Poetry: Combatting Society With Surrealism

WILLIAM FAULKNER once remarked: "An artist is a creature driven by demons. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies." It is an attitude shared by all who have discovered just how difficult it is to write one superlative poem and what bitter battles must be waged to keep poetry vital and relevant in an age when so much else seems more important.

One such battle began after World War II and during the 1950s, when the so-called Beat poets rebelled against both society and the academic, formalist mode of poetry. Three schools of revolutionary poets were founded: the San Francisco school of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder; the Black Mountain school of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley; and the New York school of Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery. Basically, the San Francisco school represented a fresh imagism combined with oriental influences; the Black Mountain group leaned toward an intellectual eclecticism typical of Ezra Pound's Cantos; and the New York school was surreal and Dadaistic, or more adamantly colloquial and hortative, as in Ginsberg's "Howl." But these distinctions tended to blur as the groups began influencing one another. Behind them, unifying them, were the established voices of Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, William Carlos Williams, and even old Walt Whitman, whose emotional, plain-speaking idiom came to be idolized by many of the new poets.

Seeking Identity. What was important was not the schools but the changing attitudes toward poetry, the breaking down of old poetic forms in an effort to initiate a fresh dialogue between the poet and his audience. What has emerged in the U.S. is a crop of poets who cannot be pigeonholed in schools or academies, whether they are writing in free verse or with a conscious debt to form. Among them, James Dickey and John Berryman have become the most prominent, while Robert Lowell continues to be the most profound force among the more formal American poets.

If there is a trend, it is toward the personal voice--the poet not only seeking his own identity but combatting society with that identity, the poet engaging the real world with more or less surreal imagery and ideas. Joined in that combat today are both well-known poets and those whose voices are just beginning to be heard.

HIS TOY, HIS DREAM, HIS REST by John Berryman. 317 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $6.50.

In 77 Dream Songs, Berryman introduced his readers to Henry, whom he describes in his latest collection as "an imaginary character (not the poet, not me), a white American in early middle age, sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss." Henry's world is modern man's world, particularly the world of the past eleven years, and embraces the whole range of human experience.

Berryman's new collection (Songs 78 to 385) completes the work started in 77 Dream Songs. As in the first volume, Henry figures as the central character; occasionally a friend, who is never named, addresses him as "Mr. Bones." The songs' idiom is always peculiarly American, peculiarly Berryman. It is a successful combination of colloquial dialects and a modern, jazzy, discordant line that continually startles.

As Henry fights his intensely personal wars, struggles with love, drinks away his loneliness and imagines killing his father, who was really a suicide, Berryman fashions an epic view of life, often more dream than real. The tone is usually mournfully ironic, as in Song 142, describing one of Henry's amorous situations:

The animal moment, when he sorted out her tail

in a rump session with the vivid hostess

whose guests had finally gone,

was stronger, though so limited, though failed

all normal impulse before her interdiction, yes,

and Henry gave in.

I'd like to have your baby, but, she moaned,

I'm married. Henry muttered to himself

So am I and was glad

to keep chaste. If this lady he had had

scarcely could he have have ever forgiven himself

and how would he have atoned?

--Mr. Bones, you strong on moral these

days, hey?

It's good to be faithful but it ain't

natural, as you knows. --/ knew what I knew when I knew

when I was astray, all those bright painful years, forgiving

all but when Henry & his wives came

to blows.

This poetic cycle is a major achievement by one of the most important poets writing today, one who has chosen to challenge society by means of an engaging, corruptible, contemporary character, that compassionately discerned yet always dispassionately dissected middle-class white/black American, Henry/Mr. Bones.

WHITE-HAIRED LOVER by Karl Shapiro. 37 pages. Random House. $4.

Karl Shapiro's second volume of verse, V-Letter and Other Poems, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1945, and established him as a poet who could deal ably with the emotions of war. His Selected Poems won him a half share, with Berryman, of the 1969 Bollingen Prize. But his latest book of verse demonstrates that the toughness is gone and the vision is blurred when it comes to love. In this cycle of 29 love poems, adolescent maundering most often conquers whatever maturity of poetic line or concept should be expected.

How do I love? I don't even know

Now we're cut off again like a bad phone

(Faulty communications are my middle name).

What is most surprising is that he should publicly confess it.

THE PILL VERSUS THE SPRINGHILL MINE by Richard Brautigan. 108 Seasons Foundation. $1.95.

In this book of selected poems (1957-1968), Brautigan is Harlequin on a tightwire, poised between Earth and Heaven, simultaneously mocking the passions of the populace below and his own frail fumblings toward the stars. Though his vision sometimes expresses only itself, it often fully exposes man's foibles and feelings. His poems are, by turns, brutally realistic or surrealistically witty. Brautigan, a West Coast poet, needs but three lines to puncture "Man":

With his hat on

he's about five inches taller

than a taxicab.

