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CREATING ANOTHER SELF: AN ANALYSIS OF VOICE IN AMERICAN CONTEMPORARY POETRY by Samuel Joseph Maio A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (English) August 1986 Copyright Samuel Joseph Maio 1986 UMI Number: DP23112 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI DP23112 Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY PARK LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089 nr p . E M 7 - 2 - 1 S/q/B'+'+S This dissertation, written by .....................SM U BXi..aP.5JPH ..M AlQ ...................... under the direction of hi . s Dissertation Committee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by The Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of re quirements for the degree of DO CTO R OF PHILOSOPHY Dean of Graduate Studies Date ....Anr;UJll .J986 DISSERTATION COMMITTEE Chairperson Table of Contents CHAPTER I AN HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION ........................ 1 CHAPTER II THE CONFESSIONAL MODE.............................4 3 CHAPTER III THE PERSONA MODE................................... 157 CHAPTER IV THE SELF-EFFACING MODE............................ 271 CHAPTER V PERSONAL POETRY IN 1986.: 377 Works Cited............................................4 30 ii 1 CHAPTER I AN HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION The title of this study is an adaptation of a remark made by the poet Richard Hugo, who said about poetic voice: "Voice is usually something that grows out of stance. It's something that comes after years of writing or does not. It has to do with how strong a person's urge is to reject the self and to create another self in its place." Voice, as T. S. Eliot suggested in his essay, "The Three Voices of Poetry," is the method by which the poet speaks; the voice is the speaker of the poem, not necessarily the poet— as never should be assumed. The poets I have chosen to repre sent the modes of voice used in a poetry indicative of a rejected self, as Hugo termed it— the poets Robert Lowell, James Wright and Robert Bly of one mode; John Berryman, Weldon Kees and Galway Kinnell of the second; Mark Strand, Charles Simic and David Ignatow of the third— have sup planted themselves with "another self," a self, that is, expressed as the speaker of their poems. As he continued the interview with David Dillon, Hugo argued that self rejection was "necessary to write the poem . . . apparently it is up to a point," and that many theories regarding the creation of verse, such as "Keats's informing and filling 2 another body, Eliot's idea of escaping the personality, Valdry's idea of creating a superior self, Yeats's notion of the mask, Auden's idea of becoming someone else for the duration of the poem," have, at their base, "an assumption that the self as found, as given, is inadequate and has to be rejected" (111). It is my contention that contemporary American poets use, as their aesthetic means of creating another self as the speaker, or voice, of their poems, one of three modes: the confessional, the persona, or the self-effacing. The central argument of this study is that American personal poetry since the late 1950s has been written in these modes, distinguishable by voice. Personal poetry acts to reveal the poet's self as that self is defined by the experience depicted in the poem. Alan Williamson has termed as "personal" that contemporary poetry which is principally informed by "images of the self or of the nature and quality of subjective experience" (1), but although that which is "subjective experience" serves as a useful phrase (in that it is sufficiently broad) to describe the representation of the self in poetry, it is my thesis that the poet's self is defined by those images, and only to the extent they are presented in the poem. The personal poet, therefore, rejects the self and creates another in its place, a self which is sincere but not necessarily authentic. Lionel Trilling has delineated the sincere self of a poet, or that which is believable, that which presents— as the poem's speaker— an experience with veracity, from the authentic self, or that which resembles more accurately the self rejected by the poet in composing the poem. Trilling's proposition in Sincerity and Authenticity is, succinctly stated, that the poet who reveals his private self publicly— by presenting this self in the poem— is "authentic"; the one who presents a self in the poem that differs from this private self, but nonetheless is a vera cious self, is "sincere." I submit that a personal poet of the contemporary era is sincere, that each reveals a self in the poem as a conscious, aesthetic choice of speaker, no matter how seemingly direct the experience may be brought to us, no matter how seemingly intimate or private the voice. In suggesting that personal poets are sincere rather than authentic, I differ from the nearly universally accepted assumption that those whom M. L. Rosenthal referred to as "confessional poets" are authentic, that a true confessional poet," as Robert Phillips argued in his The Confessional Poets, "places few barriers, if any, between his self and direct expression of that self, how ever painful that expression may prove" (8). I would amend Phillips's statement to read "a sincere, confessional poet . . ." for it seems he used "true," in this sense, in the way Trilling meant "authentic." In corroboration of my 4 understanding of the sincerity of personal poets, Anne Sexton— who "thought she was the only real confessional poet," as W. E. Snodgrass remarked— illustrated that the private self is not usually identical to the poet's public self as the speaker of a poem which recounts an auto biographical experience: "I've heard psychiatrists say, 'See, you've forgiven your father. There it is in your poem,'" she told an interviewer. "But I haven't forgiven my father. I just wrote that I did" (11). More appropriate to personal poets, then, is the characteristic Phillips applied to the confessional genre: "It uses the self as a poetic symbol around which is woven a personal mythology" (17). It is a mythology selective of experiences both autobiographical and imaginary, as Phillips rightly observed: While a confessional poem is one which mytholo gizes the poet's personal life, it has its elements of fancy like any other. It does not constitute, certainly, a mere recitation of fact for fact's sake, nor should the "facts" recited be mistaken for literal truth. If they were, one would be positive that Anne Sexton had a brother killed in the war ..