranger with damp eyes always drifting onto me and a mouth like a smirking scar burn. "Goodnight" they murmured as if resenting the very breath expelled for my sake. Goodnight don't run on the stairs don't drop the candle and set the house on fire. 52

Page  53 JOYCE CAROL OATES 53 Upstairs was a partly finished attic narrow as a tunnel with a habitable space at one end-my "room." The ceiling was covered in strips of peeling insulation and so steep-slanted I could stand up only in the center. The floorboards were splintery and bare except for a small shag rug, a discard of my aunt's, laid down by my bed. The bed was another discard of my aunt's, a sofa of some mud-brown prickly fabric that pierced sheets laid upon it like whiskers sprouting through skin. But this was a bed of my own and I had not ever had a bed of my own before. Nor had I ever had a room of my own, a door to shut against others even if, like the attic door, it could not be locked. By midnight the storm had blown itself out and the alley below had vanished in undulating dunes of snow. Everywhere snow! Glittering like mica in the moonlight! And the moon-a glowing battered human face in a sky strangely starless, black as a well. The largest snowdrift I'd ever seen, shaped like a right-angled triangle, slanted up from the ground to the roof close outside my window. My aunt and her husband had gone to bed downstairs hours ago and the thought came to me unbidden I can run away, no one would miss me. Along Huron Street, which my aunt's house fronted, came a snowplow, red light flashing atop its cab, otherwise there were few vehicles and these were slow-moving with groping headlights, like wounded beasts. Yet even as I watched there came a curiously shaped small vehicle to park at the mouth of the alley; and the driver, a longlegged man in a hooded jacket, climbed out. To my amazement he stomped through the snow into the alley to stand peering up toward my window, his breath steaming. Who? Who was this? Mr. Lacey my algebra teacher? For Valentine's Day that morning I had brought eight homemade valentines to school made of stiff red construction paper edged with paper lace, in envelopes decorated with red-ink hearts; the valentine TO MR. LACEY was my masterpiece, the largest and most ingeniously designed, interlocking hearts fashioned with a ruler and compass to resemble geometrical figures in three dimensions. HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY I had neatly printed in black ink. Of course I had not signed any of the valentines and had secretly slipped them into the lockers of certain girls and boys and Mr. Lacey's onto his desk after class. I had instructed myself not to be disappointed when I received no valentines in return, not a single valentine in return, and I was not disappointed when at the end of the school day I went home without a single one: I was not.

Page  54 54 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Mr. Lacey seemed to have recognized me in the window where I stood staring,, my outspread fingers on the glass bracketing my white astonished face, for he'd begun climbing the enormous snowdrift that lifted to the roof. How assured, how matter-of-fact, as if this was the most natural thing in the world. I was too surprised to be alarmed, or even embarrassed-my teacher would see me in a cast-off sweater of my brother's that was many sizes too large for me and splotched with oil stains, he would see my shabby litdle room that wasn't really a room, just part of an unfinished attic. He would know I was the one who'd left the valentine TO MR. LACEY on his desk in stealth not daring to sign my name. He would know who I was, how desperate for love. Once on the roof, which was steep, Mr. Lacey made his way to my window cautiously. The shingles were covered in snow, icy patches beneath. There was a rumor that Mr. Lacey was a skier, and a skater, though his lanky body did not seem the body of an athlete and in class sometimes he seemed distracted in the midst of speaking or inscribing an equation on the blackboard; as if there were thoughts more crucial to him than tenth grade algebra at Thomas E. Dewey High School which was one of the poorest schools in the city. But now his footing was sure as a mountain goat's, his movements agile andun erring. He crouched outside my window tugging to lift it-Erin? Make haste! I was helping to open the window which was locked in ice. It had not been opened for weeks. Already it seemed I'd pulled on my wool slacks and wound around my neck the silver muffler threaded with crimson yarn my mother had given me two or three Christmases ago. I had no coat or jacket in my room and dared not risk going downstairs to the front closet. I was very excited, fumbling, biting my lower lip, and when at last the window lurched upward the freezing air rushed in like a slap in the face. Mr. Lacey's words seemed to reverberate in my ears Make haste, make haste!-not a moment to waste! It was his teasing-chiding classroom manner that nonetheless meant business. Without hesitating, he grabbed both my hands-I saw that I was wearing the white angora mittens my grandmother had knitted for me long ago, which I'd believed had been lost in the fire-and hauled me through the window. Mr. Lacey led me to the edge of the roof, to the snowdrift, seeking out his footprints where he knew the snow to be fairly firm, and carefully he pulled me in his wake so that I seemed to be descending a

Page  55 JOYCE CAROL OATES 55 strange kind of staircase. The snow was so fresh-fallen it lifted like powder at the slightest touch or breath, glittering even more fiercely close up, as if the individual snowflakes, of such geometrical beauty and precision, contained minute sparks of flame. Er-in, Er-in, now your courage must begin I seemed to hear and suddenly we were on the ground and there was Mr. Lacey's Volkswagen at the mouth of the alley, headlights burning like cat's eyes and tusks of exhaust curling up behind. How many times covertly I'd tracked with my eyes that ugly-funny car shaped like a sardine can, its black chassis speckled with rust, as Mr. Lacey drove into the teachers' parking lot each morning between 8:25 A.M. and 8:35 A.M. How many times I'd turned quickly aside in terror that Mr. Lacey would see me. Now I stood confused at the mouth of the alley, for Huron Street and all of the city I could see was so changed, the air so terribly cold like a knifeblade in my lungs; I looked back at the darkened house wondering if my aunt might wake and discover me gone, and what then would happen?-as Mr. Lacey urged Come, Erin, hurry! She won't even know you're gone unless he said She won't ever know you're gone. Was it true? Not long ago in algebra class I'd printed in the margin of my textbook MR. L. IS AL WA YS RI GH T! which I'd showed Linda Bewley across the aisle, one of the popular tenth grade girls, a B+ student and very pretty and popular, and Linda frowned trying to decipher the words which were meant to evoke Mr. Lacey's pole-lean frame, but never did get it and turned away from me annoyed. Yet it was so: Julius Lacey was always always right. Suddenly I was in the cramped little car and Mr. Lacey was behind the wheel driving north on icy Huron Street. Where are we going? I didn't dare ask. When my grades in Mr. Lacey's class were less than 100% I was filled with anxiety that turned my fingers and toes to ice

Page  56 56 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW for even if I'd answered nearly all the questions on a test correctly how could I know I could answer the ne~xt question? solve the next problem? and the next? A nervous passion drove me to comprehend not just the immediate problem but the principle behind it, for behind everything there was an elusive and tyrannical principle of which Mr. Lacey was the sole custodian; and I could not know if he liked me or was bemused by me or merely tolerated me or was in fact disappointed in me as a student who should have been earning peffect scores at all times. He was twenty-six or -seven years old, the youngest teacher at the school, whom many students feared and hated, and a small group of us feared and admired. His severe, angular face registered frequent dissatisfaction as if to indicate Well, I'm waiting! Waiting to be impressed! Give me one good reason to be impressed! Never had I seen the city streets so deserted. Mr. Lacey drove no more than twenty miles an hour passing stores whose fronts were obliterated by snow like waves frozen at their crests and through intersections where no traffic lights burned to guide us and our only light was the Volkswagen's headlights and the glowering moon large in the sky as a fat navel orange held at arm's length. We passed Carthage Street that hadn't yet been plowed-a vast river of snow six feet high. We passed Templeau Street where a city bus had been abandoned in the intersection, humped with snow like a forlorn creature of the Great Plains. We passed Sturgeon Street where broken electrical wires writhed and crackled in the snow like snakes crazed with pain. We passed Childress Street where a water main had burst and an arc of water had frozen glistening in a graceful curve at least fifteen feet high at its crest. At Ontario Avenue Mr. Lacey turned right, the Volkswagen wvent into a delirious skid, Mr Lacey put out his arm to keep me from pitching forward-Erin, take care! But I was safe. And on we drove. Ontario Avenue, usually so crowded with traffic, was deserted as the surface of the moon. A snowplow had forged a single lane down the center. On all sides were unfamiliar shapes of familiar objects engulfed in snow and ice-parking meters? mailboxes? abandoned cars? Humanoid figures frozen in awkward, surprised postureshunched in doorways, frozen in mid-stride on the sidewalk? Look! Look at the frozen people! I cried in a raw loud girl's voice that so frequently embarrassed me when Mr. Lacey called upon me unexpectedly in algebra class; but Mr. Lacey shrugged saying just snowumen, Erin-don't give them a second glance. But I couldn't help staring at

Page  57 JOYCE CAROL OATES 57 these statue-figures for I had an uneasy sense of being stared at by them in turn, through chinks in the hard-crusted snow of their heads. And I seemed to hear their faint despairing cries Help! help us!-but Mr. Lacey did not slacken his speed. (Yet: who could have made so many "isnowmen,".03 so quickly after the storm? Children? Playing so late at night? And where were these children now?) Mysteriously Mr. Lacey said There are many survivors, Erin. In all epochs, just enough survivors. I wanted to ask should we pray for them? pressing my hands in the angora mittens against my mouth to keep from crying, for I knew how hopeless prayer was in such circumstances, God only helps those who don't require His help. Were we headed for the lake front?-we crossed a swaying bridge high above railroad tracks, and almost immediately after that another swaying bridge high above an ice-locked canal. We passed factories shut down by the snowstorm with smokestacks so tall their rims were lost in mist. We were on South Main Street now passing darkened shuttered businesses, warehouses, a slaughterhouse; windowless brick buildings against whose walls snow had been driven as if sandblasted in eerie, almost legible patterns. / lo_ rC*. jel 7: These were messages, I was sure!-yet I could not read them. Out of the corner of my eye I watched Mr. Lacey as he drove. We were close together in the cramped car; yet at the same time I seemed to be watching us from a distance. At school there were boys who were fearful of Mr. Lacey yet, behind his back, sneered at him muttering what they'd like to do with him, slash his car tires, beat him up, and I felt a thrill of satisfaction If you could see Mr. Lacey now! for he was navigating the Volkswagen so capably along the treacherous street, past snowy hulks of vehicles abandoned by the wayside. He'd shoved back the hood of his wool jacket-how handsome he looked! Where by day he often squinted behind his glasses,, by night he seemed fully at ease. His hair was long and quill-like and of the subdued brown hue of a deer's winter coat; his eyes, so far as I could see, had a luminous coppery sheen. I recalled how at the high school

Page  58 58 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Mr. Lacey was regarded with doubt and unease by the other teachers, many of whom were old enough to be his parents; he was considered arrogant because he didn't have an education degree from a state teachers' college, like the others, but a master's degree in math from the University of Buffalo where he was a part-time Ph.D. student. Maybe I will reap where I haven't had any luck sowing he'd once remarked to the class, standing chalk in hand at the blackboard which was covered in calculations. And this remark too had passed over our heads. Now Mr. Lacey was saying as if bemused Here, Erin-the edge. We'll go no farther in this direction. For we were at the shore of Lake Erie-a frozen lake drifted in snow so far as the eye could see. (Yet I seemed to know how beneath the ice the water was agitated as if boiling, sinuous and black as tar.) Strewn along the beach were massive ice-boulders of the size of elephants that glinted coldly in the moonlight. Even by day at this edge of the lake you could see only an edge of the Canadian shore, the farther western shore was lost in distance. I was in terror that Mr. Lacey out of some whim would abandon me here, for never could I have made my way back to my aunt's house in such cold. But already Mr. Lacey was turning the car around, already we were driving inland, a faint tinkling music seemed to draw us, and within minutes we were in a wooded area I knew to be Delaware Parkthough I'd never been there before. I had heard my classmates speak of skating parties here and had yearned to be invited to join them as I had yearned to be invited to visit the homes of certain girls, without success. Hang on! Here we go! Mr. Lacey said, for the Volkswagen was speeding like a sleigh on curving lanes into the interior of a deep evergreen forest. And suddenly-we were at a large oval skating rink above which strings of starry lights glittered like Christmas bulbs, where dozens, hundreds of elegantly dressed skaters circled the ice as if there had never been any snowstorm, or any snowstorm that mattered to them. Clearly these were privileged people, for electric power had been restored for their use and burned brilliantly, wastefully on all sides. Oh Mr. Lacey I've never seen anything so beautiful I said, biting my lip to keep from crying. It was a magical, wondrous place-the Delaware Park Skating Rink! Skaters on ice smooth as glass-skating round and round to gay, amplified music like that of a merry-go-round. Many of the skaters were in brightly colored clothes, handsome sweaters, fur hats, fur muffs; beautiful dogs of no

Page  59 JOYCE CAROL OATES 59 breed known to me trotted alongside their masters and mistresses, pink tongues lolling in contentment. There were angel-faced girls in skaters' costumes, snug little pearl-buttoned velvet jackets and flouncy skirts to mid-thigh, gauzy knit stockings and kidskin bootskates with blades that flashed like sterling silver-my heart yearned to see such skates for I'd learned to skate on rusted old skates formerly belonging to my older sisters, on a creek near our farmhouse, in truth I had never really learned to skate, not as these skaters were skating, so without visible effort, strife, or anxiety. Entire families were skating-mothers and fathers hand in hand with small children, and older children, and white-haired elders who must have been grandparents! -and the family dog trotting along with that look of dogs laughing. There were attractive young people in groups, and couples with their arms around each other's waist, and solitary men and boys who swiftly threaded their way through the crowd unerring as undersea creatures perfectly adapted to their element. Never would I have dared join these skaters except Mr. Lacey insisted. Even as I feebly protested Oh but I can't, Mr. Lace y-I don't know how to skate he was pulling me to the skate rental where he secured a pair of skates for each of us; and suddenly there I was stumbling and swaying in the presence of real skaters, my ankles weak as water and my face blotched with embarrassment, oh what a spectacle-but Mr. Lacey had closed his fingers firmly around mine and held me upright, refused to allow me to fall. Do as I do! Of course you can skate! Follow me! So I had no choice but to follow, like an unwieldy lake barge hauled by a tugboat. How loud the happy tinkling music was out on the ice, far louder than it had seemed on shore, as the lights too were brighter, nearly blinding. Oh! oh! I panted in Mr. Lacey'Vs wake,, terrified. of slipping and falling;, breaking a wrist, an arm, a leg; terrified of falling in the paths of swift skaters whose blades flashed sharp and cruel as butcher knives. Everywhere was a harsh hissing sound of blades slicing the surface of the ice, a sound you couldn't hear on shore. I would be cut to ribbons if I fell! All my effort was required simply to stay out of the skaters' paths as they flew by, with no more awareness of me than if I were a passing shadow; the only skaters who noticed me were children, girls as well as boys, already expert skaters as young as nine or ten who glanced at me with smiles of bemusement, or disdain. Out! out Of our way! you don't belong here on our ice! But I was stubborn too, I persevered, and after two or three times around the rink I was

Page  60 60 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW still upright and able to skate without Mr. Lacey's continuous vigilance, my head high and my arms extended for balance. My heart beat in giddy elation and pride. I was skating! At last! Mr. Lacey dashed off to the center of the ice where more practiced skaters performed, executing rapid circles, figure eights, dancerlike and acrobatic turns, his skate blades flashing, and a number of onlookers applauded, as I applauded, faltering but regaining my balance, skating on. I was not graceful-not by any stretch of the imagination-and I guessed I must have looked a sight, in an old baggy oil-stained sweater and rumpled wool slacks, my kinky-snarly red-brown hair in my eyes-but I wasn't quite so clumsy any longer, my ankles were getting stronger and the strokes of my skate-blades more assured, sweeping. How happy I was! How proud! I was beginning to be warm, almost feverish inside my clothes. Restless as a wayward comet a blinding spotlight moved about the rink singling out skaters, among them Mr. Lacey as he spun at the very center of the rink, an unlikely, stork-like figure to be so graceful on the ice; for some reason then the spotlight abruptly shifted-to me! I was so caught by surprise I nearly tripped, and fell-I heard applause, laughter-saw faces at the edge of the rink grinning at me. Were they teasing, or sincere? Kindly, or cruel? I wanted to believe they were kindly for the rink was such a happy place but I couldn't be sure as I teetered past, arms flailing to keep my balance. I couldn't be certain but I seemed to see some of my high school classmates among the spectators; and some of my teachers; and others, adults, a case worker from the Erie County family services department, staring at me disapprovingly. The spotlight was tormenting me: rushing at me, then falling away; allowing me to skate desperately onward, then seeking me out again swift and pitiless as a cheetah in pursuit of prey. The harshly tinkling music ended in a burst of static as if a radio had been turned violently up, and off. A sudden vicious wind rushed thin and sharp as a razor across the ice. My hair whipped in the wind, my ears were turning to ice. My fingers in the tight angora mittens were turning to ice, too. Most of the skaters had gone home, I saw to my disappointment, the better-dressed, better-mannered skaters, all the families, and the only dogs that remained were wild-eyed mongrels with bristling hackles and stumpy tails. Mr. Lacey and I skated hastily to a deserted snowswept section of the rink to avoid these dogs, and were pursued by the damned spotlight; here the ice was rippled and striated and difficult to skate on. An arm flashed at the edge of the

Page  61 JOYCE CAROL OATES 61 rink, I saw a jeering white face, and an ice-packed snowball came flyýing to strike Mr. Lacey between his shoulder blades and shatter in pieces to the ground. Furious, his face reddening, Mr. Lacey whirled in a crouch-Who did that? Which of you? He spoke with his classroom authority but he wasn't in his classroom now and the boys only mocked him more insolently. They chanted something that sounded like Lac-ey! Lac-ey! Ass-y! Ass y-Asshole! Another snowball struck him on the side of the head, sending his glasses flying and skittering along the ice. I shouted for them to stop! stop! and a snowball came careening past my head, another struck my arm, hard. Mr. Lacey shook his fist daring to move toward our attackers but this only unleashed a barrage of snowballs; several struck him with such force he was knocked down, a starburst of red at his mouth. Without his glasses Mr. Lacey looked young as a boy himself, dazed and helpless. On my hands and knees I crawled across the ice to retrieve his glasses, thank God there was only a hairline crack on one of the lenses. I was trembling with anger, sobbing. I was sure I recognized some of the boys, boys in my algebra class, but I didn't know their names. I crouched over Mr. Lacey asking was he all right? was he all right? seeing that he was stunned, pressing a handkerchief against his bleeding mouth. It was one of his white cotton handkerchiefs he'd take out of a pocket in class, shake ceremoniously open, and use to polish his glasses. The boys trotted away jeering and laughing. Mr. Lacey and I were alone, the only skaters remaining on the rink. Even the mongrel dogs had departed. It was very cold now. Earlier that day there'd been a warningtemperatures in the Lake Erie-Lake Ontario region would drop as low that night, counting the wind-chill factor, as minus thirty degrees F. The wind stirred snake-skeins of powdery snow as if the blizzard might be returning. Above the rink most of the light bulbs had burnt out or had been shattered by the rising wind. The fresh-fallen snow that had been so purely white was now trampled and littered; dogs had urinated on it; strewn about were cigarette butts, candy wrappers, lost boots, mittens, a wool knit cap. My pretty handknit muffler lay on the ground stiffened with filth-one of the jeering boys must have taken it from me when I was distracted. I bit my lip to keep from crying, the muffler had been ruined and I refused to pick it up. Subdued, silent, Mr. Lacey and I hunted our boots amid the litter, and left our skates behind in a slovenly mound, and limped back to the Volkswagen that was the only vehicle remaining in the snowswept

Page  62 62 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW parking lot. Mr. Lacey swore seeing the front windshield had been cracked like a spider's web, very much as the left lens of his glasses had been cracked. Ironically he said Now you know, Erin, where the Delaware Park Skating Rink is. The bright battered-face moon had sunk nearly to the treeline, about to be sucked into blankest night. In Bison City Diner adjacent to the Greyhound bus station on Eighth Street, Mr. Lacey and I sat across a booth from each other, and Mr. Lacey gave our order to a brassy-haired waitress in a terse mutter-Two coffees, please. Stern and frowning to discourage the woman from inquiring after his reddened face and swollen, still bleeding mouth. And then he excused himself to use the men's room. My bladder was aching, I had to use the restroom too but would have been too shy to slip out of the booth if Mr. Lacey hadn't gone first. It was 3:20 A.M. So late! The electricity had been restored in parts of Buffalo, evidently-driving back from the park we saw street lights burning, traffic lights again operating. Still, most of the streets were deserted; choked with snow. The only o ther vehicles were snow plows and trucks spewing salt on the streets. Some state maintenance workers were in the Bison Diner, which was a twenty-four-hour diner,, seated at the counter, talking and laughing loudly together and flirting with the waitress who knew them. When Mr. Lacey and I came into the brightly lit room, blinking, no doubt somewhat dazedlooking, the men glanced at us curiously but made no remarks. At least, none that we could hear. Mr. Lacey touched my arm and gestured with his head for me to follow him- to a booth in the farthest corner of the diner-as if it was the most natural thing in the world, Mr. Lacey and me, sliding into that very booth. In the clouded mirror in the women's room I saw my face strangely flushed, eyes shining like glass. This was a face not exactly known to me; more like my older sister Janice's, yet not Janice's, either. I cupped cold water into my hands and lowered my face to the sink grateful for the water's coolness for my skin was feverish and prickling. My hair was matted as if someone had used an egg-beater on it and my sweater, my brother's discard, was more soiled than I'd known, unless some of the stains were blood-for maybe I'd gotten Mr. Lacey's blood on me out on the ice. Er-in Don-egal I whispered aloud in awe, amazement. In wonder. Yes, in pride! I was fifteen years old.

Page  63 JOYCE CAROL OATES 63 Inspired, I searched through my pockets for my tube of raspberry lipstick, and eagerly dabbed fresh color on my mouth. The effect was instantaneous. Barbaric! I heard Mr. Lacey's droll voice for so he'd once alluded to female "cmakeup" in our class painting faces like savages with a belief in magic. But he'd only been joking. I did believe in magic, I guess. I had to believe in something! When I returned to the booth in a glow of self-consciousness there was Mr. Lacey with his face freshly washed too, and his lank hair dampened and combed. His part was on the left side of his head, and wavery. He squinted up at me-his face pinched in a quick frowning smile signaling he'd noticed the lipstick, but certainly wouldn't comment on it. Pushed a menu in my direction-Order anything you wish, Erin, you must be starving and I picked up the menu to read it, for in fact I wa's light-headed with hunger, but the print was blurry as if underwater and to my alarm I could not decipher a word. In regret I shook my head no,, no thank you. No, Erin? Nothing? Mr. Lacey asked, surprised. Elsewhere in the diner a jukebox was playing a sentimental song-"Are You Lonely Tonight?" At the counter, amid clouds of cigarette smoke, the workmen and the brassy-haired waitress erupted in laughter. It seemed that Mr. Lacey had left his bloody handkerchief in the car and, annoyed and embarrassed, wvas dabbing at his mouth with a wadded paper towel from the men's room. His upper lip was swollen as if a bee had stung it and one of his front teeth was loose in its socket and still leaked blood. Almost inaudibly he whispered Damn. Damn. Damn. His coppery-brown eye through the cracked left lens of his glasses was just perceptibly magnified and seemed to be staring at me with unusual intensity. I shrank before the man-'s gaze for I feared he blamed me as the source of his humiliation and pain. In truth, I was to blame: these things would never have happened to Julius Lacey except for me. Yet when Mr. Lacey spoke it was with surprising kindness. Asking Are you sure you want nothing to eat., Erin? Nothing, nothing--at all? I could have devoured a hamburger half raw, and a plate of greasy french fries heaped with ketchup, but there I was shaking my head no, no thank you Mr. Lacey. Why?-I was stricken with self-consciousness, embarrassment. To eat in the presence of this man! The intimacy would have been paralyzing, like stripping myself naked before him. Indeed it was awkward enough when the waitress brought us our

Page  64 64 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW coffee, which was black, hotly steaming in thick mugs. Once or twice in my life I'd tried to drink coffee, for everyone seemed to drink it, and the taste was repulsive to me, so bitter! But now I lifted the mug to my lips and sipped timidly at the steaming hot liquid black as motor oil. Seeing that Mr. Lacey disdained to add dairy cream or sugar to his coffee, I did not add any to my own. I was already nervous and almost at once my heart gave odd erratic beats and my pulse quickened. One of my lifetime addictions, to this bitterly black steaming hot liquid, would begin at this hour, in such innocence. Mr. Lacey was saying with an air of reluctance, finality In every equation there is always an x-factor, and in every x-factor there is the possibility, if not the probability, of misunderstanding. Out of his jacket pocket he'd taken, to my horror, a folded sheet of paper-red construction paper!-and was smoothing it out on the table top. I stared, I was speechless with chagrin. You must not offer yourself in such a fashion, not even in secret, anonymously Mr. Lacey said with a teacher's chiding frown. The valentine heart is thefemale genitals, you will be misinterpreted. There was a roaring in my ears confused with music from the jukebox. The bitter black coffee scalded my throat and began to race along my veins. Words choked me I'm sorry. I don't know what that is. Don't know what you're speaking of. Leave me alone, I hate you! But I could not speak, just sat there shrinking to make myself as small as possible in Mr. Lacey's eyes staring with a pretense of blank dumb ignorance at the elaborate geometrical valentine TO MR. LACEY I had made with such hope the other night in the secrecy of my room, knowing I should not commit such an audacious act yet knowing, with an almost unbearable excitement, like one bringing a lighted match to flammable material, that I was going to do it. Resentfully I said I guess you know about me, my family. I guess there aren't any secrets. Mr. Lacey said Yes, Erin. There are no secrets. But it's our prerogative not to speak of them if we choose. Carefully he was refolding the valentine to return to his pocket, which I interpreted as a gesture of forgiveness. He said There is nothing to be ashamed of, Erin. In you, or in yourfamily. Sarcastically I said There isn't? Mr. Lacey said The individuals who are your mother and father came together out of all the universe to produce you. That's how you came into being, there was no other way.

Page  65 JOYCE CAROL OATES 65 I couldn't speak, I was struck dumb. Wanting to protest, to laugh but could not. Hot tears ran down my cheeks. Mr. Lacey persisted, gravely And you love them, Erin. Much more than you love me. Mutely I shook my head no. Mr. Lacey said, with his air of completing an algebra problem on the blackboard, in a tone of absolute finality Yes. And we'll never speak of it again after tonight. In.fact of any of this-making an airy magician's gesture that encompassed not just the Bison Diner but the city of Buffalo, the very night-ever again. And so it was, we never did speak of it again. Our adventure that night following Valentine's Day 1959, ever again. Next Monday at school, and all the days, and months, to come, Mr. Lacey and I maintained our secret. My heart burned with a knowledge I could not speak! But I was quieter, less nervous in class than I'd ever been; as if, overnight, I'd matured by years. Mr. Lacey behaved exactly, I think, as he'd always behaved toward me: no one could ever have guessed, in any wild flight of imagination, the bond between us. My grades hovered below 100% for Mr. Lacey was surely one to wish to retain the power of giving tests no student could complete to perfection. With a wink he said Humility goeth in place of a fall, Erin. And in September when I returned for eleventh grade, Julius Lacey who might have been expected to teach solid geometry to my class was gone: returned to graduate school, we were told. Vanished forever from our lives. All this was far in the future! That night, I could not have foreseen any of it. Nor how, over thirty years later, on the eve of Valentine's Day I would remove from its hiding place at the bottom of a bureau drawer a blood-stained man's handkerchief initialed JNL, fine white cotton yellowed with time, and smooth its wrinkles with the edge of my hand, and lift it to my face like Veronica her veil. By the time Mr. Lacey and I left the Bison Diner the light there had become blinding and the jukebox music almost deafening. My head would echo for days lonely? lonely? lonely? Mr. Lacey drove us hurriedly south on Huron Street passing close beneath factory smokestacks rimmed at their tops with bluish-orange flame, spewing clouds of gray smoke that, upon impact with the freezing wind off Lake Erie, coalesced into fine gritty particles and fell back to earth like hail. These particles drummed on the roof, windshield, and hood

Page  66 66 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW of the Volkswagen, bouncing and ricocheting off, denting the metal. God damn Mr. Lacey swore softly will You never cease! Abruptly then we were home. At my aunt's shabby woodframe bungalow at 3998 Huron Street, Buffalo, New York that might have been any one of dozens, hundreds, even thousands of similar woodframe one -and-a-half- story bungalows in working-class neighborhoods of the city. The moon had vanished as if it had never been and the sky was depthless as a black paper cut-out, but a street lamp illuminated the mouth of the snowed-in alley and the great snowdrift in the shape of a right-angled triangle lifting to the roof below my window. What did I promise, Erin?-no one knows you were ever gone Mr. Lacey's words seemed to reverberate in my head without his speaking aloud. With relief I saw that the downstairs windows of the house were all darkened but there was a faint flickering light up in my room-the candle still burning, after all these hours. Gripping my hand tightly, Mr. Lacey led me up the snowdrift as up a treacherous stairs, fitting his boots to the footprints he'd originally made, and I followed suit, desperate not to slip and fall. Safe at home, safe at home! Mr. Lace/'s words sounded close in my ears, unless it was Safe alone, safe alone! I heard. Oh! the window was frozen shut again! so the two of us tugged, tugged, tugged, Mr. Lacey with good-humored patience until finally ice shattered, the window lurched up to a height of perhaps twelve inches. I'd begun to cry, a sorry spectacle, and my eyelashes had frozen within seconds in the bitter cold so Mr. Lacey laughed kissing my left eye, and then my right eye, and the lashes were thawed, and I heard Goodbye, Erin! as I climbed back through the window.

Carol MuskeMuske, CarolDecember 8thVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 67-69http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:14

Page  67 CAROL MUSKE DECEMBER 8TH The obituary taped to the front door was mine. My name, a day, a month. No year. I knew a crazy girl in class who might have typed my death like this on a strip of newsprint clipped from a daily list of newly dead (stoically facing the Style Page in the St. Paul Pioneer Press.) My mother wrung her hands, mentioning the police or (more discreet) the parish priest, but I felt better than I ever had. At fifteen, I knew the girl was mad. And I was not. Despite my own just published doom, I recognized self-ruin in this literal drop-dead style. True, I'd never doubted her particular gift for overkill. We'd vied for every literary prize, the high opinion of nuns (who drove her wild). Her deep erratic talent fired and cooled on that iron rack. (Litotes, hyperbole) Then they kicked her out for talking back. And that was that, I thought. Till later still when I heard 67

Page  68 68 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW how her passion for a nun who'd favored then betrayed her, settled it in one stroke: the door swung shut on what had been her life. But for now I stood, not yet posthumous,, merely furious at how she'd bumped mae off: the way we knocked out picas (eyelashes of Garibaldi Bold) in headline counts. I rolled a spitball of my death, lobbed it at my brother's head, careful not to catch my mother's eye. Now., every year on that date,, I cross streets carefully,, consider how she invented a perfect destiny for me. Fate had not made her mad, only omniscient: our "narrator sans merci." Because they took from her all she had-she wrote it out the way she wanted it to be. (After all, Who owns our lives? Whoever writes: The End.) I said nothing when I might have stood up for her. Might have said that she deserved Editor-in-Chief far more than me. The nun was a crush: a common thing for all of us. But that Springirreverent, reckless of her scholarship (her mother, divorced, poor), she refused to stop "99exaggerating."

Page  69 CAROL MUSKE 69 Banged the old Olivetti till it rattled the Junior Press Roomtyping racy news heads about Sister Mary Whomever. What to do with that kind of truth? I see her now: her fingers lifting from the keysshe's laughing at her own knock-knock joke (Who's there?) her upstart hair studded with pencils, balled yellow copy paper showered everywhere. Then she stares at me and types it out. The only question left now is how to count each doubt: how many years till what she left unwrit will set her rival free?

Mekeel McBrideMcBride, MekeelIf That Boaty Pink Cadillac from 1959 with the Huge FinsVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 70-71http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:15

Page  70 MEKEEL McBRIDE IF THAT BOATY PINK CADILLAC FROM 1959 WITH THE HUGE FINS the one that takes up almost two lanes as it swims by, if it were mine, I'd let you ride in it. I'd pick you up right now, at your front door. I'd just sit there for awhile, hoping you'd look out the window for a weather test, whatever, and see me in that huge pink-that-exists-nowhere-in-nature czar of a car. And you'd fly out the door as if a holiday were happening right in your driveway, as if that millionaire from the old TV show had finally found your house after all these years, as if God had said, OK, for the next day despair's going to have to hold somebody else's soul hostage. You'd swing open the Cadillac door, pearly as the nail polish of Miss Lana Turner, who is now deceased but whose glamour will never leave us. And wherever you wanted to go, well, I'd take you there because there's enough gas in this beauty to get us to Texas or San Francisco or a good viewing of the shuttle going starward which is what this bygone baby is, a dream machine with real wheels, white walls spiffier than anybody's poetry moon, prettier than Mazda or Toyota, even Infiniti. A chrome castle soaked in salmony sunrise, a huge pink thumbs-down to the rat-box subcompact of the modem auto. This 1959 Cadillac floating steamy and unstoppable down the road like a comet the color of a kiss from Jayne Mansfield, melting 70

Page  71 MEKEEL MEBRIDE 71 around corners leaving behind violet banners of beautiful exhaust. Did I see that? a pedestrian says to himself, What was that.... Well, I'll tell you, that was love's submarine taking its time, shining, sashaying through the black lack of imagination all around us. That was me wanting to get you wherever you want to gc and you going right along with it, in the pink-as-flamingoes chrome cool boat-us-home-Cadillac....

