Knock Knock II

American Poetry Review, The, Mar/Apr 2005 by Hall, Donald

A Column

KNOCK KNOCK II. KNOCK KNOCK: THE Sequel. Son of Knock Knock. Knock Knock Climbs Out of its Grave.

Back when this magazine was young I wrote a column called Knock Knock and in each included such a joke, along with assertions about poetry. I think it was Richard Wilbur who told me the first knock knock joke that bouleversed me-at least after third grade: "Knock knock." "Who's there?" "Eskimos, Christians, and Italians." "Eskimos, Christians, and Italians who?" "Eskimos Christians, and Italians no lies." I ventured into Greek; a few students recognized "Maine, and Aïda," which sounds almost like the first two words of the Iliad. But I could never equal the best-I don't remember who gifted me with it-which was: "Ezra Pound." "Ezra Pound who?" (con animation and air banjo) "Ezra Pound to get you in a taxi, honey, I'll be round about..." Most were poetry knock knocks, like the Shelley triplex: "Shelley gather by the river?" "Shelley Temple." ... "Shelley compare thee to a summer's day?"

In this new incarnation, "II" will perform no more knock-knock jokes.

It's strange, being old. One thing that's clear: Inspiration becomes rarer, and imagination less intense and spontaneous. Wordsworth got it right. I've always been slow to finish poems, and I'm slower than ever. It used to be that several times in the"year I would suffer and enjoy little meteor showers of imagery, phrases and even whole lines that leaned toward becoming poems. I felt spooked during these assaults, frightened and grateful. When the ideas slowed down, I had drafts and fragments that could keep me busy for a year. After six or eight months, as I moved toward finishing some of these things, I would be subject to another little assault of beginnings.

Now I take one note at a time, and more rarely. Maybe a week later I get a phrase or half an image, that seems to belong with the first language given. Words gather themselves, sticking to each other like plaque in an artery. At some point lines may begin to resemble a poem. "Hey," I tell them, "you're like those things I used to write!" I suppose I know more than I once did, about the multiple waysOf failure. Do I shut off possibilities because I am too aware of disasters? It is generally not encouraging, pushing eighty, to read poets who have been there before you. Frost's last book contained two and a half good poems . .. but there is also Thomas Hardy. His Winter Words was posthumous in 1928, the year he died at eighty-eight, which is the year I was born. "Proud Songsters" ought to provide encouragement to aging types:

Hear it as it paces itself; a comma is as acute as a metaphor.

At a mere seventy-six, I anticipate my death-casually. (I just ordered a new car that might do 250,000 miles. Idly, I don't suppose I may have so many.) Yet my anticipations of death began early. When I was twenty-five I wrote, "My Son My Executioner." The manners by which we anticipate death alter over the years. As Stanley Kunitz approaches his hundredth birthday, I remember a quatrain he wrote in his twenties:

Observe the wisdom of the Florentine

Who, feeling death upon him, scribbled fast

To make revision of a deathbed scene,

Gloating that he was accurate at last.

I love the starchy language of Stanley Kunitz in his youth, looking toward terminally fierce literary composition. Does he feel now as he imagined his Florentine would feel?

When good poets die they are celebrated, lamented, praised-just now, tributes to Donald Justice and Anthony Hecht-and after a while people stop talking about them. Years later, a biography, a collection of letters, a complete poems-and they are news again. Many again subside, while others become obligatory in anthologies, critical histories, and college courses. Even Robert Frost faded; T. S. Eliot still fades although "Four Quartets" begins to brighten up. Ezra Pound is consigned to poet's hell for his politics not his poems. My teacher Archibald MacLeish-winner of three Pulitzers-has not been heard from lately. My old friend James Wright is coming back; I hope he will stick around. His teacher Theodore Roethke seems to be clawing at the underside of his grave, or maybe I just want to hear such a noise. As I was growing up, Roethke was one of the young big three: WiIbur, Lowell, and Roethke. They were distinct from the fixed stars-Eliot, Williams, Moore, Stevens, Pound-who were still alive.

In those years, before the rise of the poetry reading, the sound of verse was at the forefront for all these poets. (It is a paradox that poetry today-constantly out-loud-does much less with sound.) Lowell's Lord Weary pounded iambic thunder in brilliant Miltonic paragraphing, as decisive as Yeats without sounding like Yeats. This drum-beat came later to seem melodramatic to the poet himself, as he shifted into the softer and devastating idiom of Life Studies. Those old pentameters still thunder for me: "The Lord survives the rainbow of His will." Wilbur's lyrics had the deftness, the finish and satisfaction of the great seventeenth century, of Marvell and Herrick. Now in his eighties, Wilbur has never stopped making such poems. The New Yorker did "Man Running" a year or two ago, one of his best, and it is still a Wilbur poem, as his poems of the 50s were Wilbur poems.