(she hadn't) and that Jerome Mazzaro has a twin sister who is a nun (equally untrue). (11) In the presentation of one's subjective experience through the medium of the poem, the poet assumes a voice which defines the self engaged in the poem's subject— which is often an experience that focuses on self exploration leading to self-definition. Personal poetry, 5 then, is one of this created self, one that includes the self's individual consciousness in relation to its experi ence, its personal history. The self of the confessional mode, as will be shown in the next chapter, attempts to define itself by means of a direct relationship to experi ence, the persona self by filtering experience through a mask, or persona, as discussed in Chapter III, and the self- effacing by removing itself from the context of experience, as the work analyzed in the fourth chapter will demonstrate. The modes of personal poetry will be viewed with par ticular regard to their uses of voice as they have devel oped in America since the late 1950s when the publications of Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956) and Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959), and the subsequent notice these books received, marked a significant change in the direction of poetry in this country. These books' two most distinctive features, which proved lasting influences on the majority of poetry to date, were a return to the open forms the modernists had made acceptable earlier in the century, and the extensive use of autobiography for matters of content, a subject which had been obscured by the New Critical insistence on objectivism. That is, one reason for the reappearance of personal poetry within the past several decades was that it evolved, partially, from a reaction to the theories of impersonality which were entrenched in the poetry of New Criticism, or 6 any poetry of the 1940s and 50s which intentionally eschewed the personal self— of which poetry Eliot and Auden were the reigning masters. Some New Critics wrote personal poetry, certainly, and not all poetry in the "post-New Critical era" has been personal. Yet generally, New Critical poetry presupposed a critical "orthodoxy," as Donald Hall wrote, one which dictated "a poetry of symmetry, intellect, irony, and wit" (qtd. in Cry of the Human 3). Also it was one that had adopted Eliot's "Impersonal theory of poetry," as he titled it in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (from the 192 0 Sacred Wood essays), but this formal (stanzaic, metered) New Critical poetry did not incorporate Eliot's, or Pound's, vers libre aesthetics, as Robert Lowell told Frederick Seidel (long after Lowell had abandoned his committment to the New Critical style): "I. feel- Eliot's less tied to form than a lot of people he's influenced, and there's a freedom of the twenties in his work that I find very sympathetic" (365). It was Eliot's notion of how the self should— that is, should not, or only in an imper sonal way— function as a matter of content for poetry which served the interests of such New Critical poets as John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks— poets influential of the early work of Lowell, Berryman and, later, Galway Kinnell and James Wright, to name but few. 7 Literary historians have made note of the nexus between Eliot and the New Critics, and how both differ from those writing personal poetry. James Breslin, in From Modern to Contemporary, has written of Eliot's impact on the poetry of the time of the New Critics: . . . the effect of Eliot went far beyond the supplying of manifest content for the dreams of younger poets. His influence was not so much specifically literary, in conveying rhythm, image, or voice, but one associated with a specific set of attitudes and values, subtly defining the expectations of many readers and editors as well as writers of poetry; and his influence was transmitted most powerfully by the New Critics. When the postwar period was not calling itself "the age of anxiety," it was calling_itself (somewhat axiously) "the age of criticism. Poetry and fiction might be floundering, but criticism flourished. In fact, while the second generation of modern poets often struggled against a sense of unrealized potentialities, the second generation of modern critics emerged as astonishingly successful. (15) In the opening chapter of his Cry of the Human, Ralph J. Mills made the distinction between personal poets and those of the New Critical generation based on the degree to which "the personal element" informs the poem: I have used in my chapter title the term "per sonal element," which is purposely more general than Dickey's "personality," so it might apply equally to the work of a number of poets who have differing aims and emphases. But both terms oppose the view handed down from Eliot and the New Criticism that poetry and the emotions it conveys are, or should be, impersonal, and that an author's personality and life ought to be excluded from his writings. In many of their poems Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and others stress the poet's anonymity by employing fictional masks, invented speakers or personae, thus enforcing a division between writer and work. 8 The original motive for such objectivity seems genuine enough: to rid poetry of biographical excesses and the residue of the Romantics' pre occupation with personality which had seduced attention from the true object of interest, the poem itself. . . . the emphasis on the poet as an impersonal or anonymous "medium" (actually, as various commentators have shown, to permit deeper, unconscious sources to aid in shaping poetic imagery and speech) passed out of Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" to become an important factor of the modern critical atmos phere. Subsequently, the poem came to be con sidered a neutral object, a vessel filled with the feelings of nobody, what Louis Simpson names "the so-called 'well-made' poem that lends itself to the little knives and formaldehyde of a graduate school." (4-5) The New Criticism, of which Breslin and Mills write, espoused that "a work of art is an object in itself," and some of the criteria of this "objective poem" theory were: the autonomy of every poem, verbal ingenuity and wit, sus tained objectivity, complex strains of irony and aesthetic distance. The revolt against such New Critical ideas of verse--including also, regular meter counts and rhymed stanzas, allusions to literature or other arts, subjects of ideation and philosophy but not of one's subjective experi ence (which resulted in the consideration of the poem as1 "a neutral object")--informed the basis of contemporary personal poetry and its voices. As has been suggested, this "revolution in poetic taste"— to borrow a phrase of Simpson— manifest itself in a verse of marked contrast of subject and style to that of the New Critical poetry. Let us consider first the matter of subject. 