Marianne BoruchBoruch, MarianneLine and RoomVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 72-86http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:16

Page  72 MARIANNE BORUCH LINE AND ROOM "The first act of movement (line) takes us far beyond the dead point" -Paul Klee A group of students passed the Houseone of them said oh no like you the same vagabond sweetness I followed the voice -Emily Dickinson To line bees: to track wild bees to their nest by following their line of flight Among the astonishing things Thomas Edison helped manage in his lifetime-incandescent light, the phonograph, the electric chairwas a curious book, compiled by others and published in 1940, seventeen years after his death. A small part is his diary-entries from ten largely eventless July days in 1885-and the rest, written after retirement, falls in place as "Sundry Observations" on everything: his life, the world's war and peace, the "realms beyond." I've never been to a Chautauqua camp meeting, but it's possible these "observations" fit its heyday mold-rambling, quirky, mildly inflammatory, moralistic and, so often, amazingly boring because there is no self-doubt in 72

Page  73 MARIANNE BORUCH 73 the rendering. But fascinating, too, because of that, particularly when he takes on the larger world. The inventor at such moments invents that world; he imagines, he speaks out. But there are quieter times when Edison seems to be talking to himself. His deafness, gradually increasing throughout his life, may be the central fact about him. In any case, he begins his observations recounting the famous boyhood incident-being lifted by the ears into a moving train by a well-meaning conductor. Elsewhere he dramatizes this moment-"I felt something snap inside my head"though not here. Because here the issue isn't complaint or self-pity but the sudden realization of a gift. A gift that would save him from a lifetime of stifling small talk if he wished, not to mention business lunch oratory though there were even happier consequences. He would lean closer and earlier than propriety might dictate in courtship to the woman he would marry; he would come to love New York, all at once "a rather quiet place," Broadway "a peaceful thoroughfare." Years of the gift would calm his nerves. "I am able to write without tremor," he claimed. "Few men my age can do that." But his changes went further, moving him inward. Because of his deafness, he actually thought differently, he said, solitude always available to him, a state he preferred anyway. When he did manage to hear, he would hear exactly in reverse, where others could not, catching ordinary talk in boiler rooms without trouble because the general brain-numbing racket was, literally, nothing to him; or eavesdropping on women across the aisle in roaring trains "telling secrets to one another, taking advantage of the noise" which unknown to them only Edison could screen out. As for his early fascination with the telegraph: "Deafness was an advantage. While I could hear unerringly the loud ticking of the instrument, I would not hear other sounds. I could not even hear the instrument of the man next to me in the big office." In that room, an island of quiet then; one imagines the beat from the incoming wire, two beats, three and four. Pauses held and let go, a meaningful rhythm. Bad news or good news, grief or love or both. So much like the making of a poem suddenly, the poet alert, waiting to translate something from somewhere, the whole private, terrible business. Edison bent over it. Edison writing the words as they come great distances across the river or across the world. From some faraway room there, probably equal in size, with a window or two, though its quiet can't be equal. As if anything is equal. Not Edison, really, not like a poet at all I

Page  74 74 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW suppose, though his solitude might serve and shine here, or the way, in writing poems, lines often come unbidden. Voices up from where, though, what ancient room in us, and why the line and not the sentence? And what of lines end-stopped as opposed to enjambed? Is it the difference, as Edison might understand it, between electricity's DC and AC, direct current like so many an end-stopped line, running its brief charge straight, no tricks, to begin and end sensibly enough, while alternating current seems to enjamb itself, circling, then hitting resistance to reverse its charge, endlessly restless, going whatever distance to light a room-or a stanza, the Italian word for room. Or is the poetic line mere artifice, ornamental, an aid to memory, endrhymed often in the past for that? And why do lines haunt those who write them, Tennyson, say, using "The phantom circle of a moaning sea" repeatedly in drafts of different poems, always crossing it out until finally one year, in "The Passing of Arthur," it fit? Or is this fracturing just a habit though we long ago lost its reason, because poetry is written like that, thank you, and prose is not, and we learn this fact early the way a child learns the order of a day, sleep at either end, or gardeners learn to plant in rows because to weed, one has to kneel somewhere. Whatever the cause, sentences get broken into lines; we thread them down-of course, from the Latin linea, meaning "linen"-this way, that way, as the word verse whose Latin root vertere, "to turn," reminds us, the way a kid's marble run might work, the structure itself urging each burst, or because we love the senseless on/off rush of it, though probably nothing is entirely random. "The things I needed to hear," Edison, who could barely make out anything assures us, "I have heard." And one needs to hear in the line, what exactly? As opposed to gregarious prose whose public purpose assumes audience-to tell a story, to give direction, to admit to murder-poems don't do things. They're solitary, the young telegraph man praising his deafness because it cut him off from the silly supper gossip at the boarding house so he could think, or dream, years later, he was thinking. It's just that poems so often talk to themselves, or to some other so close it might as well be oneself. Intimate guardians of those crucial human nothings: to resist or brood or lament, to declare love or take it back. Not that these genre differences are new. There's always Yeats' idea of poetry as one's argument with oneself while rhetoric, if not all prose, is busy elsewhere, taking on the world. In the power of such distinctions, even the sonnet has been elevated in this age which scorns it,

Page  75 MARIANNE BORUCH 75 redefined recently by Paul Oppenheimer who makes it evidence, as his book's title suggests, of The Birth of the Modem Mind, finding, through that first sonnet somewhere in the twelfth century, the actual moment humankind looked inward to record the famous argument with the self, to hell with the world-or at least to hell with the lute, and the idea of performing a poem in front of all those people at the court. If poetry is our literary form of solitude, our way back to the most private of rooms, then its deepest architecture-its controlling tension-depends on line. And perhaps this drama between poetry and prose enacts itself within every poem, particularly if the line's enjambed. Enter Edison once more, bent close to his telegraph, screening out the world's cacophony to focus, line by line. Which is to say, it's the public, talkative sentence out there, or its near-brother, the lucid fragment, each with syntax's reasonable complexity and both to be refigured brutally, if elegantly, by the line as it breaks to another line. Brooks and Warren said it memorably: the sentence is a unit of sense, but the line is a unit of attention. A way of foregrounding what really matters, I suppose, of steadying things. And what of the world beyond, stranger than the sentence and its fine logic, the large daily confusion out of which all art comes? Two philosophers-Deleuze and Guattari-define chaos not as disorder but as "the infinite speed which every form taking shape in it vanishes." Line as a still, then, against life's dizzying momentum which, at heart, is the lyric impulse anyway, to stop time, to feel the eternal weight of what is ordinary; or maybe just to breathe slower. Sometimes even what is flippant turns grave by such choreography. "What a thrill- I" Plath writes in these first few lines from her poem "Cut": My thumb instead of an onion. The top quite gone Except for a sort of a hinge Of skin, A flap like a hat, Dead white. Then that red plush. Plath, of course, had greater monsters before her. Another poem, "Elm," written in the same year as "Cut," just months before her death, eerily places long, languid lines against briefer ones as in these opening stanzas.

Page  76 76 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there. Is it the sea you hear in me, Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness? Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse. All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf, Echoing, echoing. Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons? This is rain now, this big hush. And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.... "Elm" carries Plath's purest form of nightmare, not distanced by irony for once though deflected by a mask of sorts, half extended metaphor, half fable. The tree seems, at times, to speak its own horrors, the poet somewhere behind, speaking hers. But poetic shape here, lines that lock and unlock, suggest a rich strain moving in countless ways throughout the piece. Her lines, when end-stopped by period, comma, or question mark, shore up energy then release it, a dirge-like hypnotic cadence which adds a curious dignity, a parody of control against a situation largely out of control. As the vision gradually darkens, enjambment increases, that earlier wrought, tense quality of the end-stops slipping now, one line then another overflowing its boundary, pressing the next. Still, I keep going back to the opening line, two phrases with every calm in the world about them. Plath gives it to us straight. "I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root...." But its power depends on the next step, as suddenly the second line is formed, underscoring what can only be called forbidden knowledge. "It is what you fear" she tells us flatly, unblinkingly. Such words say what they say in full light; their "sentence sound," that ordinary, ongoing cadence which Frost named and loved in poems, seems reasonable enough. But the physical pull downward, triggered by the

Page  77 MARIANNE BORUCH 77 end line pause, is what takes us without warning into the bleakest nether world. It is line in the poem that amplifies threat to make all this more chilling. Donald Hall was right to praise the line for its instant connection to our "psychic interior," access one feels through the body, through "mouth and muscle." "I am terrified by this dark thing / That sleeps in me" she writes elsewhere in the poem, "All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity." Lines in fact break far more than sentences. Here, they break down the weight of Plath's fevered realizations so it becomes possible-or bearable-to take them in. Even so, reading her, it's all rush and dread as line gives way to each darker line below, until the fiercest solitude fills up the room. Until there is no room. Start again, then, and say the obvious, that once we've passed into such interiors it seems impossible to speak with precision. In describing line, after all-and here's Charles Simic on this-one describes "the most intuitive part of the writing process." What's heard is only part of the mystery. That intuition is visual too, how lines live in space, how they idle there and pull back, far from margins. Line comes this way from Euclid, to him from Plato, who described it as "a breathless length," or so I read recently in Euclid's Elements-misread, really-thrilled, everything else in my head happily abandoned for a second. Wonderful, I thought, not breathing-a breathless length. In fact, it was breadthless I read, this slip without weight, length without volume, line pure enough for every shape in the world, or so Euclid imagined. But one can misread and find truth, at least a memory of truth, thirty years back, to Euclid's book in a classroom, the oldest nun in the world at the board, gumming her words, then staring out past trees, forgetting us. And how lovely to hover there at our desks in the quiet above his proofs, the lines of argument following, making sense, how each line froze that order too, one line set, then released by the next, set and released down the page until the last second's therefore, came right out of dream-a door flung open where you never thought there'd be a room, secret under the house where you never thought anything secret. But how sight and sound actually connect-poetry as figure, moving because the eye moves: this has been the bothersome issue since print, or before that, since we started to write things down, line always the place where spatial and auditory elements cross. Which is to

Page  78 78 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW say, where space and time cross. One sees it and one hears it. Perhaps more eerily, one sees it coming and sees where it's been even in the most cursory glance at the page, lines-the overall shape they make-the first thing we probably notice. There are more ancient beginnings to this. Those who study maps back to prehistory tell us that the grassland habits of homo sapiens, so different from the forest primates, forced a first, crucial aspect of human consciousnessto see spatially, to know distance as it links to heartstop matters of safety and fear. And wonder, too, I imagine, the world in a blink opened like that, an expanse, and the eye's delight and hunger in it. Because whatever their workaday function, maps invoke a mysterious, all-at-once sense of space, as if we've never lived on the earth at all but float above it always with a god-like generalizing eye. As for those ancestral grasslands that spawned such a view-survival, as the historian G. Malcolm Lewis put it, depended on our developing at the same time both prospect and refuge, that is, vision and self-concealment. In short, to look without being seen. To open and to close at once. In truth, I love these two unlikely worlds together. They seem perfect sisters, birder that I am, sitting early summer mornings an hour or two in open places because I prize my prospect of the woods' edge from there. And my concealment is stillness, waiting and looking without gesture until even the shrewdest tanager thinks I'm some weird badly pruned holly bush or some harmless debris left by a fugitive midnight truck. A line, said Paul Klee in his days teaching at the German Bauhaus, is a topographical measurement of the journey we take. But how to measure my stillness against what I hear, the ecstatic thrush, hidden, thrilling in the ragged low branches. How even to try. Fact: when poets exchange old concealments for new concealments, their lines change. Much of early Roethke, for instance, resembles later Roethke, well, not at all, except perhaps in subject matter, as praise of the natural world's hard disorder and our place in it. The best thing about "Long Live the Weeds" from his first book, Open House, is probably its title, a direct-if admitted-steal from Hopkins. Its shape, though, has almost nothing in common with the Jesuit's fresh, edgy rhythms or even Roethke's later sound. "Long live the weeds that overwhelm / my narrow vegetable realm!" he begins in a deliberate burst.

Page  79 MARIANNE BORUCH 79 The bitter rock, the barren soil that forced the son of man to toil. All things unholy, marred by curse, The ugly of the universe. The rough, the wicked, and the wild That keep the spirit undefiled.... And so on, in the shadow of Pope or Milton of a tidier age. But the even stress here-mainly four beats against an occasional three-invites to the poem little of the wildness spoken of, the end rhymes too expected, and-do I say it?-almost smug. When all's too safe, it's danger we look for, triggered by whatever long buried gene from our years as primates just out of the forest and onto the grasslands, scanning the terrain; it's probably habit by now, our alertness to uncertainty, things different, novelty. But Roethke's lines gather like good soldiers, moving their pronouncements down trench to trench, sure of themselves in the old endstopped way with little relief from the burgherdom they serve except perhaps in the monkeywrench penultimate line, unstable because it's five stresses now, the poet hoping that his sympathy for things uneven earns him the right to more daring moments, to "hope, love, create, or drink and die.... " Such moments come closer with his second collection, The Lost Son, poems less comment upon and more of experience, open season now on real memories of a Michigan childhood caught between his father's orderly greenhouse and stranger places. More, Roethke's sense of poetic shape changes with that book, foreshadowing the staggering growth in longer later poems, his "Meditations of an Old Woman," say, or "The Far Field." Even in the second volume, though, the old concealment of an elegant, generalizing distance is going, and with it the step to sound of things cut and stressed so evenly. We're out of a box and into a larger, less orderly room. Here, for instance, is the title poem's much looser start. At Woodlawn, I heard the dead cry: I was lulled by the slamming of iron, A slow drip over stones, Toads brooding wells. All the leaves stuck out their tongues; I shook the softening chalk of my bones, Saying, Snail, snail, glister me forward,

Page  80 80 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Bird, soft-sign me home, Worm, be with me.... Roethke's end-stop habit continues here, not to mention his respect for the sentence and, in turn, line as syntactic unit. These things add to the classic integrity of his work in part because, as Frost liked to quote Yvor Winters, "behind all good free verse there's a shadow of formal verse" in which, certainly, Roethke was expert. But all that isn't said here is heard-and seen-as well. It's Roethke mapping more intimate ground in highly visual ways, both prospect and refuge coming because he's mapped silence and hesitation right into the line. "I shook the softening chalk of my bones / saying"-but the line goes dead, and we wait too, gone inward, idling until the dear whisper is dropped to the next line. "Snail, snail, glister me forward, / Bird, soft-sign me home..." And so Roethke fills and staggers and questions and comes up quick, the full piece a strange assemblage of voices and styles. To vary things, especially line length, shows how the mind actually moves, he wrote later. But more than that, in this first passage, his short lines against more willowy ones, his repeated direct address to soothe and quiet things, makes a different kind of concealment, a withdrawal, a stepping back even as the tone of the piece grows, oddly, more personal, the whole business refired to rise in a buried, more private way. But one sees it taking place; line is physical gesture, too, calling us to the poem's meaning, an equal force to its words. I hesitate to call this method. Still, an analogy: each fall, I bicycle past the surveying class at Purdue, kids with their scopes and twine, year after year measuring the same acre of open space, setting down stakes, drawing the cord taut between them. But beyond this overcalculated corner, there are jagged edges in the world, squiggles on a map where ponds begin, river and creek banks, messy coastlines of rock and sand. For this surveyors have invented the so-called "meander line," measured at the mean high water mark, and drawn more to approximate than to be accurate, to generalize the measureless dips and turns that a boundary of rock and mud and water make. Such ecstasies aside, I'm thinking more often about the free verse line in this way, especially the enjambed line which moves in two directions, restlessly across, then cutting down to surprise or deflect or underscore. A romantic invention, enjambment, impressing the Elizabethans, then scorned in the eighteenth century, as Roger Mitchell

Page  81 MARIANNE BORUCH 81 has pointed out, but picked up again with wild love by the real romantics of the next century, throughout history a creature of messier, more uncertain-more meandering-times. More recently, these meander lines, which slow or stop suddenly to reflect the near viscous depth of things, have gotten stranger, certainly more visual. I'd include Jorie Graham in this, thinking of an older collection, The End of Beauty, her third, because like Roethke's second book it mapped a dramatic shift in direction, altering established points of refuge and prospect. Here, in a passage from her poem "The Lovers," a fitful interior movement is mimed by a new set of structural eccentricities. "Either they are or they're not, she thinks, hold still," Graham writes: Something fiery all around-let it decide. It will need us to shape it (won't it?) hold still. And the cries increasingly hold still. Like a this look between us hold still. If, inside, a small terrified happiness begins like an idea of color like an idea of color sinking to stain an instance, a thing, like an arm holding a lit candle in a door that is parting, if, oh if-banish it. Listen, this is the thing that can trap it now-the glanceMore than Roethke, Graham forces her line to follow an inside fury, pent up and thus increased through her curious breaks and blanks mid-line. Their looming up so clearly on the page suggests process, not the truth but a groping for it, though mainly, like Roethke, she holds to the well-mannered sentence as the basic understructure. But perhaps line has become more subtle a tracking device this way, words unfolding haltingly, their placement on the page as telling as what is said. A sea-change like Graham's, like Roethke's, from a more conventional line to this looser translation of self and mind, is almost itself a convention in this century. Adrienne Rich comes to mind, or James Wright. A well-known story is Lowell's, which amounted to a conversion of sorts, following his dense, highly metrical and rhetorical line in earlier books, to Life Studies which broke nearly everything open. To Lowell, the change seemed enormous, altering even his take on poems he once learned and loved. "... now that I've joined you in unscanned

Page  82 82 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW verse,"30 Lowell wrote William Carlos Williams before that book came outy "I am struck by how often the old classics get boxed up in their machinery, the sonority of the iambic pentameter line....X Lowell's old machinery sounds like this, from his first book, a middle passage from "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" Whenever winds are moving and their breath Heaves at the roped-in bulwarks of this pier, The terns and sea-gulls tremble at your death In these home waters. Sailor,, can you hear The Pequod's sea wings, beating Iandward, fall Headlong and break on our Atlantic wall.... And later machinery? His work in Life Studies shows reach as well as limits. His love of rhyme, of things predictable and in pattern continues in a poem like "Skunk Hour" but second thoughts and hesitations are recorded as well-line breaks governed without punctuation, and often, with ellipsis-things one needs to see to understand. The stops and starts which express vulnerability so poignantly help make this piece what it is, a poem-as Lowell would say later about Berryman's Dream Songs-"11more tearful and funny than we can easily bear." The place is Maine, and Lowell spends the poem's first half in playful overview of the town which has just lost its "1summer millionaire, / who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean / catalogue... But the humor turns quickly to something more personally chilling. One dark night, My Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull; I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull, where the graveyard shelves on the town.. My mind's not right. A car radio bleats, "Love, 0 careless Love....I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat.. I myself am hell; nobody's hereIt might be impossible not to follow this musically, such urgency and languid rush at once; or not to be haunted by Pound's up-from

Page  83 MARIANNE BORUCH 83 schoolmarmish pronouncement at the long lost end of this century: make poems in the musical phrase, not simply in the metronome's, though our music seems to have moved inward, into silence and its empty spaces, less dependent on an American street cadence, that public sound that Williams relished. Even here though, I'm not entirely certain this heard thing is the point unless what we're straining for turns out to be so much whispering. The fragility of Graham's poem or Lowell's seems heartbreakingly clear mainly because we watch the lines themselves pause and drop. Paul Klee again: "Art: that thing which is never expressed purely as result." Through line, we watch the secret thing unfold, not as result but as something put together, all the takes and double takes that actual thought is made of. Not so crucial then, the big-bang summary ending, the I-havewasted-my-life part, the therefore-Socrates-is-a-fish part. Brooks' and Warren's old breakdown between the sentence's sense and the line's attention takes on a stranger meaning in much of contemporary verse, our love of the broken and the piecemeal, our inattention toor loss of faith in-the grand and tidy overview. When one thinks in lines, it's a curious kind of dismemberment, the part at least equally treasured as the whole. Which is a thing the hand knows down to its smallest muscle and bone in a world where line has always been visual. In the Chieh Tzu Uuan Hua Chuan or The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, a book of ancient origin but assembled in China around 1700, the line means in a rich confetti of ways from its simple run of here to there, ink to paper, to nothing less than linking two sides of the universe, all that is yang-or light-in the line against all that is yin-or dark-repeated endlessly in the paper's weave, a surprising inversion. As with the poetic line, one feels weight in the movement, but this time it's the brush, its tun, all verb as it dots and flicks and moves forward "sweeping, turning, plunging, thinning out...." And to study a painting-or, I'd add, a poem-is to feel through line the press and lift of thought as it happens, forget that the moment of making may be one-or countless-lifetimes ago. Lowell's enormous sorrow in "Skunk Hour" is partly revealed by a fierce enjambment carried over from his earlier verse, or in the disquieting ellipsis, that weighted place at the end of a line that floats meaning into something one dare not say. Both moves suggest the unfinished, the still-living, the continuing thing. How deeply all this connects to the body is the real mysterybrushmarks themselves spoken of in the Manual as "muscles," mean

Page  84 84 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW ing the "short, sinewy strokes" while "bones" are "the longer and firm ones," flesh itself "the rise and fall of the rhythm of their forms and connecting strokes...." Most vital is the ch'i, that spirit on which all life depends, the thing which probably took the top of Dickinson's head right off, if we believe her irresistible remark on what a good poem might do if left to its own-and often dangerous-devices. Such danger, if we squint just right, might bring us to more recent revolutions though one's nearly fifty this year. Black Mountain College then. Go by way of the ch'i, the brush held and lowered as the spirit-the breath-runs through the body, taking us inevitably back to the said thing, the heard thing, all the resources of the page toward that. But to hear Charles Olson, so gritty and urgent, as he begins his extraordinary essay, "Projective Verse," is to hear-has anyone ever said this outloud?-writing that sounds like a bad translation of something quite brilliant. "Verse now, 1950, if it is to go ahead, if it is to be of essential use must, I take it, catch up and put into itself certain laws and possibilities of breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listeners...." How the line actually works into these laws and possibilities turns out to be a puzzling business, but first there's a larger theory, one that would shape a generation-Levertov and Creeley among them and affecting all of us coming after-Olson's "Composition By Field," the phrase virtually shouted through his weird habit of running favorite dictums in capital letters, his "FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT" for instance, or his hot-to-the-touch, kinetic pleas-"ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION" or "MOVE INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER!" Eventually his thoughts on line are amplified too, howbeit in snaggly bits. And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment he writes, and thus is, it is here that, the daily work, the WORK, gets in.... Or this: Let me put it baldly. "The two halves are: the HEAD by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE. The HEART by way of the

Page  85 MARIANNE BORUCH 85 BREATH, to the LINE.... (S)urprise, it is the LINE that's the baby that gets, as the poem is getting made, the attention, the control that is right here, in the line, that the shaping takes place, each moment of the going....." "Each moment of the going...." Again, that painterly weight on the part, not the whole, but here it's crucial to Olson's passionate feeling for the end-line pause because line is so unlike the sentence whose deft flow moves the paragraph to closure with little need for more than ordinary punctuation to soften and turn it and make it fierce. Olson's instructions are specific: "If a contemporary poet leaves a space as long as a phrase before it, that space is to be held, by the breath, an equal length of time... he [sic] means that time to pass that it takes the eye-that hair of time suspended-to pick up the next line...." Not that all of us do this, but in spirit Olson's remark could be close to what Roethke liked to say, quoting Lawrence, that "it all depends on the pause, the natural pause." Or any number of poets who have stressed silence as an equal presence to what is voiced. Still, I love one phrase buried here, set apart by its mute dashes-"that hair of time suspended"-a synapse for whatever leap, all things unsayable or unknowable coming up in the pause. There's no place else in literature where one speaks then takes back, for an instant, that speaking. Nowhere else, really, where such poignant uncertainty is encouraged, in fact worked architecturally into the very shape of things, line into room, room opening to another by angle and cross angle, the actual process of human understanding-and its limits-so visible. It wasn't strictly rhetorical for Olson, or dreamily a matter of program music. Stranger, more organic, the whole matter of line was preliterate, even genetic, a poetic DNA in each of us that shapes spirit, rising as breath, in turn, to shape the original poems we write. Each utterance has enormous and lasting weight in such a view, but "to see the word for what it is, one needs the line...." That's Charles Simic again though Olson might have added, in spite of its seeming paradox-one needs to see where the line ends and its words stop, be it a trick of light or some distant welling up we'll never be able to name. Or perhaps all this is, at best, illusion, and there are no lines, as Nicoladies claimed in his famous drawing manual from the '30s. There is only the place "where the figure ceases." So in poetry, even

Page  86 86 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW in our sense of line, one of the smallest mechanics of the creature, we're reminded continually of that inevitable darkness into which all things vanish. When I once lived in Maine, we liked to drive randomly, taking roads which themselves spidered off to smaller roads, passing meadows and creekbeds and every wild green expanse. One road was our favorite. We followed it north, oak and maple and ash thickening on either side, until there was no road. Even on the map the thin line staggered, then violently broke into nothing. I loved to track it on paper, stare down at the thing, and wonder. But I loved more going into that nowhere. Where the road simply stopped, we'd sit in our old Volkswagen, glad and grief-stricken at once, everything human swallowed up by trees on three sides, the vast tangle before us hundreds of miles, and thousands of lifetimes deep. "Some roads end abruptly in the woods," I wrote later, haunted by the place or the line. But the poem-I never finished it.

Jean Toyama, Eleanor Wilner, Nell AltizerToyama, JeanRenshi: A Linked Essay on Linked PoetryVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 87-93http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:17

Page  87 JEAN TOYAMA, ELEANOR WILNER, NELL ALTIZER RENSHI: A LINKED ESSAY ON LINKED POETRY JEAN TOYAMA For over thirty years I wrote poetry in isolated dribbles, a few poems here and there, some published, others not. I thought this the way of poetry, an activity done in solitary confinement, usually hidden away. A few years ago by some happy accident I became involved in a University of Hawaii Summer Session project on linked poetry, renshi. Ooka Makoto, the distinguished Japanese poet and worldwide propagator of this form, was invited to initiate a group of us poets into the world of collaborative poetry. In our pursuit of individuality and creativity we Westerners shun the group. Even poets. We revel in our solitude, though we may complain of this at cocktail parties. The idea of collaboration in poetry, if not threatening, is at least intriguing. Renshi derives from the ancient Japanese practice of renga or renku which is linked verse in the waka tradition that follows the strict 5-7-5-7-7 syllabic count. Even today these forms are practiced by groups of like-minded people steeped in tradition. A renga is a poem of up to 1000 links or verses written by a group of poets gathered to write together by the t6ya or to who is their leader and host. At the completion of the poem it was customary for the toya to provide suitable refreshments, usually a small banquet. These writing bouts were very popular, apparently because of the competition between the poets who were awarded points by judges. The quality of the banquets also inspired competition and some toya ended up bankrupt. At least that is how they are caricatured in a few Japanese comedies (ky6gen) according to the literary scholar, Konishi Jin'ichi. This form of poetry is depicted as an addiction that produces 87

Page  88 88 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW "renga widows" who ultimately divorce their husbands, or "renga paupers" who resort to thievery to pay for their banquets. I bring up these curiosities only to emphasize the great difference between our ways of poetry. Of course, with today's poetry slams one does get a taste of the social nature of poetry competitions, but this phenomenon can hardly provide any insight into the elaborate protocols that structured the practice of renga. In studying the form I was baffled by all of the intricate rules that governed the game. It was not only a question of the number of syllables allowed in each line but also the kinds of images and lexical choices permitted. There were even rules concerning the disposition of the links written on sheets of paper whose order and placement were meticulously prescribed. For instance, within one hundred links-the usual length of a poem-written on four sheets of paper there had to be four blossom verses (one on each sheet of paper), eight moon verses (one on each side of the four sheets). Some motifs such as "young grass," "peony," and "firefly" were thought to be so strong that they could appear only once within one hundred verses. Others like bear, tiger, dragon, demon and woman could appear only once in a thousand verses! This gives but a pale indication of the meticulous rules of the ancient game. As for the modern version, renshi, the guidelines established by Makoto that summer were, fortunately for us, simple: write short poems; use the last line or the last few words of the preceding poem as your title. The result was What the Kite Thinks, a poem of 36 links written by Ooka Makoto, Wing Tek Lum, Joseph Stanton, and myself. Two years passed, and I missed the feelings this experience of collaborative writing generated. It was then that I asked Nell Altizer and Eleanor Wilner to join me in another round, a woman's round. Although I have heard that it is unwise to try to recapture something that seems too good to be repeated, I felt that with these two poets I had nothing to lose. I doubt that they suspected how timid I felt asking them to join me. In fact, I feared that they might turn me down out of hand. It was like some featherweight asking to spar with heavyweights. But this is the magic of renshi: it allows for weaknesses and strengths. And I have been buoyed by their strength.

Page  89 JEAN TOYAMA, ELEANOR WILNER, NELL ALTIZER 89 ELEANOR WILNER In the tradition of renshi, I enter from the place where jean went out. She ends with that deep modesty which is perhaps an inheritance from her Japanese ancestors,, so different from the American boastfulness ("I celebrate myself... Y31 etc.), the ego-strut that gets us through in lieu of an ancient tradition. We are still an insecure and ego-intoxicated lot, solitary reapers of the lean harvest of the self. So it was with a kind of joyful relief that I entered into this linked poetry with jean and Nell; after all, we were friends, and something of that friendship grew from mutual respect for the art we shared. The thought of sharing it further, by actually and formally linking our poems, was a delightful one. A palliative to the proverbial loneliness of the writer-who could resist? Jean gave me a copy of What the Kite Thinks, the book of linked poems she describes above. I was hooked at once. I had often noticed,, when I was teaching a group of students who met weekly to share their poems, that a kind of collective iconography began to emerge; that certain images would recur and transform in idiosyncratic variation as they passed from hand to hand; that poetry, like whale song, communicated itself below the surface and the usual audible level, so that the imagination of one writer could reach and release in another what might not otherwise have emerged. This is what we mean by a tradition in literature, of course, but here was its living form, a vitality which is never solitary, an experience which takes literature out of the critical world of influence tracing, and makes it instead a lively confluence of images in a present, shared pool of meaning-much of that exchange underwater, as it were. It was clear, as I read What the Kite Thinks, how much the poems were in deep dialogue with one another, and how each individual was enriched in this colloquy of peers. Of course, as jean said, the contemporary version, which involves a bending of a tightly prescribed Japanese form to an American informality, had to acknowledge a lessstructured and more free-floating world of styles, and so limited itself to the taking of the last line of another's poem (or that line's last part). for the tide of our own. To have used the line within our own poem might have determined the prosody-thus the title was suggestive but not metrically prescriptive. That might seem like merely a trick of composition until you see what happens in the poems. One of the things I particularly enjoyed was the almost instinctive

Page  90 90 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW resistance. In the first round, Jean began with a paean to baldness: "I knew I wanted to be bald / when I saw him club her, grab firmly in his fist / and twist / her long full head of hair / then drag / that raving body to his cave." By the time my turn came (third), I found myself writing about "Samson, shorn and blind / enraged..."-surely the closest thing in Western scripture to a defense of hair. The mourning memorial hairs in Nell's (post-Jean) poem may also have contributed to Samson's appearance. And his stone-rolling avalanche was, no doubt, given a final push by my own captive mood, but the figure was first invited through the provocation of contrariness-resistance being one of the great sources of human invention. Affinity being another-and of that affinity all the poems spoke, and intricately so, as they called back and forth to one another. Collaboration helped close the miles of distance-Jean in Hawaii, Nell this year in Minnesota, and me on the east coast. When my three graduate student poets at Warren Wilson's MFA Program were about to disperse for Nova Scotia, Boston, and California at the end of our ten day residency, I realized that, for the next five months or so, I would be the sole link; they would not be in touch with each other. So it occurred to me to give them Ooka Makota's essay and institute our own renshi chain. By the end of the term, one of them had put a Celtic knot twist in this Japanese-inspired form: at our continent-size invisible table, we were passing poems in both a clockwise and a counterclockwise direction, and had two crossed chains going at once. The linkage deepened our connection, our sense of cohesion as a cohort, and produced some strong poems. It was, above all, a kind of lifeline. I think, to echo Jean, we all felt strengthened and sustained by it. Since poetry often involves working the edge of the abyss, with how much more confidence you can move when attached to others by strong, tensile lines. And how delightful to send or receive a poem, and have another take off from it, and go a way you never before would have imagined. And on one of those days when all your thoughts are bleak, and words shrink from your touch, an envelope arrives and the life's blood of poetry begins to flow again. My delight in the companionable renshi form brings to mind the two years we spent in Japan: there you never filled your own glass, but always that of your companion-having no worry about your own, because you knew there was another who would keep it full.