The poet's concerns, for the most part, trick the reader into seeing life afresh, as when he remarks that his nose is growing old.

/ wonder if girls will want me with an old nose.

I can hear them now the heartless bitches!

"He's cute

but his nose is old."

Occasionally Brautigan fails, tumbling from his poetic perch, but the dare is worth every one of the falls.

THE BODY by Michael Benedikt. 77 pages. Wesleyan. $4.

Benedikt might be a cubist or surrealist painter, reconstructing the body, finding new relationships between lip and eye, discovering with insane logic that man's hair is the most important part of love. Raised in New York City, Benedikt is continually inspecting, distorting and re-creating the skyline of human existence. The method is often deliberately and delightfully nonsensical.

"The European Shoe," for example, might be considered a parody of Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." The shoe, like the blackbird, incongruously becomes the focal point for all the varieties of life.

The European Shoe is constructed of grass and reed, bound up and wound around so that it may slip easily over the wearer's head.

The European Shoe spends summers in delightful ways. A lady feels its subtle and unexpected pressure the length of her decolletage. (It winters in pain.)

It helps an old lady, extremely crippled and arthritic, move an enormous cornerstone. It invents a watch, which, when wound up tightly, flies completely to pieces.

In all of Benedikt's poems, the body is somehow in a contest with the spirit, while fact struggles with fancy. The result is a verbal battlefield strewn with strange, barely recognizable victims of war, delighting in their own demise.

SHALL WE GATHER AT THE RIVER by James Wright. 58 pages. Wesleyan. $4.

A remembrance of his uncle, dead in Ohio, the wayward life in Minneapolis, the cold loneliness of a man beside the river or hunched in a freight car--these are elements captured in James Wright's latest book of poems. As in his earlier works, the Midwest is the center of his poetic world.

My life was never so precious

To me as now.

I gape unbelieving at those two lines

Of my words, caught and frisked naked.

If they loomed secret and dim On the wall of the drunk-tank, Scraped there by a raw fingernail In the trickling crusts of gray mold,

Surely the plainest thug who read them Would cluck with ancient pity.

It is a tribute to the intensity of his vision that Wright's poetry--distilled to the essential, like Robert Frost's--does make the reader cluck with the ancient pity.

BREAKING CAMP by Marge Piercy. 74 pages. Wesleyan. $4.

Marge Piercy writes highly charged poems about death, sex, love and a wide range of other social experiences. Her perceptive eye can be tough and precise ("precinct house benches dark with the grease of fearful buttocks"). She can also be highly imaginative, portraying her husband, a mathematician, in deep thought:

You go fathoms down into abstraction where the pressure and the cold would

squeeze the juice from

my tissues.

The diving bell of your head

descends.

In this, her first book-length collection, Marge Piercy proves that modern poetry can be both passionate and perceptive, well-structured and inventive.

COMING CLOSE by Helen Chasm. 54 pages. Yale. $4.50.

In this latest volume in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Helen Chasin demonstrates that she is a poet not only of promise but of some achievement. She can tease the word plum until the reader can almost taste it. Witnessing Harvard Square's hippies, she can gently puncture their posturings. Her passion is often tempered with irony, particularly in speaking about love:

Once I said always; once is enough, God knows, to establish relevance.

She can be imaginative but tough, as when she sees the sexual connection between love and junk in "Addiction."

Daddy, the concern

in your expressed hope

that I'm not on the stuff's

extremely touching.

Would it be too much to guess your guess:

Who turned me on? what junkie pressed his packet, fixed me in his need until I moan for his sweet sake? You liar, love's a racket, at best only a connection.

There may be youthful uncertainties in her work, but most often her talent allows her to gamble and gambol.

THE RESIDUAL YEARS by William Everson. 238 pages. New Directions. $6.50.

This collection includes all of the poems written between 1934 and 1948 by William Everson, before he became the Dominican monk Brother Antoninus, under which name he now writes. Brother Antoninus writes about the book: "Its roots go back to the earth of the San Joaquin Valley, the substratum of my life, back to a happy marriage, inexorable incarceration in the Waldport Camp [a conscientious objector's prison], painful divorce, hopeful remarriage, and abrupt, disturbing separation--back to my love of nature and of woman, to a poetry of physical celebration and tortured sensuality; back, in a word to the 'residual years'..."

His work is hammered out of the acute awareness of self. But. while it can be accused at times of self-dramatization, his vision is harsh and realistic, and his lines have a driving force, as in "The Stranger."

Pity this girl.

At callow sixteen,

Glib in the press of rapt companions,

She bruits her smatter,

Her bed-lore brag.

She prattles the lip-learned, light-love

list.

In the new itch and squirm of sex, How can she foresee?

BENDING THE BOW by Robert Duncan. 137 pages. New Directions. $5.