9 Since Eliot is the only poet mentioned by Hugo in his list of theorists (who claimed that self-rejection is the means of poetry) whom, however tenuously, we can call American (noteworthy in that this is a study of American personal poetry resulting from the seeming break with Eliot's followers— seeming, that is to say, because per sonal poetry, that which opposes Eliot's impersonality theory, is in actuality another form of self-rejection, or the making of another self, in Hugo's terms— even though discernible periods in American poetry, as history has proven, need not result from a decision to eschew neces sarily a countryman's influential work, but more likely a British poet's work, like Auden's as soon will be men tioned), and since Eliot's were the theories which ulti mately led to the distinguishing voices of personal poetry— in that personal poets began writing in opposition to these theories--it will be useful to review his "Impersonal theory of poetry." Eliot's best expression of this theory is found in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." The poet, he wrote, "must be aware that the mind of Europe— the mind of his own country— a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind--is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen" (51). The 10 collective mind of the country, then, takes precedence over the individual mind of the poet. "What happens [to the poet] is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality" (52-3). Eliot's conception of impersonality, which shows in his own work of this time, begins with an understanding of the "universal" mind as having precedence over the individual mind, the personal self. Near the end of the essay, Eliot summarized his thesis as follows: Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of, personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. (58) In "Hamlet and his Problems," he instructed the poet in the method of evoking emotions while restraining the poem from becoming "a turning loose of emotion": The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. (100) Eliot was later to modify his idea of impersonality in poetry (as did Auden, who wrote personal poetry by the end of his career) claiming that a poet writing of "intense and personal experience is able to express a general , 11 truth," and he used Yeats's last poems as exemplary; Eliot said, in the first annual "Yeats Lecture" (delivered at the Abbey Theatre in 1940): I have, in early essays, extolled what I called impersonality in art, and it may seem that, in giving as a reason for the superiority of Yeats's later work the greater expression of personality in it, I am contradicting myself. It may be that I expressed myself badly, or that I had only an adolescent grasp of that idea--as I can never bear to re-read my own prose writings, I am will ing to leave the point unsettled--but I think now, at least, that the truth of the matter is as fol lows. There are two forms of impersonality: that which is natural to the more skillful craftsman, and that which is more and more achieved by the maturing artist. The first is that of what I have called the "anthology piece," of a lyric by Lovelace or Suckling, or of Campion, a finer poet than either. The second impersonality is that of the poet who, out of intense and personal experi ence, is able to express a general truth; retain ing all the particularity of his experience, to make of it a general symbol. And the strange thing is that Yeats, having been a good_craftsman in the first kind, became a great poet in the second. It is not that he became a different man, for, as I have hinted, one feels sure that the intense experience of youth had been lived through— and indeed, without this early experi ence he could never have attained anything of the wisdom which appears in his later writing. But he had to wait for a later maturity to find expression of early experience; and this makes him, I think, a unique and especially interesting poet. (1828) But the poets of the New Critical school considered Eliot's first impression, or theory, more germane to their purpose. Perhaps they regarded Yeats, as did Eliot, as "unique," and that an expression of the personal an expression of universal significance or "general symbol" could be accomplished only by Yeats's genuis. That those 12 of the New Criticism believed most poetry of personal experience could not evoke a "general symbol separated their from the next generation of poets who contended that any personal poetry, because it is naturally self-serving, speaks for the many, and they cited Whitman as their fore father, in both style and content, in this versification. Yet these disciples of Whitman were then few in the 1950s, and the American bard was very much out of favor with the literati of the time. The enormous popularity of the work of Auden, who had come to the United States, servec. to strengthen the New Critical dominance of the principal current in poetry. Louis Simpson writes of this in A Revolution in Taste: The nature of the influence was not clear at first, for Auden arrived in New York with a reputation as a rebel— many even thought of him as a poet of the Left. But as time passed he revealed himself to be a mainstay of tradition. As long as Auden set the fashion— and this he was able to do, for he was a brilliant literary journalist as well as poet— the stream of experi ment that had begun with the Imagist poets, especially that kind of writing of which William Carlos Williams was the chief exponent, receded into the background. Auden ruled with wit and a knowledge of verse forms; in comparison, the American poets who looked to Williams, or to a poet thought to be even more rudimentary, Walt Whitman, appeared to be fumbling provincials certainly not worth the attention of readers who had been trained by the New Criticism to look for shades of irony and multiple, ambiguous meanings, (xv-xvi) W. D. Snodgrass, whose book of personal poetry of the confessional mode, Heart's Needle, appeared in 1959— the 13 same year as Life Studies— has explained in his In Radical Pursuit that he began writing in this atmosphere, as described by Simpson, of New Criticism, and that he pat terned his early poems to the dicta of its theories: . . . in school, we had been taught to write a very difficult and very intellectual poem. We tried to achieve the obscure and dense texture of the French Symbolists (very intuitive and deranged poets), but by using methods similar to those of the very intellectual and conscious poets of the English Renaissance, especially the Metaphysical poets. I need hardly say that this was a very strange combination. My first published poem started like this: June, and the Tigerlily swam our hedge Like gold fish in the inmost sea's most green Awakenings. Fondly, we gathered the bloom. Thus: Dis. In our inquisitive, close room The Lily parched and clenched to a fist Which could then neither fierce nor pure subsist. ’ [t/o] Of course you recognize that this is a poem about the loss of religious faith? The Tigerlily is meant to stand for Christ, who, like Persephone, was gathered away into the underworld by a dark god, Dis or Pluto— our own inquisitive spirit— but who might be reborn later in the poem. I got seriously upset when one critic said this poem had no intellectual content; he said he wouldn't demand a metaphysical conceit (which, of course, the poem was), but he would like to have it talk about something besides plain old flowers. I had so packed my poem with intellection that he thought it had nonel I was much more distressed, though, when another critic praised my poem as a piece of description by someone who had really gone out and looked at the world. (The one thing I certainly had not done and wouldn't have thought of doing.) (42-3) And Sylvia Plath's initial experiences with poetry, as Simpson reports it in A Revolution of Taste, were similar 14 to that of Snodgrass;. Simpson defines further the poetry affected by New Criticism, and explains the extent of its influence on such young poets as Plath, as well as on the "generation of readers" trained by its