Page  91 JEAN TOYAMA, ELEANOR WILNER, NELL ALTIZER 91 NELL ALTIZER "Keep it full" I would have entitled my linking poem, for that is how we worked: selecting as much or as little from the closing line of the poem we had just received to put, like a breath of wind, our own craft in motion. Most writers remind themselves daily to keep it full, to fashion a texture brimming with music, color, and design that the renshi, with its rules and rituals, its link to past and present poets, so powerfully embodies. I may have been the most resistant to Jean's invitation, for when I read her gift of What the Kite Thinks, I thought, "I can't write like that." The short lyric with its emphasis, East and West, on the brilliant image, on breakages and gaps to create coherence out of absence, its abrupt, surreal logic was antithetical to my syntactical, periodic, stanza-grounded style. When Jean sent her first poem, "Hair," I pulled my Baudelaire down from the shelf, turned to "La Chevelure" and settled into that European synthesis of narrative thrust and lyric cry characteristic of the Symbolist poets. Jean is a professor of French and as influenced by that poetic tradition as I am, so I saw no harm in throwing a line of Baudelaire into the stew. After all, I'd started off with an echo of John Donne's "bracelet of bright hair about the bone," for in looking at the poem from which Jean drew her epigram, I had seen my long-dead husband's handwriting in the margin. A professor of seventeenth-century literature, he had inscribed the book: "Sa voixfait du parfum comme haleine de la musique." That synaesthesia, I began to see, could serve me in weaving strands of a thoroughly Western consciousness into a traditional Japanese form. As a feminist committed to colloquies of women's voices, I was intrigued by Jean's desire to see if our linked fabric would differ in instructive ways from the book in which she is the only female poet. Our text not only tells "the story" from women's points of view but grapples with major and minor chords of history that have dominated its orchestration. This confrontation with the canon happens whenever an intelligent, self-conscious woman sits down to write. But when three do, look out for the fireworks. We played with an image of God that I threw deliberately to Eleanor, knowing how often she takes on the weight of the Bible in her poems: "All the wide grin of Him." In a dazzling post-modernist collage she spins the image through ads for Camel cigarettes and Cheerios, the Anglo-Saxon language, Arthur and the Lady of the Lake, and ends with the shifty fig

Page  92 92 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW ure of the Cheshire cat as a Japanese lantern swinging like wind chimes in the trees. For the first time in our linkings, the original noun subject, "grin," is still in the line. Jean picks up Eleanor's "milk rimming its grin," drops the milk and with it the cat, but continues the circle trope begun in my poem-pig tails, bathtub plug, willow cups and plates-that Eleanor had expanded with her crescent moon and grinning skull in the weeds. She then deftly turns it into the spotlight that follows Emmett Kelly around the three-ring circus and ends standing, herself a grinning clown, in an empty circle of Beckettian locution. God has traveled a long and comic way from the locks of Sault Ste. Marie to Gotham's dark plight of the soul. Such intertextuality by women writers allowed me to mix Descartes' Evil Deceiver with Elizabeth Bishop's underwear in the next poem, an act of irreverent deconstruction, if you will, but also in the tradition of such Bishop poems as "Pink Dog" and "Crusoe in England." The poem "Against It All" was the hardest for me to write. Jean's poem arrived on a day when, as Eleanor describes it, "all your thoughts are bleak, and words shrink from your touch." I had returned from a California Christmas to a small town in Minnesota where I was teaching for a year. Disoriented by exile, I had not written for months; the temperature had fallen to 56 degrees below zero, and I was reading One Art: The Letters of Elizabeth Bishop for dear life. The last line of Jean's poem, "my simple defense against it all," struck me as impossible, so I put the folder aside, and when Eleanor called to get things moving, I told her I was sick of the whole enterprise, couldn't write anyway and certainly not a poem with that title. Because Eleanor is a patient teacher of poetry, she knew what to do with such resistance: "Write a poem called 'Against It All'," she said, her voice in its firmness (to quote Bishop) "awful but cheerful." I did, and ended the poem with a direct quote from one of Bishop's letters because I needed her voice to be in our discourse, to link her correspondences (and here's Baudelaire again) to ours. What I got back from Eleanor was an Epistle of Encouragement with Bishop's words as the title. Eleanor's image of dropping Minnesota snow into scotch and soda recalled in Jean's poem Baudelaire's admonition to be always so inebriated in poetry that you will put Eve and Mallarme's blocked, drunk male poet into the same frozen lake. When Jean's poem arrived, my prosody students had just begun the terza rima, a form I had never tried before. To the best of my recollection, when I read "Why not," accompanied by Jean's translation

Page  93 JEAN TOYAMA, ELEANOR WILNER, NELL ALTIZER 93 of a famous Mallarme sonnet with its phantom swan in a glacial world, the image of Swan Lake, Minnesota, fused in my mind's eye with Baudelaire's conflation in "Le Cygne" of the enslaved Andromache and the captive, wing-clipped swan in the Paris Zoo. I sat down at the kitchen table, intuiting that the opening and closing bracelets of the terza rima stanza were perfect for this fiction. But it wasn't until I realized, after many drafts, that I could link through rhyme Baudelaire's "Andromache, I think of you" with the captured and slaughtered original inhabitants of the land I was then living on, the Dakota Sioux, that the poem came to life like a swan released with the melting of lake water.

Jean Toyama, Eleanor Wilner, Nell AltizerToyama, JeanRenshi Round, I and IIVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 94-99http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:18

Page  94 JEAN TOYAMA, ELEANOR WILNER, NELL ALTIZER RENSHI ROUNDALTIZER TO WILNER TO TOYAMA Written and exchanged, High Summer 1995 Kaneohe-Philadelphia-Honolulu Making Life a Meaningful Thing She pulled the plug from the lake and did not remove the sailboat, a pig's tail, twirling and twirling until it disappeared down the drain. Sault Ste. Marie: Mary planted with weeping willows, the water willow-blue as China. What shall we eat from the plates or drink from the small cups that nest in our hands their freckled quail eggs? Friend, as you sail, remember me. Don't, better still. The hand on the tiller, that rim of the world that has become your shoulder is not a pillow or resting place but God. All the wide grin of Him. -Nell Altizer 94

Page  95 JEAN TOYAMA, ELEANOR WILNER, NELL ALTIZER 95 All the wide grin of Him is hovering in the air, there, in the highest branches,, like the fading crescent moon,, tipped in that odd way of what's waning: a crooked smile, God's grin, the Cheshire Cat in Wonderland-the smile outlasting the cat. It fades but refuses to go, hanging like the pall of ash and smoke over a city for weeks after the bomb. On a billboard above Times Square, the man in the Camel ad has a hole for a mouth, and smoke puffs out, little o's dissolving like Cheerios in a bowl of milk. Grennian,, Anglo-Saxon root of grin: to show the teeth, to snarl. Grendel mutters, turns in his long sleep. The lake has eaten back the boats, the Lady has withdrawn her arm-sword and all, and Arthur, all the wide grin of him, royal jester at the last, his skull grinning up from a snarl of weeds, mirror image of the cat-grin above, drowned moon, or a trick of reflection: the lake staring back., wearing tradition's bony grin. While high in the willows, in a tangle of branches, the wide smile of the Cheshire Cat, bright as a Japanese lantern, still swings in the tree with the wind, and the wind chimes tinkle their sparkle of tunes, and tomorrow sleeps like a kitten, curled in time's side, soft, unsuspecting, milk rimming its grin. -Eleanor Wilner

Page  96 96 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Rimming its grin with another wider more arched like Emmett Kelly's clown sweeping the light into darkness, wearing a teary frown like Norman of the Bates motel hovering over mummy primping her hair for her next social call, like Batman's nemesis, the Riddler, all the grinning grim of him: I arch my own long-staying never-smearing smile, my simple defense against it all. -Jean Toyama

Page  97 JEAN TOYAMA, ELEANOR WILNER, NELL ALTIZER 97 RENSHI ROUNDWILNER TO TOYAMA TO ALTIZER Written and exchanged, Late Winter 1996 Philadelphia-Honolulu-St. Peter, MN " now I can go on and on" like snow, white repetitions of the cold, no two the same (said Gertrude Stein) and yet to all intents and purposes, they do repeat: white white white white white white they make a sheet.. oh shit-the barometer falls more; already the degrees have dropped like climbers falling from a ledge, left zero far behind, and plummet endlessly through night; no light, between these sheets of ice, above, below-all the indications are of snow. More snow. The sky is gray, and reminiscent of the void. The gray is uniform, confederate, sad hue of the losing side, the color bled away; it seems that warmth in any form must be a dream stoked in the fireplaces of the mind, the halcyon hearth of make-believe where a log ignites and blue flames lick along the bark, and throw their heat; a white-hot center shows through glowing red, the flames cavort on the wired grid of the brain, its firescreen: for God's sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings, these winter tales to warm the neighborhood, fictions which confound the winter's loss: accounts of old kings shriven, Perdita found,

Page  98 98 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW queens restored from icy marble to a pinkish froth of breathing health... to hell with what is frozen in the beaks of crows, those worms like popsicles; to hell with Minnesota-drop the ice in scotch and soda, to hell with snow! And hello, Nell. Take heart, the calendar's prophetic: spring will come, though it bring stress (for April is the cruellest month)-Hallmark cards are on the side of light, and who are we, mere trolls of language at the bridge of thought, to speak, however well, of endless nought? Well, who indeed? And, in all this snow, why not? -Eleanor Wilner Why not Take Baudelaire's advice and get drunk: Il faut etre toujours ivre. Ivre, I say, like in Eve, grabbing that first syllable and crying out like some swan stuck in a frozen lake, no doubt not in. Eden. But what a joy that eeee, shrieked through the night, gliding over sheets of ice. Ivre-sound of delight, intoxication, exaltation, inebriation-that rare hiccough of our endeavor, as we troll the edge, making our song. -Jean Toyama

Page  99 JEAN TOYAMA, ELEANOR WILNER, NELL ALTIZER 99 Song When, frostbitten in the Taurus, quick words (mute, whistling, wingbeat, cygnus, woo-woo-ho) from Peterson's "Field Guide to Eastern Birds" counterpoints Haydn on the radio, and the map my tongue laps over landscapes variously mildew, umber, shadows of buried arrows, asparagus, stalks, rapes (turnips or scraped grapes?) twists like a cowpath and the wind, northwesterly, scours Swan Lake snow white so that the ribbony flock's swath, a cut above the hard, forgotten slough, vanishes like trumpeters in snow drafts or captives in blue chains, Trojan, Dakota Sioux, Andromache, I think of you. -Nell Altizer

Eamon GrennanGrennan, EamonFaith, Hope, and DangerVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 100-102http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:19

Page  100 EAMON GRENNAN FAITH, HOPE, AND DANGER A small brown and gold moth is lapping the livingroom light-bulb, who flew out of the folds of my sweater this morning like the soul, we've been told, leaving the body for free air and the fresh perils of light. I take note of the cryptic signals on his wings, their hint of Aztec and Inca, the touch of sun worship about them, and of his head that is all eye and absorbs a vast acropolis of light from the pear-shaped source above me, the mystery of which-being wrung in the long run from running waterI've never begun to fathom. Now 100

Page  101 EAMON GRENNAN 101 he has commenced as I knew he would kissing what fills him with inexplicable hungers and will any minute fall, as we all do, from that incandescent absolute to the safe dullness of the rug covering my writing-table -where he'll lie stunned, wings shut, till he rises again like a shriven angel toward the light that could be moving, he must feel, the sun and the other starsto fall near my hand again and rise and fall until, exhausted, I'll carry him outdoors and lay him down among the fuchsia shades where he can take his chances in the dark or toward dawn in the real world of beaks and talons. When I wakened there the other morning wondering what I was, I could remember nothing but the X-ray shape

Page  102 102 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW of what I knew I had run up against, a kind of famished dazzle and then blackout. What we call the desert fathers had a word for this: think of their long scouring in the Egyptian sun, how it singed them to the bone as they bentlight-headed from hunger, hope and faith-over the empty page, each grain of sand a burning word they sensed but couldn't touch with their tongues, each insect noise or watery birdcall or the ghostly whisper of mothwings in the eyeblink of dusk a soul-dementing dear distraction from the main business.

Jim DanielsDaniels, JimWrestlingVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 103-112http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:20

Page  103 JIM DANIELS WRESTLING When the Big O and I fought, nobody ever got hurt. We'd wrestle and call each other names. If one of us got the advantage, it meant the Hindu Torture. The Hindu involved sticking a blade of grass up the other person's nose. I have no idea where we got this from. If anyone knows, give me a call. Tickles like hell. That's how you won a fight between me and the Big O. The Big O was my best friend, Phil. Big as in fat, O as in Ostanski. He liked having that nickname. He didn't have much else distinguishing about him except being left-handed and having bigger breasts than any guy I knew, which made gym class pretty rough for him. O was a year ahead of me in school. When he was in the tenth grade, and I was in ninth, we had one class together-Electronics, with Mr. North. Mr. North said things like "No matter how much you shake and dance, a few drops always end up in your pants." "He should be teaching poetry with shit like that," O used to say. The O was my electronics partner, and together we were making a battery charger so when he got a car we'd be able to charge it up. That car's battery would never run down, we were making sure of that. Driving to school, that was the ultimate-we fantasized about driving to Burger King for lunch. We'd walked to and from school together since forever, it seemed, carrying our stupid brown bags. Fatass Andrews and Ed Greelish, two rockers, also walked to school together. I don't know Fatass's real first name. Even Mr. North called him Fatass. He was bigger than the Big O. He flunked at least once, just like Ed G., who we called Edgy. We called them the Tagteam Flunkies, though our own grades were nothing to brag about. Ed was one of the mute rockers, and Fatass was one of the mouthy ones, so they made a real pair. They both lived over on Dallas, two streets away from ours, on the other side of Ryan Road, the main 103

Page  104 104 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW drag. Dallas, the street of tough guys. I don't know what they did different over on Dallas, but they had more rockers per square inch than any street I know-you had Terry Rucker Mother Fucker, the three Rotelli brothers, Bill Earl and his cousin Tom who moved over from Lincoln High because they didn't have a street tough enough for him over there. And that's just the first few houses. I think Ed G. lifted weights or something. He wasn't fat, just strong. His muscles were always tensed up. He wore those short sleeve shirts that made his muscles bulge. They both wore black, and these big shitkicker boots, even in summer when you know their feet must've been sweating like pigs in there. I never understood how rockers could always wear black jeans all summer long and never sweat. I guess that's why I'd never make a good rocker. I have never in my entire life seen a rocker's legs outside of gym class, but even in gym class, you could still tell the rockers because they wore black socks. It's not like O and I were wimps or anything. We both smoked, and I believe we won the under-sixteen tag-team shoplifting crown the previous year, though Steve Monchak and Paul Lipton might have won if Paul hadn't gotten caught stealing cigars at Charlie's Market and been grounded for two months. Besides, we were in the dummy classes. Only the brainy guys could be real wimps. If you were a wimp and a dummy, people pretty much left you alone. We shoplifted at Tur-Ler's, our local variety store. Sandra, who worked there, looked the other way when we slid out with Levis and records tucked under our bulky winter coats. Summer was a problem. We just took candy and little shit then. Lots of kids got their first jobs there, but they only paid a buck an hour to start, below minimum wage, but Tur-Mr. Turman-he didn't give a shit, and the kids needed the money, so they didn't squawk. The O and I, shoplifting was our kind of squawking-squawking on the sly. The thing about Fatass was that, yes, he had a tough-guy reputation and only wore black, but he could rarely catch anybody, so his threats had a limit on them. Fatass took a few quick menacing steps, but like a rhino, the speed had a very limited range. He might have made a good heavyweight wrestler, if he'd been willing to cut his hair and play by the rules-the limits of the mat would have been a big help to him. The real trouble started between me and the Big O and Fatass and Edgy after I pinned Edgy in the gym class wrestling tournament

Page  105 JIM DANIELS 105 not only pinned him, but did it in fifteen seconds. Like I said, he was strong, but I knew the holds. When I was in seventh grade and O was in eighth, we used to go to the high school wrestling matches because they only cost 35 cents, while the basketball games cost a buck. And we liked to go see big Bill Chatka wrestle. He was the heavyweight king. When Chatka took somebody down, the gym floor shook. We ate our Tur-Ler's candybars and sat in the front row chanting "Chatka, Chatka, Chatka," till he pinned the poor guy. Chatka had pretty big boobs too, but nobody said shit to him. The Big O cried when he lost in the state finals to this guy who looked more like a sumo wrestler-so big he made Chatka look small. I knew all the holds because O and I used to practice on each other on my front lawn. I got Edgy in a cross face cradle before he knew what hit him. Bam, down came Coach Zeus's hand. Pin. Now, maybe I overdid the celebrating a little-0 and I gave each other high fives, and I stomped around the mat like Bobo Brazil-that was how we'd always celebrated during our Big-Time Wrestling matches. Edgy sat on the mat and glowered. As usual, he didn't say a word, but he looked more menacing on his knees than I'd ever seen him. The other rockers in class were all laughing at him. Fatass didn't have to take gym class-it was a great mystery. "If we could only find out how he got out of gym, he'd be eating out of our hand, I just know it," O said on more than one occasion. I knew the O suspected Fatass had bigger boobs than he did-he certainly didn't wear tight t-shirts like Edgy. I think he got out of gym because he was simply too fat. The O hated Fatass with a passion, ever since he had succeeded in getting a hold of the O in the school parking lot one morning before school-snuck up behind him and got him in a headlock. At the time, he wasn't particularly pissed off at 0, but being a rocker he wanted to rough him up some, just on principle. Keep the rep up, you know, and O was an easy target. He started walking around holding O in the headlock. "Let's go for a walk, Ostanski," he said. I was standing there with a bunch of other guys waiting for the bell. Fatass seemed like he was joking and shit, so I didn't worry too much. Then he pushed O's head down by his crotch and said, "C'mon homo, suck my dick." O was pleading, "C'mon, let me go, Fatass, c'mon." Fatass was clearly enjoying the attention of his captive audience. He said, "Oh Philip, that feels so good. Suck me like a good homo." O was starting to cry, I could tell. I didn't know if the others could tell yet or not, but

Page  106 106 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW I knew how his voice got higher when he was starting to lose it. The last thing you wanted to do was cry in front of a bunch of guys. It's all over then. The only one who could get away with that was the wrestler Crybaby McCarthy, and that's because everyone knew the crying was fake. "What'd you call me?" The 0 was confused. I mean, Fatass let everybody call him Fatass, and suddenly he was taking offense. "What'd you call me?" 0 mumbled, "Fatass." He was really choking back the tears-his face looked like it was crumbling, right up there beneath Fatass's big belly. The bell rang just then, though Fatass wasn't one to pay a lot of attention to bells. He was in no hurry to graduate, especially when he could pick on guys like 0 for years to come. "It's Mister Fatass to you. Call me Mister Fatass, and I'll let you go." His first name must have been really something goofy like Francis. "Mr. Fatass," Phil said, so quiet we could barely hear him. Most of the other guys were laughing. Some just shaking their heads. Some headed into school. A few stuck around hoping to see some blood. "Louder." "Mr. Fatass." Since most of the crowd was in the school now, he let O go. Phil ran away from the school, and I ran after him. I caught him easily, out by the football field. He was whoofing and wheezing, "Mother fucker, goddamn mother fucker," really crying now, letting it out. I handed him the handkerchief I carried for my allergies. Didn't want to be slinging snot all over the school. He blew his nose and looked at me, quiet now. A look that said "I know I'm a wimp, but I can't help it." "No shame in it," I lied. 0 tried to hand me my handkerchief back. "Keep it," I said, "I got a million of them." What Fatass did to him was worse than getting your ass kicked. "I mean, who can take Fatass?" I said. "Nobody in the tenth grade, at least once he gets a hold of you." "Maybe Tommy Conway. I think he could take him," 0 said, serious now, happy to be talking away from himself. "Yeah, maybe Conway. Conway, and maybe the Brute." "Brute Bennett? No, no way." "I don't think Fatass even got a dick," I said. "That's why he don't have to take gym. Guy ain't got no dick." We swam naked in our high school.

Page  107 JIM DANIELS 107 O laughed at that long and hard. We both got a good laugh out to clear the air. "We're late for school, buddy," he said. "No shit," I said, and together we headed back. After that, Fatass used to yell at us across Ryan Road when we walked home from school, him and Edgy on one side, us on the other. There were four lanes of heavy traffic between us-no way was Fatass going to get across without getting bounced in the air like a giant basketball. "Phil-lup, ya gonna come over and suck my dick again? C'mon Philip, you fucking homo." And to me, "Hey Buford, you big shisshy, why don't you shay shome shing." I had a speech defect that I'd just about overcome, but Fatass had a long memory, and he went with what he had. He didn't have much imagination when it came to talking trash. We just ignored him, mumbling under our breath, turning red. The day I pinned Edgy, I met O after school by the tenth grade lockers. Fatass had been talking around that Edgy was going to get me on the way home. I was worried, since Ed G. could run and maybe catch me if it came down to it. Running from Fatass was a game, except for someone like the 0. Fatass was such a freak no one would call you a coward for running away. You could laugh about it later, as if, "Yeah, got away from Fatass today. Close call. Ha, ha, ha." But Edgy, he was in my wrestling weight class, and hadn't I just pinned his sorry ass with my cross face cradle? Why should I be afraid to take him on? I had this problem with fighting: I didn't like getting punched. For one thing, it hurt. Wrestling was fine, but nobody wrestled anymore, not out on the street where it counted. Street fighting with a rockerthat didn't appeal to me at all. They didn't call them shitkicker boots for nothing. O walked up. He had a book in his hand. "Whoa, what's with the book?" I asked, trying to keep things light. It was a matter of pride in our school not to be seen lugging books home, especially if you were tracked dumb like O and I were. Those biology guys could take their books home, but not us Future Shoprats of America guys. Hell, you could get kicked out of the club for that. We couldn't imagine ourselves working in a factory, but we weren't able to imagine anything else, not then. "Some English I gotta read," he said sheepishly. "Oral report." "Oral report. Bummer." With my speech defect, I dreaded any occasion that required public speaking. "Yeah," he said. "I'd better load up on the deodorant tomorrow."

Page  108 108 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW He lifted up his arms, and I saw the huge sweatstains. I looked down at the book. Animal Farm, by George Orwell. "A farm book?" "Never mind," he said. "You'll have to read it next year." "Listen," I said, "we gotta ditch Fatass and Edgy-Fatass said Edgy's gonna kick my ass." "Oh, man, I knew something like this was gonna happen. Why'd you have to go and pin him?" "I couldn't help it. The ghost of Chatka took over." Chatka, our hero, had been shot and killed in an armed robbery last year after he graduated. He was working at a party store when these two guys came in. Chatka against one guy with a gun, I'd take Chatka. Two guys? He didn't have a chance. Only on Big-Time Wrestling did one guy ever take two. We snuck out the side of the school opposite from where we lived and headed over to Tur-Ler's. "Sandy says they got some new albums in," I said. "We can't steal no albums. We ain't got no jackets." "Oh, yeah. Well, let's check them out for the next cool day." It was mid-May, warm enough for short sleeves. Ass-kicking weather. Sandy was just putting on her Tur-Ler's smock when we walk in. "Hey Sandy," I said. "Hey Timmy," she said. Sandy was the only one who still called me Timmy besides my mother. I let her because we'd been babies together-she lived right next door and was the closest thing to a sister I was ever going to get. "Hey Sandy," O said. "It's the little one," she said. That went back to when O and I were sleeping in my tent last summer and Sandy snuck out of her house and came over and we played strip poker. It was something O and I had done together ourselves once. Sandy added a new exciting element. We didn't kiss-we were too close for that-but I got a hardon for her. The O had stayed soft. I thought it was a little mean for Sandy to bring that up, but sometimes she seemed jealous of the O and me being so close. O made a face at her, then we checked out the new albums, putting the ones we wanted to steal in the back of the stacks so people who were actually looking to buy a record couldn't find them. We wandered around the store killing time, but Mr. "Ler" Lerman was following us around asking, "Can I help you boys?" So we headed out, thinking maybe it was safe, but rounding the corner to the Rat Place,

Page  109 JIM DANIELS 109 the empty lot between Tur-Ler's and A & P, we bumped right into Fatass and Edgy. "Shit," I mumbled, backing up a step. "Hey boys," Fatass said with a big evil smile on his face. He had this voice, kind of lispy and threatening at the same time-gave me the creeps. "Edgy here has a score to settle." I think Fatass watched too many gangster movies. "Buford don't want to fight," 0 said. If he knew one, thing about me, he knew I didn't want to fight. "Stay out of this, little one," Fatass said. 0 and I looked at each other. We were both thinking, where did that come from, Sandy? That threw the 0 off, and he stayed silent. Edgy looked at Fatass, who nodded, "Go get him, Ed." He was like the Weasel, the Sheik's manager on Big-Time Wrestling. Sheik never said a word because he supposedly didn't speak English. The Weasel did all the talking. I'm sure Edgy knew a few words like "Duh" and "Fuck you." Edgy rushed up and grabbed me around the neck, choking me. I grabbed his arms and twisted, and we both fell on the dirt and gravel. No grass around, so the Hindu was definitely not an option. We were rolling around, and he kept trying to punch me, but I was squirming and rolling and he couldn't get any leverage. Edgy was breathing hard and saying "punk" over and over. Fatass was yelling "Punch him, Ed, kick his fucking ass." The 0 was kind of dancing around. He didn't want to get too close to Fatass. A crowd was gathering, some more of the Dallas rockers who hung out at Kowalski's Drugs, where they got their cigarettes. "Get 'em Buford," somebody yelled. I was so surprised to hear my own last name that I almost took a punch from Edgy flush on the jaw. I twisted and it hit the top of my head. Edgy was pissed because that one hurt his hand. He was on top of me, and I couldn't seem to shake him. He was getting in a few good licks, and it was starting to sink in that I was in the process of getting my ass kicked. Then out of nowhere an enormous rocker I'd never seen before lifted Edgy off me in one motion. He said to me, "Are you a Buford? Larry's brother?" "Yeah," I said, spitting dust and trying not to cry. "Do you want to fight this guy?" "No, not really," I said, as if I was thinking it over.

Page  110 110 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW He grabbed Edgy and kicked him in the ass with one of the pointiest, shiniest, slickest shitkickers I've ever seen. They made Fatass's seem like those rubber boots we used to wear in winter. Then he turned to Fatass, "What are you looking at, Fatass?" I bet he didn't even know that was his nickname. I bet he was just calling him that. "What are you looking at, huh?" Fatass seemed to be trying to crawl into himself, but he was so fat, there was no way. "Nothing," he said, and jiggled away after Edgy. The guy, he didn't even look at me again. He just walked off and got in a sleek yellow Barracuda and squealed his tires, pealing out. The O, he was beside himself. I'd never seen him happier. He helped me up and was brushing me off as the crowd wandered away. "Hey man," he said, "You woulda kicked his ass. That guy, he was doing Edgy a favor. You see him scare the shit out of Fatass? Man, I never seen someone go from being so tough to so wimpy so fast since Man Mountain Cannon became Crybaby McCarthy." O was talking so fast I could only half hear him. I was still trying to slow my heartbeat down some to get it out of my throat, breathing in and out, tasting a little blood, but just a little, from a fat lip. We were both so worked up, we just started walking any which way. I mean, really stepping too. The O, who usually waddled, was striding like a pro. We even ended up walking down Dallas. One of the Earls was working on his car in the street. He didn't look up. After awhile, I noticed the O's empty hands. "What about Animal Farm?" "Forget it," he said. "I'll make something up." We stopped down at Shaw Park and sat on the swings smoking and laughing, replaying and modifying the story. O picked a long blade of grass. "Should have given old Edgy the Hindu. I bet those muscles of his would have just about exploded," O said, tensing up his body and contorting his face. We both laughed. "I never seen that guy around the house," I said, "but he knows Larry. I owe big brother Larry big time." 0, who had no older brother, liked hanging around my house when Larry was home. It was like he had a crush on him or something. Larry, a champion rocker, had graduated the previous year and was working in the plant with my dad. He was so much older than me that we'd never been close. "Yeah, you owe Larry, that's for sure," he said. He started really swinging, up and down, pumping his arms, then he did the craziest thing for a big kid like him to do, he jumped off and

Page  111 JIM DANIELS 111 landed in the muddy grass. He bounced up, limping a little, but laughing, laughing uncontrollably. That night after dinner, we met under the streetlight for our evening prowl. O and I had a route we liked to walk, our little circuit, smoking and walking and shooting the shit. Every night we passed by the old Ryan Theater, which had closed the previous year. The marquee out front still read CLOSED FOR REPAIRS. Or C O F R RE. Kids had started busting out the glass and knocking down the letters when it was clear the Ryan was never going to reopen, like most of the businesses in our neighborhood-everything was moving out to the suburbs. That night, we were surprised to see only one letter left. We weren't very good shots with the rocks, so hadn't knocked any letters down. This looked like our last chance. "Sure would like to have that," he said. That one letter was an O, and right then, I knew I had to get it for him. I picked up a handful of stones, and when there were no cars passing, zinged them up against the marquee. I grabbed one handful after another while the O danced around, watching out for cops. Finally, I nicked the edge of it, and it swung, then fell slowly down. The O reached out for it, and though he bobbled it and it hit the cement, only a small piece chipped off. He handed it to me, not presuming. "Hey, it's yours-a Big O for the Big O." "Thanks, man," he said, holding it tight, raising it above his head, dancing around. "O, O, O," I chanted, dancing with him till we were out of breath. After that, we didn't want to press our luck-we'd had enough of our little dreams fulfilled for one day. We headed back toward our street and sat on the corner of Otis and Pearl, where the streetlight was burned out. The same streetlight Carl Minski crashed his car into when the cops were chasing him. You could still find little pieces of windshield glass in the street and in the grass around the pole. We called it Minski glass. The O was scooping his hands along the curb, as if panning for gold in the piles of dirt that always accumulated there. He sifted in the dark until he pulled up a tiny square of safetee glass. "A rare piece of Minski glass," he said, "a little red. Maybe some dried blood on it." "Bullshit," I said, "you can't even see it." Though that was a lie. It twinkled in the moonlight. Some nights it seemed like our city rained

Page  112 112 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW broken glass, and then there were nights like this, where it seemed like you were getting the last little pieces of everything. "Ruby-red Minski glass," he laughed. I punched him in the shoulder, but I was laughing too. It was nice that we could sit together in the dark like that and laugh. Tomorrow would bring more taunts of "shlurpee" and "big boobs." Hell to pay for a lost Animal Farm and a battery charger that didn't charge. But that night, the 0 had his 0, and I had been rescued by the Barracuda Man, as we would come to call him, even later, when he pumped gas down at Ed's and wore a shirt that said Bobby on it when we knew his name was Ray. He reached over and put his arm around me-something we just never did. "Hey Timmy," o said, "we make a great tag-team." I looked at him, and he looked at me. "Get away from me, you homo," I said, but didn't move his arm away. He just grinned. Years later, when we both lived far from that dirty city of our births, far from Dallas and all that seemed important then, I found out 0 really was gay. I had some kind of feeling this might be true on the night of the Barracuda and the red plastic 0. And he must have known it then too, though it'd be years before he'd admit it to himself, and to his crazy parents, who then wrote out new wills to disinherit him, though his father was only a janitor and his mother had nothing to her name. The Big 0. He told me once that he felt like kissing me sometimes back then, but pushed that thought away like a bad dream. "'I didn't know then that it was really a good dream," he said. He was my best friend who knew I was a coward. In my heart of hearts, I loved him, I surely did. Back then, I might have kissed him back, back when we knew all the holds, but we didn't know why.

Donald HallHall, DonaldTyler JealousVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 113-116http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:21

Page  113 DONALD HALL TYLER JEALOUS Forty years later, a grandmother four times over, Louise looked her age. Her waist was no longer small, and her face puffed as round as a beachball, but Tyler had married the most beautiful girl from high school-Homecoming Queen as junior, head cheerleader as seniorand never noticed that she had altered. They still made love twice a week, often on the sofa between shows, until one Sunday when Louise mentioned her old boyfriend Ricky Domingo, who had been fullback and linebacker on the football team. It was double-header day on Fox, and they were switching from Bears-Redskins to GiantsCowboys. Louise said she didn't know why but she was thinking about "that picnic, spring of senior year, the one for athletes and cheerleaders, you know, June it must have been. Ricky was funny that day." Tyler had not been an athlete; he felt a prick of jealousy that went away. Whenever he saw Ricky these days-fat and bald with his badge dangling above his left teat in a gaping blue uniform as he directed traffic at Rex and Eddlestone-he felt superior; it was Tyler, not Ricky, who got Louise. "I remember that night," said Tyler. He liked remembering things; even when he sorted mail for his route, he put the streets and houses in the correct order right away. "A bunch of us had a couple of beers at Colony's that night. I remember because Eddie and Cass came around for a burger, after that picnic of yours, and they said something about somebody horsing around at the picnic. With a busted rubber. I remember." Thinking back forty years, he could see Eddie and Cass, the way they looked then. Louise was silent. "Were you there?" he said. "I mean, at Colony's that night? Usually, I'd remember if you were there." Louise blushed. She didn't blush often and when she did the flesh 113

Page  114 114 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW of her cheeks reddened where they hung at her jawline. She ate a chocolate-covered cherry. When Tyler had a holiday, he bought her chocolate-covered cherries. Monday had been Columbus Day. '"What?" he said. "What do you mean?" After a moment she said, "No. I wasn't there. No." "Where were you?" "Rick wanted to go to the police station, doing somebody a favor. I went with him." Domingo had always wanted to be on the force; they let Domingo hang around the station while he was still in high school. He always was an asshole. "Why?" said Tyler. "What happened?" Louise's neck turned purple. Tyler stared at her; it was Tyler not Ricky who got Louise. "Well," she said, "I guess somebody who was on duty wanted to go off someplace and there we were. Alone." Her voice trailed off. "I mean they weren't supposed to leave the station but sometimes they did." Her eyes would not look into Tyler's eyes. "I think one of them had a girlfriend, maybe, and her husband worked Saturday nights." "You mean you did it?" said Tyler. "You mean you and Ricky did it? At the police station?" "You knew," said Louise. "You knew you weren't the first." "I knew about Frog," said Tyler. "That was later. That was when I was in Spain." Tyler had spent four years in the Air Force, and when he came home from Spain Louise was waiting on table at the Sophocles Cafe. Even after four years in the service, it took courage to ask her out. "You told me about Frog and that time you went to Ithaca." "Well, this was the first time," said Louise. "It was so long ago, Tyler. I was just a girl... I was ashamed, goodness knows. But he was so... you know." "Where did you do it?" said Tyler. His heart felt sore in his chest. "Did you do it on the floor?" "It was in a cell," said Louise. "There weren't any prisoners in jail that night. Nobody was there or we wouldn't have done it. There was a cell with a mattress." Tyler felt nauseated: Louise the cheerleader, Homecoming Queen--doing it in a jail cell. When Tyler drove past the policeman now, maybe Domingo was thinking of Louise forty years ago, spread wide on a cot in a jail cell. Tyler's mind scurried with questions, and for a while Louise answered him. As they talked Tyler undressed.

