American Poetry: School's Out

Poetry editors are drowning in a sea of manuscripts. It is not unusual for the most obscure journals and quarterlies to be inundated with 3,000 poems a month. Nearly 400 books of poetry are published in the U.S. each year. Antaeus Editor (and poet) Daniel Halpern optimistically calls this a "blossoming of talent," but there is a darker side to the phenomenon. Poet Louis Simpson voices a common refrain when he complains that "there are few readers of poetry of any kind." Statistics bear him out. Poetry is a prestigious loss-leader on publishers' lists. The book of verse that sells more than 2,000 copies is a bona fide success.

Evidently, many people now find poetry easier to write than to read. The demolitions of old poetic constraints--inaugurated by such elitists as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound--have allowed just about any flyspecked page to masquerade as divine afflatus. "Poetry," Pound insisted, "must be as well written as prose," but he did not reckon on the grunts, snorts and limping non sequiturs that his epigones would later commit to paper under the banner of the new.

During the '50s and '60s, several loose "schools" of poetry provided some fixed points in a chaos of experimentation. A poet of the New York School, for example, was inclined to adopt his methods and aims from the French surrealists and Dadaists, while the Beats on the West Coast looked to the dharma and karma of the East for their inspiration. Today the schools have let out, and contemporary poetry has become a babel of idiosyncrasies.

Within that choir of voices there are genuine talents, poets whose recognition is justifiably earned. Five of them have works current and available:

DIVINE COMEDIES by JAMES MERRILL 136 pages. Atheneum. $8.95.

The centerpiece of this new volume by a former National Book Award winner and recipient of the Bollingen Prize in Poetry is The Book of Ephraim, a 90-page narrative poem. Merrill, 50, sets up a premise that gives him the latitude of Dante and the eternity of Scheherazade. He claims that in 1955 he and a companion made contact--via a Ouija board--with the spirit of Ephraim, a Greek Jew born in A.D. 8 who was also, in a second incarnation, a favorite of the Emperor Tiberius. As a cup moves among the capital letters on the board, Ephraim is resuscitated as a chatty, crotchety witness to history and to two decades of the poet's life.

Through this aperture into the occult, the reader views a tapestry as large and ornate as any to be found in recent poetry. Merrill's allusions are often recondite. But his loving attention to brilliant surfaces outdazzles difficulties. The Book of Ephraim crackles with wit:

Oh god, these days...

Thermometer at 90, July haze

Heavy with infamy from Washington.

Impeachment ripens round the furrowed stone

Face of a story-teller who has given

Fiction a bad name (I at least thank heaven

For my executive privilege vis-`a-vis

Transcripts of certain private hours with E).

The spirit Ephraim brings his pupils good news about the cosmic dance of souls, though he warns that if the world is destroyed, heaven would vanish. The same Keatsian reverence for earthly pleasures pervades Merrill's poem. Words are to be cherished because they open magic casements:

Hadn't--from books, from living--

The profusion dawned on us, of "languages"

Any one of which, to who could read it,

Lit up the system it conceived? --bird-flight,

Hallucinogen, chorale and horoscope:

Each its own world, hypnotic, many-sided

Facet of the universal gem.

In all its diversities of tone and mood, The Book of Ephraim refracts that gem. It is a tour de force and a major accomplishment.

SELF-PORTRAIT IN A CONVEX MIRROR by JOHN ASHBERY 83 pages. Viking. $5.95.

Even Ashbery's staunchest defenders admit that his work is difficult. A noted art critic as well as poet, Ashbery, 50, manipulates words as if they were daubs of paint, interesting not for their meaning but for their coloration:

Small waves strike

The dark stones. The wife reads

The letter. There is nothing

irreversible:

Points to the last sibilants Of invading beef and calico.

This is the gaudy tightrope mode of Wallace Stevens, and few poets since Stevens have been able to escape the pit of arrant gibberish that yawns below. In his eighth volume, Ashbery once again proves that he can. What is striking in his poems is not the absence of simple semantic logic but the implication of a rationality that lies just out of reach. Ashbery makes clear his impatience with simple verisimilitude in art:

Aping naturalness may be the

first step

Toward achieving an inner calm But it is the first step only, and

often Remains a frozen gesture of

welcome etched On the air materializing behind

it,

A convention. And we have really No time for these, except to use

them For kindling.

Ashbery's poems do not evade the real; they deny it the power to prevent other realities from being conceived.

FELLOW FEELINGS

by RICHARD HOWARD 77 pages. Atheneum. $4.95 paperback.