school. He wrote: In her attempt to write about history and culture in the manner of Auden, Plath diverged from her best subject— experience and what to make of it-- as far as she would ever go. She was not alone: the influence of Auden was strong in these years. Young poets tried to write like Auden about history, with irony and wit, using traditional forms. . . . This elegance was very much of the period. New Critics emphasized the qualities in verse that lent themselves to "explication." Irony and ambiguity were especially favored. If the poem didn't fit the tools they kept the tools and threw away the poem. Cleanth Brooks' and Robert Penn Warren's Understanding Poetry, from which a generation learned how to read, contained six poems by Donne and not a single poem by Whitman. . . . it would be another ten years before Ginsberg made an impression and Olson had a fol lowing. The admired poets of the period were Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, and, most of all, Auden. They stood for poetry written in tradi tional forms and in a language removed from actual speech. There were a dozen younger poets who agreed with them in principle. (100) Yet Ginsberg did arrive (and the dozen younger poets altered their styles), bringing the notion that autobiog raphy— that which "you tell your friends about yourself," even— is the only proper subject for literature. Ginsberg said in an interview with Paris Review: So then— what happens if you make a distinc tion between what you tell your muse? The prob lem is to break down that distinction: when you approach the Muse to talk as frankly as you would talk with yourself or with your friends. So I began finding, in conversations with Burroughs and Kerouac and Gregory Corso, in conversations : ___. with _people whom I knew well, whose souls I 15 respected, that the things we were telling each other for real were totally different from what was already in literature. And what was Kerouac's great discovery in On the Road. The kinds of things that he and Neal Cassady were talking about, he finally discovered were the subject matter for what he wanted to write down. That meant, at that minute, a complete revision of what literature was supposed to be, in his mind, and actually in the minds of the people that first read the book. . . . It's the ability to commit to writing, to write, the same way that you . . . are I (288) It was the poets' committment to writing in a style which best suited their personal poetry ("to write the same way that you are!") that led in part to the rejection of the "objective school" represented by New Critical poetry. "So it was," writes Mills in Cry of the Human: that Stanley Kunitz, Richard Eberhart, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, Robert.Lowell, Karl Shapiro, Randall Jarrell, and others who_began to write in the 1930s . . were freed as individ uals from the demands created by literary move ments to an energetic and single-minded concentra tion that brought, in due time, Roethke in The Lost Son, Lowell in Life Studies, Berryman in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and The Dream Songs, and Shapiro in The Bourgeois Poet, for example, to the kind of poetic breakthrough James Dickey calls "The Second Birth"— an intense imaginative liberation, achieved at great personal cost, in which the poet, like a snake shedding his dead skin, frees himself of the weight of imposed styles and current critical criteria to come into the place of his own authentic speech. (3) In 1958, Robert Bly was calling for a break with that tradi tion established by the New Critical thought of objectivism; in reference to the insistence on objectivity (as opposed to the more subjective personal self) in poetry, Bly wrote in his essay "Five Decades of Modern American Poetry": 16 Why do so few poets write now of business experi ence, of despair, or the Second World War? One reason, I think, is that we write in the old tra dition, and it is impossible to write of these subjects in the old tradition. A new style is invented to deal with new subject matter, and if we continue to write in the old style, we will cut ourselves off from the most important experi ences of our time. (38-9) The books, besides Howl and Life Studies, which soon began appearing— and which could be added to Mill's list--were Snodgrass's Heart's Needle, poems about the complications arising from the poet's divorce, Bly's Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962) , which collected poems of his subjective experience he had written in the 1950s, Plath's Ariel (1966), which showed clearly her change from an earlier style (informed by Auden's influence) by revealing a per sonal verse mostly concerned with a suicidal protagonist, and many others— all poetry which took as its subjects the self, the concept of selfhood, personal experience, the individual's relationship to his or her time in history. And most of it was written in the "new style" (that is, not really "new" or inventive, but not in the formal style of the New Critical school of poetry) since, as Phillips has remarked, "openness of language leads to openness of emotion" and of subjective experience— which brings us to personal poetry's contrasting style to that of New Critical verse. The decade between 1959 and 1969 culminated with the appearance of two major poetry anthologies: Naked Poetry 17 and The Contemporary American Poets. Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey, in their Naked Poetry (1969) , called attention to "open forms," a term first introduced into the vocabulary of criticism in the foreword of that anthology. Although several, smaller, publications such as the first issue of the magazine Fifties (1958), edited by William Duffy and Bly, encouraged the poetic movement away from traditional prosody ("The editors of this magazine think that most of the poetry published in America today is too old-fashioned," that issue's epigraph read), Naked Poetry was the first anthology from a major, commercial publisher to receive wide observation, and acceptance, from the literati. "Naked poetry," as it were, had supplanted that of the more traditional forms as the main current of American poetry. Mezey and Berg remarked in introducing the book: "We began with the firm conviction that the strongest and most alive poetry in America had abandoned or at least broken the grip of traditional meters and had set out, once again, into the 'wilderness of unopened life.'" The "open form" was some what defined by Mezey and Berg as "poems [that] don't rhyme (usually) and don't move on feet of more or less equal duration (usually). That nondescription gropes toward the only technical principle they all have in common" (xi). Naked Poetry fairly represented verse in open form, which by 1969 had become the preponderate mode of writing poems, even though the content varied .widely between the poets. 