Page  115 DONALD HALL 115 When Louise saw him take off his clothes, she opened her dress, slipped off her pants, and lay down on the sofa. But before they could start, Tyler thought of another question. An hour later Louise pulled her pants back on and sat up on the sofa; Tyler remained naked. "Were you wearing a dress or did you still have shorts on from the picnic?" "There must have been bugs in the bed," said Louise. "I was so ashamed. Next day I had bites all over.." Louise laughed but Tyler didn't. "All over your butt?" said Tyler. "Bedbugs," he said. "What were you wearing?" He lit a cigar and paced back and forth smoking rapidly. A whole ash fell into the white hair of his chest and stayed there until he sat in the La-Z-Boy when it tumbled further into a stomach-fold. At first Louise tried to answer his questions-"What position?"-but when he continued half an hour later-"Did you bleed much?" "Did he use a rubber?"-she turned first sullen and then angry. Red-faced again, Louise said that she had answered enough questions; she had answered too many questions and it was stupid to talk about something that happened way, way back and it didn't matter anyway. She wouldn't say anything more. Louise set her mouth in a line and when Tyler went on questioning-"Were you sore?" "When did you do it next time?" "Did you do it again in a cell?"-she would not answer him and they went to bed, after the second game ended, in anger and silence. It was mostly silence between them then. Tyler couldn't stop the scene of the jailcell from rerunning in his head. As he drove to work or looked at television or tried to amuse his grandsons, he watched repeatedly while Louise of the highschool corridors with her tiny waist and big breasts peeled her halter off over her head, let her shorts drop down, and embraced the fullback in a prison cell with bars at the window, dirty mattress, bedbugs, and open toilet. Sometimes, as he played the scene she was wearing her cheerleader costume. Driving by Rex and Eddlestone, Tyler looked at the obese patrolman with hatred. On Veteran's Day he forgot to buy chocolate-covered cherries. Jealousy scourged Tyler awake and asleep until Christmas Eve. That afternoon, coming home tired in early darkness, after delivering half a ton of Christmas cards, he stopped at the Sophocles Cafe for a beer; old Soph was dead but they kept the name. Stepping to the bar

Page  116 116 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW for his Rolling Rock, Tyler's heart pounded when he saw that the figure turning away from the bar was Ricky Domingo-wearing huge chinos and a checked shirt, broad leather belt supporting his stomach. "Hey, Tyler," said Domingo. "Hey. Come sit down. Long time." Trembling, Tyler brought his bottle and chilled glass to the booth with Domingo. He felt like picking a fight, but Domingo was affable, chatty, and drunk. Repeating himself, he bragged about his grandchildren, and talked about retiring from the force to a mobile home in South Carolina. He didn't ask about Louise until he came back from the men's room, when he asked, "How's the Mrs.?" Domingo had forgotten Louise's name-or maybe that Louise and Tyler were married. Tyler felt scorn for the fat drunk who couldn't remember anything-who only asked about Tyler's wife in order to complain about his own. She was sick all the time, said Domingo-always, all the time. "Most days, she don't get out of bed." Domingo laughed and shrugged his shoulders. "It don't matter none." He punched Tyler on the shoulder, as if he were telling a good one. "I can't get it up. Fifteen years I can't get it up. Hah-hah." Tyler's shoulder hurt. On the way home he bought chocolate-covered cherries for under the tree and felt a twinge in his trousers.

Diane WakoskiWakoski, DianeThe EscortsVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 117-118http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:22

Page  117 DIANE WAKOSKI THE ESCORTS When the actresses, like glove-shaped velvety bats trapped in a room, hear their names called and stand up, slightly blind in all the lightseven the glitter reflecting off their diamond earrings and braceletsand look desperately around the room full of twinkling celebrities, knowing they have to flit up to the stage and receive this award, they are shaking with unbelief: they've actually won! and disoriented in the crowded room, and with unfamiliar shoes, and dresses that rest precariously on their bosoms, heavy jewelry and somewhere in a costume with no pockets a piece of paper on which is scribbled what they hoped they'd have a chance to say if they won, there is always a moment when you think, "Oh, my god, she's going to trip over someone! She's going to stumble or fall" but then they are there, those escorts in their traditional tuxedoes, black armed, white breasted, young Tyrone Powers or Clark Gables, and instantly one arm is under the winning arm of this actress or around her Scarlett O'Hara waist, and they are moving as well as Fred and Ginger, so that she looks as if she too floats and he can steer her anywhere. How comforting those young men in tuxedoes, there always in just the right place, efficiently escorting 117

Page  118 118 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW those velvety girls without panic away from the crowd and out, up to the freedom of the stage where they fly off into the oratory of gratitude and acceptance. Oh, that we should all have such tuxedoed men waiting for us when we panic, trapped, feeling as if we are hanging upsidedown in a room where we don't belong.

Carolyn KizerKizer, CarolynSecond Time AroundVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 119-120http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:23

Page  119 CAROLYN KIZER SECOND TIME AROUND You're entangled with someone more famous than you Who happens to vanish. You marry again in haste, perhaps to a nurse Or your late wife's good friend, Someone whose name will never appear in print Except, perhaps, in your entry for Who's Who; Someone obliging and neutral, not too good looking To whom you say, "Darling, the supper was excellent." Free, now, of that brilliant aura, that physical dazzle That you always acknowledged, insisting You relished her fame, believing you meant it, And love her you did, but you're so relieved she's gone. How sweet to embrace the mundane, endorse the ordinary, In its starchy smock or its ruffled apron, Saying, "Bronwyn-or Carole, or ElsieSuits me down to the ground." The ground. There's to be no more celestial navigation; It's the end of smart missives, of aerial bombardment. One can relax, and slump into being human. Sometimes you sift through her papers When you're bereft of ideas, Though of course ideas are not what stimulates art: It's snapshots of people in old-fashioned bathing suits, The man she saw by the road with the three-legged dog, That week in Venice when it never stopped raining, the odor Of freshly washed hair when she dried it in sunlight... Something she lightly sketched in that needs fleshing out; Could you? Should you? You put it to one side. 119

Page  120 120 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW With a minor effort of will you stop thinking about her, And decide instead to update your vita, Or work some more on that old piece On Descartes that has always given you trouble. And Bronwyn, or Elsie, or Carole Comes tiptoeing into your study with a nice cup of coffee.

A Portfolio of PoetsVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 121-128http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:24

Page  121 A PORTFOLIO OF POETS LORNA GOODISON Photo by Bemd Bb5hner

Page  122 MARY CROW MARIANNE BORUCH Photo by Joan D. Hackett

Page  123 MARILYN CHIN Photo by Joanna Eldredge Morrissey

Page  124 LUCIA PERILLO

Page  125 JIM DANIELS Photo by Robert Turney

Page  126 MAXINE KUMIN Photo by Thomas Victor ~ 1982

Page  127 DONALD HALL Photo by Steven W. Lewis

Page  128 Robert Frost with holders of fellowships at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, August 1960. From left, novelist Edward Stephens, X. J. Kennedy, poet Claire McAllister, Robert Frost, nonfiction writer Martin Dibner, and children's book writer, Robert Burch. Photo by John F. Smith, Jr. Courtesy of Middlebury College

X.J. KennedyKennedy, X.J.Robert Frost OverheardVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 129-138http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:25

Page  129 X. J. KENNEDY ROBERT FROST OVERHEARD That summer in 1960, when I was still laboring under the notion that the best poetry has to be fiercely impassioned, the work of Robert Frost didn't much appeal to me. At the time, my touchstones-the poems I judged all others against-were poems obviously fraught with emotion: Hopkins's "The Windhover," Blake's "Tyger," Robert Lowell's wild-eyed "Drunken Fisherman." Next to those flamboyant bards, a poet who could calmly say, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," struck me as hopelessly tame. But a few days on a high plateau in the mountains of Vermont were to change my mind. I had been given a fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference on the strength of having had a first book accepted. I arrived on the Bread Loaf campus expecting a kind of Olympus with immortals walking about in togas, communing with those seeking to be inspired. But if the conference was indeed an occasion for veteran writers to pass down their knowledge to novices, it was also a convivial party that Director John Ciardi annually threw for himself and his wife and children and friends. The rank novices, who paid tuition, remained on the fringe. Some of the same staff-members were said to return every year: writers Nancy Hale, Eunice Blake, William Raney, William Sloane (who was also Ciardi's editor)-even Ciardi's family doctor, Irving Klompus, designated the conference physician. At scheduled lectures, the published writers would declaim their views, but before lunch and before dinner and for half the night, they would congregate in Treman Cottage, far removed from the paying customers. At meals, they kept their own company at the faculty table. Ciardi was determined to protect them from being annoyed. He spelled out his policy to the customers: no one who hadn't paid to have his manuscript read was to solicit any free advice. The night before the conference started, Ciardi took me aside. He told me not to get too cocky. He had read far better poems than 129

Page  130 130 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW mine-I didn't doubt that he had-and he spelled out my duties. I was to eat with the customers, and make dates with six or eight of them to discuss their manuscripts. With the other holders of fellowships, I would ply the dishrag at Treman, making sure there were always clean glasses for pre-lunch bloody Marys and for pre-dinner and evening libations. In return, I would room at the cottage and hobnob with the immortals. The venerable Dudley Fitts would confer with me over my poems. And one day I'd receive the ultimate reward: I would meet Robert Frost. Despite my lack of enthusiasm for Frost's work, what little I had read of it, I looked forward to seeing him. John Ciardi loved to tell of one occasion at Bread Loaf when Frost, in front of an audience, had exulted in the ingenious rhythm of one of his lines-"D'ya hear that? That's two spondees there." All of a sudden a woman in the audience had stood up, shaking with indignation, and said something like, "Mr. Frost, poets are supposed to be the unacknowledged legislators of the world. They have a high and universal calling. Mr. Frost, you don't mean to say you actually care about iambs and trochees and stuff like that, do you?" And Frost had glowered at her from under his shaggy brows-"Care about it? Lady, I revel in it." As was his custom, Frost was summering in his cabin on a farm he owned and shared with the Theodore Morrisons in the hamlet of Ripton, just down the road. Since 1938, Morrison's wife Kay had served Frost as secretary, manager, protector, and sometime nurse. Lately, biographer Jeffrey Meyers (Robert Frost, 1996) has made news headlines by claiming that Frost and Kay became lovers besides. Old, familiar gossip. Back in 1993 David Haward Bain noted in his history of the conference, Whose Woods These Are, "It seems possible that for an undetermined but relatively short time, a sexual relationship existed between the two, and that they grew out of it." That guess seems as good as any. The Morrisons conveyed Frost to Bread Loaf that first evening, Kay walking at his elbow, steering him along. Ted Morrison followed at a distance-minor poet, Harvard teacher, and the previous director of the conference for twenty-four years. Like his poems, he seemed low-keyed and diffident. He wouldn't even let Ciardi introduce him to the audience. Eighty-six when I first saw him, Frost looked his age. His stocky form moved ponderously. He seldom smiled, but, in front of an audience, his craggy face would occasionally break out with a flash of

Page  131 X. J. KENNEDY 131 spirit. As a reader-aloud of his work, Frost was like no other I had heard before. Sometimes he would say a poem twice, making sure we had taken it in, spending less time in reading than in rambling talk. In all, he would deliver no more than six or seven poems. The ones he chose impressed me deeply. Probably they were all poems he knew by heart, for according to Ciardi he was too vain to wear his reading glasses in public. I had never paid close attention to those poems before. To hear them delivered in Frost's flat, matter-of-fact voice made them strike me with fresh force. One that I loved was "Tree at My Window," apparently about coming perilously close to losing one's mind. Clearly, it was possible to convey profound, even scary, emotion in a poem that was quiet and delicate. Frost's reading was unrhetorical. He practically tossed off this moving poem as though he were reciting station-stops from a railroad timetable. Then Frost recited the well-known "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," and told how he had written it. He had been working all night on a different poem, having a hard time with it. Then just before dawn, sleepless and tired, had found himself writing this one. Not knowing how to end it and needing one more line, he had wearily repeated "And miles to go before I sleep"-and decided to hang on to that repetition after all. On the problem of closure, he read another poem-was it "Neither Far Out Nor In Deep"?-and remarked, "If you don't know how to end a poem, you can end it on a question." He believed poets needed to know something outside of books. Farming had supplied him with plenty of common knowledge. He chided us on not knowing our stars, and bragged that he could go outside on any night of the year and identify all the constellations. Frost created the illusion that a poetry reading isn't theater but spontaneous talk-though it inevitably is a performance, and I don't doubt that Frost's was shrewdly calculated. At moments he seemed oblivious to us, talking out loud to himself, unconcerned that we overheard. Newly taken with Frost's poetry, I was sorry I hadn't written down his every sentence. I promised myself to do so the next time he returned. Two days later, on August 30, Kay Morrison brought him back again, and as I recall, his working day unfolded methodically. In the morning, we fellowship-holders were introduced to him, and he shook hands, and we got to sit in a row of chairs by his side and have

Page  132 132 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW a group picture taken. Young poet Claire McAllister sat next to Frost. Addressing herself to his good ear, she bellowed a few loud compliments. After lunch in the dining hail with the faculty, Frost isolated himself at the Inn, where, without ever meeting the purchasers, he laboriously signed stacks of his Complete Poems that people had paid for in advance, transcribing their names from slips of paper that Kay Morrison doled out to him. Nearly every paying customer, it seemed, had bought a book. I cherish the copy he signed "'Joe Kennedy from Robert Frost, Bread Loaf 1960," and sometimes I take it down and look at his drudging fountain-pen inscription and pretend that he knew who I was. In the late afternoon., Frost combined a reading of his poems with an off-the-cuff talk. Being a graduate student at the time, I was used to talking lecture notes rapidly. Dutifully, I set myself to save the gist of Frost's remarks that afternoon. In the Little Theatre, where Frost held sway over the massed throng, Ciardi relayed questions from the audience by shouting them into his right ear., his better one. Despite this difficulty, Frost seemed to come alive before so devout an audience, and responded to some of the questions quickly and wittily, with surprising fire. With a few lacunae for things I didn't record, his performance went like this. ""Poe says your heart strings are a lute, and you pluck 'em, finding a string that's just right. If there's no quick left in you to be touched, you're dead.",. "Simple people like Harry Truman think that when. we know enough, we stop fighting each other. You know too much by the time you're forty anyway., so don't be in a hurry to find out."JJ Frost recalled how, when he had talked to us the other night, he had suddenly been reminded of The Education of Henry Adams. While saying his poem "'Come In," he had stopped at the lines "CAlmost like a call to come in / To the dark and lament." Interrupting the poem, he had mentioned Adams's tendency to hesitate before trusting his own feelings. Poems, he said, often began for him by establishing such connections. "'It's seeing a connection between two things that nobody noticed before. That's what sets me going. But that isn't all of it-that's just how it starts sometimes.." "When you begin as a young writer, you're everybody but yourself. My real model was Palgrave's Golden Treasury, one of the earliest things I saw. Also, the Virgil Eclogues." Someone in the audience

Page  133 X. J. KENNEDY 133 asked, "When did you first start writing like yourself?" For reply, Frost began reading aloud his early poem "My Butterfly": Thine emulous fond flowers are dead, too, And the daft sun-assaulter, he That frighted thee so oft is fled or dead: Save only me.... After those stilted opening lines, so larded with stale poetic diction, he paused and said, "That's somebody else." Then he read the next stanza: The gray grass is scarce dappled with the snow; Its two banks have not shut upon the river.... He seemed to exult. "I knew I was doing something then. Those two lines-that was the beginning of ME. That's just another way to say, 'I'm frozen over.' " He read the rest of the stanzaBut it is long agoIt seems foreverSince first I saw thee glance, With all thy dazzling other ones In airy dalliance, Precipitate in love, Tossed, tangled, whirled and whirled above, Like a limp rose-wreath in a fairy dance. And he added, "Now, the only thing there that doesn't belong to me is the wordfairy." "Why didn't editors print your poems at first?" another questioner wanted to know. "They didn't see 'em!" he snapped back. "I was a haughty youngster. I didn't want to plaster my walls with rejection slips. You want to hear a much-rejected poem?" He began to recite "Bond and Free," from his third book, Mountain IntervalLove has earth to which she clings With hills and circling arms aboutWall within wall to shut fear out. "That came back rubber-stamped all over with the people who read it, and the stamp I sent with it pasted on the back of it, and it was shut with a pin." And he gave what I can only call a leer, triumphantly. Ciardi, at Frost's right ear, put in a question of his own. What about

Page  134 134 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW the criticism that "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" contains a death wish? I suspected that Frost had arranged beforehand for Ciardi to raise this question. Ever since 1959 when Lionel Trilling had called Frost "a terrifying poet," the opinion had been echoed widely; and I wondered whether Frost had wanted a chance to respond to it. As if expecting the question, he didn't seem discomfited. "That could be. Or it could be that life is lovely, dark and deep, and I must be getting on. It could mean that, too. He goes on, doesn't he?" I wasn't convinced that the poem makes life lovely, dark and deep, instead of the woods, but didn't doubt that the speaker goes on to keep his promises. (A yet more obvious death wish occurs in Frost's "To Earthward," whose masochistic speaker longs for bigger and better pain, and wants to feel rough earth at body-length.) In an implied reference to critics, including Trilling, Frost added, "I don't care who goes me one better, so long as they don't drag [a poem] down to the operating table and cut its gizzard open." Still, annoying though they were at times, critics could be useful. "Criticism is good for you. Like being slapped on one cheek and then on the other one: 'Come on, do something."' But even the best critics can go wrong. "Conrad Aiken, a friend of mine, said Emily Dickinson was like Emerson and Thoreau combined. Gee willikins! So you don't pay too much attention to these biffs and barns you get from people. You turn the other cheek until you get in a position to retaliate." His poems have often been misinterpreted. "The Road Not Taken," he claimed, was a war poem. "I wrote it in 1914, 1915, in Europe. Sent it to a friend at the front who 'might be telling this with a sigh.' I wonder if I should tell that. If I didn't, you might think it was about me." (That Frost had indeed meant himself was how his friend Edward Thomas had misunderstood the poem. Frost may have been suppressing a painful memory. According to Lawrance Thompson, Frost had written "The Road Not Taken" to chide Thomas on his habitual indecision. It was ironic that Frost had sent it to Thomas at that moment. Still at home in England in 1915 when he received it, Thomas had made up his mind to enlist. The decision cost him his life. At 39, he would be killed by a German shell in 1917.) "I've never written a single review," Frost boasted. "No criticism. Unlike Eliot. Fine fellow, but I think he takes religion different from how I would. He was willing to let Ezra cut The Waste Land down by half. That's a different nature from my nature." When he said he had written no criticism, Frost was ignoring the many prefaces, tributes

Page  135 X. J. KENNEDY 135 to other poets, and critical essays he had supplied-as the Library of America Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays now makes amply clear. Next he read "The Bearer of Evil Tidings," a fable in which a messenger decides not to deliver his message after all, and so avoids being punished for it. "A popular painting of this title shows a messenger decapitated," Frost added. "I wrote that poem in order to get back at a friend who always told me what people told against me, so he could tell me what he said in my defense. Sent it to him on a postcard with a reproduction of the painting on the back. I always remembered what had been said against me, rather than what he said." Asked whether he wrote consciously in New England speech, he thought a moment, then said he doubted that. "My knowledge doesn't go into any of this speech rhythm knowledge. I just talk the way I talk. I don't think it's local." He dismissed Carl Sandburg's efforts to write poetry in an American speech. "Sandburg and me, we're friends after a fashion. I met him one time in the Library of Congress. He was wearing a get-up, a big hat and a hair-do. I greeted him, 'Here comes the Slob of the Sunburnt West.'" Another questioner: "Why are you so difficult to translate into other languages?" "I wonder. I think I'm an excessive case of a play on words. You get words that come over in translation, but the phrases don't-the little plays on words." "Mr. Frost," a woman asked, "do you think America is going to the dogs?" "Don't ask me, lady, I'm such a rank insider, I can't tell." His appreciative audience howled. After the show, when Frost, with Kay at his elbow, was shuffling back to the Morrisons' car to be driven home, a few of us were lounging on the side porch of the inn. As he approached, all of us spontaneously leaped out of our chairs, like sailors snapping to attention when the Chief of Naval Operations walks by. He waved in acknowledgment, but he had had a long day. He kept on going. With my newly autographed Complete Poems, I played hookey from lectures for a while, to retire to a quiet grove and become better acquainted with Frost's work. Breeze riffled the leaves of the stout old maple I sat propped against, and "Tree at My Window" suddenly made more sense to me. Frost's comparison of his own head to

Page  136 136 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW the tree, through which wild winds can play, struck me at the time as marvelous, and still does: Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground, And thing next most diffuse to cloud, Not all your light tongues talking aloud Could be profound. As I read this and other poems, I could now imagine them uttered in Frost's own voice. I was beginning to lose my prejudice against poems that sounded casual, poems in which intense feeling was buried deep, yet clearly was there. I carried Frost's poems away with me from Bread Loaf, not only in book form. Already, some had engraved themselves in my memory. No poet has a better sense of the weight of an ordinary word, nor can beat Frost at laying a phrase from our common language against the frame of a metrical line. His best lines stick like burrs, and are hard to shake off. After my book came out, I was dumbfounded to hear that the great man had read one of my poems. I was also a bit chagrined. A friend at Harvard had monitored Frost's remarks to some students at a club meeting (of the Signet Society, I think), at which Frost had alluded to my "First Confession." The poem contains a stanza in which the narrator remembers himself as a small boy, confessing to a multitude of sins: My sloth, pride, envy, lechery, The dime held back from Peter's Pence With which I'd bribed my girl to pee That I might spy her instruments. Not that the poem stays on that piddling level: it goes on to tell of the priest's handing down absolution and the child narrator's receiving the eucharist. But that dirty little confessed secret was the only thing that struck Frost. His comment on it made it dirtier still. "I read a poem by some beatnik poet," he told the Harvard students, "about a fellow who steals a dime out of the church collection and gives it to his girl friend, and she shows him everything. What would he have got if he'd paid her twenty cents?" Well, at least he had read a stanza of mine-more or less! I was to hear Frost myself one last time, on the second of April, 1962, when he faced an overflow crowd in the University of Michi

Page  137 X. J. KENNEDY 137 gan's sold-out 4,000-seat Hill Auditorium. Early in his career, Frost had known rewarding days at Michigan, teaching a course so informal that it had met in his living room, when it met at all. He had also known lonely days-and nights. Local legend had it that his poem "Acquainted with the Night" had been written in Ann Arbor, and that its "luminary clock against the sky" was the clock in Burton Tower, a campus landmark.* According to Mary Cooley, longtime curator of the Hopwood Room, who as an undergraduate had been Frost's student, the poet had been given to long, aimless midnight walks. On one of these rambles he had been stopped and questioned by the police as a suspicious character. That night I was again just a member of his audience. Donald Hall introduced him, to tremendous applause. A surprising change had come over Frost. The 88-year-old poet seemed charged with energy, perhaps due to, among other things, the appearance of his last collection, In the Clearing, published the month before, which had scored a rare success for a book of poetry: it had hit the best-seller list. He explained its title, and in my copy I wrote down his explanation: "It suggests how, when you stir a spring up, it clears. Taking out the leaves in it." He read with more zest than he had shown at Bread Loaf, and seemed hugely to enjoy himself-still talking much, reading little poetry. He gave us two encores, and finally snapped shut his reading with the sonnet "Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same," about Eve in Eden, ending with a wonderful configuration of one-syllable wordsNever again would birds' song be the same. And to do that to birds was why she came. -snapped it shut like a triumphant pitcher fanning a batter in the bottom of the ninth inning. Because of the size of the audience, there were no questions, so that his deafness caused him no problem. After that night, he would live less than a year. Frost may be our least Romantic poet-the one least inclined to let his emotions flow aimlessly. He always has something to say-has, as *Editor's note: This identification remains a popular legend in Ann Arbor. Unfortunately, the facts will not cooperate. "Acquainted with the Night" appeared in Frost's volume of 1928, West-Running Brook, and Burton Tower was not erected until 1935. Frost surely refers to the Big Ben tower of the Houses of Parliament in London.

Page  138 138 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Samuel Johnson might put it, a bottom of sense to him. Between him and Walt Whitman there is little common ground, unless it be a love for small, humble details. "I look into the crater of the ant," says Frost with apparent awe in an early poem, "A Vantage Point." That attitude isn't far from Whitman's: "I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars, / And the pismire is equally perfect...." Then, too, both share a serene and overpowering self-confidence. But compared with Whitman, Frost seems free of illusion, skeptical, hardminded. When he makes the most sweeping general statement, we believe him, for we feel that his knowledge is hard-won. That immense sonnet "Design" may be to the point: his final, terrible doubt that there is an intelligent order in the universe has been prepared for by a scrupulous and minute examination of that universeof at least one small corner. "Earth's the right place for love," he tells us in "Birches," in effect rejecting heaven. He would merely climb toward heaven-italics his-instead of hoping to hoist himself directly to it bodily. Before hearing Frost, before I had sat under a tree to read him, I had believed that ordinary, casual speech wasn't the stuff of poems. I had been enamored of the diction of Hopkins, with his "dappledawn-drawn Falcon," of Hart Crane, with his "rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene." But Frost had shown me that poetry can be written as well in everyday language, set in tension against a basic meter and deriving power from that tremendous source-"And to do that to birds was why she came." I had believed that poetry at its best tends to arise out of joy or fervor; but clearly, some of Frost's best poems drew upon his "desert places": depression, dread, near-madness, suicidal urge. In that mysteriously lovely early poem "My November Guest," the poet's sorrowful muse finds beauty worth cherishing in days of rain, in the stripped landscapes of bare trees. In "The Night Light," one of "Five Nocturnes," Frost chides a woman who burns a lamp to drive back darkness while she sleeps-"Good gloom on her was thrown away." Lionel Trilling was right. Not only was Frost acquainted with the night-he reveled in it.

Marilyn ChinChin, MarilynRound-EyesVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 139-145http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:26

Page  139 MARILYN CHIN ROUND-EYES I woke up one morning and my slanted eyes turned round, which was nothing to be alarmed about. It happened to my rich cousin Amy, whose mother thought that she was too ugly to capture a rich Chinese American prince-she was gagged, sedated, and abducted-zoomed to Japan in a private airplane to a famous roundeye plastic surgeon. Well, Amy woke up with huge, round "Kathleen Turner eyes." They fixed her nose into a perky "Little Orphan Annie"; and while she was deep under, they gave her new mammoth Madonna breasts for half price. So, when I woke up with round eyes, I was not particularly surprised. But then, I thought, hey, wait a minute, my family's not rich. We don't have any money to be vain. We're immigrants who toiled in sweatshops after sweatshops. We're the poor relations that everybody spat on. Amy's family gave us hand-me-downs and scraps that their Cairn Terriers didn't want. In the Fifties, they bought my father's papers, shipped him here and he worked as a slave cook for them in their chain of chopsuey joints for the rest of his awful life. Of course, we were supposed to be eternally grateful. I remember one steamy episode in which my father banged his head on their giant butcher block and said, "You want grateful! You want thanks! Here, kowtow, kowtow, ten thousand years kowtow!" He banged his head so hard that he opened a gash three inches wide, and the blood streaked down his face. That kind of histrionics continued until he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1979. Sometimes I look at the mirror and expect to see my father's bloody face. But this particularly succulent spring morning the birds were cheeping and the dogs were barking, and in our old, cracked bathroom mirror-you know, the kind that is so old that the beveled edges are yellowing-I saw the monster of my own making. This morning some Greater Mother Power had transformed me into a 139

Page  140 140 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW bonafide white girl with round eyes. My single-creased eyelid turned double, which forced the corners that originally slanted upward to slope downward. My eyes were now round as orbs and appeared twice as large as before. My eyeballs that were once deep brown, almost black, had suddenly lightened into a golden amber. Even my eyelashes, which were once straight and spare, became fuller and curled up against my new double lids. I immediately felt guilty. My conscience said, "Serves you right for hating your kind, for wanting to be white. Remember that old Chinese saying, don't wish something too hard, you might just get it; and then what?" There were no tell-tale signs of expensive surgery-no gauze, no swelling, no nothing. When the good lord makes a miracle she does it seamless. After surgery Amy looked like Frankenstein for about two months. She was black and blue and had huge ghastly stitches. Three months later, she was a completely new person cut out from Vogue-she had totally reinvented herself, new clothes, new friends, new attitude. She even lost her Hong Kong accent. And there she was hanging out with the in-crowd, smoking and swearing up a storm like a rich white person. Like she had in her pocket a piece of the American dream. "What did you do," I said, "pay for your face with your soul?" The terrible truth is that I was desperately jealous of Amy's new popularity. She said once, while buffing her fake nails, "We're Americans now, we have to climb that ladder of success, keep up with the Joneses. Always one up ourselves." Well, that's our new motto, isn't that quaint, "improve ourselves Wongs." Amy's family started this trickle-down effect. In the Eighties the fierce competition and struggle for status in Amy's family infected ours like the plague. Every day, after my father's death, my mother would come home from her long day's work at the factory and scowl blankly at us. My sister and I-we were never good enough, pretty enough, smart enough. My mother was the sacrificial tree, on which the next crop was supposed to flourish and bear beautiful fruit-only, the present harvest was not quite ready. We were an anemic batch, or one too hard or green and small to bring a good barter at the market. My mother would scrutinize us in her sleepy sadness and sob, then fold herself up in bed and not come out again until it was already next morning and time for her to go to work at the factory. There was no end to her misery. My father used to say, only in America could you reinvent yourself. Morons could become presidents, fools could become princes, ban

Page  141 MARILYN CHIN 141 dits become CEOs. Whores become first ladies. Of course, what he was really getting at was that my uncle the "immoral two-bit fourlegged thug sodomist" became a millionaire restaurateur overnight. Somehow, the "golden mountain" dream had eluded my father. The great lorries of gold had passed him by; and all he had left in his miserable soul was rage and envy. My father loved to bitch and mutter and spit his venom into the giant wok of chop suey-into that great noxious swill they called Suburban Chinese American food. He would spit and swear, "You, Mother's c__ _. You turtle's eggs. You bag of dead girl bones." He would shovel and toss unidentified chunks of flesh and veggies into his giant sizzling wok. An unfiltered Lucky Strike dangling from his lips, rivers of sweat pouring from his greasy hair. I can still see him now, bless his dead soul, red-faced, shoveling and wokking in the great cauldron of hell, hacking and coughing up bile from his black lungs. So, that fine succulent, spring morning in 1985 I stood in front of the mirror. After my initial shock and strange shiver of delight, I noticed that the extra epicantic folds had made deep creases around the sockets. My eyes felt dry, I supposed because more surface was now being exposed to light. Suddenly, it occurred to me that my new eyes were not beautiful. They looked like they were in a persistent state of alarm. If my cousin had had the subtle "Kathleen Turner" job at the premium price, I must have had the bargain basement "Betty Boop." Finally, I managed to pull myself away from the mirror to go downstairs-to ask my wise sister Bessie for her opinion. She said, barely looking up from her cereal, "Nah, don't worry about it. It's the process of assimilation. Happens to the best of us." To me my sister was God. Like my grandmother, she always had this "Buddhistic" attitude, like so-what, you turned into a donkey, you'll get over it. She was never a team player. In fact, as a child she was always relegated to the sidelines to warm the bench. The white kids never "chose" her to play in their team sports. They used to tease her for being a foureyed geek and she didn't give a damn. "Dodge Ball, what kinda game is that? Who wants to be a moving target and get brain-damaged?" She was like one of those Chinese people who could climb the apex of a mountain and see everything. Someday, she would become a famous biologist or anthropologist and the people would pay 100 bucks a plate to hear her talk about neo-genetic theory. And she would get back at those white folks for all those years of humiliation

Page  142 142 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW and benchwarming by saying something utterly inane like,, "Caucasoids have more hair on their bodies because they are less evolved,"" and everybody would applaud, buy her book and stand in a long line for her autograph. Afterward, they would go home and say,"J have touched the sleeve of genius."1 But I was not as self-assured as Bessie. I was a shallow everybody. For god's sake I was a teenager; I didn't have any depth. It was not my station in life to see beyond my petty; personal predicament. I was always falling through the cracks, always afraid of being different. In this way, I was more like Amy than Bessie. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be conventional. I wanted the sublime, banal package they made in the mall. I wanted to be the perfect stupid blonde girl who married the perfect stupid blonde boy next door. It was no secret that I wanted to be white, to be "4accepted" by the in-crowd, to look white as a magazine cover-I confess, in sixth grade, in the shameful privacy of my own bathroom, I used to tape my eyelids up with strong scotch mailing tape and pretend that I was Christie Brinkley, with big round cow eyes. Don't worry. This is no Kafkian tale, in which I turn into a giant cockroach and my family the philistines beat me up and kill me. I had no fear of my present transformation. We know that anything can happen during adolescence: nipples turn into breasts, breasts turn into beards. But look, there is no mystery to this, at fifteen the entire female population of the species is mired in self-hatred and despises their own faces and bodies. We all wanted to be cookie-cutter Barbies. If the dominant race had green skin and purple genitals, I would want to look like that, too. It was not until I turned 35 that I finally realized I was a beautiful Chinese woman and that my ancient features were hand painted on the elegant Sung dynasty scrolls. But so what, my enlightenment came too late; my self-esteem was already irreversibly damaged. Finally, on that fateful day, my sister Bessie suggested that I tell an adult. Mind you, this was the last resort. In my household my father was already dead; my mother and grandmother were my guardians now. My mother was doing double shifts at an electronics firm, putting tiny chips into "motherboards"-she had just returned to work after three days in the hospital recovering from carpal tunnel surgery. And she was asleep, which was her favorite thing to do on Saturdays and I dared not disturb her dreams. She smiled in her sleep. I knew that it was only in her dreams where she could be happy.