Howard, 47, is a prolific translator and critic of poetry, as well as an indefatigable champion of younger poets. His five previous books of original poems were longer on erudition than passion. The same dry, academic rustle is audible at times in Fellow Feelings, but a number of poems seem lived rather than researched. An elegy to W.H. Auden begins with an epigrammatic snap that the late master might have enjoyed:

What do we share with the past?

Assurance we are unique,

even in shipwreck. The dead

take away the world they made

certain was theirs--they die

knowing we never can have it.

As each of us knows, for even

a nap is enough to confirm

suspicion that when we are not

on the scene, nothing else is.

Call it the comfort of dying:

You can take it all with you.

In "Venetian Interior, 1889," Howard draws an odd, comic tableau: Robert Browning's ne'er-do-well artist son Pen, a nude model, Pen's wealthy, exploited wife and the old poet himself, "a short and foreshortened colossus with feet of clay/ but the hardest imaginable cranium." The scene shifts to the subsequent deaths of all the actors. His mind on modern Venice, Howard muses on his vignette and its bearing on the parade of death that is history:

We realize our task.

It is to print earth so deep in memory

that a meaning reaches the surface. Nothing but

darkness abides, darkness demanding not

illumination--not from the likes of us--

but only that we yield. And we yield.

WHAT THOU LOVEST WELL, REMAINS AMERICAN by RICHARD HUGO

71 pages. Norton. $6.95.

Those who think they dislike poetry might test their conviction on this fifth collection by Richard Hugo, 52. Hugo's poems are accessible without being simple. His subject is the American Midwest and Far West, vast tracts of thinly peopled space, and times when "Poverty was real, wallet and spirit, and each day slow as church." His constant theme is dispossession: owners forced from their homes, young people fleeing the drudgery of domesticity, never escaping the full ache of loss.

Here, the stores are balanced

on the edge of failure and they never fail. Minimal

profits seem enough to go on one more day

and stores that failed were failures in the '30s.

The district failed from the beginning. The pioneer

who named it for himself died wondering what's wrong

with the location.

When he abandons this subject and laconic tone, Hugo seems lost. The last part of his book is padded with some satirical and arty pieces that are plainly inept. But his portraits of loners and down-and-outers have a fresh and memorable sting:

He was crude as a loon on land. His tongue

drove girls away and he sat in taverns hours

and the fat piled up. Women and children

mocked him when he waddled home. Alone

in his rented room he made friends

with the wall and chair. He dialed Time

to hear a voice, and when the voice said 4 a.m.

he said, no, that couldn 't be the time.

E.A. Robinson and Robert Frost mined this native lode; Hugo shows there is still plenty of ore left.

45 MERCY STREET by ANNE SEXTON

Edited by LINDA GRAY SEXTON 114 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $6.95

hardcover; $3.95 paperback.

At the time of her suicide in October 1974, Anne Sexton left this partially unrevised collection and another binder full of new poems. As arranged by her daughter, 45 Mercy Street traces the harrowing path of the last three years of the poet's life. Yet the fact that she suffered torments is not what makes her poems compelling: her powers as a poet pull the reader onward and downward, increasingly aware of the ferocity of her narrow, demonic vision.

Like Sylvia Plath, whose suicide preceded hers by eleven years, Sexton was a major force among the "confessional" poets who appeared in the early '60s. A cycle of 17 poems in 45 Mercy Street follows the process of her divorce in 1973:

Skull,

museum object,

I could squash you like a rotten melon,

but I would rather--no, I need

to hold you gently like a puppy,

to give you milk and berries for your dear mouth,

husband, husband.

During her last year, the poet told a friend that the leaves were calling to her, telling her to die and join them. The conclusion of "Leaves That Talk" rings with a vernal premonition:

The leaves lie in green mounds,

like fake green snow huts.

And from the window as I peer out,

I see they have left their cages forever--

those wiry, spidery branches--

for me to people

someday soon when I turn green

and faithless to the summer.

At 45, Sexton felt that her poetic skills were failing. Contrary evidence is sprinkled throughout this posthumous collection.

Such work is no guarantee of a renaissance. Poets and readers may continue to drift apart; the art may yet degenerate totally into self-therapy. Fame is now reserved for poets who do something else-- like writing bestselling novels (Erica Jong, James Dickey). There is no serious living writer whom the reading public gets by heart the way it once learned Frost and Auden. That echo in the brain now comes from rock lyrics and TV jingles. But set against all the reasons for pessimism are the voices, this spring, of these five poets. They show that it is still possible to discover the private, contemplative rewards that finely wrought language can give: the sudden illumination, the eerie sense that the phrase "in other words" has been robbed of meaning.

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