civilized

Daniel Hoffman’s collection of sonnets opens with a non-sonnet entitled “The Sonnet.”[1] In it, he remembers an attempt by Louise Bogan (1897-1970) to communicate to an audience of university students the idea that an art form such as the sonnet is among the things that make up a civilization. Warning against facile avant-gardisme, Bogan notes (in Hoffman’s paraphrase) that once poets have “breached / the fortress of a form, then send / their shock troops yet again / to breach the form, / there’s no form.” The students, uncomprehending (this is plainly the 1960s), ask what Bogan thinks of “the poetry of Rock.” Later, she confides privately: “This is a bad time, / bad for poetry.”

Bad then, and worse now. Then again, Daniel Hoffman’s still at it, making his own unquestionably civilized contribution to American verse – and, in these sonnets, written over fifty years, echoing others who have made contributions before him. “David’s Folly,” a meditation on a New England town’s long-dead local hero who “scorched The Dial with diatribes on God / And wrote three poems that once pleased Emerson,” recall Lowell’s sonnets “Salem” and “Concord” from Lord Weary’s Castle; “Evidence” riffs whimsically on Stevens’ line “Money is a kind of poetry”; and “Lines Written near Linton, On Exmoor” wittily imagines what Coleridge might have composed had the person from Porlock come knocking a few minutes earlier. A couple of Hoffman’s fourteeners tell tragic Carver-style backcountry anecdotes; “A Legacy” is an authentic outburst of joie de vivre, while other poems are effective memento mori (reminding one that in an age dominated by TV, pop music, and film, no art form’s practitioners routinely deliver solid memento mori as reliably as good poets do). Communication failures are amusingly and thought-provokingly pondered: in “Violence,” an audience member at a poetry reading can’t be made to understand that an anecdote in a certain poem is invented; in “Philosophy” the speaker can still vividly picture a retired sage’s long-ago valedictory lecture, but admits to having forgotten entirely the wisdom imparted that day: “The scene has never left my mind. I wrote / His lecture down, but, in an old trunk, my notes / Have crumbled, and I can’t recall a word.” To read these elegant, lucid poems is to delight in Hoffman’s fresh articulation of eternal truths and universal sentiments – and in the perennial serviceability of the sonnet form, which bequeaths to each new utterance a wealth of historical resonance.

Wendell Berry, too, has been at it for half a century, and Given, his fifteenth poetry collection (or thereabouts), proves he’s still a master.[2] Alas, Berry’s not just a very fine poet – he’s a very fine poet with some highly tendentious ideas and prejudices, not all of them congenial. Proprietor of a Kentucky farm that’s been in his family for generations, Berry has pooduced an oeuvre (novels, short stories, non-fiction) whose central conviction is that the optimum lifestyle choice for homo sapiens is – ahem – running a farm that’s been in your family for generations. For decades, he’s been banging the pulpit for the philosophical proposition that virtue inheres, above all, in rural communities populated by old families with deep local roots and longstanding mutual ties, in the local economies that are sustained by such communities, and in a way of life that affords daily contact with nature. For him, the pathetic fallacy (“The young woodland remembers / the old…”) is not merely a poetic device but an expression of the belief that “The incarnate Word is with us, / is still speaking, is present / always, yet leaves no sign / but everything that is.” He commends the beauty, wisdom, and joys of the wildwood with a Christian-pantheist zeal that makes even Wordsworth look like, say, Karl Marx (who scorned “the idiocy of rural life”) or Dr. Johnson (who opined that “those who are content to live in the country, are fit for the country”).

Family, the family farm, the local community, the pathless woods: these are the things Berry loves, and when he’s extolling them, he can be a top-notch poet. Many of his poems are statements or products of a straightforward belief that the world requires no explanation or analysis, that it is what it is, and that we need only notice it and point it out to those who are too distracted by the madding crowd to see it properly. This, in Berry’s view, is his task as poet: to open our eyes to the miracles around us. To be sure, some of his eulogies of the forest primeval are as platitudinous as Ella Wheeler Wilcox, others as exiguous as a lame haiku. And his unfailing self-satisfaction can make one want to ship him a T-shirt reading “I’m at one with nature and you’re not!” Many of these poems are splendid, however, as when he exults in summer’s abundance (“Who now / can believe in winter? In winter / who could have hoped for this?”) or notices that a blinding sun, when you turn around, becomes an illuminating beacon:

Here, as elsewhere, Berry not only celebrates nature but also points toward a theology about it. Also worthy of commendation are his axioms (”I think therefore / I think I am”) and his love poems, which are of a kind that most poetry editors nowadays never publish – to their readers’, and the civilization’s, impoverishment:

Three cheers for the Wendell Berry of these poems – the Berry who loves, praises, rejoices. But the Berry who hates is something else again. Berry hates a lot. He hates rampant capitalism. He hates technology (he still composes with pencil or pen, and has written an essay entitled “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer”). Many readers may find themselves nodding in agreement at “Some Further Words”:

Well, okay. But opinions do not poetry make (especially when they’re essentially commonplaces). And as this poem goes on, the opinions grow increasingly eccentric. Berry makes it clear that for him, the very concept of progress is bunk: “No ‘futuristic’ / twit or child thereof ever / in embodied light will see / a better world than this….” He calls it cowardice to accept technological “progress” as inevitable – only to admit, a few lines later, that while “I don’t like machines…I am constrained to use them. / (Thus the age perfects its clench.)” Why doesn’t this make him a coward? He writes: “When I see an airplane / fuming through the once-pure sky / …I say, / ‘Get out of there!’ as I would speak / to a fox or a thief in the henhouse.” Yet this is sheer posturing: as he’s acknowledged elsewhere, he’s taken planes himself. “Health,” he further grumbles, “is not procured / by sale of medication”; nor does he wish to “survive / an hour as a cooling stew of pieces / of other people.” Would he really die – or let a loved one die – rather than accept a transplant? Would he be willing to read these lines aloud to someone whose child had just received a new kidney? Or is this, too, just empty bluster? Though he presents himself as an advocate for all things human, Berry’s blithe dismissal of medical advances that have saved millions of lives comes off as chillingly inhuman.

Then there’s Berry’s environmentalism. In our time, it’s become identified with the left; Berry reminds us that it’s essentially a conservative cause. A Luddite’s Luddite, he endlessly sentimentalizes pre-industrial hardship and counsels against the use of modern conveniences:

The first six lines here reveal Berry as a crank, a crackpot, a village explainer; the remaining lines remind us that he’s also an artist. Yet one wants to ask him: “So, what about the Satanic mills where they print your books? Are they desecrated, too?” Likewise, it’s impossible to read his many paeans to trees – which he sees as embodying nature’s wisdom and goodness – without thinking about all the lumber that’s gone into his collected works. (A list of his book titles fills an entire page.) Then there’s the ticklish question of tobacco – which, as it happens, is the principal crop on Berry’s farm. How can someone so hostile to corporate exploitation and so ardent about community responsibility be a nicotine merchant?

Most distressing about Berry, however, is his ideological inflexibility. Some writers savor human variety – the extraordinary range of people’s tastes, longings, talents, curiosities, affections. Not Berry. Though he patently regards himself as a humble soul, and wants us to view him that way, too (in “How to Be a Poet,” he advises himself: “Any readers / who like your work, / doubt their judgment”), the fact is that the more you read him, the more he sounds like Ezra Pound at his most intolerant and dictatorial. (He even rants about “usury”!) Nor does this incessantly solemn, self-satisfied preacher betray so much as a glimmer of humor about himself. One comes away from Given enchanted anew by Berry’s talent, but exceedingly grateful that this Bluegrass prophet isn’t in charge of anything more than a few acres of tobacco.

What a pleasure to turn from Berry’s farmyard evangelism to Kay Ryan. I wasn’t familiar with Ryan’s poetry before opening her sixth volume, The Niagara River, and at first blush the look of the poems on the page didn’t seem promising: they were long and lean, with two to four words per line, and no sign of end rhymes or regular meter.[3] Yet instead of the poetry-workshop claptrap I feared, I found myself reading the freshest, most invigorating new poetry I’d encountered in a long time. On a poetry scene crammed with generic MFA vers librists, Ryan is sui generis. Now and then, admittedly, she brushes up against Dickinson or H.D. or Hopkins, or Stevens –

