Late Excellence

Late Excellence

IN HIS ELEGY FOR WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, "Dream Song #324," John Berryman praises the older poet's "mysterious late excellence" as "the crown / of our trials & our last bride." He may be quoting Eliot who in "Little Gidding" has his composite ghost speak to the poet much less optimistically of "expiring sense," "impotence," and "shame," as "the gifts reserved for age / to set a crown upon your lifetime's effort." It would be like Berryman to correct the Great Tom, a poet Williams despised, in a poem that also praises Williams' "generosity / to juniors [that] made you deeply loved, deeply." Late excellence and generosity mark the careers of the six poets whose books are under review here, and I would venture to say each of them enjoys the deep love of their juniors. Their poems sometimes speak of the disconsolate gifts espoused by Eliot, but we can share Berryman's pleasure and consolation at seeing excellent work done by poets in their later years.

At the heart of her new book,1 in the poem "Collaborations," Adrienne Rich writes, "Make a list of what's lost but don't / call it a poem." Her method has become a kind of Whitmanian cataloguing and process of association, often appearing to be a series of notes. The journal entry has provided a form for her poems for many years now, each of which usually comes with a date; one sequence in this new book is called "USonian Journals," and there is a poem entitled "Five O'Clock, January 2003." She also makes frequent references to photography and film, and another sequence is entitled "Dislocations: Seven Scenarios." These methods and approaches are not so much to eschew poetry as to escape the literary. Rich has long been a master of the telling shard of language broken off from some horrendous event. Part IV of "Rituals" is a good example:

You need to turn yourself around

face in another direction

She wrapped herself in a flag

soaked it in gasoline and lit a match

This is for the murdered babies

they say she said

Others heard

for the honor of my country

Others remember

the smell and how she screamed

Others say, This was just theater

The poem ends by claiming, "We want to show ordinary life / We are dying to show it," and it appears that Rich has mastered a style that can do just that.

It is the prophet's and visionary's belief that poetry expresses truth, even at the expense of beauty. Thus for Rich the personal has long been raised to the level of the political. In "Five O'Clock, January 2003," promising a friend that she will think of his surgery on that day, at that hour, still she begins her poem:

Tonight as cargoes of my young

fellow countrymen and women are being hauled

into positions aimed at death, positions

they who did not will it suddenly

have to assume

I am thinking of Ed Azevedo

And she considers her own privileged vantage point, looking out at the Pacific Ocean, which she calls the poet "Jeffers" 'most glorious creature on earth.'"

Although the political is much on her mind and furnishes much of the subject matter of her poems, there is in this book a note of apologia pro vita sua, and it is this note that, I think, enhances the late excellence of Rich's recent poetry. The final sequence of the book, "Tendril," follows her persona on an international plane flight, where she meditates on the life that has found her, a life of action rather than contemplation. She has her epiphany facing the mirror in a restroom:

This confessional reeks of sweet antiseptic

and besides she's not confessing

her mind balks craving wild onions

nostril-chill of eucalyptus

that seventh sense of what's missing

against what's supplied

She walks at thirty thousand feet into the cabin

sunrise crashing through the windows

Cut the harping she tells herself

You're human, porous like all the rest

Called to be a visionary and a prophet, a good poet has to remember her humanity. Here it is not so much the self-reproach ('You're human") that reminds her and us, but the admission of craving for aspects of the California landscape-apolitical and nostalgic-that remind us that Rich's greatest gift has always been to render the sensual details of the real world and her honest response to them. Nevertheless, as long as there are political outrages, there will be poetry from Adrienne Rich.

The same is true of Maxine Kumin. No poet since Robert Lowell, except Adrienne Rich, has made poetry out of politics like Maxine Kumin, struggling with the issues of our day as if they were personal. I used to think Kumin's political poetry was inferior to her personal lyrics, but now I recognize that simply as a preference of my own. I do prefer the surprising and mysterious lyrics to the poems occasioned by political outrage. Her shame about giving a horse away, only to learn of his sale, informs the title poem of her latest collection2 with a poignant theme of ubi sunt and regret. I prefer such poems, but on closer inspection they do have a political dimension-our responsibility to others. And with this book at last I can see that for this poet the personal and the political are seamlessly connected.