18 Following each selection of poems, the living poets included a statement regarding his or her philosophy of the practice of open form poetry, resembling in manner some types of modernist manifestoes, many which acknowledged the poet's allegiance to the modern masters: Pound, Williams, Stevens, Roethke, ignoring, except in a disparaging context, Warren, Brooks, Tate and Ransom. Parallel in importance to Naked Poetry, The Contemporary American Poets (1969), edited by Mark Strand, proclaimed to reflect the "rebirth" of poetry in this coun try. Whereas Naked Poetry's primary objective was to dis play recent poetry's new look, differentiated from the adherence to forms common to the poetry written in the decade after World War II, Strand's choices, although the same at times as Mezey's and Berg's, reflected his concern for subject matter. To that end, he took as his starting date 1940, which included some poetry written in the New Critical style— that is to say, his anthology did not espouse a polemic of poetic form as did Naked Poetry. Strand wrote in his preface that: Many of today's poets have made, if not a cult, at least a lifetime's work of the self, a self defined usually by circumstances that would reflect a sense of self-definition, they have used what they wanted from various literary traditions. Helped on in recent years by the abundance of translations from almost every language, there are poets in the United States whose imaginative roots seem to have sprung from Neruda or Char or Cavafy or from Arthur Waley's versions of Chinese poetry quite as much as they ___________have._from_Ernerson or Whitman. (xiii-xiv)_________ 19 Strand's remarks suggest that Bly's directive had become common practice, that "a new style is invented to deal with new subject matter" and that the "new style" could, presump tively, borrow from the old; they also corroborate my earlier comment concerning the influence of foreign poets affecting the direction of American verse. Statements by Adrienne Rich and Louis Simpson serve as examples to confirm Strand's claim that some poets have made "a lifetime's work of the self." Rich has argued, in her essay "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re—Vision, that: Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.^ And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male- dominated society. A radical critique of litera ture, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name and therefore live--afresh. A change in the concept of sexual identity is essential if we are not going to see the old political order re-assert itself in every new revolution. We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us. (278-79) Although she speaks of "we" in the foregoing passage, Rich's personal "drive to self-knowledge" has brought her to the rejection of her authentic self and the projection in her poetry of her sincere, public self, as she told 20 Stanley Plumly: "I am not interested in the poem as a way of revealing a self that I think I know about to the outer world. I am interested in, certainly, finding out more about that self, and I think of myself as using poetry as a chief means of self-exploration" (29-30). Simpson speaks in a more general context than does Rich; his statement in American Poets in 1976 included the following: For some time American poets have been writing almost exclusively about their personal lives. We have become accustomed to poets' telling us what they are doing and thinking at the moment. The present moment is everything— there is no sense of the past. Nor is there any sense of a community. If poetry is the language of a tribe, it seems there is no longer a tribe, only a number of individuals who are writing a personal diary or trying to "expand their consciousness." (332) The problem of self-definition had been the focus of the poetry written in the period covered in Strand's anthology, and one solution, of course, was to write poems in a dis tinctive, individual manner. That ambition, coupled with the subject of self, dictated which foreign poetry was to be translated— which further contributed to the influence of translations on American poets that Strand mentioned— and this in turn may have been responsible for poets having lost "any sense of community," as Simpson believes, in favor of an overwhelming obsession with their private expe riences. Rich and Simpson, both writing in 1976, indicate how the obsession flourished since Strand's remarks of 196 9 tn.the point where American poets write "almost exclusively 21 about their personal lives," as Simpson complains. How it reached this level of saturation in contemporary poetry is due in part to the freedom open form allows, and in part to the (over) reaction against New Critical objectivism; that these poets have "no sense of the past" is in deliberate disregard of Eliot's theory presented in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Having published his first full-length collection of poems (Reasons for Moving) just the year before writing the preface to this anthology, Strand was still developing his own aesthetic of voice and style, and therefore nat urally was concerned with the personal styles of other, older poets, as he said in an interview with Richard Vine and Robert von Hallberg: At the time I was doing the anthology, I was myself concerned with developing an idiosyncratic or personal style, and so it naturally seemed to me that others were up to the same thing. We all require a certain amount of self-definition, and self-definition means being recognizable as some one different from the others. I think that poets, particularly young poets, really want that in their work. They don't want their poems to sound like someone else's. In the very beginning, of course, they do. It gives their poems author ity. They want to sound like Eliot or Lowell because that's what poetry sounds like to them. If they write like established poets, their poems will sound like real poems. (131-32) Strand, then, tried to determine these older poets' "imag inative roots," by which he seems to mean their forms as well as their subjects; and when subsequently breaking from them, he developed what he considered his own, • 22 idiosyncratic, voice (as we shall see in Chapter XV). Xt is understandable, too, that many of the poets represented in his anthology would turn to "self-definition," not because of the then increasing trend towards introspection, but also as an organizing principle for their poems in light of the absence of traditional prosody, as previously sug gested, and as Bruce Weigl has recently written: "The most immediate reason for the common use of autobiographical detail, structure, context, or strategy within the contem porary tradition seems to be the increasingly widespread use of the free—verse form, especially in the latter half of the twentieth century. Given the absence of traditional prosody to organize and structure a poem, it became neces sary for poets to look elsewhere for organizing principles, the most common of which presents private consciousness for public consumption: telling a story about oneself (113). David Ignatow explains more specifically, and in more depth, that the concentration on the self as subject matter is necessary in our age, and that a poet's notion of self hood will ultimately dictate the principal structural means of the poem; more importantly to Ignatow, as he said in "A Dialogue at Compas," is the model (inclusive of the impetus of poetry written in intentional rejection of