Page  143 MARILYN CHIN 143 So I had to tell my grandmother, the great matriarch. She was the one who raised us while my parents spent most of their lives grueling at their respective sweatshops. She was, as all Chinese grandmothers are, the self-appointed keeper of our Chinese identity. She thought that we were still sojourners, that sooner or later we would pack up our belongings, improve our bad Cantonese and that the Chinese from ten thousand diasporas would fly back to China like a pack of homeward geese, back to the "middle kingdom." And there, we would start over in a new Utopian village, marry yellow husbands, produce yellow children and live in eternal golden harmony. Indeed, my grandmother would be the one to offer me a profound explanation. She was the one who knew about the transmogrification of the soul. She used to tell us stories about all kinds of magical transformations-women turned into foxes, foxes into spirits. Don't be a jerk in this life, for you would be punished in the next by transforming into a water-rat. She showed us pictures of a pagan Hell where the punishment always fit the crime. If you were a liar an ox-headed hatchet man would cut off your tongue. If you were a thief, they would cut off your hands. If you were an adulterer, they would cut off your "you-know-what." What then would be the appropriate punishment for a girl-child who wished so hard to be accepted by white people that her beautiful slanted eyes turned round? Right then she was asleep, snoring in her favorite armchair. See that squished gnat on her dress, that was her characteristic signature. The great matriarch did not believe in frivolity. I never approached her with the various problems of girl-children. When a pool of blood appeared mysteriously on my dress, I consulted my sister and she pulled out her textbook on the "various hormonal problems of prepubescent girls" and bought me a copy of Our Bodies Ourselves. She said, "Damn, sorry, Sis, but you've entered the world of womanhood." When two bullies at school beat me up, stole my lunch money-I was too ashamed to tell my grandmother. Instead, I worked an extra shift at my uncle's restaurant and peeled shrimp to pay for the missing money. This continued-they beat me up, took my money and I had to work extra hours to pay for my own lunch. This went on for three weeks-I peeled so much shrimp that my allergic fingers blew up like pink pork sausages. Finally, I told my pugilistic father. He immediately took time off from work, drove me to the hospital to get my fingers drained. They also gave me adrenaline shots. My father

Page  144 144 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW then went to school and grabbed my vice-principal Mr. Comely by his lapel and loudly urged in broken English that those boys be suspended. "Moogoogaipan, you want Moogoogaipan? You get Moogoogaipan." For some reason, my father just happened to have a giant spatula in his pocket that day. He pulled it out and started slapping Mr. Comely with it, making tiny red marks the size of chopsuey chunks all over his face. And there I was, a typical stupid teenager, not proud that my father was trying to defend me, but embarrassed that my geek-father would actually use a spatula as a deadly weapon. It would be a different story if he had brandished a machete or a sawed-off assault rifle. What a sight, my father waving his spatula and Mr. Comely defending himself, backing up, with his gold Cross pen. The boys were never suspended. But, suddenly, I was given a reprieve. After all, it's not divine intervention but fate that is the catalyst for change. Within the next few months, everybody sort of "poof' disappeared: my father died shortly after that episode, Mr. Comely was transferred because of his alcoholism, one bully went to prison, the other moved to Pittsburgh with his divorced mother. (And who could've predicted that I would someday end up graduating cum laude from Harvard Law School and become a Yuppie trial attorney for the Small Business Administration. Then, in my thirties, I would marry a Filipino activist I met at a coffee shop, whose radical ideas would transform my whole life. And I would end up devoting my life's work to defending the wives of murdered guerrillas in the Luzon. Of course, this is another story). Well, anyway, in my terrible childhood, life was humiliation after humiliation, and tiptoeing around that sleeping mother and grandmother. My grandmother had survived a series of natural and manmade disasters: the Sino-Japanese war, famine, drought, flooding, bloodthirsty warlords, the Nationalist debacles, the Communist revolution, pestilence, a long bout of the cholera epidemic, and now that she was 85 and had survived everything and reached the shores of safety it was ripe time for her to finally enjoy peace and her grandchildren, and napping in her favorite armchair. I was worried that she would have a heart attack upon seeing me. I climbed up her lofty lap and said, "Granny, look what happened to my eyes, they've turned round, I am sorry for having been remiss, for being a bad child. For wishing the unthinkable. For dreaming the unmentionable." She looked at me with her complacent Buddha smile. "So, girl

Page  145 MARILYN CHIN 145 child, now you're a round-eye. When you were born you were such a beautiful princess, more beautiful than Yang Kuei Fei. You had skin of jade, and slanted moon-like eyes. Our ancestors were proud to behold such a plum blossom. Now look, what has happened to you, my little snake in the grass, my little damselfly, how you have changed."p Her compassionate words touched me deeply and I began to cry from my little round eyes. The tears were especially bulbous and fat. She caressed me all night long, telling me ghost stories and fables, feeding me glazed ginger and dried plums. No mention was made of my transformation. Deep in her heart, she knew that each step backward would only mean regret-the vector only goes one direction, the homing geese must find their new nest., the ten thousand diasporas will never coagulate; there was no way back to the Middle Kingdom.

Mary CrowCrow, MaryStresa-1943Vol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 146-147http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:27

Page  146 MARY CROW STRESA-1943 The clock said afternoon clouds, sun sliding down the mountain. Trucks flashed on the mountain side and a church spire jutted from leafless trees. Afternoon and clouds and blue blue. The lake even bluer and the villas white or tan or gold, one blue. How can you tell? they asked. I know what I know, he replied. The afternoon slammed its doors, and he lined them up. The clock of the clouds tocked: No ice on the lake. Unbutton, unbutton. This long dock is for boats. Take off their coats. They won't need them. Why is the sun blinding? Don't touch them. Think of it all as a postcard. They will not appear. What little cap? What woman's coat? Listen to the church bell complaining about time. 146

Page  147 MARY CROW 147 This little piazza has a dock but they won't wash up. That slick is oil washing over their sleep. Remember the postcard. It has Alps, with snowtops, it has evergreens, it has villas, and hotels. We are all tourists here.

Deanna Kern LudwinLudwin, Deanna KernA Conversation with Mary CrowVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 148-160http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:28

Page  148 DEANNA KERN LUDWIN A CONVERSATION WITH MARY CROW Mary Crow is a poet, essayist, and translator whose work has appeared in almost two hundred anthologies and magazines. She has published two chapbooks of poetry and two full-length collections, I Have Tasted the Apple (BOA Editions, 1996) and Borders (BOA Editions, 1989). Her books of translations include Vertical Poetry: Recent Poems by Roberto Juarroz (White Pine Press, 1992), From the Country of Nevermore: Poems by Jorge Teillier (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), and Woman Who Has Sprouted Wings: Poems by Contemporary Latin American Women Poets (Latin American Literary Review Press, 2nd edition, 1987). She has received a Fulbright Creative Writing Award to the former Yugoslavia and Fulbright Research Awards to Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, and Peru; an NEA Poetry Fellowship; and a Colorado Book Award for Vertical Poetry. A professor of English, Mary Crow teaches creative writing at Colorado State University. Mary Crow and I sat in her high-windowed house, where light poured into her living room, spotlighting masks, baskets, hand-woven rugs, and curious carved tables, treasures she has collected during her travels to, among other places, South America, Turkey, Israel, Thailand, and the former Yugoslavia. * * * DKL: When I read your poems, I'm reminded of Elizabeth Bishop's obsession with travel, and I think of the last line of "Arrival at Santos": "we are driving to the interior." How does travel help you to explore your own interior? MC: It's certainly true that for me travel has always been running away, and running away means that I'm going to find freedom. It's a freedom into a bigger world. And I can write when I run away be 148

Page  149 DEANNA KERN LUDWIN / MARY CROW 149 cause I'm inspired by new landscapes with new people; I'm reading new works of literature, and I'm exploring how other people come to terms with life, many of whom seem to have a more direct relationship-a less intellectualized, less distanced relationship-to their own lives. Another thing that for me is very important in travel, especially travel in Latin America, is coming into a new language. In Spanishspeaking countries I find more courtliness in the way people address each other, and there's-I almost want to call it-a different kind of dance that's going on when I'm operating in Spanish. So I think travel certainly takes me to my interior; it certainly directs me to ask some very fundamental questions about why I've been leading the life I've been leading. And then after awhile, I also ask myself why I'm trying to run away from my life-what's wrong with it that I need to escape from it so often. DKL: You said you run away to escape oppression, but often you're running away to a place where women are even more oppressed. As a woman coming from the U.S., does that mean you're going to be less oppressed in the country you visit? Mc: Sometimes I have to endure some of that oppression, but frequently I'm outside of it, I'm not a part of the culture I'm visiting. I don't have to obey all the injunctions of that culture, I don't have to worry quite so much. If I lived in Mexico, let's say, I might have to concern myself with the fact that it's not considered proper to travel as a woman alone. But as an outsider, I travel alone. And of course when I'm visiting that culture, I don't have to deal with a husband who has traditional ideas, I don't have to deal with a mother and father who have traditional ideas. So, in many ways, I'm not dealing with the oppression. I thought you were going to ask about the other kind of oppression, the political oppression. Unless you get into the political life of the country, you're not really swept up into that oppression. Though I talk to people about their politics and what's going on politically, I do not myself participate in the political life of the country. That doesn't mean I'm not affected. DKL: In your poems there are fears your speakers seem to be confronting, or trying to confront. How do these reflect your own fears? MC: The question of fears is interesting because someone asked me recently what I was afraid of, and I said, "Nothing!" I take quite a few risks-I plunge in and do things-that many people would consider

Page  150 150 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW dangerous. I've ridden a horse alone in the Colombian jungle, for example, and I've gone to all kinds of treacherous places alone, and I really and truly did not feel afraid. On the other hand, I do know that there are some things it's stupid to do and I don't do them. The fears I have are not so much related to travel as they are to my childhood and the admonitions from my culture, which were that if you're a woman, you have to have a man to be complete. In the small town where I grew up, few women were career women; it wasn't considered a nice thing to be. The one career woman I knew was an object of gossip. So for me one of the big struggles has been to keep confronting those fears from childhood. Every time I think I've defeated them, they reappear in some other form. What they do is keep me busy. They keep me from working or from working well. Du.L: The settings of many of your poems are so lush-so much green and so much light and air! How would you define the role of nature in your poems? Mc: I have to define the role of nature in my poems in relation to Colorado, where I live now, and to Ohio where I grew up and to Iowa, in between the two. I grew up in a small town surrounded by hills-a small version of the mountains-where I spent a great deal of time hiking, horseback riding, running free, and wanting always to be outdoors and away from town, even though it was a small town. In graduate school at Indiana University, I got married and went on to the University of Iowa Writers Workshop with my husband, and there I experienced the incredible humidity and deep green. After awhile, the rich green of that Iowa countryside began to seem extremely oppressive, undoubtedly because of what was going on in my personal life. I felt almost as if it were invading my dreams, waiting outside my windows to swallow me up. And I began to feel that I wanted to get away from all that green-it was just too devouring. So when I first saw Colorado, it was wonderful. It was olive green, muted browns,, tan earth. It was very dry, very sparse, very open. It had a grandeur,, but it was a different kind of grandeur-a sweep of space and light with colors washed by light, so they were not so intense. And I fell in love with those colors! Then, after some years passed, there would come an occasional longing for a deeper green, a richer,, more fertile green. After struggling with trees-once I planted about a thousand trees, but only about a hundred survivedI started longing for a darker green. And I think that's been something important to me in traveling. I've gone to the jungle, I've gone

Page  151 DEANNA KERN LUDWIN / MARY CROW 151 to the lush countries, but I think now that Colorado is home, and to come back to it is also something I need. I need both. But I have always felt, from childhood on-everybody feels this, I suppose-that I had to have some attachment to the world outside the window, that I'm not really a city person, that I need some plant life around me. Particularly, I need trees. DKL: Most of the poems in Borders are about Latin America. In I Have Tasted the Apple, there are poems about Latin America, as well as poems about Colorado and Ohio. But there are also poems about the former Yugoslavia. Could you comment on these poems. mc: I visited the former Yugoslavia on a creative writing award in 1988 before the civil wars broke out and broke it up into smaller states. So I visited Yugoslavia as Communism was coming apart and as many of the old racial hatreds were being revived. It was a very moving experience because the different groups of YugoslavsCroats,, Serbs, Slovenians, Macedonians-at that particular moment, in the intellectual and artistic spheres, writers, were talking about their angers and their hurt. I went to an International PEN meeting in Bled, and the theme of the meeting was minorities. Writers had come from all over the world, and presumably we were going to talk about minorities from all over the world, but in fact, we began focusing on Yugoslav minorities, and people were in so much pain that several cried when they began talking in public. Soon there emerged this theme of the mistreatment of each group by other groups surrounding it, and so what had at first appeared to be a country where a lot of groups lived peacefully together very quickly revealed itself as an area where old hatreds and old pain dominated. Some of the problems went back to the Second World War, and even back to the First World War. You might think that in 1988 only the older generation would remember the hatreds of World War II, but people had not forgotten the fascist government in Croatia and the atrocities that were carried out there. Younger people had been told the stories, and I was surprised at how vivid the memories still were and also how bitter the anger. I traveled up to the area near Albania where many Albanians had crossed the border and lived in the former Yugoslavia, and there, too, were these corrosive angers. On another occasion, I went to a women's meeting, where I sat down at the breakfast table with a perfect stranger who lived in the area bordering Austria. Within three or four sentences she (a Slovenian) was crying about the treatment she

Page  152 152 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW had received at the hands of her Austrian neighbors. When I traveled to Pristina, near the Albanian border, I asked about a newspaper report that an Albanian mob had attacked a Serb and shoved a broken Coca-Cola bottle up his ass. An Albanian faculty member from the university where I was speaking said, "No, no, no,, that's impossible, we could never do that. No one here would ever have done that, something so savage. That got into the paper because there are outside agitators whipping things up-there's nothing like that really happening here, it's not true." Well, when I went back to Belgrade, I heard on the news that indeed it had been true,, that the man attacked had been operated on and he was still alive. But in Pristina, after the Albanian left the room, a man I had thought was a Serb pulled me aside and said in a whisper, "It is true. I know how impossible it is to live here because I'm half Serb and half Albanian. I've tried to say, 'I'm a Yugoslav,' but people won't accept that answer. I have to be either Serb or Albanian,, and I cannot tell you how much suffering this has caused me., It was this way over and over again. Before I'd gone to Yugoslavia, I'd been told to read The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andri6-, who won the Nobel Prize for this novel, but I couldn't read it because I could not get through the description of an impaling; it was too gruesome. But when I got back, I said to myself, I have to read that book because I know it will help me to understand what was going on. in Yugoslavia. It's a very unusual novel about the people who live near the bridge over a period of many centuries, so it doesn't focus on individual characters but on the ethnic groups that came to make up Yugoslavia. So I made myself read this description of an impaling, which is literally, inch by inch, a form of torture whose intent is to make the person impaled live as long as possible and suffer to the maximum degree., thereby striking terror in the hearts of those who have to pass by while this person wriggles in death agonies on the pole. This cruelty helps you understand the vengefulness, the desire to hurt those who. have hurt you, because all of those ethnic hatreds go back to an earlier suffering. I don't know when you could say it all began, and I don't know how you can make it all stop., but there is no will to live together in a unified state because there is such a violent history of pain. DKL: Do you think you'll go back again? mc: I would like very much to go back again. I met so many wonderful people, and I had so many warm, moving, even magical experi

Page  153 DEANNA KERN LUDWIN / MARY CROW 153 ences. I went with an expert in folk art to a village near Hungary to see the masks that were made there, and I saw a video of the ceremony in which they used the masks to celebrate Easter, but their ceremony was really a pagan ritual. Yes, I would like to return to this little village and see again these masks that have been used for centuries and centuries and centuries, or go to another village, Pirot, and see the weavers who are still making rugs as they have been making them for generations. What was so wonderful was that so many cultures were living there. Many, many things are just heartbreaking about what's happened-the atrocities but also the destruction of what ought to be our shared international heritage-for example, the bombing of the bridge in Mostar or the walled city of Dbrovnik. These are crimes against humanity. DKL: In I Have Tasted the Apple, as in Borders, you've created a persona who, though she is horrified at what she witnesses, courageously confronts political upheaval, danger, death. How can you explain her willingness-even desire-to expose herself to such threatening circumstances as the ones she finds in South America and the former Yugoslavia? MC: Well, I'd say that one of the central concerns of our times is not to forget the horrors of the past, and the only way that we can continue to remember is to face over and over again what we don't want to face. We keep hearing that each generation of students comes to our classrooms with less knowledge of the events of the past, and it's very important, therefore, for us as individuals and for us as teachers and writers to re-confront the pain, the terror, the evil that is re-created in every generation. I think the Holocaust is the defining event of the twentieth century, and somehow we have to try to be the citizens, and the teachers, who have the moral courage to refuse obedience to immoral orders. This refusal depends on our knowing how difficult refusal to obey is in our society. In my travels, since I've been in many Latin American countries during the most terrible years of the military regimes, when torture and murder were being carried out, though frequently hidden, I thought it was important to learn as much as possible and then to find a place for it in my writing. And it's important to recognize that it's not just people out there who are evil; we also have to struggle with the evil in our own hearts, the many, many ways in which we act without love, demeaning other people-all the little ways in which we buy into the bureaucracy that is so efficient because it has no heart. We have to open our eyes and

Page  154 154 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW look into ourselves as well as look out at the world. And, when we look out at the world, we must acknowledge that even though it appears that other forces are creating the terrors of the twentieth century, we too have had a role. We need to take responsibility for our share and try to do something about it, which is, I hope, a way of saying that we need to try to live fuller lives, more conscious and more deliberate. Somehow,, at the same time, we have to find grounds for joy. Now something is happening in recent poetry, which is the creation of whole bodies of poetry about the most terrible events that can happen to individuals. Childhood abuse, for example, has become one of the most common themes. There are some dangers, very great dangers, in filling one's poetry with so many horrors that after awhile readers can read it without feeling shocked, especially if that abuse is not somehow given a larger context-not that any individual poem can do all that, but a body of work can do it. DKL: Do you think political poems should operate in the same way? Mc: There have been horrors with us since the beginning of the world. A writer of political poems must consider this: are the horrors that we have been witnessing in the twentieth century different in some way? In what contexts have writers of previous generations and previous centuries presented evil? Certainly, there have been quite graphic descriptions of terrible events. Homer is full of such descriptions, but what is the context in which these horrible events are placed? Theodor Adorno asked: After the Holocaust, how can poetry be written? Adorno is talking about the fact that once you start to have aliterary work, you are going to be concerned with giving it literary qualities. As soon as you are concerned with giving a work literary qualities, are you betraying, let's say, the people who were massacred? Are you betraying the philosophical and moral issues? Once you give certain events a structure, that structure seems to endow the events with meaning that they didn't have and which demeans the suffering. But poetry has to talk about what is important. What is important includes the political but is not exclusively political. I would like to think that poetry could find something of the tension in our lives between the moment of joy and the moment, ten minutes later, in which, let's say, some crazy man has machine-gunned everyone in a restaurant. You can't stop feeling the joy, because if you do, you are

Page  155 DEANNA KERN LUDWIN / MARY CROW 155 going to commit suicide. You can't pretend that there are not insane people who commit insane acts for which innocent people suffer. And for me at least, what poetry does is touch me to the heart; it makes real, brings to life the full range of human expression. George Eliot says it best: "The quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity. For otherwise it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence." That's more or less what poetry is trying to do-momentarily pull the wadding from our ears so we can hear and see and feel more than we usually do. That is its function. DKL: Is that the function of all art, do you think-to make us experience more intensely? Mc: I think so. That's one of the main functions, though perhaps not the only function. Or maybe I ought to put it in another way. That's the function, but it can be approached in many different ways. One way might be to create a poem in which there is a tension between the political and the personal, for example. Another might be one in which language is being pushed to its limits, in which there's experiment with language. I think of Paul Celan's poems in which, as he gets older and older, he increasingly tries to push the limits of language. For me, some of those very late poems fail. But when you read the body of them, you can't help but be moved by his passion, by his attempt to stretch language to do almost what it can't do: to express the unspeakable. I think some of the language poets are also doing some interesting work. One thing I would like to do increasingly is express the fact that the speaker is not a unified whole, but that the speaker speaks and then questions her own speaking, that the speaker speaks and contradicts her own speaking, and that the speaker speaks with one opinion one moment and then with another opinion another momentthat there is a dialogue going on inside a person, not a dialogue of two voices alone but sometimes of many voices. I call that the "internal stutter," and I would like to get more of the internal stutter into my poems. I do think that the internal stutter has a great deal to do with pushing the limits of language because the stutterer is finding inadequate the language that she has, that they have. DKL: As I read I Have Tasted the Apple, I grew increasingly aware that I was making a discovery-that you were showing me that the contrasts that seem so apparent at the beginning of the collection are

Page  156 156 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW actually not so apparent after all-that scissors and knives exist in Colorado just as they do in Chile, that they are both external and internal. Mc: This is one of the important things that evolves out of the poems-that the contrasts are not so apparent after all, that the pain and the hurt and the desire to hurt exist in Colorado as they do in Chile and are both external and internal, that we are the source of the problem to some degree-well, not all of the source but some of the source. In my personal life, I tend to express strong opinions and simplify things. But in the world of my poetry I would like to insist on the complexity of things and the ambiguity of things and the moral difficulty of the world and not say, "X" is responsible for all the difficulty in the world; if it weren't for "Y" the world wouldn't be evil. Instead, evil is much more shared, something we are drawn into under certain circumstances. So, there are a number of levels of complexity that I would like to bring into my poems, and I would like to keep away from easy answers, though I'm sure I've been guilty of easy answers at times, because one of the temptations of poetry is to allow structure to give a pattern to experience that is satisfying poetically but is not,, in fact., truthful. DKL: I think that's one of the things I like most about I Have Tasted the Apple and about the last poem, "Swimming"-the resisting of the temptation to give those easy answers, almost embracing ambiguity. The poem ends with the word "toward,".. and we don't know what we're being led toward. mc: I see this poem as trying to express the embrace of the immediate experience and the difficulty even of saying what is being experienced at this very moment. So the speaker first tries to say it one way, then tries to restate it, then tries to say it again, and at last simply stops and, in effect, gives up-at least for the moment. At this point she brings in the whole other world beyond her immediate experience. The speaker's out in the mountains and then says, ""from here you can't hear the news." But as soon as you say "cyou can't hear the news," the news comes butting in, and then the attempt is to push it back out and to be in nature physically, "9pulling the air with my arms, bucking," feeling it in the body and experiencing the light-which in the mountains is so wonderful and so intermittent. The ending is intentionally ambiguous-what is it that the speaker is moving toward? I can't say, no one can say. But definitely, there is nonetheless a movement toward-and I suppose the motion

Page  157 DEANNA KERN LUDWIN / MARY GROW 157 of the book is toward-some tempered optimism. At least the physical world is beautiful and that beauty is a joy. DKL: Your new poem "Stresa 1943"' [published in this issue] presents the beauty of the physical world-blue skies, bluer lake, evergreens, and snowtops of the Northern Italian Alps-as the context for the Holocaust victims thrown into Lake Maggiore. The setting is postcard spectacular, but the narrator actually implicates nature, which seems to be in collusion with the perpetrator of the crime: "the afternoon slammed its doors," the sun blinds, and the lake swallows. Are you suggesting that an informed visitor will never be able to enjoy the natural beauty of such a place? When you visited Stresa, did you enjoy the beauty nonetheless? mc: I certainly did. But there is something in us that feels surprised when great natural beauty and extreme human cruelty exist side by side. We feel it's impossible that such a thing could happen in such a setting, part and parcel of our human desire to not believe that atrocities actually occur-to deny them, avoid them,, not wanting to hear about them. But it's important to become aware of our tendency to shut out and deny the massacres and pogroms that have taken place and that human beings like us have carried out. Something in us is amazed that nature can stand by and not, as in Shakespeare, crack open the heavens with thunder and lightning. We feel there ought to be that coherence, but there's not. It's our human egos. Our tendency is to say, well, everything looks wonderful, therefore everything must be wonderful. The tragedy's not occurring right beside me. The water of Lake Maggiore is now flat. They couldn't have thrown anybody in there. That was the feeling I was having, was trying to express. DKi: Of course, when you visited Stresa, you were very much aware of its recent history. Do you think that most visitors are aware of what happened there? MC: I suspect that very few visitors are aware, and that very few of the residents are aware. There certainly are no signs, no plaques anywhere, no monuments-which, to tell the truth, surprised me quite a bit. Since the Holocaust in Italy began in Stresa, I thought there would be some indication. I didn't know anyone there, but I did ask at the tourist office and was met with blank stares. This is one of the things, too, that I was trying to express in the poem-the attitude of 'Who, me? What did I have to do with it?". DKi: When did you visit Stresa?

Page  158 158 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW MC: In March of 1996-just this past March. DKL: The poem has a strange, oneiric atmosphere, partly due to the personal pronouns that have no antecedents. This strangeness is due, too, to the gradual, inescapable inclusion of the reader in the scene, beginning with imperatives such as "unbutton, unbutton" and "Take off their coats." Then, at the end of the poem, the narrator no longer refers to an implied "you" but uses the inclusive first person plural: "We are all tourists here." Will you comment on this line, especially on what the word "tourist" means. MC: Generally speaking, a tourist is somebody who is a passive observer, who looks on during a tour that has been set up for him or her-a person who is unconcerned, uninvolved, outside of events, scenes, etc. I read in a travel magazine an interesting distinction between travel and touring, that what people do today is tour and what people used to do is travel. Earlier travelers set up their own travel arrangements. They were participants; they were at the heart of their travels. Now, for most people, everything is done for them and they just watch. I think that's a fair way to describe how some people live. Years ago, I hiked in Utah in Zion National Park. I hiked the length of a canyon, leaving my car at one end, descending into the canyon, and coming up at the other end, where I hitchhiked a ride back to my car. The ride that I got was with a couple in an enormous recreational vehicle. When they picked me up, they asked, "Do you mind if we keep looking at the canyon as we go?" So I saw how they traveled. The couple looked at the national park through a huge glass windshield. They turned off at the overviews, looked out through their window, drove on, then turned off again. It was almost as if there were a germ barrier-as if the natural world needed to be like a postcard-beautiful, untouched, unthreatening, no mosquitoes. I think many people prefer this kind of travel, where you are still at home in a way, and in fact, it is almost like watching a nature documentary on a television screen, except that you move instead of the images on the screen. It's a feeling we often have-I've had it, toothat we cannot control the world. So when we read about what's going on in the former Yugoslavia, for example, we throw up our hands and say, "Don't tell me about it because there's nothing I can do. I just don't want to know about it." DKL: But when you say in this poem "We are all tourists here," who is included?

Page  159 DEANNA KERN LUDWIN / MARY CROW 159 MC: The "we" includes not only the perpetrators who feel detached but also the bystanders who do not respond. In Italy, Erich Priebke, responsible for the Ardeatine Caves Massacre near Rome in 1944, was just found innocent by a military tribunal on the grounds that he was acting on orders and, therefore, wasn't responsible-which of course was his claim. None of us takes responsibility. Nobody is guilty of what's happening. DKL: In a recent AWP Chronicle article [October/November, 1995], Claudia Johnson says, "underlying any good story... is a deeper pattern of change [than conflict], a pattern of connection and disconnection"; underneath the conflict and surface events "is an emotional tide, the ebb and flow of human connection." I find this "ebb and flow of human connection" in your poetry, in "As If," for example, a poem that ends with a ship "flinging its tiny anchor out." Do you think these patterns of connection and disconnection are essential to contemporary poetry? MC: I guess I thought the image of the ship flinging its tiny anchor out over and over again was an image of the continual struggle to find grounds for hope-that is, perseverance in spite of the storm around us-more than one of connection and disconnection. I think that biologically we strive for more connection than we get in the kind of society we live in, that there is a physical and emotional need to connect and that we are in many ways starved-thirsty-for connection in our world. So, yes, I think there's this constant reaching out and very frequent disappointment in the reaching out, or very frequent failure to find anything to connect with. And the reaching out is for comfort, for meaning, for some kind of purpose-and purpose and meaning have partly to do with belonging to a community with some kind of shared goals that are good and not evil. Within the context of that community, we want individuals whom we love and who love us, which is another way to say family, I suppose. Even in the loneliness of travel-so many of my poems are about a woman traveling alone-there is an attempt to find in the world that vision of connection and to find a way to overcome the disconnection, which is not simply to have an affair, but to find a stronger thread that runs through societies and history and shows us that all of our time on earth is not going to simply end in the holocaust of all holocausts in which everything is destroyed. DKL: I'm curious about the title of your book. Certainly, there are the Biblical implications, but the collection opens with "Gift," an epi

Page  160 160 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW graph from Jorge Teillier. In the poem, the speaker resists eating a beautiful apple immediately upon receiving it. Instead he admires it, comparing it to the earth. The speaker of your collection, however, chooses to taste the apple. What are readers to make of this choice? Mc: Well, I don't see it as either the apple from the garden of Eden or the apple which is the earth; I see it as both. Someone asked me, "Is this a book about sin?" And yes, I think so. This is a book about both sin and earthly delights. In a way, the two cannot be separated. How can we be alive and not sin? And sin not only in the sexual sense but in the broader sense of having oneself committed evil-of having oneself been a party to evil, to wrongdoing on various levels. So it's very definitely a book about both, and I like to think it has a lot to do with sensual pleasures-with eating, with enjoying the landscape, with enjoying friendships, with lovemaking. DKL: The poem "Layers," which comes midpoint in I Have Tasted the Apple, suggests so many of the motifs I find in the book: growth, death, love, and our need for eternity. And it ends with that haunting image, "At the end / of this corridor, a door opens." MC: The ending is ambiguous, because the door that opens is the grave as well as a door out into something, perhaps, hopeful. It's a door into the earth, into the "flesh falling apart." "Layers" is about belonging to time and belonging, in a certain sense, to a community that we excavate. There are the skeletons, but there are also the shards. And the small events tie us to earth and therefore tie us to death so that some small thing can suddenly activate in us so many longings and so much memory, even of things we can hardly articulate. So in a way, this poem is about trying to separate oneself from too much desire and trying to live more simply and without so much need. I have written a lot of poems in which I try to go back and begin again, in which I try to scrape away the extraneous and get back to the essentials, and this is one of those poems where I'm paring it all away, trying to say, "What is it I can live without, and what is it I have to have?" DKL: In that way, the poem is very spiritual, as so many of your other poems are. MC: Yes, I think it is spiritual in a way. But I think this is a poem against sentimentality: "Our bodies know / we need eternity, and they breed it." We're full of our delusions. I have been full of delusions, and I would like to have the strength to face things as courageously as I can.

Timothy SteeleSteele, TimothyBoundless Wealth from a Finite Store: Meter and GrammarVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 161-180http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:29

Page  161 TIMOTHY STEELE BOUNDLESS WEALTH FROM A FINITE STORE: METER AND GRAMMAR in memory of Charles Gullans Reflecting in 1947 on his experiences as a teacher of poetry, W. H. Auden remarked: It's amazing how little students know about prosody. When you teach a college class, you find they read [verse] either as straight prose, or as deadly monotonous beat as in Gorboduc. Auden's observation raises a crucial point. Poetry consists neither exclusively of grammatical prose-sense nor exclusively of meter, but is rather a fusion of the two. On the one hand, poets make themselves intelligible by the same means that prose writers do-by agreeably and coherently arranging words and phrases into clauses and sentences. On the other hand, poets compose according to a regular beat and recurring rhythmical pattern, a procedure not characteristic of prose-writing. Unfortunately, this point is little appreciated. What Auden says of college students seems equally true of most other readers of poetry. Some focus on its grammatical sense at the expense of its metrical element; others concentrate on meter at the expense of meaning. Since Auden's day, the size of the former group has probably grown, whereas the latter has probably shrunk; but the division itself is much the same. In any case, neither approach serves poetry well. To neglect meter is to lose access to the music and modulation that fine metrical composition offers. By the same token, narrowly emphasizing meter can result in misunderstandings about it. Such emphasis can lead to the notion that actual metrical practice concerns merely 161

Page  162 162 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW "deadly monotonous beat." It can obscure the critical fact that though poets write according to a fixed rhythmical pattern, they do not replicate it exactly, line after line, but instead realize it in continually different ways and by means of various kinds of grammatical organization. This essay will explore the relationship between meter and grammar, and will discuss ways in which poets coordinate the two. I should mention at the outset that it is not my aim to challenge or discredit traditional metrical analysis and foot-scansion. Properly applied, these usefully clarify verse structure. Working poets, however, do not divide language into two- or three-syllable units and then fasten them together, one at a time, foot by foot, to form verses. Rather, they fashion their lines out of larger segments of speech. In learning their craft, they acquire a special feeling for the shapes and rhythms of words and phrases that enables them to write, simultaneously, metrically and grammatically. They learn to hear when words and phrases fit a meter, or section of it, and to make the necessary adjustments or alterations when they don't. The elements of grammar most relevant to versification are syntax (the study of the forms of phrases and sentences) and morphology (the study of the structures and shapes of words). We can begin our discussion by examining the syntax of a common type of iambic pentameter represented by the following lines: My mountain belly and my rocky face (Ben Jonson, "My Picture Left in Scotland," 17) A painted meadow or a purling stream (Joseph Addison, "A Letter from Italy," 166) The smoothest numbers for the harshest prose (George Crabbe, "The Newspaper," 32) The wretched refuse of your teeming shore (Emma Lazarus, "The New Colossus," 12) Reading these verses aloud, we can hear their rhythmical similarity, and looking at their grammatical components, we can discover the reason for this likeness. Each line is composed of two noun-phrases connected by a monosyllabic conjunction or preposition. The first of the phrases involves a fore-stressed disyllabic adjective and a forestressed disyllabic noun. The second involves a fore-stressed disyllabic adjective and a monosyllabic noun. And both phrases are introduced by an article or attributive pronoun.

