The New Poetry

THE first collections have come out. Slender, sometimes oddly titled, published often under obscure imprints like Jargon Books, Migrant Books, the Talisman Press, or sometimes by university presses like Yale or Wesleyan, they may at least be held in the hand. The poet has been able to look at his work in the coldness of print, to put behind him the amateur business of passing typescripts around among his friends. Now he may think of looking on himself as a professional, for a book must have readers! His first collection was a reckoning.

The poet did not have too much difficulty getting it published, for every publisher, amateur or professional, is always alert for a discovery. (A poet may in fact have more difficulty finding a publisher for his second collection.) A few hundred copies were read, or at least bought, by individuals and libraries. The poet himself gave a number away to friends. There were a few reviews, possibly in the great newspapers, more likely in the literary quarterlies.

The furor, such as it was, has abated. Several years have passed. The poet, in spite of so modest a flurry, has gone on writing. He has hoped to surpass his earlier work, either by perfecting what was there imperfect or by going forward to different and more satisfying ways of illuminating his vision of the world. He has looked back at the first collection and found it too small, or too unselective, or too uninstructed. The first exuberance of writing has been replaced by something else.

So the second collection appears, or the third. The obscure publishing imprints do not often repeat themselves, for it is somehow in the nature of such publishers not to survive long enough for a second collection. If survival had been their only object they would not have published the first collections at all. Now the imprints are Harper, Scribner’s, Atheneum, signifying that the poet has gained some kind of stature since the first volume, and that at least his fellow poets have recognized him sufficiently to recommend him to the professional publishers. The poet, if he has survived and grown, is now ready to be taken seriously. It is time to assess the value of his future career. Within the last twelvemonth a number of second and third collections have appeared; and at least five of them deserve serious attention.

FOR LOVE: POEMS 1950-1960 (Scribner’s, $3.50 cloth; $1.45 paperback) is ROBERT GREELEY’S third book, but his first to appear under the aegis of a major publisher. The ten years whose work it contains show Greeley moving toward the gradual definition of his own original style, his own range of emotion, his own pattern of imagining. Greeley has a subtle, almost feminine sensibility, and the best of his poems are those dealing with the intricacies that exist between men and women. The poems move back and forth between the mood of loneliness on the one hand and on the other the repeated exhortation, “Be natural.” The poems fulfill this plea in their plaintiveness, their refusal to oversimplify, in their aloneness, even in their mannerisms. They evade the bold statement, luxuriate in the inconclusive, and often strike perfectly the note of the dying fall.

Greeley’s poems are as delicately patterned as a butterfly’s wing, particularly in his later work. Since he prefers moods of perplexity, of quiet currents below the surface, of bittersweet lack, his poetic techniques are curiously suitable and often highly effective. Again and again you will come across one of his poems containing a subtle rhythm which winds back on itself, involute as a seashell, and in which the rhythm itself casts the illumination. For instance, in “The Rain,” the poem begins in shadow and ends in light, all controlled by rhythm, moving from evasion to certainty:

Another poet would not have used a term so apparently awkward as “the getting out,” but its very vagueness, in Creeley’s hands, endows his last stanza with strength. His occasional pure lyrics also depend on this simplicity, not to say naïveté, of language.

I doubt, however, whether it is pedantic to suggest that Creeley’s grammar and punctuation are often very uncertain indeed, to the extent of confusing the meaning of his poems, and sometimes of making them downright ridiculous. One example of many comes in a poem called “The Women”:

The author’s intended meaning is clear, but his literal meaning is absurd. He is very foolish, too, not to use question marks in place of periods when they are needed. These may seem like small matters, but in elusive poems like Greeley’s, it takes only a very slight shift of weight to upset the balance.

Robert Creeley and DENISE LEVERTOV are both in their late thirties, and their work has certain affinities, particularly in its privacy and intimacy. The two poets are often mentioned together; their work often appears in the same magazines and anthologies. Of the two, however, Levertov is the stronger, the more brilliant. She shows more direct traces of the past, and particularly the influence of the imagist movement of some fifty years ago. Through clean, simple, precise language she seeks to record in terse pictures the vivid present, though not for its own sake so much as for the sake of a mystical vision of life:

Yet by their nature Denise Levertov’s poems suffer from limitations much like those which ultimately sterilized the imagist movement. Too often her insistence on the present tense, the present participle, the present perception necessitates a narrow, mannered way of speaking, particularly since she dispenses with meter and has no recurrent heartheat to broaden and unify the rhythm. Too often her poems, anchored in the present, cannot move out of it unless the reader, independently, can make the same mystical connection that the poet has made.

This is the risk inherent in depending only on unconnected images: the poet leaves it to the reader, not to the power of language, to guide the connection between image and idea. It is like a conversation whose silences are as meaningful as its words; such conversations do not take place between strangers.

A very different sort of poet is JOHN HOLLANDER, whose second volume, MOVIEGOING AND OTHER POEMS (Atheneum, $3.50 cloth; $1.65 paperback), shows much more education of the head, and less of the heart, than Greeley’s and Levertov’s books. Hollander’s first collection won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1958 and displayed a dazzling talent for parody and pastiche full of metrical trickery and exuberance. Moviegoing’s accomplishments are no less dazzling, but it is to be taken rather more seriously. It contains less apparent pastiche, less flippancy. Hollander is fully conscious of the riches of poetic and scholarly tradition but is capable of his own variations and inventiveness.

One long ironic “Eclogue,” in a modern setting, tells the story of two lovers who, trapped in a cave in a thunderstorm, become engrossed in a book: “We loved no more that day.” It is a delicious parody of Paolo and Francesca in Dante’s Inferno, and rolls off with wicked relish. There are poems in the shape of Burgundy bottles, of hourglasses. There are two poems (one a viilanelle) on fried shoes, delivered as a challenge to the beat poet Gregory Corso, who said, “No square poet would ever begin a poem with ‘Fried Shoes.’ ” There are syllabic meters, half rhymes, assonances, elaborate enjambments, stress-rhythms, titillating epigraphs, and one of the silliest publisher’s blurbs to decorate a book of verse in several seasons (though, Lord knows, the blurbs on books of verse are seldom noted for their good sense).

Many of Hollander’s serious poems, like the title poem (a disquisition on old movies and movie theaters) and the long didactic poem “Upon Apthorp House” (the history of a Harvard building in the eighteenth-century style), use the past as a wedge to enter the present:

This book’s greatest metrical originality lies in a group of landscape poems spun out in intricate stanzas which embody an almost surrealist concern with the cold of snow and the heat of blood, or with the shapes of light and dark, as in “Race Rock Light”:

Anybody interested in the techniques ol verse will want to listen to the interplay of half rhymes, as in “green-seems,” “sun-cupped,” “contractsplashed,” and so on, throughout. Hollander, too, uses the six-stress line, so difficult to manage in English, with fluid and evocative effect.

John Hollander’s poems, even at their most frivolous and perverse, explore the shifting barriers between semblance and reality with a sort of chuckling irony, but never with a very high inner seriousness. His irony has no satirical thrust behind it, little melancholy, no compelling joy. These are poems whose major emotion lies in their own cleverness. It is worth taking poetry more seriously — as in their ways Greeley and Levertov do — and perhaps in his third book Hollander will find his way.

ANNE SEXTON in ALL MY PRETTY ONES (Houghton Mifflin, 83.00 cloth; $1.50 paperback) cannot be accused of a lack of seriousness. As her epigraph she quotes Kafka: “the books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune. ... A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.” Her poems have a beleaguered and desperate honesty about them. Short on thought, long on sensation, they hog the reader into feeling. Many are manifestly autobiographical, and almost all sound so. If Denise Levertov’s poems are obsessed with the present moment, Anne Sexton’s cannot escape the vertical pronoun: the “I” is everywhere. Yet she is faithful as a poet, faithful to her own feelings, to the terrible ambiguities of imagination, to the grim joy to be taken in facts. She shows her worst habits when she goes overboard into hallucination without control; but when controlled, hallucination becomes in her hands a way of illuminating the dark recesses of existence.

Anne Sexton’s first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, was a loose series of poems describing a mental breakdown and recovery. The autobiographical poems in this second book continue the story yet reveal a greater breadth of style and mood, a diversity of imagination which in the end give the second book a stronger unity. One long poem, called “The Operation,” is absolutely superb. Its unflinching candor, clarity, matter-offactness set a standard which is almost unrivaled in contemporary verse. Here is its first stanza:

Recall if you can the opening of any recent poem to match that for economy, fullness, and power in setting a scene.

Yet no other poem in the volume approaches this height, and many suffer from sheer excess, as though the poet were straining every sense to try to identify with her subject matter, like this opening stanza of “For God While Sleeping”:

A poem like this overshoots its mark when it slips beyond the purity of horror into the incongruity of self-consciousness. Too often, the author reaches so far for the striking simile that she makes the reader uncomfortably conscious of the “I” behind the poems — not the “I” of the sufferer but the “I” of the artificer. “Their breasts as limp as killed fish,” “a brown voice as soft and full as beer,” “Their nipples as uninvolved as warm starfish” — similes like this show the overstrain. Yet when natural they could hardly be more original:

Of all the poets reviewed here, WILLIAM STAFFORD shows the greatest promise of major stature. His first book, West of Tour City, was published very prettily in 1960 by one of those small private presses which can bring a book to print but have trouble causing it to be noticed or read. This book is already unavailable. The second collection, TRAVELING THROUGH THE DARK, contains too many new poems of lower energy than Stafford’s remarkable best, and it seems a pity that this new volume (Harper & Row, $3.50) could not have been arranged to include the best poems from West of Tour City instead. Yet the first long section has many rich poems in it — robust, mystical, sensuous, witty, wealthy with the rhythms of everyday speech. Stafford brings to his poetry a really good mind, a highly developed eye for landscape, a broad frame of reference, a maturity about joy and trouble, and a natural unforced talent that may one day make him the envy and despair of his contemporaries.

In the best poems of Traveling Through the Dark you find yourself plunged happily into the middle of a poem’s experience before you know how you have got there. In the less good poems you tend to be aware of a bustle of preparation, but the lesser poems are simply a little less intense, less striking. Among the finest poems, as in the first book, are those dealing with the patterns behind landscape; but you will also find quizzical poems on the nature of thought and understanding, on the meaning of natural disasters, on the discrimination between the large and the small, on the exchange between one generation and the next, or on the place of poetry. No narrowness here. One poem, called “The Job,” is the best I know about the profession of teaching. Another, “The Thought Machine,” gives sheer delight in the reading and the rereading, as it relates, with humor and justice, man to machine. The best sample short enough to be quoted here in its entirety is a rueful one called “Parentage”:

If William Stafford can discipline himself to print only the very best of his poems, watch out. He is a poet with something to say, who can transcend his human limitations and perform the poet’s highest task by clarifying the world around us. As a sample of his prophetic quality, here is a short poem from West of Tour City which in its way has the power of Yeats’s “The Second Coming.”. This one is called “At the Bomb Testing Site.”