that model) Whitman provides for this kind of poem: . . . the mainstream in American poetry derives from Walt Whitman. It’s not so much a celebra tion of oneself, and not oneself as a self, but 23 as a self which is a personification or a surro gate of another power transcending the individual power. And it's not so much a poetry of optimism as a poetry of self-identification with that which exists above and beyond us, whatever it-is. Now that, of course,, has come into disrepute in the last one hundred years because we question the presence of any unifying sense or principle in the universe. We question ourselves as being surrogates of any kind of divine energy, and American poets are sons and daughters of Walt Whitman. We are still arguing this problem with him. We are asking him, "Are you still viable?" We don't believe he's viable to the extent that he thought of himself as viable. Yet it's a nag ging problem, because we can't dismiss this sense of ourselves, as a mystery, a wonder, especially; and it's almost a desolation that we exist with out prior knowledge as to our purpose in exist ing. Whitman thought he had the answers, and Whitman, as the center of our psyche who also brought us a sense of commonality, is not plausi ble with what we're going through today. But to give up entirely is to let ourselves sink into something which we just don't want to imagine. So we are at a point now where we talk to him, argue with him, refute him, and when things become very desperate for us, when events in the universe or the world itself bewilder us or throw us into despair, we have an automatic reflex and fall back upon things that he said. We fall back upon the self once more. But that's still not adequate, which is the main problem. We're in a crisis, an intellectual, philosophical, and emo tional crisis right now as poets. (62-3) When poets "fall back upon the self," their poetry becomes more personal, in search of the proper definition, or re-definition, of one's self, marked by a distinctive style as Strand and Bly have mentioned. Yet Strand feels there should be limitations of subject in trying to create a poetry that is, as Ignatow said, a "celebration of one- , self . . . a poetry of self-identification with that which exists above and beyond us." Eliot called for a poet, in 24 "retaining all the particularity of his experience, to make of it a general symbol," but sometimes, Strand suggests, a poet does not have a personal experience that can be applied generally, as he said of Adrienne Rich’s work. In response to Richard Vine's question: "Would it make sense for any poet today to address his readers the way Whitman addressed his?" Strand replied: It would be ridiculous. Still, some people try. I can't figure out whether Robert Bly is trying that or not. He seems to be speaking to a very small group of people as if they were the whole world. It's very presumptuous, I think, of any one to address himself to a whole nation. And it is a bit self-defeating to address yourself to the little sunbirds of poetry. But I'm not sure that one has to do either one of those things. I think all you can do is address yourself to ideas and issues that you yourself are concerned about. Hopefully, these exist at the very center of your culture and have to do with being human and being alive. Poetry doesn't usually address itself to specific issues. Such issues tend to diminish. At least time seems to tell us that. Unless the issues are overriding— but we don't know at any given moment what issues are going to endure. I am not sure that the issues to which Adrienne Rich addresses herself right now, and the terms in which she addresses them, are overriding. A poet can go ninety percent of the way in approach ing the reader, but he or she has to allow the reader room in which to move. A poet must invite you out of yourself with what you yourself have. He can't bombard you with prejudice. Reading Rich one is participating in an assault, or one is defending one's self. I just don't believe, for example, that all women are lesbians. Some are. But the argument is: well, they all would be if they had the courage. That's like saying all men are killers, etc. (132-33) In following Bly's directive, then, to write about "the most important experiences of our time" in a new style, 25 Rich, Strand contends, has failed to make clear how the issue of her private self becomes "a general symbol"; rather, like the poets of which Simpson wrote, Rich seems to feel that "the present moment is everything," that "there is no longer a tribe" to which she must address her personal poetry other than the community she has conceived. I use Strand's remarks about Rich to illustrate that although personal poetry was one result of the break from the New Critical "old style," it certainly was not the only; poetry written in open form does not necessarily make it personal, nor does it represent a uniform school of style or thought as matters of content. It was earlier suggested that personal poetry may have been an effect of the need for an organizing principle "in the absence of traditional prosody," but as Berg and Mezey write in their foreword of The New Naked Poetry (1976), this may not be: One academic fellow who saw a preliminary version of this book wondered why the editors did not write a long essay defining the "genre" of open form and relating each poet to this "genre." That doesn't seem to be the right word. Listen ing to the sounds of Ethridge Knight and Robert Duncan, for example, we do not believe it means anything to say they are both working in the "genre" of open form. We would suggest the fel low have a look at "Some Notes on Organic Form" in the first Naked Poetry. Organic— the metaphor is of the living and growing thing. The rhythm and shape of the flower cannot be made clear as separate from or meaning anything different from the coming to be a flower. (xviii) Whereas the more traditional poetry of New Criticism was, 26 in fact, a seemingly unified school, representing the domi nant period style, poetry of open form, the "new style" (again, much of which is personal poetry) is neither uniform in subject nor technique, evident by the disagreements cited by poets over the role of Whitman, the extent of personal, subjective experience as matters for poetry, audience con cern, and so forth. Further, not all personal poetry need be expressed in open form, as will be demonstrated with some of Lowell's work discussed in the next chapter and a few poems of Strand (forthcoming in Chapter IV); about which any poetry of open form Strand wrote in his essay "Notes on the Craft of Poetry": It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape. They argue that there is formal poetry and poetry without form, free verse in other words, and that formal poetry has dimensions that are rhythmic or stanzaic, etc., and conse quently measurable. But if we have learned any thing from the poetry of the last twenty or thirty years, it is that free verse is as formal as any other verse. There is ample evidence that it uses a full range of mnemonic devices, the most common being anaphoral and parallelistic structures, both as syntactically restrictive as they are rhythmically