Always a Reckoning and Other Poems. - book reviews

National Review, Feb 20, 1995 by John Simon

There are two foolproof ways of getting your unpublishable poetry published. One is to be some sort of irrelevant celebrity, e.g., movie star (Jimmy Stewart), wife of a famous aviator (Anne Morrow Lindbergh), or Pope (Karol Wojtyla, a/k/a John Paul II). If this route isn't available to you, try dual entitlement, such as being both black and female. This has worked wonders for the likes of Maya Angelou, June Jordan, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, and many others. I have a certain soft spot for Gwendolyn Brooks, however, if only for watching her pass out from the free fruit punch served at the White House on Poetry Day.

On that Poetry Day, I met Jimmy Carter, then merely President, but now peacemaker as well as published poet, Times Books having brought out Always a Reckoning and Other Poems. I wouldn't be surprised if he had discovered his published poet's mission on that very day, when in every room of the White House you could hear published poets spouting their verse, some of it respectable, some of it good only for eliciting the response, "Heavens to Betsy, I can write stuff as good as that!"

Jimmy Carter, as the author's note reminds us, has published other books, some in collaboration with his wife, but those were in prose. That was a smart move: no matter how bad prose is, it is still, as Moliere's M. Jourdain discovered, prose. But bad poetry is not poetry; it is nothing. At most, some sort of text printed in short lines down the middle of each page. This has two seeming advantages: it looks like poetry, and it fills a book faster than stuff that has to cover the entire page. Moreover, in the old days, to impress folks, it had to adhere to strict form. Nowadays, however, thanks to the pioneering efforts of such stars as the poet-playwright Miss Shange, the poet-inauguralist Miss Angelou, and the poet-professor Miss Jordan (one of whose effusions begins: "5 shirts / 2 blouses / 3 pairs of jeans and the iron's on hot / for cotton"), a much greater freedom has been gained, making it easier for everyone.

So one of Jimmy Carter's poems starts out "in a musty attic box I found / letters of my family in the War - / from places like Bull Run and Gettysburg / and places seldom mentioned in the books." As you can see, this is not a laundry- (or ironing-) list poem, but a newer genre, the letters-in-the-attic-box poem, and just as potent. It even bears the vatic title "The More Things Change." The humble Civil War epistolarians "served a cause and often gave their lives / not knowing how to tell the history / they made, except a private's point of view / set down in a simple line or two." Clearly, the ancestors inspired our poet to tell the history he made, not from a private's but from a Commander-in-Chief's point of view, yet also set down in a simple line or two.

These forty-odd mostly short poems - only three of them longer than the two-page (prose) dedication to the poet's family, friends, and various unnamed people, including the "readers of this book" - fall into four sections: "People," "Places," "Polities," and "Private Lives." All these P-headed rubrics are very nearly interchangeable, most of the poems really being pro,, anecdotes that could fit into several of the categories. There are reminiscences of growing up in Plains, Georgia; of friends black and white; of hunting and fishing; of growing peanuts, and harvesting and selling them; of family (father, mother, wife, but no offspring); of a favorite hound dying, "nose and eyes still holding on the point"; and of itinerant songsters coming to visit the village, after which "I wished to write / in fumbling lines why we should care / about a distant starving child."

There are also autobiographical poems about local politics and Washington, poems about travel in the air ("Flying to Japan and Seeing Mount Fuji Above the Clouds"), and undersea ("Life on a Killer Submarine"), where Carter served, and quite a few about people being exploited, abused, imprisoned, and killed in sundry parts of the world. There are poems about Mother Lillian's nursing career and treatment of a young leper, about Father Earl's severity, hunting prowess, and death by cancer; about not finding Dylan Thomas memorialized in Westminster Abbey, and doing something about it; about "One, Now Gone, Who Always Let His Hunting Partner Claim a Downed Bird" ("A rarity / who showed us what agape means"); also philosophical ones, e.g., "A Contemplation of What Has Been Created, and Why," and "Considering the Void" (which ends: "knowing that this galaxy of ours / is one of multitudes / in what we call the heavens, / it troubles me. It troubles me"); and one "On Using Words," which runs in toto:

I first heard jumbled sounds before they framed my infant thoughts and didn't know beliefs and dreams would ride on random consonants and vowels in the air.

Now when I seek efficient words to say what I believe is true or have a dream I want to share the uagueness is still there.

The terms that best describe these pieces are "anecdotal," "concerned," and "disarming." They testify to the niceness of a guy talking about people, issues, incidents from his life (e.g., bird watching from the White House roof), and there is hardly one among them that wouldn't appeal to the Nobel Peace Prize jury, and not a single one that, in anything but superficies, re sembles a poem. Here is a stanza fro "Of Possum and Fatback," about possum hunting in Mr. Carter's youth: