Three Prize-Winning Poets - three books of poetry - Review

Literary Review, Summer, 2001 by Burton Raffel

These three wonderfully handsome books, beautifully produced--one presented to us by one of America's most noted book designers, Richard Hendel--are in some ways a measure of where the century's poetic upheavals have now brought us. It is, of course, not fair either to the three poets, or to the distinguished university press which has honored them with its prizes and, even more importantly, with its imprimatur, to load them down with heavy and to some extent extraneous freight. However, though these three books certainly do not embrace all the current issues of poetic concern, they happen to be in many ways deeply representative. And, in particular, they are demonstrative of (1) the steady replacement of literary standards by academic and intellectual ones, (2) the creation of a surprisingly large "poetic" community, writers, readers, and critics, to a considerable extent built around the university world, and (3) the growing abandonment in that poetic community of reasonably clear measures of accomplishment. I will, of course, try to deal with each poet on his or her own grounds, with as much particularity as I can. But it is, I think, clear that two of the three poets here under review have not only largely failed at their chosen craft, but have, more or less deliberately, so failed. That is, they seem not to be aware that there are in fact craft standards, serious and well-known, and that it is not enough to be, as Ezra Pound once proclaimed, "a Poet, that doth drink of life / As lesser men drink wine" ("And thus in Nineveh"). Poets are indeed chosen, rather than choosing, to paraphrase Denise Levertov, The Poet in the World. But inherent in that process are reciprocal obligations. Poetry is simply not a free ride, even for the immensely talented.

Kathleen Peirce's The Oval Hour is not so much a bad book as a badly flawed one. It has good points, good lines, and some good poems. A beautifully-structured ten-line lyric called "Poem" has a fine sensual glow:

   The white cat's neck is thicker in winter.
   It's winter now. Fear also can enlarge her
   but not this afternoon. I believe she'll sleep
   as I write this like she slept when I thought to write,
   when I wanted to pass something through my hand
   that would have otherwise remained ideal
   or come out my mouth if you were here
   or listening. Your mouth is beautiful especially
   as its expectation of loss collapses. You remember.
   My mouth also was opening.

The halting rhythms are poignant, as is the carefully circumscribed imagery. Peirce employs a highly personal rhetoric, clearly risky, but memorable when it works. There is no question that she has a distinctive voice. The difficulty is that, in a book composed of sixty-five short poems, few a full page in length and only two longer than a single page, there are, in my judgment, only five that fullywork. Peirce too often presses at her poems, flattening them with piled-up, plodding, uncommunicative assertions: "Among them, there were very few / whose presence shone despair so violent / we hated them"; "we slept and woke beside a trellis of clematis / shaking with the implications of mannered withering"; "If the coronal suture of the young deer's skull / is the smallest trough for listening to death ...;" "Songbird on a brown- / black branch among the ochre- / charcoal atmospheres"; "should I resist / the understanding of the uninvented future offering?" Indeed, piling things up is virtually a tic, here: Peirce will start reasonably well, but then plow her poem under:

   Because I cannot understand how things are made,
   I seek to be perfected, to watch myself being made,
   fluttering between the motions
   of things past and to come, as if presence
   is not possible in present time
   except between the hands of was and going to be,
   and not like between hands, but like between
   the motions of the hands....

Perhaps the most blatantly obvious, and unforgivable, of her rhetorical excesses is a dreadfully insistent, deeply monotonous use of uncontrolled repetitions. I can only quote, and gape in wonder:

   In hope of loving what is real
   and in hope of being loved
   by something real ...

   what is the seeing of a snake in the rope
   except hallucination, and what else is the seeing
   of a deer on the path when there is
   no deer there? ...

   When I feed the wind
   with thinking and longing, am I the pleasure
   of nothing? I have not seen a vivid wind,
   and trying caused my eyes to close
   and I saw nothing ...

   the mirror that reflects my face
   reflected first its make as all mirrors do ...

The obsessiveness, and the monotony, is especially noteworthy, here, because all of these examples are, in fact, from the same poem, one of many based on Augustine's Confessions ("Confessions 4.2.3"). And since the poem is only eighteen lines long, the maundering, flabby wordiness I have just been quoting is roughly thirteen-eighteenths of its entire length, or just over seventy percent of the whole.