Corkscrew in the Sky

Last Sunday afternoon over CBS a young ex-reporter named Norman Corwin, who started out in radio six years ago by interviewing an ashcan rolling champion, made his big bid for a front-row seat among radio poets.

His versification, inspired by Vittorio Mussolini's classic comparison of a bursting bomb to a "budding rose" was dedicated "to all aviators who have bombed defenseless civilian populations." A bomber sets out, sights its objective, "regiments of tenements, arrayed between the banners of their wetwash." In these tenements a family argues over breakfast, someone plays a piano sonata, a baby cries. A bomb lands, booming dully. Others drop on refugees; the ship dives to strafe survivors. Says the pilot: "That work always reminds me of mowing wheat." His companion agrees: "Nice symmetrical pattern." The narrator agrees, too: "A symmetry of unborn generations, of canceled seed ... of ciphers linked, repeating down infinity." But then a pursuit plane catches the bomber, shoots it down. "Be calm," advises the narrator, "sit back; there is still time to see a final symmetry--a corkscrew in the sky."

Boston-born, 28-year-old Norman Corwin has elicited many more bouquets than brickbats from listeners. Most of them enjoy his weekly dramatizations--with sound effects and asides--of the poetry of others as well as his own. His liberties with poetry and the unities he calls radio impressionism.

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