Alan Williamson: The poet-critic

American Poetry Review, The, Jan 1995 by Williamson, Alan

The last stanza returns to Proustian nostalgia, but without losing its grip on irony: is the suspended "fire" that of beauty, the autumn leaves, or of marital warfare? The poem ends with one of Yenser's most resonant puns. "Striking out" still means adventure, freshness, oneness, as it did in the first stanza; and it extends this meaning onto the act of writing itself. But it also means "retaliation." And it also means "leaving out." What unseemly incidents do lie behind "grip," "screwed," and "medlar"? What makes even "straightforwardness" "warped"?

For the reader who knows Merrill's poem "Days of 1971," there is a further poignant subtext here. In that poem, "Stephen" gives the narrator "a Basque walking stick"--a gift the older poet takes as an implied critique of his self-indulgent life. How infallibly we project strength onto our friends, and weakness only onto ourselves!

A poem like this is an "intelligent act," in Wright's sense--the product of years of thinking about the possibilities of the art--without losing its essential grip on important human crisis. And, lest anyone consider the mise-en-scene of the crisis too "academic" or "elitist," it is good to find, farther on in the volume, equally assured poems about the rural Midwest--notably "Carnal Knowledge," a literary ballad as successfully unself-conscious, in its way, as Bishop's "The Burglar of Babylon."

Two first books of essays, by already eminent poets, have made an enormous impression on me, in the last year. I would note with pleasure, without unduly underlining, that both are by women. (Women poets have played a pivotal role in the making of feminist criticism, but are still underrepresented in the less ideological--in the best sense, belletristic--criticism that influences taste.) Mainly, both books are the expression of fiercely independent spirits.

Louise Gluck's Proofs & Theories was published by Ecco in 1994. What I love in Gluck's prose--as, often, in her poetry--is how, with a few magisterially placed words, she forecloses easy, comfortable ways of looking at the world, and makes us consider the logic of uncomfortable ones. Has what is wrong with bad "confessional" poetry (its obligatory therapeutic optimism, its unconscious competitiveness, its self-pity) ever been stated better, or more savagely, than in these few sentences?

I don't think our society's addiction to exhibitionism and obsession with progress (a narrow myth for triumph) completely explain the ease with which survivors have begun to show their wounds, making a kind of caste of isolation, completing in the previously unpermitted arena of personal shame.... In what would seem an impossible manoeuver, any number of poets have managed to dissociate the forbidden from all tragic implication while continuing to claim for their efforts the prestige of tragedy....[W]hat they demand...is admiration for unprecedented bravery, as the speaker look back and speaks the truth. But truth of this kind will not permit itself simply to be looked back on; it makes, when it is summoned, a kind of erosion, undermining the present with the past, substituting for the shifts and approximations and variety of anecdote the immutable fixity of fate....