– but she’s never anything less than triumphantly, and winningly, herself. This is terrific poetry, rich in authentic feeling and perception (with never a point belabored or dressed up in highfalutin language), humor that feels as natural as breathing, and unerring rhythm. Indeed, each poem is a neat little arc of rhythm, packed with unforced alliteration, assonance, internal rhymes, and half-rhymes, and succinctly conveying, in a space of ten or twenty lines, a single well-rounded thought that invariably feels novel and arresting: “The light of interiors / is the admixture / of who knows how many / doors ajar….” Physical spaces, and people’s relationship to them and impact upon them, preoccupy her: “A life should leave / deep tracks,” she muses, explaining that, say, the stretches of floor or yard where somebody walked frequently during a lifetime, “should be left scarred / by the grand and / damaging parade. / Things shouldn’t / be so hard.”

There’s a brisk realism about Ryan – whose takes on ordinary things (a game of hide-and-seek, a car wreck, a duck dipping underwater for a morsel of food) can stir shocks of recognition – but there’s also what you might call a matter-of-fact mysticism in regard to light and rooms and spatial relations, a sense of the mystery inherent in homely objects. Her poems probe daily life’s underlying truths in crisp, even offhand-seeming language, free of intellectual posturing or exhibitionistic sensitivity. Few have written lighter, less self-pitying memento mori poems; in a time when the first-person singular is a poetic mantra, the word “I,” admirably, almost never appears in Ryan’s poems. Like Berry’s, but in an infinitely more appealing way, they hint at a philosophy:

Brilliant. As Spencer Tracy said of Katharine Hepburn in Pat and Mike, there’s not much meat on these poems., but what’s there is cherce.

Midway through Ryan’s book it occurred to me that I’d seen her name recently. Where? Then I remembered: she’d written the funniest and acutest thing I’ve read in years about the poetry scene – a piece entitled “I Go to AWP” (Poetry, July 2005). Covering an Associated Writing Programs conference, Ryan criticized (among much else) the ubiquitous groupthink and the prolific use of the words “mentor” and “workshop” as verbs. “These presenters,” she wrote about one session, “assume that everybody has taken/taught writing courses. It’s natural life to everyone here. They refer to their own professors and various writing programs where they’ve taught or been students, and the audience murmurs, laughs, and groans in response. Because that’s the kind of church this is.” Ryan’s reaction to it all: “I don’t want to be connected to poetry in an easy, fellowshipping way, but I do want to be connected in a way that will earn me the respect of the dead.”[4] Somewhere, methinks Louise Bogan is smiling.[5]

Ann Stevenson is yet another poet who’s been at it for fifty years. The more than four hundred pages of small type in her thematically arranged Poems 1955-2005 contain a surprisingly high percentage of moving and memorable verses, many of which confront elementary questions of time, place, identity, existence: Why now, not then? Why me, not another?[6] “God is impossible,” Stevenson writes. “Life is impossible. / But here it is.” She’s especially poignant on the passage of time, the pastness of the past, the illusion of newness: in one poem each stanza ends with a variation on the words “we thought we were living now / but we were living then.” She’s ever aware that someday not only the present but the future, too, will be past: “They are already building the long straw cemetery / where my granddaughter’s daughter has been born and buried.” (No, these aren’t cheery poems.) She remembers her parents, her childhood home:

In a Shakespearean sonnet entitled “To Phoebe,” addressed to her newborn daughter, she contemplates the act of giving birth in an age when the cosmological certainties of Shakespeare’s time are no longer available to thinking individuals. In the Bard’s day, she observes,

The only consolation? That “no small Phoebe circa sixteen-three / Was ever free to be what you shall be.” Yet Stevenson’s choice of form seems to suggest a further comfort – that of civilizational continuity, as manifested in childbirth and, yes, in the sonnet.