Page  163 TIMOTHY STEELE 163 Overall, the lines are plainly iambic, though the rhythm is unemphatic in the middle. Neither the fifth, sixth, nor seventh syllables has much speech stress, though the sixth is a little weightier than the fifth or seventh. Putting the matter another way, we may say that the verses are pentameters with light third feet. If in scanning the lines we wish to draw attention to the light foot, we can supplement the conventional descriptive notation with the four-level stress-register that linguists sometimes employ. That is, in addition to marking the syllables as metrically unaccented or accented, we can speak of them in terms of weak stress (1), tertiary stress (2), secondary stress (3), or strong stress (4). To take the example from Jonson, we can render the line thus: 1 4 1 4 12 14 14 x / x / x / X/ x/ My moun I tain bel I ly and I my roc I ky face As an aside, it may be useful to remind ourselves that iambic verse requires of poets only that they adhere to the general rise-and-fall of the metrical pattern. It is not necessary that all the metrically accented syllables be equally prominent; nor do all the metrically unaccented syllables need to be equally weak. The degree of difference between the rises and falls, though affecting actual speech rhythm, is for purposes of scansion irrelevant. Analogously, an iambic foot requires only that the second syllable receive more accent than the first. Whether it receives a lot more or little more does not, in terms of metrical classification, matter. For these reasons, it is perfectly possible and commonplace for poets to write iambic pentameters with fewer or more than five notable speech stresses. Here, for example, are pentameters with two and nine: 1 2 1 4 12 1 412 x / x / x/ x /X/ In our competitive humility (Edwin Arlington Robinson, "Captain Craig," 169) 3 4 3 4 1 4 3 4 3 4 x / x / x/ x / x / Milk hands, rose cheeks, or lips more sweet, more red (Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, 91.7)

Page  164 164 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW The key thing is just to maintain the basic fluctuation. (For a detailed analysis of this and related topics, please see my "On Meter," Hellas 1 [Fall 1990], 289-310.) To return to Jonson's line, note what happens if we reverse the order of the noun-phrases: My rocky face and my mountain belly. Even though the line has the same words and the same number of syllables, its rhythmical character has changed. In particular, "4my mountain belly"V. no longer fits into iambic measure. Whereas the shape of the phrase suits the first five positions of the pentameter,, it is not well adapted to the second five. In its altered situation,, it puts heavy beats on the seventh and ninth syllables, while leaving the eighth and tenth weak. Overall, the new line has a more tripping, semi-anapestic rhythm. Such a line might work in a poem in loose four-stress measure with feminine endings: x / x x / x / x x 1(x) Behold the results of candy and jelly: x / x / x x / X 1(x) My rocky face and my mountain belly But it is not in sync with the pentametric pattern. Turning more particularly to morphology and word-shape, we can examine another species of pentameter which we encounter fairly often and which is exemplified by the following lines: My ship and me Charybdis wol devour (Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 5.644) When I am made unhappy by my skill (Michael Drayton, Sonnets to Idea, 12.12) To write what may securely stand the test"98 (John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, "An Allusion to Horace," 8 And afterwards remember, do not grieve (Christina Rossetti, "Remember,". 10) And see the great Achilles, whom we knew (Alfred Tennyson, "Ulysses," 63) I may have looked attentive for a while (Wendy Cope., "So Much Depends," 6) Though these lines are syntactically diverse (Drayton'Ps, for instance, is a dependent clause, Tennyson's is a portion of a compound

Page  165 TIMOTHY STEELE 165 predicate, Cope's is a complete sentence), their rhythmical similarity is no less hearable than was the rhythmical similarity among the earlier group of lines. In this case, the likeness seems chiefly to result from each line's having a middle-stressed trisyllabic word that runs from the fifth to seventh positions. The words themselves represent different parts of speech. We have proper nouns (Charybdis, Achilles), adjectives (unhappy, attentive), an adverb (securely), and a verb (remember). But their shape is the same. This, and perhaps the pause that generally follows the word, produce the corresponding movement. As with the pentameters made up of noun-phrases, we can alter these verses in sundry ways without damaging their grammar, and we can in particular move the middle-stressed trisyllables to different positions. We could write, for instance, And remember afterwards, do not grieve For a while, I may have looked attentive But metrically speaking, or at least pentametrically speaking, such changes make the verses jump the tracks. The emended lines fall into that swingy, four-beat measure that we observed a moment ago: x x / /x x / x / And remember afterwards, do not grieve xx / x / x / x For a while, I may have looked attentive To read these as pentameters, one would have to mispronounce some of the words and give peculiar articulation to some of the phrases: And remember afterwards, do not grieve For a while, I may have looked attentive Meter and grammar are no longer in harmony, but are contradicting each other. Beginning poets often have difficulty harmonizing meter and grammar, especially when they attempt to write in iambic pentameter. This difficulty results chiefly from the combined effect of the line's asymmetry and its extreme flexibility. As many have noted, even when a pentameter seems to fall naturally into two five-syllable sections, the first half has only two metrical beats, whereas the second has three:

Page  166 166 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW x / x / x /x / x / The shrieking heaven <> lifted over men (Louise Bogan, "Cassandra," 7) And while the pentameter is a long line, it is has no obligatory caesural division. It is not, that is, conventionally partitioned into more manageable sub-divisions, as are long lines in some other poetries. In contrast to a poet working in, say, the ancient hexameter, which customarily pauses in the third foot, or the classical alexandrine, which customarily breaks after the sixth syllable, a poet writing English pentameters is free to pause (or not to pause) at any point in the line and may divide the line in any number of ways: A hand that taught what might be said in rhyme (Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, "Tribute to Wyatt," 13) The stars, I see, will kiss the valleys first (William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale, 5.1.205) Which only heads, refined from reason, know (Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, 3.6) A desolation, a simplicity (William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 4.402) My letters! all dead paper, mute and white! (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese, 28.1) Good. That man goes to Rome, to death, despair (Thomas Hardy, "At Lulworth Cove a Century Back," 17) Though the pentameter's flexibility makes it inexhaustibly interesting and exciting for the experienced poet, it takes a while for younger writers to develop that intuitional familiarity with it that is necessary to using it fluently. Initial attempts to write in the measure often produce verses which have ten syllables, but which are really in the loose, swingy, semi-anapestic, four-beat rhythm that characterizes the awkward emendations of Jonson's, Rossetti's, and Cope's lines. Since a good deal of popular verse and song-lyric features some sort of four-beat measure, and since such verse is very familiar to us, we perhaps naturally fall back on the measure when metrically confused. In any event, poets who wish to write pentameter must learn to distinguish between lines of this tripping four-beat sort and lines which may have only four (or three or two) strong speech stresses, but which nevertheless keep to the iambic tread or fluctuation and which merely feature a light iamb or iambs at some point:

Page  167 TIMOTHY STEELE 167 1 41 21 4 1 4 1 4 S/x / / x / x / Bespotted as with shields of red and black (Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 1.9.11.5) 1 41 4 14 1 21 4 x /x / x / x / x The many paper parcels in a stack (Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree, 6.4) It is not always the case that one and only one arrangement of words or phrases will prove metrically workable. In pentameters that divide into groups of four and six syllables, for instance, the phrases may sometimes be transposed, assuming no logical relationship or pattern of rhyme is violated. When Friar Lawrence advises the banished Romeo to console himself with "Adversity's sweet milk, philosophy" (Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 3.3.55), he could just as well say, for metrical purposes, "Philosophy, adversity's sweet milk." Similarly, words in a line may sometimes be transposed with one another, especially if they are coordinate adjectives, nouns, or verbs, and have the same number of syllables and the same rhythmical contour. Indeed, on occasion a poet may artfully flipflop such transposable words, as Thomas Hood does in his rueful observation about "The Irish Schoolmaster": He never spoils the child and spares the rod But spoils the rod and never spares the child. Though certain grammatical patterns appear relatively frequently in our verse, metrical composition is by no means limited to these. The pentameter line in particular seems capable of accommodating almost any syntactical arrangement, and the serious poet will in fact avoid relying on the more common ones. There are cliches of rhythm as well as speech, and the ear may be put off by familiar modulations no less than by stereotypical diction. These remarks are pertinent to the line-type featuring the two noun-phrases. It has a kind of facile sweetness. It tends to feel padded, mainly because of the two disyllabic adjectives and their symmetrical positioning-one in the first phrase, one in the second. A historical factor is involved as well. Eighteenth-century poets were particularly fond of this line-type and milked it to exhaustion. Per

Page  168 168 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW haps because they sought to make their pentameters as smooth as possible, and because they consequently and desperately needed sources of rhythmical modulation, the line-type had a dual appeal for them. On the one hand, its paired noun-phrases made for balance. On the other hand, its light third foot made for metrical variety. Unfortunately, when one hears the line several times in close proximity-as one does, for instance, toward the close (346,354,361) of Goldsmith's "Deserted Village"The various terrors of that horrid shore The rattling terrors of the vengeful snake The breezy covert of the warbling grove it sets one's teeth on edge. If the line has become something of a rhythmical cliche, its familiarity has on occasion been put to good effect by modem poets. For instance, in their memorial tributes to Arthur Henniker and John Muir respectively, Thomas Hardy and Yvor Winters seem to use the line to indicate something of the simple, old-fashioned goodness of their subjects: His modest spirit in his candid look (Hardy, "A.H., 1855-1912," 4) A gentle figure from a simpler age (Winters, "On Re-reading a Passage from John Muir," 18) Also, if a heavy iamb appears at any point before or after the light third foot, the rhythm tilts in such a way that it loses its cloying quality and acquires (at least to our ears at this point in metrical history) a more interesting effect: 34 A cleaving daylight, and a last great calm (Robinson, "Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford," 291) 3 4 The bare man Nothing in the Beggar's Bush (Auden, "The Hero," 4) It will be noted that, to produce this alteration, the poet must dispense with one of the disyllabic adjectives. Doubtless this morphological shift affects the change of rhythm. So, too, a line of the paired-noun-phrases type may acquire rhyth

Page  169 TIMOTHY STEELE 169 mical interest if it appears in the midst of enjambments. For example, when Milton writes (Paradise Lost, 2.278-280), during Mammon's speech arguing against a second assault on God,... All things invite To peaceful counsels, and the settled state Of order... even the most fastidious reader will probably not find anything trite in the movement. Admittedly, "To peaceful counsels, and the settled state" might appear in isolation just another variation on a familiar rhythmical theme, in this instance the first of the noun-phrases beginning with a preposition rather than an article or attributive adjective. Yet we don't hear the noun phrases as neatly balanced. The enjambments sever the close syntactical relationship between them. Grammatically, the first noun-phrase goes with material from the line above it and the second with material from the line below. Many other syntactical arrangements can produce lines with a sense-break after the fifth syllable, in the middle of a light third foot. Though the arrangement involving the two noun-phrases is most common, we can cite various different examples, which may give us some sense of the innumerable ways that this simple form of the pentameter may be realized: It frets the halter, and it chokes the child (Walter Ralegh, "Sir Walter Ralegh to his Son," 12) The pipe, the tabor, and the trembling crowd (Spenser, "Epithalamion," 131) My sweet companion and my gentle peer (Abraham Cowley, "On the Death of Mr. William Hervey," 9) Resolved to ruin or to rule the state (John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, 174) Of life reviving with reviving day (Walter Scott, The Lady of the Lake, 2.1.4) There is a mountain in the distant west (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Cross of Snow," 9) Ralegh fills out the line with two independent clauses joined by a coordinating conjunction. Spenser uses a series of three nouns, the last modified by an adjective. Cowley deploys two noun-phrases-the first of which, however, differs from the more common pattern, by involving a monosyllabic adjective and a trisyllabic noun accented in

Page  170 170 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW the middle. Dryden offers a past participle followed by coordinate infinitives. In Scott's line, we see two prepositional phrases. In the Longfellow line, we have an anticipatory ("dummy") subject, followed by a verb, subject, and prepositional phrase. A light middle foot may consist as well of a conjunction and an article: Of heightened wit I and of I the critic's art (Anne Finch, "Poem Occasioned by the Sight of the Fourth Epistle, Lib. Epist: 1 of Horace," 60) Or it may entail a syllable with weak stress, followed by a syllable with tertiary (or secondary) stress, in a polysyllabic or fore-stressed trisyllabic word: In sad simil I itude I of griefs to mine (Pope, "Eloisa to Abelard," 360) You know the moun I tainous I coiffures of Bath (Wallace Stevens, "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," 29) Let us return to word-shape and to middle-stressed trisyllables. In pentametric verse, these seem most often to occupy the fifth-to-seventh positions. Or perhaps they merely have special rhythmical distinctness when so placed. Nevertheless, such words appear in all of the other possible locations in the line. We frequently find them, that is, running from the first to the third position, from the third to the fifth, from the seventh to the ninth, and from the ninth to the eleventh-in this last case the final unaccented syllable of the word comprising a feminine ending: Divinely imitate the realms above (Sarah Fyge Egerton, "The Emulation," 35) The late appearance of the northern lights (R. S. Gwynn, "Horatio's Philosophy," 12) In marble quarried from Carrara's hills (W. H. Davies, "A Strange City," 16) Go, get you up; I will not be entreated (Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, 4.3.3) Moreover, two different middle-stressed trisyllables may occur at different positions in the line: In aforbidden or forbidding tree (John Donne, "The Blossom," 12)

Page  171 TIMOTHY STEELE 171 Adulthood's high romantic citadel (Kingsley Amis, "Romance," 8) Or three may appear, as in Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow (Shakespeare, Macbeth, 5.1.19) To shift morphologies, one can find as well, in the same line, a pair of trisyllables with chief stress on the first syllable and tertiary stress on the third: Boys seek for images and melody (Robert Browning, "Transcendentalism," 17) The singular idea of loneliness (Robinson, "Isaac and Archibald," 63) And one can find the two different kinds of trisyllables mixed together in a single line, as was the case in Amis's verse cited a moment ago, and as is the case in these verses: Or memorize another Golgotha (Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1.2.41) Whatever hypocrites austerely talk (Milton, Paradise Lost, 4.744) Indeed, because most English words of more than one syllable feature alternating stress, whether rising or falling, it is relatively easy for poets, once they get the hang of it, to fit them at any point into the line. Here, for instance, are verses that integrate, into the pentametric pattern, words of four and five syllables with rising stress: I saw eternity the other night (Henry Vaughan, "The World," 1) Procrastination is the thief of time (Edward Young, Night Thoughts, 1.393) And here are verses that integrate words of five and six syllables with falling stress. (The first verse also features a four-syllable word with rising stress.) By psychological experiment (Robert Frost, "At Woodward's Gardens," 19) Of all this unintelligible world (Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey," 40)

Page  172 172 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Likewise, it is possible to integrate two four-syllable words with different stress-contours into the same pentameter: The reputation of Tiepolo (Anthony Hecht, The Venetian Vespers, 6.94) Or two five-syllable words with different stress-contours: Involuntary immortality (Vikram Seth, "The North Temple Tower," 10) Other combinations may be noted. For example, Milton gives us, in the following verse (PL, 3.492), four words of different length, arranged in a kind of descending succession. The first and second words have four and three syllables respectively and feature rising rhythm; the third word is a disyllable with falling rhythm, the fourth a monosyllable: Indulgences, Dispenses, Pardons, Bulls And in the verse below (Troilus and Cressida, 5.2.127), Shakespeare offers this same mix of words, but swings the polysyllable down to the end of the line and moves the tri-, di-, and monosyllable up a place: Created only to calumniate The shapes of English words may account partly for the existence of the two most common variations in iambic verse-the inverted (i.e., trochaic) foot at the beginning of the line and the feminine ending (i.e., the extra-metrical unaccented syllable) at the close. Many English words of two or more syllables start with a heavy syllable or end with a light one. Though such words can be integrated into the middle of the iambic line, it is useful to have the option of setting them at the head or the end of the line, too. The conventions of the inverted first foot and of the feminine ending enable poets to make these alternative placements. Consider the following line (115) from Frost's "Generations of Men": Making allowance, making due allowance This line twice features the fore-stressed disyllabic word "making." The second time it appears, it is integrated iambically into the interior of the line; however, the convention of the trochaic first foot lets

Page  173 TIMOTHY STEELE 173 Frost position the word at the line-beginning as well. The line also twice features the middle-stressed trisyllabic word "allowance." When it first appears, Frost merges it into the iambic rhythm of the line's interior; but the convention of the feminine ending permits Frost to employ the word at the line-ending, too: / x x / x / x /x /(x) Making I allow I ance, mak I ing due I allowance Frost, incidentally, may be having a little joke here. This line, about making allowance, makes use of the two most common allowances of English verse. Similarly, in this line (507) from Frost's Masque of Mercy, Failure is failure, but success is failure the conventions of the inverted first foot and of the feminine ending enable the poet to use "failure" in three different metrical manners. The word initially figures as a trochaic first foot, then is integrated into the line's overall iambic rhythm, and finally serves to produce a feminine ending: / x x / x / x / x / (x) Failure I is fail I ure, but I success I is failure (The conventions of the inverted first foot and the feminine ending are also partly attributable to phonological conditions. For instance, as Roman Jakobson has pointed out, the longstanding allowance of the inverted first foot may reflect the fact that at line- and phraseboundaries, the ear tolerates metrical modifications more readily than it does elsewhere. Following a pause between lines or phrases, an inverted foot seems less disruptive than it would if it appeared in the midst of a developing segment of rhythm. Likewise, one could argue that when a line concludes, an extra unstressed syllable that follows the final beat is not necessarily felt as a break in the prevailing pattern; indeed, in iambic verse, the feminine ending actually continues the fluctuation between light and heavy syllables. If I note here the relevance of English word-shapes to our two common metrical variations, I do so only because the matter has been previously overlooked.) While the abstract norm of the pentameter has five accents, one common version of the line has only three strong speech stresses. In this type of line, the second and fourth feet are light, and strong beats

Page  174 174 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW fall on syllables two, six, and ten. Grammatically, this line often involves two major fore-stressed disyllables (e.g., nouns or verbs), introduced or connected by particles (e.g., articles or monosyllabic conjunctions and prepositions). The line customarily concludes with another major word, usually a monosyllable, though a fore-stressed disyllable is possible as well, in this latter case the light second syllable comprising a feminine ending. This line-type appears with some frequency in Chaucer: In Omer or in Dares or in Dyte (Troilus and Criseyde, 1.145) In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay (Canterbury Tales, Gen. Prol., 20) Later instances include: A kingdom, or a cottage, or a grave (Edward de Vere, "Epigram," 6) The tutor and the feeder of my riots (Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV, 1.3.86) The bosom of his Father and his God (Thomas Gray, "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard," 128) And listen to the flapping of the flame (Wordsworth, "Personal Talk," 1.13) The glory of the beauty of the morning (Edward Thomas, "The Glory," 1)) As with other species of pentameter, this one can be realized in many ways. The poet can introduce, so to speak, a trisyllable for one of the disyllables and delete one of the particles: Nor wonder at complainings in your streets (Mary Barber, "On Seeing an Officer's Widow," 30) Or one of the disyllables may be replaced by a monosyllable, and a trisyllable may make up the difference by replacing a disyllable: As sweet and as delicious as the first (John Ford, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, 5.3.9) Or a rear-stressed disyllable can close the line, the initial unaccented syllable of this word standing, in a sense, in place of one of the particles: The Paythan an' the Zulu an' Burmese (Rudyard Kipling, "Fuzzy Wuzzy," 3)

Page  175 TIMOTHY STEELE 175 Or the pattern may result from two rear-stressed disyllables flanking a polysyllable whose primarily stressed syllable occupies the sixth position in the line: Detained for contemplation and repose (Wordsworth, The Excursion, 1.42) Or it may involve two middle-stressed trisyllables and a rear-stressed disyllable: Distinguished, and familiar, and aloof (J. V. Cunningham, A Century of Epigrams, 54.4) Or a middle-stressed and a fore-stressed trisyllable and a rearstressed disyllable: Wherever on the virginal frontier (Richard Wilbur, "John Chapman," 2) Once readers or poets acquire a sense of rhythmico-grammatical groups, they may be able to specify other common types of this or that meter. They also may develop an ear for less common correspondences. Below, for instance, are the opening iambic tetrameters of two well-known poems which are centuries apart, but which have the same unusual rhythm. This involves an inverted first foot and a fore-stressed disyllabic word laid across the fourth and fifth positions of the line; the unaccented syllable of this word in turn constitutes the first syllable of a light iamb, which is followed by a heavy iamb, with the result that four degrees of stress rise over the course of two successive feet: 1 2 3 4 / x x/x / x / Drink to me only with thine eyes (Ben Jonson, "Song," 1) 1i2 3 4 / x x/x / x / just as my fingers on these keys (Stevens, "Peter Quince at the Clavier," 1) Here are two iambic pentameters that feature similarly contoured and coordinated parallel phrases:

Page  176 176 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW False Friend, false Son, false Father, and false King (Charles Churchill, Gotham, 2.385) Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and-sans End! (Edward Fitzgerald, Omar Khayydm's Rubaiyat, 23.4) It should be said, by way of encouragement to younger writers, that even great poets make metrical mistakes, and that one shouldn't be frightened of errors or feel that one is a tin-eared klutz if one on occasion fumbles a line. For instance, Philip Sidney, as sure-footed a metrician as ever wrote, perhaps loses his balance at that point (9-11) in "With How Sad Steps" where he wonders if in heaven, as well as on earth, constant love is met with contempt: Then, even of fellowship, O Moon, tell me Is constant love deem'd there but want of wit? Are beauties there as proud as here they be? Remembering that "even" could be pronounced monosyllabically in the Renaissance, one can make iambic sense of the first four feet of the first line, but in the final foot, the meter appears to strain against natural speech stress: x / x / x / /?? Then, even of fellowship, O Moon, tell me Normally, we would say the two-syllable imperative clause with the accent on the verb: tell me. Yet this gives us a trochaic substitution. Such a substitution in the last foot of a line is almost always awkward, and in this case it would spoil the rhyme with "be." Evidently, then, Sidney wishes us to render the foot "tell me." But such a reading seems odd, unless the moon has recently imparted the desired information to some other nocturnal wanderer and the poet feels slighted in consequence. At times meter and syntax may seem to be at loggerheads, but will, upon closer examination, prove to be in interesting and lively concurrence. At times, that is, meter may seem to require an unusual reading which will turn out to be significant and appropriate for the context. A good illustration of this situation occurs toward the close of John Greenleaf Whittier's "Abraham Davenport." In this poem, an eclipse has spread darkness over the countryside, and in the Connecticut State House, most of the legislators are terrified that the Day of Judgment has arrived. Amidst a clamor for adjournment, Rep

Page  177 TIMOTHY STEELE 177 resentative Davenport calmly rises and suggests that people cannot know the ways of divinity and that the lawmakers should therefore remain at their earthly tasks-in this case, amending an act to regulate state fisheries-until heaven explicitly orders them to do otherwise. And he concludes by saying: Let God do his work, we will see to ours. Were we to encounter the first clause in isolation, we would probably read it with stresses on the two nouns. Let God do his work. However, such a reading does not fit the iambic pentameter pattern, which instead suggests that the stress should fall on "his." Though normally we do not stress an attributive adjective at the expense of its noun, rendering the line in this evidently unconventional fashion not only recovers the rhythm, but also clarifies the poem's meaning. We see that Whittier intends that the pronominal forms be emphasized right down the line and that the line itself encapsulates the poem's key juxtapositions-God/man and God's work/man's work: Let God do his work, we will see to ours Generally speaking, grammatical variety is as pleasing in verse as it is in prose. In terms of morphology and word-shape, it is frequently the case that verse which naturally and unostentatiously mixes different types of words will appeal to the ear more than verse whose vocabulary is notably constrained or limited. To take an obvious case, Shakespeare time and again captivates us with the dextrous diversity of his language, often creating interesting verbal and rhythmical counterpoints simply by juxtaposing lines of short words with lines of longer ones. Consider, in this regard, that passage in The Taming of the Shrew (2.1.170-76) in which Petruchio announces that he will not let Kate's ill temper discourage him from wooing her. Part of the rhythmical charm of the passage results from Petruchio's hypothesizing, in verses comprised of monosyllables, ways in which Kate may insult him, and then imagining, in verses featuring di-, tri-, and polysyllabic words, complimentary replies to turn aside her rudeness: Say that she rail, why then I'll tell her plain She sings as sweetly as a nightingale. Say that she frown, I'll say she looks as clear As morning roses newly washed with dew. Say she be mute and will not speak a word,

Page  178 178 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Then I'll commend her volubility And say she uttereth piercing eloquence. (It may be observed that Shakespeare probably intends us to read, in the final line of this passage, the second syllable of "uttereth" as elided or syncopated away: "utt'reth." Otherwise, the line has an extra syllable. Those who, like George Saintsbury, object to resolving syllabic ambiguities by means of elision will scan the line as having an anapestic third foot.) Another instance of this type of juxtaposition occurs toward the close of Hamlet. Mortally wounded, the dying prince is concerned for his posthumous reputation, and he realizes that unless he has an advocate to tell the world his side of the sad story of his family, he may be blamed for the catastrophes that have befallen the Danish court. So he begs his distraught friend Horatio, who himself wishes to commit suicide, to live at least a little longer and give a fair accounting of all that has happened. As Hamlet puts it to Horatio (5.2.349-50): Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain Though it is the thought that touches us in these lines, the thought may be memorable precisely on account of the contrast between the first line's graceful paraphrasis (for "Don't die yet") and the second's clotted density. Both lines are conventional pentameters, but the first, with its disyllables and polysyllable and its alliteration, seems rhythmically to carry a sense of the happy (to Hamlet's way of thinking) realm of death, whereas the congested rhythm of the second suggests the acerbic domain of terrestrial experience. Poems may also benefit from syntactical variety. J.V. Cunningham's epigrams and translations illustrate, in miniature, this point. For example, in Cunningham's version of Catullus's two-liner Odi et Amo I hate and love her. If you ask me why I don't know. But I feel it and am torn. we have, in two iambic pentameters, three short sentences. The first is a simple declarative sentence, with subject, (compound) verb, and object. The second sentence is complex, the dependent clause coming first, the main clause, "I don't know," following. The third sentence has yet a different structure, being introduced by a coordinating conjunction and having a compound predicate.

Page  179 TIMOTHY STEELE 179 It is doubtful that Cunningham was solemnly deliberating about syntax when he did this translation. Like most excellent poets, once he had acquired the skills of his trade, he applied them with a natural grace and devoted most of his conscious energy to thematics or, in the case of translation, to philological and interpretive questions. (Because Latin is much more highly inflected than English, and because its grammar differs from ours, the cast of Cunningham's sentences is necessarily his own as well as Catullus's.) But the quiet variety of syntax is a key aspect of the translation and significantly contributes to its success. One needn't use fancy words and intricate grammar to write great verse. Cunningham's translation is, despite its syntactical fluidity, composed entirely of monosyllables. And many of the most memorable passages and lines in our poetry are written in simple words, with straightforward sentence structure: Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more. (Shakespeare, King Lear, 5.3.308-309) I must stop short of thee the whole day long (Alice Meynell, "Renunciation," 8) Other things being equal, however, having a good working vocabulary and a rich command of grammatical structure will prove to be to the poet's advantage. It will give him or her a wider range of thought and expression than would otherwise be the case. In closing, I should like to say a few words about the benefits of considering meter in connection with grammar. The masterpieces of our poetry are an enduring resource; they have a singular power to instruct, elevate, move, console, and civilize. Yet if they are to exercise their regenerative function, they must be understood and experienced in the spirit in which they were written. We must be able to internalize their rhythms of thought and sensibility. We must read them not merely with the eye, but also with the ear and mind and heart. We must experience them as the integrated works they are. We must hear both their grammatical and their metrical structures, both their sense and their music. To return to Auden's comment, it is possible to read verse as pure grammar, rendering it as though it were prose, or as pure meter, simply sing-songing or intoning it forth. But the magical paradox of verse is that it joins fixed measure with fluid

Page  180 180 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW idiomatic speech. The better we appreciate this union, the more deeply and comprehensively we can grasp and share in the art. Finally, the relationship between meter and grammar is well worth attention, in that the two perhaps illustrate, in similar and concurrent ways, something of the very nature of our being. In his stimulating study, Grammatical Man, Jeremy Campbell writes: Biologists as well as philosophers have suggested that the universe, and the living forms it contains, are based on chance, but not on accident. To put it another way, forces of chance and of antichance coexist in a complementary relationship.... The proper metaphor for the life process may not be a pair of rolling dice or a spinning roulette wheel, but the sentences of a language, conveying information that is partly predictable and partly unpredictable. These sentences are generated by rules that make much out of little, producing a boundless wealth of meaning from a finite store of words; they enable language to be familiar yet surprising, constrained yet unpredictable within its constraints. No less than grammar does, meter fuses and enacts those principles of constancy and of change that seem essential to life and to the world about us. Like grammar, meter involves simple structures which can nevertheless be manifested in varied and complex ways. It organizes the rhythms of speech while at the same time allowing for all sorts of modulations, shadings, and surprises. And when Campbell adds that "grammatical man inhabits a grammatical universe," poets and readers of verse might speculate that we also inhabit a metrical one.

Alan WilliamsonWilliamson, AlanLa PastorelaVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 181-184http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:30

Page  181 ALAN WILLIAMSON LA PASTORELA [Hispanic Christmas play, performed every other year at the Mission in San Juan Bautista by the Teatro Campesino, a group which had its origins in Cesar Chavez's migrant workers' movement. A few years ago there was a televised version, with an elaborate frameplot, and with Linda Ronstadt as the Archangel Michael.] Like the first centuries. The outsiders get wind of what's at the center, down thousands of desert milesthe golden Empire, pulsating, tossing out its tentacles, leaching their strength-and wanting so much at once to share and despise it, break it down. (Bomb-factories in New Jersey; slave-ships foundering offshore...) But these are different. Their language held this place, right for the dust-glint of olives, the waterless flame that, from April onwards, licks across the hills like an Inquisitor's, centuries before they were brought here in truckloads, seasonal, the flat hot fields another country the American highway looks away from, like Europe from the cattle-cars. But for ten years my mother and her friends have come across the hills from Carmel only Arabs and movie stars could build in now, to see them take the old Mission for their new-old play. And one year it even got on television: the shepherd-girl dreaming St. Michael-Linda Ronstadt come in shopping-mall-rainbow jewels, solar gauze, out of the too-white California sky to send them out on the roads to seek the Child. 181

Page  182 182 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW The journey long as history, the eternal gray of the ghost-sloughs, hill-oaks scrubbed with winter. The Hells Angels roaring through Hollister are remembered in the spiked leather wristbands the demons wear; Manson and his girls in El Cosmnico... In the campfire songs at twilight, the devil joins in, as when does he not, on such journeys? They've got him splendidly, as he is, a subtle fellow; offering no kingdoms or orgies, he gets people to see things a little wrong, out of the steady balance of wants and limits. (In our multicultural English Departments, you can hear him whisper to the ethnic poet, the post-colonial critic, "'If they fault a line, or question a fact, it's racism; they've been having their say a thousand years"then tell the whites, "'Look how sloppy they are, how arrogant; always getting something for nothing-that's their game.") So he turns them all to sheep, and sends them running.... In the real church, of course it's better: the Shepherds', staves bright with crepe paper, tin cans, lanterns, feathers, flowers. San Miguel by the altar; Lucifer at Hell-mouth (draped over the church door); and the girl kneeling where their rays converge.... Lucifer (Luzbel) and Satan-as are two separate persons; Satan-a's is androgynous; at Armageddon, St. Michael and Luzbel sweep in on high-necked wooden horses, black, star-blue. The angels bullfight the little devils, the ones whose horns keep slipping off;, then the great protagonists, swordless, fling brujo magic from their palms. At last -all draw toward the altar; resonance of whitewash on Roman arches; a real baby; gift-giving; and the Hermit does a dance, because he owns nothingz to gzive. Then they file back, an angel and a devil,, two by two, and, walking out, we shake the actors' hands.

