Even though the annual editions of Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize Anthology arrive in stores during the fall, poetry now achieves peak visibility in April. This month, as every former English major knows, was called the cruelest by T.S. Eliot, but the Academy of American Poets’ William Wadsworth, the force behind what has become increasingly well-known as National Poetry Month, calls April “the coolest month.” Joining the celebration this year is the Postal Service, which has issued stamps honoring Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Frost, and Edgar Allan Poe, among others. A full sampling of the stamps can be viewed on the Academy Web site (www.poets.org), where visitors may also nominate a favorite poet for a future stamp and sign a petition urging the USPS to print more stamps bearing the likenesses of America’s greatest bards.
The seeds of National Poetry Month doubtless began to germinate during Wadsworth’s days at Columbia University, where he studied with the late Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky, whose Collected Poems in English (FSG, $30) was published toward the end of 2000. While Brodsky defected from his native Russia and became a fan of many things American, our native suspicion—and even dislike—of poetry stunned him. Russia regularly fills soccer stadiums with fans eager to hear Yevgeny Yevtushenko, just as Irish citizens do the same to hear Seamus Heaney; in most American cities, poets are lucky to read to a dozen folks, not including relatives and bookstore staff. Yet Brodsky became convinced that the American avoidance of poetry resulted from the art’s elitist and academic associations, not the general reader’s inability to understand and enjoy verse. For in Brodsky’s totalitarian Russia, where the average citizen’s level of education fell considerably short of the American standard, poetry was customarily available in village and town shops and read by a large number of the customers, who browsed through newly published volumes at checkout counters the same way Americans do with People and TV Guide.
Is this because even well-educated Americans lack a particular verbal skill possessed by Russians? Not according to Eliot, who, unlike Brodsky, wasn’t exactly known for his democratic politics. Genuine poetry, as the St. Louis native said many times, “can communicate before it is understood,” meaning that the art’s more obviously complex elements are rarely as important as its simplest—imagery, rhythm, and emotional urgency. Thus mass interest in poetry, both for the author of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and for the Russian émigré, finally depends on availability and the reader’s willingness to participate actively in the poetic experience.
Eliot’s and Brodsky’s ideal readers are willing not to understand immediately. They are willing to engage deeply with otherness without judgment, and to submit their own egos, sometimes over the course of many years and many rereadings, to a poet’s work. Such submission has its best contemporary proponent in the renowned Irish critic Denis Donoghue, who—coincidentally enough—exemplifies the process in a study of Eliot published just three months ago. Words Alone (Yale, $26.95) combines a lifetime’s immersion and reimmersion in Eliot’s poetry with intellectual memoir, proving that the willingness to subsume self in someone else’s words is finally nothing more—and nothing less—complicated than literate empathy.
Nonetheless, it’s significant that Eliot chose to live in England, not in America: On these shores we worship independence and view any kind of submission with something close to horror. After all, our country’s favorite mascots are drawn from the frontier experiences that demanded a perhaps ultimately crippling myth of self-reliance: The strong, silent cowboy; the Huck Finn who defies attempts at “sivilizing” him; the stoic mother jostling along on a covered wagon; the one-horse town’s only woman, usually a golden-hearted prostitute—many, many variations of these characters remain ubiquitous, from MTV to Montana to fashion magazines, and none of them is even remotely hospitable to the fostering of a national appreciation for language. In fact, a cynic would say that America’s only real lingua franca is the one created by advertising, which sells back to us images of the very same characters named above.
A man without so much as a cynical corpuscle when it came to his art, Brodsky never doubted that if we had the same kind of access to poetry as we have to junky magazines and to the increasingly dumbed-down Bibles to which politicians give lip service, our souls would change in ways that even religion doesn’t make possible. What would happen if a lonely traveler opened a Hampton Inn’s drawer and found not pizza flyers or the Gideon’s logo but the colorful cover of the Pushcart Prize Anthology or Best American Poetry, both of which have reached a new apogee this year?
The Pushcart Press and Scribner’s (publisher of BAP) notwithstanding, the gradual elimination of poetry from most major American houses—80 percent of which are now owned by five international conglomerates—makes Brodsky’s publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, one of the few beacons on the current literary scene. The publisher of four recent Nobel laureates—Czeslaw Milosz, Derek Walcott, Brodsky, and Heaney—offers a first-rate list this season, including new trade paperback reissues of Pablo Neruda’s Passions and Impressions ($16), Memoirs ($15), and Extravagaria ($16), along with forthcoming new titles from Heaney and Milosz. The house’s April list also includes James Fenton, who succeeded Heaney as Oxford Professor of Poetry and whose lectures there comprise the masterful essays in The Strength of Poetry ($25); the always clever and increasingly plangent Paul Muldoon, who now teaches at Princeton; the elegantly venomous Frederick Seidel and his version of Dante’s Purgatorio, Life on Earth ($23); and relative newcomer Carl Phillips, whose background in classics clashes interestingly with his use of themes drawn from contemporary African American and gay male experiences in The Tether ($22).
National Poetry Month also promises several titles of interest to Nashvillians:
—The Secret of Poetry (Story Line, $16) collects a variety of Mark Jarman’s poetic essays and reviews, their subjects ranging from Randall Jarrell to Donald Justice to Jorie Graham. Jarman, who teaches at Vanderbilt, won the highly prestigious Lenore Marshall Award for Questions for Ecclesiastes in 1998, so an essay called “Poetry & Religion” isn’t a surprise. But Jarman has also gained a well-deserved reputation for stringent fair-mindedness in writing about poets and subjects that might seem antithetical to his vision.