The experience of parturition makes for other strong poems, among them “The Victory” (“I thought you were my victory / though you cut me like a knife / when I brought you out of my body / into your life”) and “Poem for a Daughter”: “A woman’s life is her own / until it is taken away / by a first particular cry. / … / When we belong to the world / we become what we are.” These are indeed poems about belonging to the world, about finding one’s identity and seeking meanings amid the perplexing particularities of time, place, and season. Some of them evoke specific locales – New York, Ann Arbor, Wales – at specific times of the year. There are highways, trains, and boats aplenty, and, if anything, perhaps a few too many birds and a bit too much weather. Sometimes, in moments of relative tranquility, Stevenson is content simply to describe the setting, the rain or sunshine, the flora and fauna; at her finest, however, she’s less a Romantic nature poet than a rather agitated heir of the neoclassical tradition, bursting with quirky, tart, wistful, witty, wry observations (“Without nostalgia,” one poem begins, “who could love England?”); like Ryan, she radiates cool intelligence, hard-won wisdom, and strength of character. After Ryan’s economy, to be sure, the amplitude of some of Stevenson’s poems can be fatiguing. Yet every so often, amidst all the generously upholstered sentences, one encounters a short, stiletto-sharp poem that takes one’s breath away.

Originally published in 1991, B.H. Fairchild’s second book, Local Knowledge, has now been reissued.[7] The first poem, “In Czechoslovakia,” which is set in that country, brings to mind – of all things – the famous title story of Delmore Schwartz’s 1938 book In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. Like the story, it is set in a cinema and is possessed by an intense film noir-like drive and suspense and weirdness – an angst, a dread, a sense of doom, that seems to summon up all the dark, despairing European ghosts of the twentieth century. Alas, its placement at the head of the book is misleading – partly because most of the succeeding poems are set in places like Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, and Arizona, and partly because the book doesn’t quite deliver on the opening poem’s promise.

To be sure, there are some highly accomplished poems here. (One, entitled “There Is Constant Movement in My Head,” reads so naturally that at first you don’t even notice it’s a sestina.) But ultimately they’re just too repetitious, too formulaic. Fairchild keeps setting us down in some humble middle-American setting (a “dirt farm,” a seedy laundromat, a shabby roadside café) among humble people who crave – or, alternatively, are put off by – some touch of beauty, sophistication, mercy, or transcendence in their prosaic surroundings. A machinist teaches his daughter to play the piano; an appliance repairman is baffled by a “computerized cappuccino machine”; a cowman who’s moved to the south of France sends back poems to his home folks that they don’t understand. Fairchild’s poems capture the diction and rhythms of the Midwest and Southwest, except when he drops in a sentence in French, German, or Italian or a European composer’s or poet’s name. These alien interpolations beckon teasingly, like strains of music from a more refined, exalted sphere – or, you might say, like a dream of Oz on the Kansas prairie.

It’s all nicely done. But in poem after poem, the point – and effect – is identical. In a blurb, Carol Muske-Dukes praises Fairchild for being “the poet as working-class hero” (that cozy faculty-lounge conceit); one wonders whether such a self-image on his part might help explain why this book is a riot of redundancy. In a five-page prose afterword, Fairchild sums up his childhood in Kansas and Texas, which he depicts as unrelievedly bleak: “I do not know how I could have survived without the words of the printed page, of books.” This postscript is considerably more moving than the poems themselves. Perhaps Fairchild should write a novel.

But enough of these obscure scribes. It’s time to turn to Billy Collins, who has twice been U.S. Poet Laureate and who, according to the jacket copy on his whimsically titled new collection, The Trouble with Poetry, “has opened the door to poetry for countless people for whom it might otherwise have remained closed.”[8] What do the multitudes see in a book like this? Well, the poems are written in a plainspoken prose that makes straightforward statements about simple actions and thoughts and feelings and that is packed with concrete domestic details. There’s hardly a hint of rhyme, meter, alliteration, or assonance, and precious little metaphor or simile (pretty much the only thing that identifies these poems as poems is their division into regular stanzas of two, three, or four lines). The voice – that of a self-effacing, temperate, mildly reflective middle-aged man (whom one is invited to identify with the poet himself) – is as calculatedly likeable as the lead character in a Hollywood star vehicle, while the middle-class American settings and inconsequential subjects are familiar and unthreatening as a smooth-cheeked teen idol. Then there’s Collins’s standard tone – casually neutral, with a hint of rather bemusing whimsy – as illustrated by the opening conceit in the opening poem, “You, Reader”:

The poem continues in this bloodless vein for seven more stanzas, adding a few more homey details (candles, a clock, a radio) and another touch of whimsy about the salt and pepper shakers (“I wondered if they had become friends after all these years”).