Page  183 ALAN WILLIAMSON 183 Out into America, under the thick, full stars.... Does it help us accept it all? Our human lights thicker than stars, over what was once plain country; this culture of quotation marks, without boundariesthe Teatro moving north to the city; the man whose wife cut his penis off, a hero on the talk shows... "When we first came," my mother says, "it was all Mexicans and five of us; now it's the other way round." Accept, even, Linda Ronstadt saying to the Devil, in her version of Biblical English, "Rise, you horrendous beast!" -though perhaps in a thousand years some hybrid flower, lovely with possibility as French or Italian, will bloom out of the wreckage.... In the film, the shepherd-girl wakes up, and finds she's just a girl from the town; it was the scruffy old Hermit knocked the eagle-lectern down on her head when he mounted the pulpit; and suddenly she was no longer watching, she was part of the play. And she'll be different, now that she's been there at the manger in Bethlehem, with the real child: in love with a young field hand, who's come in to be one of the actors; sorry she blamed her mother for going on having babies and keeping them poor.... A little north of here, someone just slightly younger didn't wake up; she was found thrown in a scrub-wood by the highway, outside Cloverdale, by a man let loose after serving half his sentence. By all the bad childhoods, sealed in blue tattoos like Satands' wristbands? By a society that won't believe its own moral judgments sixteen years' worth? By the gladiatorial murders on t.v.? How short a time back, we were the severe Republic, gone back to filch learning-but also keep our distancefrom the sly old centaurs under the olive trees.

Page  184 184 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Now the sex-shops in Milan are called "Magic California." If you were with Tacitus, and walking in that brick market-labyrinth-arcade, near the Forum of Trajan, where the terror of its having happened over and over can be felt more than in Circus or Colosseum, what vision could you have truer than the moment when the Devil holds up the Crown of Thorns on fire, and shows (in the high-tech version) the whole future flickering within: Calvary, the long procession aslant the hill-ridge, like the one Death leads in Bergman's Seventh Seal; the sponge, the spear; and says, in effect, "You'll be poor all your lives, miss out on the fun of America, for this?" And though we know it's a false question-they'll be poor anyway; the corporations have paid for this broadcast, as Augustus was "always a good-humored spectator" at the Gamesstill, how we're gladdened by the countervoice that says, so strongly it needn't be out loud, out of the center of that flaring ring, it has always been so; says, if you want your life to mean something more than its moment, go through here.

A.R. AmmonsAmmons, A.R.Now ThenVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 185-187http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:31

Page  185 A. R. AMMONS NOW THEN You can have your bathroom window open an inch and if the door is nearly closed, it can slam it shut: the wind can: whereas, if the door is standing open (as perhaps it shouldn't be) (not if you're doing anything, you know, cool) a hurricane would do little more than tremble the door (however much it rattled the window); may not, contrariwise, the physics be in the metaphysics: which is to say that major effects can come of slender spacings, while something too wide open cannot be bothered by anything: broadly, therefore, welcome the world, and if you must have them keep your splinterings and partitions solidly shut away from transmission: you are, in other words, everyone, except for your little exception box to which you may repair for repair or prayer when the wide scene loses hold on its outlines: the more to be said the closer you get to nothing: you peep out at dawn and say of the whole thing, 185

Page  186 186 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW look at that, when, later, looking at the vibration in the microinscriptive, you may need to call up libraries of language for poise: it could not be truly said of the yellowjackets that they are out in the drizzle today without their jackets, even though it is true that they are not without their jackets: if god is in each of us, I wonder if he is in each of the gorillas, if only in his gorilla-aspect, a facet the gorillas can see themselves and be seen by, just as, I suppose, when we look, we see our own natures, native and, like ligatures, sewn together: the yellowjackets that usually streak straight into the stone socket of the stone wall they nest in, today buzz broadly about that wet entrance before diving in: the yellowjacket god is these motions, and when naked yellowjackets dip and streak and hunt the clover blooms, don't think they don't feel at home, right with their god: for it is true far and wide that nothing is so true as what breaks into being this minute from colossal petrifications of past time and huge issuances into time-to-be: don't mess with me, or the yellowjackets: we are in a high place which may or may not explode

Page  187 A. R. AMMONS 187 but if it explodes nothing will be lost, every little tiny atom will still be spinning for the lord: we may go, and scientists may suck the yellowjackets out of their hole to extract the sting-venom: have no fear: weep but move on: if the god is not in residence, he is in motion, and it is hard to tell which is which: coco rico, the rooster crows: it is day again

BooksVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 188-218http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:32

Brian HenryHenry, BrianThe Woman As Icon, The Woman As PoetVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 188-202http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:33

Page  188 BRIAN HENRY THE WOMAN AS ICON, THE WOMAN AS POET An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987. By Eavan Boland. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. Pp. 205. $25. Object Lessons. By Eavan Boland. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995. Pp. 254. $23. In a Time of Violence. By Eavan Boland. New York: W.W. Norton, 1994. Pp. 70. $17.95. In what appears to be a bid to be considered the woman Irish poet, Eavan Boland has recently published two volumes of poetry-In a Time of Violence and An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967 -1987-and Object Lessons, a collection of essays subtitled "The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time." The poems and essays reveal a powerful intellect at work, though her intelligence can at times seem like calculated shrewdness, especially when we examine the poetry and prose together. These three books allow us to trace Boland's progression as a poet and to evaluate her emergence as a significant literary figure, a spokeswoman for her generation. They are roles that she takes seriously and that, for her, are inextricably linked. From the beginning, Boland's poetry is historically and politically aware as well as utterly humorless. Despite an evident ambition toward grandeur, her early poems emerge as stilted and pseudo-Yeatsian in rhythm and tenor. However, to loudly criticize Boland's early poetry would be redundant, for she herself dismisses these poems in the preface to An Origin Like Water because they "struggled for skill and avoided risk." She includes these early poems, "with their failures, their awkwardness, because although the connection [of her 188

Page  189 BRIAN HENRY 189 womanhood with her life as a poet] was often flawed and painful, [that connection] remains central." Although she criticizes these poems, she clearly does not expect us to follow suit. Her inclusion of a substantial number of poems that she considers failures compels us to consider them beside the later poems as stations on her journey toward a more capacious identity and vision. As with Adrienne Rich, one of Boland's obvious models in craft as well as ideology, the early work is exhibited as symptomatic of an undeveloped feminist sensibility in need of re-vision. In Boland's first collection, New Territory (1967), occasional dramatic monologues appear with more common third-person narratives, allowing the poet to remain outside the poems and to withhold feeling or emotion. We can see everywhere the work of a young poet struggling with form and slavishly imitating Yeats. In the first three quatrains of the sonnet "Yeats in Civil War," one of the strongest poems in the collection, Boland forces several rhymes to achieve her line breaks; the slant rhyme of the final couplet, however, is a sign of formal rebellion, or at least innovation: In middle age you exchanged the sandals Of a pilgrim for a Norman keep In Galway. Civil war started. Vandals Sacked your country, made off with your sleep. Somehow you arranged your escape Aboard a spirit ship which every day Hoisted sail out of fire and rape. On that ship your mind was stowaway. The sun mounted on a wasted place But the wind at every door and turn Blew the smell of honey in your face Where there was none. Whatever I may learn You are its sum, struggling to surviveA fantasy of honey your reprieve. The "reprieve" is not only for the great poet, but also for the reader whose ear is jarred by the ostentatious rhymes. In Boland's second collection, The War Horse (1975), she becomes more historian than mythologist, and she eases up on her strict rhyme

Page  190 190 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW schemes. Unfortunately, most of the weaknesses of the poems in New Territory-especially the stiff cadences and the poet's distance from her subjects-are carried over to these poems. We see more dramatic monologues and the third-person narratives, but Boland's focus is more political now, in poems like "The Famine Road," "A Soldier's Son," and "The Hanging Judge," as well as two poems written "after" Mayakovsky. Her preoccupation with the suburbs, which strengthens with time, emerges in "Ode to Suburbia," where the suburb is "an ugly sister" that "swelled so that when you tried / The silver slipper on your foot / It pinched your instep." Is the poet feeling hemmed in by her surroundings? In the title poem, however, we see Boland for the first time entering and occupying her own poem. In its reliance on a first-person narrative and in its equating of the domestic world with the violent outside world, "The War Horse" foreshadows Boland's later poems. In the poem the passing of a horse is imbued with a sense of danger: This dry night, nothing unusual About the clip, clop, casual Iron of his shoes as he stamps death Like a mint on the innocent coinage of earth. The slant rhymes and lack of regular meter give the poem a more natural and more pleasing rhythm. When the horse passes by, the poem acquires a pentimento effect, as if Boland were rewriting Yeats's epitaph from "Under Ben Bulben": Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by! But here there is no horseman-no agent-only an unwitting and clumsy horse. After the horse disappears, the poet finds that "No great harm is done. / Only a leaf of our laurel hedge is torn // Of distant interest like a maimed limb." Now the floral landscape, marred by this seemingly harmless horse, becomes a human landscape, with the rose bush "expendable, a mere / Line of defense against him, a volunteer," and the crocus "one of the screamless dead." Before she allows herself too much melodrama, Boland wisely remembers, But we, we are safe, our unformed fear Of fierce commitment gone; why should we care

Page  191 BRIAN HENRY 191 If a rose, a hedge, a crocus are uprooted Like corpses, remote, crushed, mutilated? But the rose, hedge, and crocus are not corpses; and despite her inclination to make them so, Boland returns to the unwitting horse who "stumbles on like a rumor of war, huge / Threatening." The horse threatens neither the poet nor her suburban neighbors, but his passing through-the wreckage he leaves behind-reminds the poet of "A cause ruined before, a world betrayed." This hugely symbolic horse gallops improbably into Boland's milieu straight from the poetic tradition, as her historical analogies suggest-a masculine force of immense threat to the safe world of the suburban present. Casting off her male influences, Boland delivers a cornucopia of psychological misfits in In Her Own Image (1980). A cathartic collection of dramatic monologues, the book begins at a high pitch with "Tirade for the Mimic Muse," a blast against everything poetically and politically oppressive. In its rhythm and tone, the poem reads like a re-tuned version of Plath's "Daddy." The poem steamrolls us with its Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, hard consonants, and loud internal rhymes: I've caught you out. You slut. You fat trout.... Anyone would think you were a whoreAn aging out-of-work kind-hearted tart. I know you for the ruthless bitch you are: Our criminal, our tricoteuse, our MuseOur Muse of Mimic Art. How you fled The kitchen screw and the rack of labor, The wash thumbed and the dish cracked, The scream of beaten women, The crime of babies battered, The hubbub and the shriek of daily grief That seeks asylum behind suburb walls.... After two books of mostly insipid poems, it is refreshing to encounter such voltage in Boland's language. But if we return to any stanza of Plath's "Daddy," we realize that "Tirade" is a weak imitation:

Page  192 192 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two. Boland's mimicking of Plath raises an important question: Does imitating a male poet (Yeats) produce bad poetry while imitating a female poet (Plath) produces good poetry? What kind of value system does that imply? Boland's acknowledgement of her debt to Yeats and her criticism of the resulting poems seem like a preemptive strike because she knows her readers will recognize the Yeatsian echoes in those poems. But she expects us to ignore that these poems mine Plath territory. Although the other poems in In Her Own Image seldom attain the verbal power of "Tirade for the Mimic Muse," they attempt to shock us with their content-domestic violence, breast cancer, anorexia, menstruation, masturbation. Because these subjects are common fodder for American poems, these poems carry the extra burden of convincing already skeptical readers. They seldom succeed. For example, the narrator in "In His Own Image" does not feel normal unless her husband beats her, ostensibly in order to recast her in his own image: Now I see that all I needed was a hand to mold my mouth to scald my cheek.... He splits my lip with his fist, shadows my eye with a blow, knuckles my neck to its proper angle. What a perfectionist! His are a sculptor's hands: they summon form from the void, they bring me to myself again. I am a new woman.

Page  193 BRIAN HENRY 193 Although the poem is a dramatic monologue, the narrator's total submission rings false to me. The cheap irony of the last line invites a programmatic feminist response: "Look how this poor woman has conspired in her own victimization! All her abuser has left her is a useless sarcasm." Readers of poetry are likely to resist this simplistic rhetorical stratagem. In contrast, the dramatic monologue of "Anorexia" is faithful to the complexity of this disease: "Flesh is heretic. / My body is a witch. / I am burning it." Much of the poem recalls Plath's "Lady Lazarus," but Boland manages to fully explore the motives of the narrator who is destroying her body yet protecting her spirit: I vomited her hungers. Now the bitch is burning. I am starved and curveless. I am skin and bone. She has learned her lesson. When Boland can transform her narrators from stock characters to fully realized women, the poems work as verbally taut performances. The too-close resemblances to Plath's staccato short-line speech acts, however, diminish these poems' long-term significance. With Night Feed (1982), Boland cools off a bit and enters her own territory rather than that of Yeats or Plath. The poems are carefully crafted and more subdued. In the opening poem, "Degas's Laundresses," we hear Boland savoring the textures of language instead of the harshness of it: You seam dreams in the folds of wash from which freshes the whiff and reach of fields where it bleached and stiffened. Your chat's sabbatical.... But it is the domestic that dominates Night Feed-a domestic life that can be stultifying ("a room white and quiet as a mortuary") as well as exhilarating. In this white-washed suburbia-where "It's a Woman's World" is more than the title of a poem-Boland observes a seemingly static world that is actually full of flux. The possibility of transformation in such a setting is Boland's real concern here, whether physical ("The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish," "Daphne

Page  194 194 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW with Her Thighs in Bark," "A Ballad of Beauty and Time") or cognitive ("Woman in Kitchen," "It's a Woman's World," "Patchwork",). Transformation is paramount in the book's central poem, "Domestic Interior," where the poet negotiates her world as a mother. Boland's treatment of this mother/daughter relationship can be touching, as in the section "Night Feed": This is dawn. Believe me This is your season, little daughter. The moment daisies open, The hour mercurial rainwater Makes a mirror for sparrows. It's time we drowned our sorrows. I tiptoe in. I lift you up Wriggling.... The scene is an ordinary one, but perhaps it seems more tender to us because of Boland's usually hardened stance. She is now looking beyond herself to another person who is completely reliant upon her ("gwe are one more and inseparable again".). Another transformation-the alternation between day and nightappears in "Domestic Interior."' Boland treats this transformation deftly throughout the poem, where dawn becomes a prelapsarian world (after the feeding "ewe begin / The long fall from grace") and night is hardly innocent ("And in the dark / as we slept / the world / was made flesh"). What makes this poem succeed-in addition to its economy of language and tenderness of emotion-is how Boland inscribes an entire world into such a small, desultory space. In The journey, the final book represented in An Origin Like Water, Boland continues to explore the domestic life in an attempt to come to terms with "the terrors of routine." By now her poems focus almost exclusively on her life. But a new subject preoccupies her here: language. Whether she is searching for "the language that is // lace: // a baroque obligation"p or asserting that "la new language / is a kind of scar / and heals after a while / into a passable imitation / of what went before,"' Boland is intent upon the power of language-to oppress, to transform, to liberate. In "The Women," Boland explains her reasons for writing poetry:

Page  195 BRIAN HENRY 195 This is the hour I love: the in-between, neither here-nor-there hour of evening. My time of sixth sense and second sight when in the words I choose, the lines I write, they rise like visions and appear to me: women of work, of leisure, of the night, in stove-colored silks, in lace, in nothing, with crewel needles, with books, with wide open legs who fled the hot breath of the god pursuing, who ran from the split hoof and the thick lips and fell and grieved and healed into myth, into me in the evening at my desk.... Hence the women in her poems: Daphne, suburban women and country women, her daughter and mother and grandmother, women in paintings, the faceless women of history. These women were present in Boland's early poems, but by now their identities, or lack of identities, have acquired a sense of urgency for the poet. For her, no woman's life is too insignificant to enter a poem. Thus, when Sappho guides her to the Underworld in "The Journey," she encounters women and children, victims of "[c]holera, typhus, croup, diphtheria," washerwomen, court ladies, laundresses; and she pleads, "'Let me be / let me at least be their witnesses.' " Sappho answers, "'What you have seen is beyond speech, / beyond song, only not beyond love' "; and, as they ascend, she tells Boland, "'I have brought you here so you will know forever / the silences in which are our beginnings, / in which we have an origin like water.'" Poetry, then, becomes a way to usurp those silences, to bring back from an immersion in the collective unconscious, like Dante from his journey, the language that can liberate an oppressed community. This notion of empowerment through poetry energizes many of the poems in The Journey. By claiming "My muse must be better than those of men / who made theirs in the image of their myth," Boland rejects the conventional and depersonalizing perceptions that arise from myth. This is a theme that Boland also explores in her essays. Indeed, the strong connection between her poems and her es

Page  196 196 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW says makes a consideration of Boland's efforts in one genre contingent upon her efforts in the other. The subtitle of Object Lessons-"The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time"-makes a huge claim, leading one to anticipate a book devoted to a commentary on the woman poet's condition in Ireland today. But the book presents only essays on Boland's life and poetry: when Boland writes, her subject is always herself. While this can be an enjoyable and illuminating trait in poetry, in prose it comes across as egotistical. Part of the reason that Boland's recent publishing endeavors seem self-aggrandizing is her reticence about other women Irish poets-this despite all her talk about women progressing from being the objects of poems to being the authors of them. When she mentions other women Irish poets in these essays (she quotes Medbh McGuckian, Paula Meehan, and Eilean ni Chuilleanain), she does so only in passing. Her discussion of women Irish poets other than herself amounts to less than two pages of the 250. Perhaps it is overly optimistic of me to expect Boland to reach out to her sister Irish writers, but her continual focus on "the woman poet" practically begs for such a communal gesture. When asked in a recent interview (Verse, Volume 13, #1) whom she considers to be successful writers of the political poem, Boland mentions only Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon-male poets with firmly established reputations. In my mind, McGuckian's omission from that list is an egregious one, because of her ability to control her environment (Belfast) by means of linguistic innovations more original and remarkable than Boland's. Boland's is the most familiar name to those of us interested in women's Irish poetry, and it seems that she wants to keep it that way. By holding herself up in Object Lessons as the model woman poet who struggled through Irish patriarchy and a male-dominated poetic tradition, she contributes to her relatively uncontested reputation. How unfortunate, then, that the book is so tedious. Although Boland has an elegant prose style, her essays rarely have true emotional power. And because she obsesses so much about herself, she often cannot connect with her readers, leaving us amazed at and increasingly intolerant of her infinite capacity for self-examination. Boland divides her book of essays into two parts: "Objects" and "Lessons." The essays in "Objects" explore the experiences that shaped her as a woman and as a poet and examine the relationships among gender, nationhood, and poetry. As an Irish citizen, she ad

Page  197 BRIAN HENRY 197 dresses the colonization and subjugation of Ireland by England; as a woman, she tries to find a place in her society and in the Irish poetic tradition. In these essays, Boland strives to articulate the impetus for and the consequences of her poetry because she will not allow her poems to speak for themselves. When read in tandem with her poetry, some of Boland's essays become redundant. In her preface to Object Lessons, Boland explains (excuses?) the repetition in the essays as being akin to those in a poem, with "turnings and returnings." The way she describes her prose technique makes it seem attractive: Therefore, the reader will come on the same room more than once: the same tablecloth with red-checked squares; the identical table by an open window. An ordinary suburb, drenched in winter rain, will show itself once, twice, then disappear and come back. The Dublin hills will change color in the distance, and change once more. The same October day will happen, as it never can in real life, over and over again. While this returning of details in the essays enriches them, the recycling of the same themes and issues as in her poetry is objectionable because it detracts from her poetry. The essay "Lava Cameo," for example, is an expanded version of the poem of the same title in In a Time of Violence. The essay "Outside History" shares its title with Boland's volume of selected poems as well as a poetic sequence. The theme of the poem "An Irish Childhood in England: 1951" and most of its details reappear in the essay "A Fragment of Exile." At the risk of sounding puritanical, I believe that assigning the same title to an essay and to a poem diminishes the poem's importance, as if the poem could be written in prose with little difference. Ultimately, this book of essays negates the need for many of the poems in In a Time of Violence (or vice-versa). Occasionally, an essay gives us the feeling that Boland has discovered something new about herself without writing a poem about it. In "In Search of a Language," she explains the effect of her family moving to London when she was five years old. Not knowing the Irish language as a teenager (by now she had moved back to Ireland), she searched for both a mode of expression and an identity through that expression. With Irish closed to her and English oppressive to her, she found solace in Latin. Knowing Latin-the language that had "forged alliances and named stars"-gave her a sense of power and a

Page  198 198 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW path to clarity and safety. Because this feeling of possessing a language enabled her to write poetry, the language she discovers becomes her own. In the "Lessons" section of Object Lessons, Boland becomes more political. She begins "The Woman The Place The Poet" with an eloquent consideration of the idea of place: There is a duality to place. There is the place which existed before you and will continue after you have gone.... there is the place that happened and the place that happens to you. Boland has lived in Dundrum, a suburb of Dublin, for nearly half her life. Before moving to Dundrum (and she makes much of this forced displacement), she lived in London, New York, and Dublin itself. Her position as a suburban poet would merit little, if any, discussion if she did not feel compelled to rationalize it as a landscape for poetry. Perhaps she feels guilty, or uneasy, about her locale while other women Irish poets live in troubled areas such as Belfast. When Boland makes an argument for the "fragile and transitory nature of a suburb," or argues that lives in her suburb "thrived, waned, changed, began and ended here," she doesn't convince me. Don't lives thrive, wane, and change everywhere? In "Outside History," Boland gets to the heart of her project as a poet: her analysis of the idea of woman as object/subject/author in Irish poetry. She begins the essay with a formative event: an old woman-the caretaker of the cottage where Boland is vacationingbrings her water, and they talk about the famine. This encounter also comprises an earlier poem, "The Achill Woman." By beginning an essay on women with her own poetic experience, Boland makes herself a metaphor for all women: This is my experience, she says, this is our experience. Boland then turns to the "virulence and necessity of the idea of a nation" and how male Irish poets blended the idea of the female with that of the nation. Mother Ireland, in their poems, becomes a woman raped and conquered by the English, violated while her poets/protectors can only watch and scribble in their notepads. Because these male poets created a poetic tradition and an idea of an Irish nation that excluded activist women, Boland as a young poet realized that "the Irish nation as an existing construct in Irish poetry was not available to [her]." The only way to enter that tradition was to repossess it. Thus, Boland, as well as other women (though, characteristically,

Page  199 BRIAN HENRY 199 none is mentioned in the essay), "'moved from being the objects of Irish poems to being the authors of them." She perceptively exposes a tendency in Irish male poets to fetishize the female: The majority of Irish male poets depended on women as motifs in their poetry.... The women in their poems were often passive, decorative, raised to emblematic status. The trouble was these images did good service as ornaments.... Women in such poems were frequently referred to approvingly as mythic, emblematic. But to me these passive and simplified women seemed a corruption. Moreover, the transaction they urged on the reader, to accept them as mere decoration, seemed to compound the corruption. However convincing her argument might be, Boland's sweeping focus (she directs her attack at most male Irish poets, with "the later Yeats [being] a rare exception") inevitably leads to the author herself, forcing us to ask how Boland treats women in her poetry. In fact, Boland can be as blinkered as her male predecessors in her treatment of the female, especially in her more recent poems. In "The Death of Reason" in In a Time of Violence, Boland contrasts the violence in Ireland with the "cart of portrait-painting" in England. The woman sitting for a portrait emerges both as an anonymous female and as Brittania, the English version of Cathleen ni Houlihan: And she climbed the stairs. Nameless composite. Anonymous beauty-bait for the painter.... The easel waits for her and the age is ready to resemble her and the small breeze cannot touch that powdered hair. That elegance. Boland strives to accomplish two tasks here: to reveal the objectification of women and to contrast the daily realities in Ireland and England. In the poem the violence in Ireland threatens the English: "'The flames have crossed the sea. / They, are at... the door. / At the canvas, / At her mouth." Because the woman represents the English and their enlightened ways, reason itself becomes engulfed in the spreading fire: "the eighteenth century ends here / as her hem scorches and the satin / decoration catches fire. She is burning down." Although Boland deftly uses the woman to represent several things (art, reason,

Page  200 200 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW England), she falls into the trap that she denounces in "Outside History": she transforms the woman into an icon. The woman is faceless, a stock figure with no depth or humanity. On this central polemical point, then, Boland's credibility in her essay becomes questionable when we examine her treatment of the woman in "The Death of Reason" and elsewhere in In a Time of Violence ("In a Bad Light," "Legends," "The Pomegranate"). In the very poem that emerged from Boland's encounter with the cottage caretaker, "The Achill Woman" (originally part of the "Outside History" sequence), she uses the woman as a token, as a way to give the poet a chance to arrive at the end of the poem. The title alone depersonalizes the woman; and because Boland ignores the class distinction between herself and the old woman, the woman becomes nothing more than an unrealized figure. She represents the peasantry and the Irish language while Boland, a privileged college student, speaks English, the language of the oppressor. By failing to remark on this distinction, Boland fails to do justice to the woman's story and the meeting between them. Perhaps Boland omitted this poem from An Origin Like Water because it represents exactly what she condemns in her male predecessors. In any case, the poem is an excellent example of Boland using the power of poetry to objectify other women while empowering herself. Indeed, in both poetry and prose, Boland continually concerns herself with power: the power of language, the power of the woman, the power of the nation. However, the only woman in In a Time of Violence to acquire power is the poet herself; she never develops her female characters or narrators except when the central figure is the poet. When she comes to understand the power of language through rhetoric, Boland finds strength, for herself, in "Writing in a Time of Violence." She talks of the destructive power of language: we will live, we have lived where language is concealed. Is perilous.... But it is too late... to refuse to enter... a city of whispers and interiors where the dear vowels Irish Ireland ours are

Page  201 BRIAN HENRY 201 absorbed into Autumn air, are out of earshot in the distances we are stepping into where we never imagine words such as hate and territory and the like-unbanished still as they always would be-wait and are waiting under beautiful speech. To strike. Although she uncovers the terrors that lie under "beautiful speech," she serves merely as a distant witness, not as a participant. Rhetoric becomes a tool of persuasion, the people of Ireland the object of that tool. However, the poet lives far from this "city of whispers / and interiors" where language is concealed and veiled beneath glorious words. Her protests seem impotent even though she sees hateful language waiting to strike. By placing herself at the periphery of the poem, "at a desk in college," she fails to enter the realities of the poem. Because most of the issues in In a Time of Violence also appear in Object Lessons, we must look to the language in the poems to notice the differences in her treatment of ideas in her poetry and prose. The language in most of these poems vacillates between being purposefully flat and being perfectly crafted. The first three lines of "The Parcel," for example, are prosaic, and the line breaks are weak: "There are dying arts and / one of them is / the way my mother used to make up a parcel." But the poem gathers momentum, and its ending is stunning: See it disappear. Say this is how it died out: among doomed steamships and outdated trains, the tracks for them disappearing before our eyes, next to station names we can't remember on a continent we no longer recognize. The sealing wax cracking. The twine unravelling. The destination illegible. Many of these poems begin insipidly and end explosively. But the prosaic quality of much of the poetry again calls into question Boland's shifting between genres. One poem in In a Time of Violence that avoids flat language, re

Page  202 202 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW hashed themes, and objectifying the female is "Anna Liffey," the most ambitious and most human poem in the book. The "turnings and returnings" that Boland describes in her preface to Object Lessons occur here to great effect. Dublin-'s River Liffey courses through the poem: it is free, as it "rises in rush and ling heather and / Black peat and bracken and strengthens / To claim the city it narrated." But the poem's narrator is not so free: "'If I could see myself!/ I would see / A woman in a doorway." The river frames the poem while the doorway (read: suburbia) frames (read: restricts) the woman. Because she displays both real emotion and technical adroitness here, this poem marks a significant departure from the other poems in this book and in An Origin Like Water. This emotion is restrained, yet we feel that Boland is barely holding it in: Make of a nation what you will Make of the past What you canThere is now A woman in a doorway It has taken me All my strength to do this. Becoming a figure in a poem. Usurping a name and a theme. The locutions of Adrienne Rich are readily identifiable in such a passage. But influence need not be a problem. Boland is more human here than in any of her other poems. If she continues to explore these difficult areas in her poetry, her prediction at the end of "Anna Liffey"-"In the end / Everything that burdened and distinguished me /Will be lost in this: / I was a voice"-maypoetu.Bufsepr sists in self-aggrandizement in her poetry and prose and if she continues to ignore the valuable writing of the women around her, her work risks becoming overwhelmed by the weight of her ego.

Mark HallidayHalliday, MarkKoch and SenseVol. XXXVI, No.: 1,
Issue title: The Poet's Voice (Vol. II)
Winter 1997, pp. 203-218http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.001:34

Page  203 MARK HALLIDAY KOCH AND SENSE On the Great American Rainway: Selected Poems 1950-1988. By Kenneth Koch. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Pp. 324. $25.00. One Train. By Kenneth Koch. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Pp. 74. $20.00. Kenneth Koch is a marvelous life-giving poet. His two recent volumes, On the Great American Rainway: Selected Poems 1950-1988 and One Train (newer poems) offer us a chance to celebrate afresh the fountainy refreshment of his work and to encourage new readers to wake up: wake up and taste the Koch! Ah, but there is more than one Koch in Koch. A striking fact about his poetic oeuvre is that it can be divided into two persistent currents that run throughout the career, from the Fifties to the present: there is the current of wacky wildness and there is the current of discursive meditation and argument. The difference between these two currents is dramatic, even though (as you'd expect in the oeuvre of a serious artist) there are certainly overlappings and flashing echoes and sudden eruptions which remind us that both currents flow from the same imagination. The wacky wild style has always been the most noticeable version of Koch-his verbal playfulness, his readiness to let words jump out of their clothes and run free from their meanings, his bursts of comic surrealism, his characteristic combination of urbanity with nonsense. This made Koch famous at least as early as Thank You (1962) and has remained the most easily remarked thing about his poetry ever since. His enthusiasm for whatever a vigorous imagination can come up with was also the heart of his famously liberating work in getting chil 203

Page  204 204 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW dren and very old people to write unhackneyed poetry (as demonstrated in Wishes, Lies and Dreams, 1970, and I Never Told Anybody, 1977). I am grateful for all that wildness, for the entire long and ongoing river of Koch's don't-chain-me-with-logic poetry. I am glad he had the nerve to write these lines in a poem called "Pregnancy": Shall any laundry be put out to dry With so many yellow and orange sequins falling through the air? Yes, the donkey has become very corpulent. Will the blue carpet be sufficiently big to cover the tennis court? Down the street walked a midget. "She's a good looker, hey?" He said to a passer-by. O tremulous stomach! Or in "Sleeping With Women": And the iris peg of the sea Sleeping with women And the diet pill of the tree Sleeping with women And the apology the goon the candlelight The groan: asking you for the night, sleeping with women Asleep and sleeping with them, the green tree The iris, the swan: the building with its mouth open... And yet.... The fun there evaporates awfully fast, doesn't it? What I really love in Koch is almost all in the other current, the other style, the discursive style in which this prince of nonsense becomes a statesman of sense-usually comic sense, but often at the same time serious didactic sense or serious elegiac sense. What I want to do, therefore, is to show the virtues of Koch's discursive poetry, while considering its relation to the wild wacky poetry; and if there are readers who turned away from Koch because of the lightness of the Dada-flavored nonsense, I hope to persuade them that the discursive poetry deserves their admiration and that this po

Page  205 MARK HALLIDAY 205 etry has been vivified, in elusive ways, by Koch's love of the disjunctive, the impulsive, and the silly. Is discursive too clunky a word? (On the other hand, is wacky too breezy a word?) Anyone who loves Koch would worry less about sounding breezy-unprofessional than about sounding clunkypompous. Koch is our smartest demolisher of the clunky-pompous in poetry. He has the rare kind of intellect that makes you think twice about your intellectual habits. One of the lovely things about Koch is the suave way in which he enjoys and lets us enjoy his erudition about poetry (English, Italian, French., Latin) while constantly reminding us that poetry is not (or should not be) written for the sake of dissertations, theories, or MLA panels. Fresh Air! That should probably be the title of Koch's Collected Poetry. In 1969 a friend gave me an anthology of poems about poetry, The Mirror's Garland (still delicious; what more exciting subject for poems?, I still think), and there I stumbled upon "Fresh Air," by Kenneth Koch and it changed my life. Or at least, it delightfully tried to change my life. This 1956 poem was Koch's hilariously exasperated all-out counterattack against the dominant poetry of the time, the poetry of professors tensely trying to demonstrate their calmly educated control of the New Critical values-"One hardly dared to wink / Or fool around in any way in poems, / And Critics poured out awful jereboams / To irony, ambiguity, and tension-I And other things I do not wish to mention." (These lines are from Koch's retrospective 1987 poem, "Seasons On Earth"'.) Now, irony and ambiguity and tension can be great things in poetry, in Frost or Stevens or Yeats or Eliot or Keats or Herbert or Donne or Shakespeare, and surely in Lowell, Bishop, Merrill, and surely in poets alive today including our Kenneth himself. Koch knows this, and knew it in 1956, but he was much less enthralled by those New Critical values than most of his contemporaries and he was in love with other values abundantly apparent in Whitman and in many twentieth-century European poets. There was a fight to be fought for nerve, panache, sensation, surprise, strangeness. Koch and his close friends Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery (I am trying to avoid the term "New York school") were the funny-brave freedom fighters (alongside the different, more earnestly angry Beat battalion led by Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso), and "'Fresh Air", was, I say, the most sparkling attack in the campaign.