binding. .1 do not want to suggest that measured verse and free verse repre sent opposing mnemonics; I would rather we con sidered them together, both being structured or shaped and thus formal, or at least formal in out ward, easily described ways. (344-45) So far, then, all we have established is that personal poetry is not wholly without form— rather, it is usually in open form or, as Robert Phillips observed, in "the lan- _.guage_.._____ o.f_,ordinary speech, whether in blank verse or ' 27 no" (9)— and that it represents a marked distinction from the more objective subject matter ("history and culture in the manner of Auden," as Simpson said of Plath's early work) of the poetry it succeeded; that is, its subject became more and more that of the subjective self. Yet this is not to presume that all poetry of the "new style" is personal poetry. Let us again turn to Strand for a general description of American poetry since the New Critical verse of the 1950s; he told Plumly: I'm not sure I would characterize recent poetry or post-World War II poetry as anti-poetry. We had a terrific resurgence of formalist poetry in the 50's, and what we had conbating that, I guess, was "beat poetry." . . . anti-poetry is really modern poetry. Contemporary poetry isn't modern poetry, and it isn't anti-poetry. I feel very much a part of a new international style that has a lot to do with plainness of diction, a certain reliance on surrealistic techniques, a certain reliance on journalistic techniques, a strong narrative ele ment, etc. Now I realize this doesn't cover all of contemporary poetry . . . (57) But it does, I suggest, provide a broad summation of the arrival (and brief description) of the style of personal poetry. Both Naked Poetry and The Contemporary American Poets, viewed in retrospect (it is interesting that neither book included the work of the editor, or editors, of the other), were important in identifying the poetic taste of the period in style and subject, a preference, once established, that has remained in fashion for the nearly two decades 28 following their publication. Although Strand chose from among poems published since 194 0— which is to say that some are in measured forms— he betrays, by his selection of those poems (the "formal" verse in his anthology is often only very loosely, or irregularly, metered and rhymed), an explicit favor for those in open form. Most likely, then, the general consensus is that personal poetry is best pre sented in that way. Louis Simpson's remarks lend support here; writing of Auden's formal verse, which influence, Simpson believed, prolonged the reign of the New Critical school, he offers his version in A Revolution in Taste of how current poetry became so self-involved and written in open form: . . . something was missing in Auden's concept of poetry, and what this was became evident when the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas began his American tours. The missing quality was passion. In Thomas this was expressed in music, the sound of words, over and above what they might be saying. A poem by Auden was an exercise in reason, listen ing to a poem by Thomas was an experience. At the boom of his voice from the platform the Audenesque facade began to crack, and a few years later Allen Ginsberg brought it tumbling down. The poet moved to the center of the stage and spoke his mind freely. This became the common stance for poets in the years that followed. "Most artists and critics," said Susan Sontag, writing in the sixties "have discarded the theory of art as representative of an outer reality in favor of art as subjective expression. (xvi) The primary reason for the continuing emphasis on the self in poetry following the decades of the 1960s, Simpson would argue, is no longer an issue of form, or of the need 29 for passionate presentation of a verse no longer "objec tive," no longer Audenesque, but it is a consequence of the society which spawns it: If one considers the impersonality of the modern bureaucratic state it is likely that, more and more, poetry will be written to express the life of an individual. . . . To most people living in the West, poetry has become almost exclusively a means of self-expres sion. This is bound to continue until the aim of education is changed, and this must wait on changes in society as a whole. (16 9) Robert Penn Warren, in his prose work Democracy and Poetry (1975), presents a similar notion, but from a different perspective: In the preceding essay I looked at our poetry as a record of the dwindling of our conception of the self. Then I was regarding poetry as "diagnostic," as a social document; I noted how it has analyzed and recorded a crucial ailment of our democracy: the progressive decay of the notion of the self. Now I am regarding poetry as "therapeutic"; I am trying to indicate how, in the end, in the face of the increasingly dis integrative forces in our society, poetry may reaffirm and reinforce the notion of the self. Though I hasten to say that the end of poetry is to be poetry, and that only insofar as it fulfills that end may it properly serve either diagnostic or therapeutic ends. (42) But Richard Hugo thought a democratic society allows poetry— no matter what its purpose— to flourish, as he stated in "Stray Thoughts on Roethke and Teaching": Mark Strand remarked recently in Montana that American poetry could not help but get better and better, and I'm inclined to agree. I doubt that we'll have the one big figure of the century the way other nations do, Yeats, Valery. Giants are not the style of the society, though the wind knows there are enough people 30 who want to create them, and not just a few who want to be them. I think we'll end up with a lot of fine poets, each doing his thing. (33) That the subject of self— whether "the progressive decay of the notion of self," as Warren said, or the repre sentation of "art as subjective experience," as did Sontag— is the predominant one in our current poetry supports the argument of a lingering Romantic tradition. Leonard Nathan believes that the personal "I" introduced by William Wordsworth in his "There was a boy" (Nathan writes: "Only a critic defending a theoretical position could doubt that the Wordsworth in 'There was a boy' is the real Wordsworth,") continues now in the form of our "confes sional" verse, and he cites other characteristics of Romanticism in today's personal poetry: The third new element in poetry, besides the private "I" and the importance of pathos, is the loosening of form and structure, which fol lows from the fact that poems are in some sense— in theory if not in practice— the spontaneous overflow of feeling, in other words, the individ ual awareness actually in the process of dis covering or experiencing its own deepest emotions. . . . the exaggeration I have pre sented as Romantic poetic practice and theory is more or less the reality today. It is as if a certain logic based on Romantic premises had worked itself out to its conclusion, a conclusion which no contemporary poet is spared, no matter how anti-Romantic he may think himself. (88) The self is certainly not a contemporary notion for poets, as Edmund Wilson argued rather succinctly in his Axel's Castle; its most recent ancestor— which is to say that the self has been a subject for verse periodically 31 throughout history (one discussion of confessional poetry began with a sonnet from Shakespeare; others have traced the mode from Sappho through Catullus, Augustine and Rousseau)— is ninetieth century Romanticism, which, Wilson said, "was a revolt of the individual. . . .