YIP: A Cowboy's Howl - R book reviews

Literary Review, Fall, 1993 by Burton Raffel

How does one find words - not one word, but any assortment, any number - to express the steadily mounting and unique power of David Romtvedt's poetry? Comparisons obviously will not do the trick: "Combining Philip Levine's sense of the world's inexorable power, and Robert Lowell's final awareness that the worm in the apple belongs there, even at the cost of man having no apples, and Allen Ginsberg's moments of genuine innocence ..." No: it is not that comparisons are odious, but that they are useless. Says Romtvedt, in "In Winter," "We get what we ask for / though maybe we don't ask / often enough." Is there anyone writing in English who can pack into thirteen small words that much passion and truculence, shyness and sophistication, Zen-like silence and sheer modern American noise?

I stand up to walk away.

As I open the door

I am slapped in the face

by another world

and it is this one.

There have been, at least since World War II, a great many English-language poets who have wanted to write politically. Most have been bearers of Stances and Concepts and made of themselves more or less flatulent bores. But Romtvedt waves no banners and proclaims no slogans - and he is never a bore. He knows something that Eastern European poets know, namely, that at least in our time, political involvement either begins with your first breath and then continues with all the other breaths that follow, or else it is at least two parts (and maybe three) fake. In the first poem in this fine new book, "Shelter," we have a maniacally selfish neighbor with an expensive bomb shelter into which, he announces, no one but his own family will be admitted. "If others / tried to force their way in, he'd shoot them." The poet's father makes a kind of shelter in his family's bathroom; lacking people to shoot, as he waits for nuclear war, the neighbor "fire[s] his rifle at the stars." Nuclear war retreats, all bomb shelters disappear, "But even now / when I sit on a toilet I see that stuff, And when I hear / a sharp noise, it's the neighbor shooting the stars."

Romtvedt does not particularly distinguish between and among the earth's denizens and the earth itself. He is not some will-eyed Oneworlder, but rather (as I have said before in these pages) a kind of latter-day Thoreau. In "The Aspen from the Mountain," for example, even "the common birds" are agents of politics, because "They can fly to other planets / and find food wherever they go." In "Eating Dinner at My Sister's," the atomic bomb does (metaphorically) fall, but "My sister opens her mouth and swallows," and then, when everything is well again, the poem smashes its way into one of the quietest and yet most devastatingly political pronouncements I know of in American poetry:

I thank my sister for swallowing

our bomb and wonder how many

have done it before, how many

whose names I cannot say.

Again, could anyone now writing say so much in so little?

Romtvedt seems not to have lived in Europe, though he has spent fruitful years in Africa and Latin America. his Yip is dedicated to Allen Ginsberg, and there can be small doubt that his politics comes from inside, not out. He can certainly assume, fluently and powerfully, an African (or a Latin American) persona; in "Kibuye, Rwanda, We Wave Goodbye," a tautly drawn African voice reflects at the poem's end, that "There is an airport whichever way one turns / and another world to which one can fly, / leaving behind a variety of pests and voices, / the variety of ways each pest speaks / clearly of the place the one who is leaving / leaving will forever remain." But as he also says, in "Yuma, Arizona, the Harvest," "At first my dreams were in English, / then, as a student, in Spanish. / Now I don't remember."

In this context, of course "politics" means "life." Indeed, "The earth is a life," Romtvedt tells us in the book's last poem, "Life Story," and the sea, the chain / on which I sit." "Looking at my hands / I think a person / can do anything." There is a much the same large-toned strength and, miraculously, ease, all through this book, power that scarcely seems to care whether it roars or whispers; I know of no living poet so blessedly, complexly un-selfconscious. But as Romtvedt first inquires and then explains, in "All through November," "There's no other man, is there? / No other man to be." As Jehovah is reported to have said, some years ago, "I am that I am." I do not know if the child is father to the man, but in David Romtvedt's poetry, surely, the man is father to the poetry, and the poetry reaches out to, embraces, includes, enlightens, illuminates, and can help make sense for us all.