Page  206 206 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Where are young poets in America, they are trembling in publishing houses and universities, Above all they are trembling in universities, they are bathing the library steps with their spit, They are gargling out innocuous (to whom?) poems about maple trees and their children, Sometimes they brave a subject like the Villa d'Este or a lighthouse in Rhode Island, Oh what worms they are! They wish to perfect their form. Reading that in 1969 I knew I had run into SOMETHING NEW, something my professors had never mentioned. I wish I could say that Thank You immediately became my Bible, with O'Hara's Lunch Poems as another sacred text; but I had no context in which to read Koch and O'Hara, and I was too lazy or too distracted (Vietnam, Woodstock, feminism, Watergate) to discover such a context. Writing poems in the Seventies I was too impressed by the reigning versions of darkly serious poetry-Kinnell, Levine, Merwin, Rich, Strand, Wright-but meanwhile in the back of my mind "Fresh Air" was trying to rescue me into other possibilities which could ring more true to me. Finally around 1980 I realized that the poetry I needed to write would be fundamentally influenced by Koch and O'Hara. The Sixties/Seventies orthodoxy of Deep Image poetry, of monotonal archetypal terseness, was not the orthodoxy against which Koch cried out in the mid-Fifties, yet the two orthodoxies have qualities in common when seen from the perspective offered by "Fresh Air" (and by Whitman, too): a solemnity, an attitude of I-am-doing-the-greatwork, nothing-could-be-more-serious, an unmodestly unspoken implication of My-poem-is-a-gem-in-which-every-word-is-perfectly-placed, a pomposity of If-you-only-knew-enough-you-would-see. Of course there were fine exceptions to all this in the "academic" poetry of the Fifties and in the "deep" poetry of the Seventies; but the dominance of these styles created an intense need, in each period, for ventilation. Yet could not these young men, put in another profession, Succeed admirably, say at sailing a ship? I do not doubt it, Sir, and I wish we could try them. (A plane flies over the ship holding a bomb but perhaps it will not drop the bomb, The young poets from the universities are staring anxiously at the skies,

Page  207 MARK HALLIDAY 207 Oh they are remembering their days on the campus when they looked up to watch birds excrete, They are remembering the days they spent making their elegant poems.) In rhythm and syntax and in the readiness to repeat phrases for the sake of momentum, and in the humorous insistence on making an attitude abundantly clear (without worrying about redundancy), and in the sense of a talker fervently possessed of a perception that is intensely true for him-in all these respects the passages I've quoted from "Fresh Air" are indebted to Whitman. Like Whitman, Koch arrives with drastically uncramped ideas of what can be a poetic phrase, line, sentence, and subject. Like Whitman's great Songs, Koch's discursive poems brim with confidence that feelings and perceptions so fervent and so intelligent will be poetic, free from any inhibitive anxiety about whether a certain phrase or stanza is metaphorical enough, symbolic enough, "high" enough, or sufficiently connected with the verse of the august'dead. "Fresh Air" is an ample poem-it fills seven pages of On the Great American Rainway-loaded with funny passages I'd love to quote, but it is a well-known poem, and I should move on to less famous examples of Koch's discursive style. The term "discursive" may sound too stiff to describe such an ebullient comic tour de force as "Fresh Air"-but it seems the best word available to refer to poems in which the poet (like an essayist, though never "merely" an essayist) has a distinct topic or issue clearly in mind and strives to explore and explain it as clearly as possible, with multiple illustrations and generous rephrasings of the main idea; poems in which the desire for communication dismisses any preening desire for symmetrical neatness or tightness or antiseptic efficiency. To be sure, we need kinds of poetry that are not discursive; Koch would be the first to agree, as poems like "Farm's Thoughts", "Geography", "You Were Wearing", "Lunch" and many more show; but at the same time, the notion that the discursive is fundamentally antipoetic is a banality discredited by countless pages of (among others) Horace, Pope, Wordsworth, Whitman, and Kenneth Koch. Oh yeah? Yeah! But irritating banalities can stimulate, and for Koch the notion that discursiveness is antipoetic became a stimulating challenge-implicitly met by "Fresh Air" and some other early poems, and more directly taken on by his 1975 collection The Art of

Page  208 208 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Love. If we ask why the same poet who turned toward surrealism and nonsense in reaction to pretentious New Criticismish poetry in the Fifties later turned also toward extremes of discursiveness (without ever renouncing the wild and wacky), one good answer is that extreme sense-making had an appeal amusingly similar to the appeal of nonsense-making: both approaches repudiate the hegemony of poetries that claim to go Very Deep by way of contorted symbolism, layered irony, or Jungian scuba-diving. Thus a sort of blatantly lucid discourse in poetry can feel as radical and flamboyant as blatantly nutty opacities. There is another good answer-a related but slightly different answer-to the question of why such opposite styles coexist cheerfully in Koch. Koch's temperament is vigilantly on guard against boredom, and for him, the tangled or submerged half-sense of most consciously ambitious poetry is boring. The hidden or half-hidden meanings of such poetry (whereby we arduously rediscover that, aha!, time is loss, and loss is a form of death, etc.) seem to Koch so drearily familiar that the poetry's metaphorical twistings aren't worth the reader's effort. What's objectionable is not sense, not ideas, but the unrewarding murkification of ideas in strenuous metaphor. If so, then one alternative is a poetry of flashing sensation without complicated ideas ("Portugal was waiting for him at the door, like a rainstorm of evening raspberries."). But another alternative is to say, in effect: "If sense is what we want today, then let's not be tricky, let's make a lot of sense! The more the better, if indeed one has interesting thoughts." That attitude leads to a generosity and vulnerability which I find courageous. The poet's thoughts come out in the open, and if they are foolish, fig-leaves of elaborate imagery and metaphor and tortuous syntax are not available to disguise the folly. Koch's "The Art of Poetry" is a long Horatian didactic poem that thoroughly and successfully lives by such courage. The loveliness of this poem involves its sincere effort to be "complete / With information about everything concerned in the act / Of creating a poem" while at the same time Koch implicitly acknowledges over and over that the art of poetry is too mysterious and protean to permit fulfillment of that goal.... Remember your obligation is to write, And, in writing, to be serious without being solemn, fresh without being cold, To be inclusive without being asinine, particular

Page  209 MARK HALLIDAY 209 Without being picky, feminine without being effeminate, Masculine without being brutish, human while keeping all the animal graces You had inside the womb, and beast-like without being inhuman. Let your language be delectable always, and fresh and true. Don't be conceited. Let your compassion guide you And your excitement. And always bring your endeavors to their end. Is the language of the above passage delectable, fresh, and true? In the context created by "The Art of Poetry," I feel it is. The effect is crucially a matter of tone, which is to say it is a matter of character. When we speak of the tone and mood of a poem, we are referring to the sensation of having met a person-the speaker. Speakers try to create contexts in which they can best be heard; a poem is a self-presentation by its speaker. If the speaker emerges as someone unusually vital, intelligent, and engaged, then a given phrase ("Let your compassion guide you") coming from that speaker can sound delectable and fresh, whereas the same phrase might have sounded preachy and conventional coming from a different speaker. At any rate, this idea of poetic value is at the center of my admiration for Koch's discursive poetry. Koch has written at least twenty discursive poems that I want to recommend, and I wish I could discuss them all without extending this essay to monstrous length. It is in the nature of discursive poetry to call for large-scale quotation in order to indicate the poetry's rhythm and energy and mood. Brief quotation of two or three lines misleadingly exposes the poem to an unsympathetic reader's cheap response-"Oh but this is merely prose." Let me here list the discursive poems I would (had we but world enough and time) quote from at length and discuss. Most of them may be categorized as either didactic or elegiac. Along with "Fresh Air" and "The Art of Poetry," other didactic-discursive poems are "The Art of Love," "On Beauty," "Some General Instructions," "The Boiling Water," "Our Hearts," "The Problem of Anxiety," and (from One Train) "One Train May Hide Another" and "A New Guide." The elegiac-discursive current includes "The Circus" (II), "Fate," "To Marina," "Days and Nights," "Seasons on Earth," and (from One Train) "Energy in Sweden" and "A Time Zone."

Page  210 210 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Also there are poems I will loosely call meditative-discursive, including "Hearing" and "The Departure From Hydra" and a recent poem called "Vous Etes Plus Beau Que Vous Ne Pensiez." And there are many passages in the book-length rhyming poem The Duplications which partake of Koch's discursive style, variously with satiric, didactic, elegiac or meditative spirit. At one point in The Duplications (a comic epic in which the digressions are more interesting to me than the narrative) Koch raises the question of the purpose of poetry: I think I have already said, but one Keeps asking. It is to help people love it, Their world, I mean, which has such means to stun, Confuse, and kick. But one can be above it And in it all at once, it can be done If poets do what I believe they're meant to, I.e. the whole of what they feel give vent to. He refers to the confusingness of life, but he sounds very unconfused about his view of poetry's purpose. Often in Koch there is a feeling that life is abundantly stocked with complexity, and thus we don't need further complexity in art. Comical, diverting complications (ottava rima; Byzantine plots; Shandyesque digressions) are fine, because they are fun, but not agonized quadrupling of countervailing meanings, not the complexity in poets like Donne, Marvell, Eliot, Lowell, Hill, Graham. But what if "the whole of what they feel" is itself agonizingly complex? Well, Koch is instinctively suspicious of this as a justification for knotty poetry. Art should be helpful, it should help us enjoy life; enjoyment is terrifically important; if life is not enjoyable then what's the point of it? Hence a poem should delightfully cut through the world's confusion, it should paint in primary colors, it should energize. That description of a poem's activity could also describe the activity of one kind of teacher. Though I don't think students (we all continue to be students) should only be taught by charismatic charming enthusiastic teachers who cut through complexity all the time, I do think an English Department should have at least one such professor, someone who galvanizes students into vigorous optimistic encounters with literature (and life). Such an educator is analogous to the speaker in Koch's didactic poetry-he brings up many a mysterious issue, but he will not get mired in them, he will not arrange for his

Page  211 MARK HALLIDAY 211 poem to trap us in grimly eternal ambiguities. He seems to know a good restaurant we can go to immediately after the discussion. But first he does want to help us by presenting his accumulated wisdom-briskly, and clearly, and never (he hopes) pompously. Wait-my effort to characterize Koch's didactic voice should not tilt toward caricature. The voice is brash, but it is never allowed to become smug or blindly blithe; Koch distrusts complexity (whereas some poets seem to wallow in it) but he can't escape it. What's fascinating is the way his brisk let-me-make-this-totally-clear tone inevitably (since he is so honest and intelligent) collides with the intractability of life's moral and spiritual mysteries, their refusal to be briskly sorted out. This resistance leads to the best passages in Koch's didactic poems (as, indeed, such resistance often provokes the best work from a poet, as Eliot remarked about Tennyson's poems of religious doubt, and as others have remarked about Eliot's poetry, and Wordsworth's, etc.), passages in which we hear a smart and serious and humorous man thinking-on-his-feet, like a teacher challenged by good students and determined not to resort to canned maxims. In "The Problem of Anxiety" he discusses the danger that awareness of mortality will overwhelm us: We will die, there is no doubt about it. We shake And think What is the point of it after all? But "Point" does not require "Permanence." There Is a point in opening the window: to let In some air; and a point in painting a sign: So people will know where something is. But what Is the point of these individual actions if There is no major point of all? This I cannot answer, but surely life is better off the floor. To take a walk with you, how good it is! and To talk about recoveries from anxieties! to pick This blossom, it's a purple one, I shall name it L'Innocence retrouvde what does that mean? It's French. And in these summer days to go with you To Lo Fung's Restaurant, and to eat the rice! To be Asleep with you, wake up with you, and strongLy dislike the idea of dying, well that's life! but At any moment the anxiety over death can strike one. Then All is despair.

Page  212 212 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW That passage (from the middle of a 9-page poem) perhaps does not rival passages you could find in Pascal or Kierkegaard or Camus, as philosophy about mortality; perhaps not, but are you sure? And anyway, Koch's passage is not meant to be directly matched against your existential philosopher; instead it is a phase in the poem's drama, which is the drama of a man feeling very anxious on a certain day and trying to "teach" his way into peace of mind. He is showing himself, and us, an attitude, a style of coping. Does Koch arrogantly suppose that the average reader of "The Problem of Anxiety" can't translate "L'Innocence retrouvee"? Of course he doesn't; he is imagining a rapid exhilarated dialogue between friends or lovers in which the strangeness of a foreign phrase would be one of the countless quick ingredients of mutual delight. He could easily have chosen a more recondite name for the purple blossom (Koch is in fact fluent in French), but in the discursive spirit of "The Problem of Anxiety" he wants us to understand the French phrase while also imagining the momentary fun of using a strange foreign phrase-"what does that mean? It's / French." That kind of momentary-fun-of-foreignness is the dominant value in most of the disjunctive poetry I called wild and wacky. In the discursive style, Koch occasionally nods to that value but won't let it take over. The discursive style is an order-making activity, and the didactic relation to the reader emphasizes even further the value of clear order, yet in writing these poems Koch never forgets his love for the way poetry can break molds. To reach fresh air we may have to smash buildings. One of several passages in which Koch ponders the danger of this Dionysian side of art is in "On Beauty": Rilke says that we love beauty because it "so serenely Disdains to destroy us." In making works of art, then, Is the excitement we feel that of being close to the elements of Destruction? I do not want any mystery in this poem, so I will Let that go. Or, rather, I want the mystery to be that it is clear But says nothing which will satisfy completely but instead stirs to action (or contemplation) As beauty does-that is, I wish it to be beautiful. But why I want that, Even, I do not entirely know. Well, it would put it in a class of things That seems the highest, and for one lifetime that should be enough.

Page  213 MARK HALLIDAY 213 I love the sound of a person honestly thinking and revealing the movement of his thoughts in that passage. When I praise Koch or you praise someone else as a serious poet, what do we mean? Koch'%s poem "The Boiling Water". explores the concept of seriousness more directly and usefully than any other poem I can think of. Beginning with the idea that "A serious moment for the water is when it boils" the poem develops an understanding of seriousness as awareness of the power of transformation-the ultimate transformation for us being death. Here is a passage from this beautifully tender poem: We drink the coffee And somewhere in this moment is the chance We will never see each other again. It is serious for the tree To be moving, the flexibility of its moving Being the sign of its continuing life. And now there are its blossoms And the fact that it is blossoming again, it is filling up with Pink and whitish blossoms, it is full of them, the wind blows, it is Warm, though, so much is happening, it is spring, the people step out And doors swing in, and billions of insects are born. You call me and tell me You feel your life isn't worth living. I say that I'm coming to see you. I put the key in And the car begins to clatter, and now it starts. If a reader questioned whether sufficient awareness of suffering appears in Koch's poetry, I would want the lines just quoted to be listened to again. However., I can see how the question might arise. Koch is much less inclined to dwell upon injury, loss, grief, and despair than most ambitious poets. His attitude toward pain is like his attitude toward complexity: the world supplies too much; art should offer alternatives. His objection to an emphasis on suffering in poetry seems not so much to be that the subject is painful but rather that most suffering (less terrific than Lear's or Othello's) is tedious; most suffering dulls the spirit; suffering causes us to say the same old things. Whereas it is often remarked that happy poems tend to be less interesting than sad ones, Koch seems genuinely to feel the opposite. When Pleasure is mild, you should enjoy it, and When it is violent, permit it, as far as

Page  214 214 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW You can, to enjoy you. Pain should be Dealt with as efficiently as possible. To "cure" a dead octopus You hold it by one leg and bang it against a rock. This makes a noise heard all around the harbor, But it is necessary, for otherwise the meat would be too tough. That bit from "Some General Instructions" conveys a seriously unsentimental attitude toward pain, though the effect depends on the way these lines come amid an unbroken series of hundreds of instructions. The poem creates simultaneously a hilarious sense of the absurdity of teaching anyone how to handle the infinity of life and a feeling that we have, after all, received some good advice. This same double effect is achieved less hectically in "A New Guide." There is one kind of pain that Koch does evoke and ponder not fleetingly but with compulsive fascination in at least seven important poems since 1975: the pain of nostalgia for glory days. Like many of us, but with more conviction than some of us, Koch is haunted by the feeling that he was more alive in his twenties, more excited and more exciting, more inspired. I admire the honesty with which Koch addresses this painful feeling in his elegiac-discursive poetry. An aging poet might hintingly invite the reader to infer his youthful brilliance; another would labor to convince the reader "I'm as marvelous as I always was, even more so!" Koch disdains such stratagems. "Those were the days" he says in "Energy in Sweden" When there was so much energy in and around me I could take it off and put it back on, like clothes That one has bought only for a ski trip But then finds that one is using every day Because every day is like a ski tripI think that's how I was at twenty-three. The title poem of Days and Nights (1982) is a collage of entries all seeking to catch the truth about the excitement of his early career; here are excerpts: We wrote so much that we thought it couldn't be any good Till we read it over and then thought how amazing it was! You must learn to write in form first, said the dumb poet. After several years of that you can write in free verse.

Page  215 MARK HALLIDAY 215 But of course no verse is really "free," said the dumb poet. Thank you, I said. It's been great talking to you! I walked through the spring fountain of spring Air fountain knowing finally that poetry was everything: Sleep, silence, darkness, cool white air, and language. Language in those days seemed infinitely fertile, bursting with unforeseen possibilities; the mildly transgressive phrase "spring fountain of spring / Air fountain" is a nod toward the impassioned transgressions (of syntax and sense) that filled Koch's pages in the Fifties and Sixties. Poetry and sexual desire seemed to be forms of each other in those days, as the elegiac poems often suggest. Meanwhile during most of those years Koch was often energized by competition and collaboration with his friends O'Hara and Ashbery, and the painter Larry Rivers and others. The friendships of one's formative years retain a deep electricity-they have the seriousness of imminent or ongoing transformation, like water about to boil or boiling. What if some of your closest friends later turn out to be nationally and internationally acclaimed as important? One kind of modesty would advise not writing poems about such luminaries, but I think Koch has been right to judge that a deceitful modesty; he was, in his youth, both remarkably talented and remarkably lucky in his talented friends, and the truth of his nostalgia requires him to describe them, as he does in touching glimpses in "Fate" and "A Time Zone" among other poems. The elegiac poems acknowledge in passing that there were doubts and fears in the glory days, but even those doubts and fears seem to have been exhilarating and nourishing, like those of Wordsworth's boyhood; whereas by the age of fifty Koch found himself beset with doubts not so readily overcome-like most writers in their fifties, perhaps. The striking thing, the moving thing about Koch's misgivings concerning his wisdom and achievement is the persistence with which he measures himself against a standard of inspiredness set by his much younger self. In "Seasons on Earth" he recalls the periods during which he wrote his two rhyming comic epics, Ko (1960) and The Duplications (1977)What's here if I'm not that same sensual Kenneth Of years ago, nuts for exhilaration

Page  216 216 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW And always willing to convene the Senate Of nudes and nights and nerve-ends of the nation For one great further push through the impenetRable Castello del Realization, To its high hall where, on the gods' advice, Is painted the true face of Paradise? For me, as a lover of Koch's discursive poetry, the irony of his admirably candid, admirably vulnerable, generously readable nostalgia poetry is that it is much more intelligent, interesting, moving and helpful than the wild poetry produced out of the avant-gardey tumult of the glory days. For me, in some broad sense Koch's career reverses the notorious decline pattern of Wordsworth's career-though Wordsworth did write some good things after age forty, and Koch wrote some superb things (like "Fresh Air" and "Locks" and "The Departure From Hydra") before age forty. For me, the unpretentious striving for clarity and the Whitmanlike thoroughness in exploring and expanding ideas in the discursive work are more deeply original qualities than the zingy startlingness of the disjunctive work. There are Koch poems that defy the neat dichotomy between the styles, as I've admitted, but no reader of Koch can escape the comparison; Koch invites it and even requires it by offering two poems both called "The Circus." The later poem, written in 1972, is an elegiac-discursive account of the phase of his life when he wrote the first poem, seventeen years earlier. At the end of the second poem Koch declares that the earlier "Circus" was a better poem; but he is audibly in the grip of his nostalgia when he says this, and I think he's wrong. The first "Circus" is a partly marvelous partly surreal narrative-intwelve-sections about a traveling circus which is a metaphor for all of life, no less, its thrills and effort and exhaustion and change and desire. The sky-blue lion tamer comes in, and the red giraffe manager. They are very brave and wistful, and they look at the girls. Some of the circus girls feel a hot sweet longing in their bodies. But now it is time for the elephants! The elephant man is at the peak of happiness. He speaks, giddily, to every one of the circus people he passes, He does not know what he is saying, he does not care - His elephants are on display! They walk into the sandy ring...

Page  217 MARK HALLIDAY 217 That elephant man is a version of the young Koch, too thrilled for meditative discourse. When a trapeze performer in the poem's next section is mortally injured, the poem is jolted but doesn't lose its essential spirit of delight. The great power of the second "Circus" is that it discovers, by recalling the writing of the first "Circus," the solipsistic egotism of the happy young man who wrote that first poem. Like several of Koch's other elegiac poems, "The Circus" (II) is addressed to Janice, his first wife, who was with him in Paris when he wrote "The Circus" (I) and who died before the second poem. Her death seems to have forced Koch into a larger awareness of interpersonal responsibilities. This awareness may not be exhilarating, exactly, but I find it much more interesting than the kaleidoscopic marvels of the wilder poetry. I will quote seven lines from early in "The Circus" (II) and then the last six lines, which I find very moving-not solemnly earnest (still anathema to Koch) but earnest in a serious way. Sometimes I feel I actually am the person Who did this, who wrote that, including that poem The Circus But sometimes on the other hand I don't. There are so many factors engaging our attention! At every moment the happiness of others, the health of those we know and our own! And the millions upon millions of people we don't know and their well-being to think about So it seems strange I found time to write The Circus... I came home And wrote The Circus that night, Janice. I didn't come and speak to you And put my arm around you and ask you if you'd like to take a walk Or go to the Cirque Medrano though that's what I wrote poems about And am writing about that now, and now I'm alone And this is not as good a poem as The Circus And I wonder if any good will come of either of them all the same. Reading those last sentences of "The Circus" (II) I have the double sensation that comes when a poem strikes us as lastingly resonant: it feels at once unsettlingly fresh and deeply akin to something great

Page  218 218 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW in poetry of the past. Where have we heard a note like this, this tone combining rueful meditation with bravely vulnerable plainness of speech? Whitman: "... though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wide flat space, / Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near, / I know very well I could not." Hardy: "O it would have been good / Could he then have stood / At a clear-eyed distance, and conned the whole, / But now such vision / Is mere derision, / Nor soothes his body nor saves his soul." Yeats: "And yet, because my heart leaped at her words, / I was abashed, and now they come to mind / After nine years, I sink my head abashed." Eliot: "So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years- / Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres / Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt / Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure...." Kenneth Koch is not regularly quoted alongside Hardy, Yeats, and Eliot, but there is a chord shared by all these passages, the sound of a person whose regret and need have required from him a gesture of undecorated frankness. In my emphasis on the discursive poetry, I have neglected the large portion of Koch's oeuvre which is variously more zany, more radically playful, more disjunctive than the poems I've praised. There are poems whose happy mixture of sense and nonsense or off-sense blows away the neatness of my categories-poems such as "Locks," "The Artist," "Desire For Spring," "The Pleasures of Peace," and (in One Train) the funny "Poems By Ships at Sea." I trust the onesidedness of my preference for the discursive work won't keep any reader from exploring Koch on his or her own. Koch's poetry has an unpredictable richness beyond what I've described, and also beyond the scope of even a large Selected Poems like On the Great American Rainway. People should go and see.

Page  219 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW INDEX FOR VOLUME XXXV, 1996 ESSAYS AUTHOR TITLE PAGE Balzac, Honor6 de...................The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee 273 Anderegg, Michael.................. Cameos, Guest Stars, and Real People, with a Special Appearance by Orson Welles 43 Baxter, Charles...........................................Rhyming Action 616 Bernstein, Charles.....................from The Revenge of the Poet-Critic 644 Boyle, T. Coraghessan.................A Response to Franz Kafka 548 Braudy, Leo..........................................."No Body's Perfect": Method Acting and 50s Culture 191 Briley, John........................... The Centennial of Motion Pictures 37 Farred, Grant................................... Menace II Society: No Way Out for the Boys in the Hood 475 Friedman, Bonnie.................................Relinquishing Oz: Every Girl's Anti-Adventure 9 Gilbert, Sandra M................ Suckled by Manly Bosoms: Confessions of a Culinary Transvestite 676 Gliick, Louise...............................Fear of Happiness 579 Goldstein, Laurence........................... Introduction (The Movies) 1 Goldstein, Laurence.......................Introduction (The Poet's Voice) 575 H.D.............................................................. Beauty 253 Hamilton, David.................Someone Is Leaving: A Ghost Story 337 Koenen, Ludwig....................................Phoenix from the Ashes: The Burnt Archive from Petra 513 Konigsberg, Ira............................. Introduction (The Movies) 1 Lewis, Jon........................Trust and Anti-Trust in the New New Hollywood 84 Marks, Martin.............................Music, Drama, Warner Brothers: The Cases of Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon 112 Marx, Samuel..............................................The Bomb Movie 179 Milton, Edith...................................... Thinking About Houdini 460 Miner, Valerie.................................. Our Life With the Windsors 329 Muske, Carol..........................................Women and Poetry 586 Novakovich, Josip................................. The Devil's Celluloid Tail 31 Paul, William................................ Screening Space: Architecture, Technology, and the Motion Picture Screen 143

Page  220 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Rosenberg, William G.........................."New Russia" and the Democratic Predicament 425 Stavans, Ilan.............................Translation and Identity 280 Stevenson, Anne..............................The Iceberg and the Ship 704 Vaid, Krishna Baldev.........Franz Kafka Writes to T. Coraghessan Boyle 533 Watanabe, Sylvia.................................Knowing Your Place 316 West, Alan.....................................The Breath of Signs: Thoughts on Opera and Film 221 INTERVIEWS Prelutsky, Burt..............................An Interview with Billy Wilder 65 FICTION Boyers, Robert................................In Hiding 499 Gallagher, Tess.....................................The Mother Thief 631 Grossman, Seth....................................Quetzales 307 Kaschnitz, Marie Luise.................................. The Sleepwalker 296 Lamazares, Ivonne..................................Storm Captains 448 Miller, Alyce.................................................. Ice 368 Shami, Janset Berkok..........................I Offer My Love To You 242 Shepard, Jim...................................... Film-Making in Polynesia 75 Soto, Gary............................Angel and the Buried Onion 690 Tate, James...........................................TV 667 POETRY Abse, Dannie...............................New Granddaughter 703 Ackerman, Diane...................................... Remodeling 673 Andrews, Tom............ Cinema V6rit6: Joyce Kilmer, in Picardy, Worries About Plagiarism in "Trees"; Cinema V6rite: The River of Barns 106 Benedikt, Michael................................Rita and Ringo 175 Boyle, Kevin......................................Through Science 366 Clark, Jeanne E.............................The Summer That Isn't Mine 305 Cr~asnaru, Daniela.........................................Classic Movies 110 Davison, Peter...............................A History of Reading 641 Field, Edward......................................To My Country 454 Garrett, George.................................. Anthologies I and II 663 Gillett, Mary Jo Firth...................."World Enough..." 496 Hicok, Bob........................................ Selling Magritte's House 497 Hollander, John...........................Then All Smiles Stopped Together 608 Holmes, Janet.................................The Duck at Mid-Life 473 Jastermsky, Karen.................... And for a moment I saw myself in you 261

Page  221 INDEX Kelly, Brigit Pegeen............................ Garden of the Turmpet Tree 698 Kim, Caroline......................... Night Seasons; Love in This Century 361 Komunyakaa, Yusef...................................... Eclogue at Twilight 671 Laughlin, James.................................... My Mind; In the Harem 469 Malanga, Gerard..................................... How They Didn't Meet 358 M oolten, D avid...................................................... Orpheus 458 Moss, Thylias.........................................After Reading Beloved 639 Olds, Sharon....................................................... True Blue 578 Pasolini, Pier Paolo................................................... M arilyn 216 Perillo, Lucia.......................................................... Apollo 612 Reed, John R......................................... from Cancer Sequence 363 Schulman, Grace................................................. God Speaks 615 Scott, Herbert................................................... M ime; Bees 471 Shipley, Vivian...................................... Fair Haven, Connecticut 456 Simic, Charles............................................To the One Upstairs 614 Song, Cathy............................................ The Pineapple Fields 653 Sylvester, Janet......... No Boy Would Tell His Mother He Wasn't Hungry 29 Terada, Rei................................................ Tea; 100% Honey 278 W ebb, Charles H.............................................. Fantasy Girl 493 W isenberg, S. L................................................ M ussulmen 108 Wojahn, David................................. Beginning in Las Vegas, 1985 61 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny.............................. Gorbachev in Oklahoma 423 Young Bear, Raymond A............................... Louann Principal Star 700 REVIEWS AUTHOR AND TITLE REVIEWER AND PAGE Biasing, Randy, Graphic Scenes........................... Lisa M. Steinman 399 Buckley, Christopher, Dark Matter........................ Lisa M. Steinman 399 Celan, Paul, Breathturn.......................................... Steve Light 550 Chow, Rey, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and the Contemporary Chinese Cinema.... Poonam Arora 270 Crafton, Donald, Before Mickey: The Art of the Animated Film 1898-1928.............................. Thomas Doherty 263 Devereaux, Leslie, and Roger Hillman, Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography........................... Poonam Arora 270 Dukes, Carol Muske, Dear Digby............................ Lynn Emanuel 720 Dukes, Carol Muske, Saving St. Germ....................... Lynn Emanuel 720 Giscombe, C. S., Here..................................... Lisa M. Steinman 399 Hall, Donald, Death to the Death of Poetry: Essays, Reviews, Notes, Interviews........................... Laurence Goldstein 745 Hall, Donald, Life Work................................. Laurence Goldstein 745 Hall, Donald, Principal Products of Portugal........... Laurence Goldstein 745 Howard, Richard, Like Most Revelations.................. Lisa M. Steinman 399 Kasischke, Laura, Housekeeping in a Dream.................... Bruce Bond 734

Page  222 222 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW Kaufman, Merritt and J.B., Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney............................. Thomas Doherty 263 Klein, Norman M., 7 Minutes: The Life and Death of the Animated Cartoon.................................. Thomas Doherty 263 Moss, Thylias, Small Congregations: New and Selected Poems......................................... Lisa M. Steinman 399 Mueller, Lisel, Circe's Mountain. Stories by Marie Luise Kaschnitz...................................... Barbara Zeisl Schoenberg 418 Muske, Carol, Red Trousseau................................. Lynn Emanuel 720 Oates, Joyce Carol, George Bellows............................. Irving Malin 570 Oates, Joyce Carol, The Perfectionist........................... Irving Malin 570 Oates, Joyce Carol, Zombie..................................... Irving Malin 570 Peacock, Molly, Original Love................................... Bruce Bond 734 Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, and Paul Willemen, Encyclopidia of Indian Cinema......................................... Poonam Arora 270 Sahlins, Marshall, How '"Natives" Think: About Captain Cook, for Example.......................................... Barbara Ryan 387 Schama, Simon, Landscape and Memory...................... Barbara Ryan 387 Smoodin, Eric, Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons from the Sound Era..................................... Thomas Doherty 263 Steiner, Wendy, The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism.................................. Gorman Beauchamp 559 Taylor, Lucien, Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from VA.R.......................................... Poonam Arora 270 Tillinghast, Richard, The Stonecutter's Hand.................... Bruce Bond 734 Whissen, Anni, Long Shadows: Stories by Marie Luise Kaschnitz......................... Barbara Zeisl Schoenberg 418 White, James Boyd, "This Book of Starres": Learning to Read George Herbert....................................... Wayne Booth 379 Yamanaka, Lois-Ann, Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre......................................... Lisa M. Steinman 399 STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP Michigan Quarterly Review is published four times a year by the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109 with general business and editorial offices at 3032 Rackham Building, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 48109-1070. Editor: Laurence Goldstein. Extent and nature of circulation of issue published nearest to filing date (fall 1995): Net press run, 1,960; paid circulation, 1,810; free distribution, 140; total distribution, 1,950; copies unsold by vendors, 0; office use, 10; total 1,960. I certify that these statements are correct and complete. Laurence Goldstein, Editor

Page  [unnumbered] The Centennial fteview Edited by R. K. Meiners The Centenniial Review is committed to reflection on intellectual work, particularly as set in the University and its environment. We are interested in work that examines models of theory and communication in the physical, biological, and human sciences; that re-reads major texts and authoritative documents in different disciplines or explores interpretive procedures; that questions the cultural and social implications of research in a variety of disciplines. From Kansas University's symposium on Reconsidering Graduate Education: Pressures, Practices, Prospects Edited by Iris L. Smiti With keynote speeches by Michael Berube and Herbert Lindenberger Please begin my CR subscription with Spring 1996 O $12/year (3 issues) O $18/two years (6 issues) O $6 single issue (Add $4.50 per for mailing outside the US) Name Address State/Country Zip Please make your check payable to The Centenenial Review. Mail to The Centennial Review, 312 Linton Hall, Michigan State Univ. E. Lansing, MI 48824-1044.

Page  [unnumbered] PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE Denis Dutton, editor University of Canterbury, New Zealand Philosophy and Literature brings fresh perspectives to two modes of inquiry through its effective interdisciplinary approach to the study of major literary and philosophical texts. The journal publishes both philosophical interpretations of literature and literary investigations of classic works in philosophy. Its lively style, clear prose, and wide variety of subjects and methods enhance the journal's appeal to both scholars and students. Sponsored by Whitman College. Published twice a year in April and October. Prepayment is required. Annual subscriptions: $19.00, individuals; $38.00, institutions. Foreign postage: $2.70, Canada & Mexico; $5.40, outside North America. Single-issue price: $10.00, individuals; $21.00, institutions. Payment must be drawn on a U.S. bank or made by international money order. MD resident add 5% sales tax. For orders shipped to Canada add 7% GST (#124004946). Send orders to: THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS, Journals Publishing Division, PO Box 19966, Baltimore, MD 21211. *Ordering by VISA or MasterCard? For fastest service, call toll-free 1-800-537-JHUP Mon. -Fri., 8:30-5:00 ET or Fax us anytime: (410) 516-6968. L 1EA3

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