For Robert Duncan, a member of the Black Mountain school, the poem is a universe in itself, and a soul. With his consciousness of poetry's epic and mythic nature, it is no wonder that Duncan's efforts to collect so much of living, thought and feeling into the world of one poem should be quite like Ezra Pound's Cantos and William Carlos Williams' Paterson. His concern, therefore, is most often with the poem itself, as in "Bending the Bow."

We've our business to attend Day's

duties, bend back the bow in dreams as we

may

till the end rimes in the taut string with the sending. . . .

At other times, Duncan escapes from the esoteric game playing of his cross-referencing of word and image, forgets to be the Delphic oracle, and finds a poem that reaches outside of itself to the real world of experience. In "My Mother Would Be a Falconress," the relationship between mother and child is placed on a chilling medieval level that includes a touch of Freudian contest:

My mother would be a falconress,

And I, her gay falcon treading her wrist,

would fly to bring back

from the blue of the sky to her, bleeding, a prize,

where I dream in my little hood with many bells

jangling when I'd turn my head.

THE BACK COUNTRY by Gary Snyder. 128 pages. New Directions. $4.25.

A member of the San Francisco school, Gary Snyder writes primarily from his modern Western background and the influences of his journey to the Far East. This new collection contains four sections: those poems written before 1956, when he was working as a logger and forest ranger; those composed between 1956 and 1964 in Japan, where he studied Zen; those influenced by his visit to India; and those completed on his return to the U.S. In all, the mark is of the imagist poet concentrating on the pure intensity of the picture.

The structure of each poem is determined by the fragmented highlights of what is apprehended, as in "What Do They Say."

The glimpse of a once-loved face

gone into a train.

Lost in a new town, no one knows the

name.

lone man sitting in the park Chanced on by a friend of thirty years before, what do they say.

Play chess with bottle caps.

"for sale" sign standing in the field:

dearest, dearest, Soot on the sill,

a garden full of weeds.

The impressions are drawn together out of the subconscious and the memory to collide with the fresh sensations of the present. The logic must be pieced together from the wreckage. In recording this poetic traffic accident, what must be remembered is that it's not the speed that kills, it's the impact.

INCARNATIONS: POEMS, 1966-1968 by Robert Penn Warren. 64 pages. Random House. $4.

The old magician is back again, bringing new poems written since his Selected Poems: New and Old, 1923-1966. A major craftsman in poetry as well as fiction, Warren demonstrates in his latest book that age has not diminished the passion he brings to his witnessing of life. The fierceness of nature is here placed side by side with the violence of urban life and the physical frailty of man. A convict in a cell doubles over in pain in "Keep that Morphine Moving, Cap." Death arrives in a cheap motel. A woman is struck by an automobile. All of it is told with a combination of elegant line and colloquial speech that makes each moment vivid and real beyond the pretensions of poetic form.

Oh, in the pen, oh, in the pen, The cans, they have no doors,

therefore I saw him, head bent in that

primordial

Prayer, head grizzled, and the sweat, To the gray cement, dropped. It

dripped,

And each drop glittered as it fell, For in the pen, oh, in the pen, The cans, they have no doors.

CABLES TO THE ACE by Thomas Merton. 60 pages. New Directions. $3.75.

The late Trappist monk, in his last book of poems, offers his apprehensions of the Kentucky woods and views of his mystical insights. Basically, however, he is a modern antipoet. Sense and nonsense are mixed, but out of the confusion comes a curious lucidity. In his parody of a newscast, he finds that:

In New Delhi a fatal sport parade I nvolving long mauves and delicate slanders Was apprehended and constrained at three P.M.

By witnesses with evening gestures In a menacing place where ten were prohibited Many others were found missing in colossal purples And numerous raided halls. Martian Doctors recommend a low-cost global enema To divert the hot civet wave now tending To swamp nine thousand acres of Mozambique.

Wit is the order of the day; anger against the misuse of language and life is the primary emotion, and bizarre revelation is most often the final effect.

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While poets are finding fresh and forceful ways to address their times, and an increasing number of literary journals are devoting themselves to poetry, the folk-rock singers and lyricists have pre-empted a sizable share of the primary poetic audience--the young. It may be that youth finds it easier to grapple with the social commentary found in Simon & Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" or in the political-protest songs of Bob Dylan than with the more complicated work of poets like Berryman. Or it may be that the poem as ballad is simply coming back into its own. In any case, the music world is experimenting with a revolutionary surrealism, and contemporary songwriters and poets are apparently enriching one another's work. Many folk-rock lyrics stand up as poems, and some poets--Michael Benedikt and Canada's Leonard Cohen among them--are devoting part of their energy to writing songs. Meanwhile, a modern music has entered into and enlivened the poem, giving Faulkner's demon-driven creatures new voices for their poetic torments.

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