And that’s about the size of it. Not to put too fine a point on it, these are stupefyingly insipid poems. The list of what’s missing from them amounts to an inventory of poetic themes and devices through the ages. There’s hardly a hint of love, anger, fear – certainly not enough of any of them to roil the poems’ kitchen-countertop-smooth surfaces. There are no evident religious or political convictions, there’s no shadow of the magical or spiritual, there’s just the slightest occasional glimpse of anything foreign or historical (or ethnic), there’s no tragedy to speak of, and there’s barely a whisper of death. It’s as if Collins has made a pact with his readers not to provoke unfamiliar thoughts, stir unwelcome feelings, lead them down into their own dangerous depths, or press them upwards toward some apprehension of higher meaning or transcendence. These poems introduce us to a mind inconceivably unburdened by powerful emotion – no existential panic, no unbridled passion, no bitter regret, no lingering resentment, no clinging trauma. The unswerving, pulseless equanimity, the Muzak-like blandness, are staggering to behold. Collins claims in the title poem that writing poetry brings with it “the longing to steal” from other poets. Who’s he stealing from – Hallmark? Look for wit here and you’ll find only, well, whimsy – which never seems anything more than silly, idle, pointless:

Most of Collins’s poems attend to everyday activities – the kind of material in which Ryan and Stevenson can find gold. But Collins’s pans always turn up empty. Yes, sometimes he uses a literary allusion or historical reference to kick things up a notch (“he turned and met my glance / as if I had an appointment in Samarra, / not just the usual lunch at the raccoon lodge”). But there’s not a single image here that asks to be remembered. And the topics! One reason why Collins is so popular is doubtless that he writes “high-concept” poems: like a big-budget Hollywood movie, his poems originate in contrived ideas. In “See No Evil,” the three monkeys of “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” uncover their ears, eyes, mouth; “Height” begins with the commonplace that people observed from a great height look like ants. It’s as if he’d set himself a series of purely mechanical exercises: write a poem about the expression “beating swords into ploughshares” –

And the style fits the content. Since there are no strong feelings here, there’s not even the most modestly heightened language to express them. Reading Collins, one is reminded of The Bridges of Madison County (1992), Robert James Waller’s slim, market-savvy narrative of middle-aged Midwestern adultery. As in the massively bestselling Bridges, the voice here is flat, steady, unhurried; smart but not intellectual, manly but not too manly, sensitive but not too sensitive. Once upon a time America’s favorite poet was Robert Frost. Now this. Is Billy Collins really all that middle America can handle? Are there actually so many readers out there who think they want to read poetry but who don’t want to be challenged? A typical hour of Oprah is more unsettling than this entire book. The best one can say about it, in fact, is that in three or four places it’s genuinely funny: “The Introduction,” for instance, entertainingly mocks the kind of poet who before reciting a short poem at a reading has to spend ten minutes explaining all the references therein. But it’s not really a poem.

Louis Simpson, a master at making over the material of daily life into unforgettable and undying poems, once wrote that American poetry “must have / A stomach that can digest / Rubber, coal, uranium, moons, poems.” Collins’s poetry chews on just about every fixture, appliance, and stick of furniture in your standard three-bedroom contemporary ranch house, but heaves it all right back up again – to the delectation of an army of readers, some of whom, middle-aged now, one imagines as students in that long-ago college audience that caused Louise Bogan to despair about the fate of her art, and her civilization.

[1] MAKES YOU STOP AND THINK, by Daniel Hoffman. Braziller. $14.95.

[2] GIVEN, by Wendell Berry. Shoemaker Hoard. $22.

[3] THE NIAGARA RIVER, by Kay Ryan. Grove Press. $13p.

[4] “I Go to AWP” is online at www.poetrymagazine.org/magazine/0705/comment_171211.html.

[5] Like Ryan’s poetry, interestingly, her essay evinces a concern for spaces: one of her objections to the AWP conference, and to writing programs and organized literary gatherings generally, was that “One must truly HOLD A SPACE for oneself. All things conspire to close up this space. Everything about AWP has always struck me as closing the space.”

[6] POEMS 1955-2005, by Anne Stevenson. Bloodaxe. £12p.

[7] LOCAL KNOWLEDGE, by B.H. Fairchild. W.W. Norton. $13.95.

[8] THE TROUBLE WITH POETRY AND OTHER POEMS, by Billy Collins. Random House. $22.95.