Brilliance and open-minded humility rarely coexist; as Richard Tillinghast says of Jarman, “One would hardly expect this stout defender of narrative verse to have thought hard and independently about postmodernists like John Ashbery and Jorie Graham.” Tillinghast goes on to compare Jarman with Eliot, maintaining that the contemporary poet “provides invaluable service, in his reconsiderations of neglected masters, to readers looking for a balanced historical view that would include neglected masters such as Robinson Jeffers and Edwin Arlington Robinson.” The Secret of Poetry, like Eliot’s Selected Essays, he says, “belongs on the very short shelf of essential commentary on poetry.” Amen.
—Allen Tate: Orphan of the South (Princeton, $35) is Thomas A. Underwood’s first volume of what promises to be an exhaustive (and, in the proposed Volume II, uncomfortable) study. Several reviews of Underwood’s book have noted how previous biographers have run aground on the rocky shoals of Tate’s personal life: Compulsive philandering, Catholicism, and the creative process aren’t, after all, very easy to reconcile on an intellectual basis, though they seem to recur frequently, and in even more bizarre combinations, in many artists’ lives. Similarly, ISI Books’ reissue of Tate’s Essays of Four Decades ($29.95) contains pieces that are not only brilliant, but disturbingly brilliant for those who tend to dismiss the former Fugitive/Agrarian on the basis of his creepy biases and reactionary politics.
—Poetry East 1980-2000, a handsome boxed set of three anthologies featuring work previously published in this journal, makes for excellent browsing but also leaves a troubling omission: Poetry East is described as having been founded by Richard Jones in 1980, whereas longtime readers know that the magazine was in fact co-founded by Jones and Nashville’s Kate Daniels, whose name doesn’t appear in the press material or in any of the anthologies themselves, despite her decade of work for the publication. While Poetry East has apparently proved more enduring than the co-founders’ relationship, the exclusion of Daniels’ name in this celebratory publication seems especially odd in light of the wide acclaim accorded her most recent book, Four Testimonies.
Other books of interest, listed alphabetically:
—Erin Belieu, whose snazzy first book, Infanta, was selected by Hayden Carruth for the highly prestigious National Poetry Series, deepens her interrogation of both classical and American myth—the latter primarily in its Midwestern variations—in One Above and One Below ($14).
—Anne Carson’s 1986 Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay won its author an instant, if small, circle of admirers when it was published in Princeton’s Classics Series. The Canadian author and McGill classics professor has since published four books of poems, with new work popping out each month in journals. Carson’s source material derives from the crossing of the poet’s life with her longtime means of interpreting life in general: literature, specifically Beckett, Woolf, Thucydides, and, in the new The Beauty of the Husband ($22), Keats.
Knopf, her press, stands alongside FSG in its role as publisher of some of the best contemporary poetry. Visit the excellent Web site at www.randomhouse.com/ knopf/poetry, and sign up to receive a poem via e-mail each day during National Poetry Month.
—And you thought Orestes and Hamlet had a hard time of things. Some Ether (Graywolf, $12.95), Nick Flynn’s account of his god-awful childhood, which was wrenched and tormented by his drug-addled, suicidal mother and his mostly absent schizophrenic father, largely escapes the predictable through a proliferation of metaphors.
—This year’s winner of the coveted Bollingen Prize, a biennial award given by the Yale University Library, is Louise Glück. Her new book, The Seven Ages (Ecco, $22), shows Glück’s relatively unchanged aesthetic, which rests on a blend of classical myth and unsparing psychological insight, leavened of late by genuine humor.
—The late James Merrill, also a Bollingen winner, is honored by the publication of Collected Poems (Knopf, $ 40), beautifully edited by J.D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser. The book testifies to a rare and hard-earned metamorphosis, one beginning in technical wizardry and ending in human wisdom. Alison Lurie’s controversial memoir of Merrill and his lifelong partner David Jackson, Familiar Spirits (Viking, $22.95), may or may not make for illuminating background.
—Georgia native and frequent Southern Festival of Books guest Charlie Smith simultaneously channels the aftershocks of the Southern frontier experience and the ever-shifting nature of addiction in the excellent Heroin ($22), which is published by one of Knopf’s and FSG’s few peers, W.W. Norton.
—C. Dale Young, who is surely the only poet in the country who writes, edits poetry for a top-flight journal (New England Review), and practices radiation oncology, debuts with The Day Underneath the Day (Northwestern University Press, $15.95). The intelligence and precision that this branch of medicine demands are vibrantly present in Young’s poems, which have been included in past editions of BAP.
—Last, the much-loved Herbert Morris died only two months after the fall publication of his final volume, prophetically titled What Was Lost. Briefly reviewed in a previous edition of the Scene, Morris’ ultimate offering reminds us just how willing we are to overlook pain that doesn’t meld with our notions of acceptable grief, however empathetic we may believe ourselves to be.
In What Was Lost, as in his three previous books, Morris breaks readers’ hearts over and over again via subjects as rarified and, we might think, easily dismissed, as the sad aftermath of Brenda Frazier’s debutante season. Slow down, Morris’ poems say, and see how this character’s tears are much like those you shed, how they are perhaps even more justified, even more necessary, and even more generous in their scope. For, as he puts it in “The Plight of Us in Caravaggio,” “We are all to be sacrificed tonight.”
Morris’ mastery of blank verse created his most characteristic rhythm, which—tellingly enough—beats with the weighted, alternating thumps of the human heart. We owe an incalculable debt to Counterpoint Press, an outstanding newcomer to the world of literary publishing and thus a great source of hope, for giving us What Was Lost to cherish in the sad aftermath of Morris’ passing.