[the Classical poet] would consider it artistic bad taste to identify his hero with himself and to glorify himself with his hero, or to intrude between the reader and the story and give vent to his personal emotions. But in [Romantic poetry] the writer is either his own hero, or unmistakably identified with his hero, and the personality and emotions of the writer are presented as the principal subject of interest. . . . Byron and Wordsworth ask us to be inter ested in themselves by virtue of the intrinsic value of the individual: they vindicate the rights of the individual against the claims of society . . . it is always, as in Wordsworth, the individual sensibility, or, as in Byron, the individual will, with which the Romantic poet is pre occupied" (2-4). Wilson has separated "the poet as his own hero" from a "created" hero with whom the poet is "unmistakably identified," a distinction which can be made in contemporary personal verse, particularly that of the confessional and persona modes of voice. Alan Williamson suggests that the need for poets to be their own artistic heroes is cultural, and that introspection is a result of historical and sociological 32 sequences: The diffusion of psychoanalysis in the general culture, and the sheer amont of inner conflict and turmoil experienced by some of the most talented poets of the period, are factors that should not be underestimated. But the larger political history may have been even more impor tant. The poets who shaped contemporary poetry all came of age sometime between the rise of Hitler and the fall of Joe McCarthy— that is to say, during a time when the relative influence of irrational hatreds, fears, and identifications, as against pragmatic interests, in political life seemed more disproportionate than it had, perhaps,j for several centuries. The responses of the great Modernist writers to this history wrong-headed, symbolic, and personally driven as they often were— I suspect helped later poets conclude that a psychology beginning at home was a necessary middle term between poetic sensibility and imper sonal or ideological judgment. (2) Whether certain Romantic tendencies emerged again in poetry since the 1950s, or that cultural conditions influ enced the subject matter of poetry— whatever the reasons— poets became more personal than objective, more inward directed than outward. And although, as Wilson traced for us, history shows this not to be unique, never has the concern for self so completely dominated any period of poetry, any style, as it has our present one. Yet, be that the personal poem's reliance on self as principles of theme and structure is predominant, it is somewhat surprising that much academic commentary of con temporary poetry has been focused on other subjects. At present, the critical fashion is to find meaning between the texts (or to find no meaning at all, at criticism s 33 most irrational extreme). "There are no texts, but only relationships between texts," (3) Harold Bloom tells us in A Map of Misreading, which de-emphasizes the author's work as a distinctive object of art and removes the focus from the author of (and very much in) the work; indeed, Roland Barthes (in "The Death of the Author") would have us believe there are no poets either, in addition to there being no texts. And Helen Vendler has minimized the importance of autobiography in Robert Lowell's most personal poetry, pre ferring instead to concentrate on the objects he describes, his external stimuli. She has written of the Lowell of Life Studies: "for all his learning and his intellectuality, for all his interior 'autobiography' even, Lowell is a poet essentially externalized— in data, in description, in scene, in action, in history" (351). Despite the critical preference of the most famous literary theorists and commentators, a few younger critics in this country, not yet widely known and oftentimes poets themselves, have begun to argue the significance of personal poetry and to examine more closely the poets' personalities and lives in relation to their poems, as this study must do in contending for the modes of voice in current practice. Alan Williamson has recently pointed towards the critical bias against the examination of the self, stating: "although the imporatnce of subjectivism in the development of contemporary poetry is universally acknowledged, there 34 seems to be a certain resistence to making it the main focus of critical scrutiny--especially an implicity approving scrutiny" (5-6). And the poet Dave Smith, in reference to the poetry of James Wright, has written in The Pure Clear Word: We live in a time when critical theory has called into question not merely the function of art but the very existence of art. Theorists deny there can be an author. From Derrida to Culler to Fish, the talk is of the text, an impersonal object neither story nor poem. The desire of such criticism, whatever its Archimedean point, is to bring to literature the objectivity of scientific inquiry; that is, to codify what and how literature knows. This is the direction and legacy of New Criticism in part, of modernist rebellion in part— but it is largely the tempera ment of the industrial world. While criticism fabricates objectivity and impersonality, becoming at last not a way of experiencing art but a kind of parodic extension of Robert Frost's remark about free verse--that is, a game played without net, racket, or balls--poetry has gone in the opposite direction. To understand and to follow James Wright's development as a poet we have to search for the man in the poems. (xii) Consequently, there has not been a study of the self as subject, particularly as a means to analyze voice, in contemporary poetry such as this I now present. To reit erate, my argument briefly stated is this: American per sonal poetry since the late 1950s has been written in either the confessional, the persona, or the self-effacing mode, each distinguishable by voice, and each defined as follows: The Confessional Mode, which employs "I" as the prin cipal speaker, relates a personal incident of the 35 poet's public self— an incident either actual, that is, autobiographical, or created from the imagination— usually intended as a means of self-identification, self-definition, and which often evokes pathos in the reader, although the incident depicted in a poem of the confessional mode can be joyous as well. This "I" is the sincere voice of the poet, which is not his authen tic self— however near it may seem to the poet's own voice— but one used for the public presentation of the poem. The poet who writes in this mode attempts to present the "I" as the self he or she wishes to define by the poem. The Persona Mode, which combines the intensity of the subjective voice of the confessional mode with the depersonalized objectivity of the self-effacing poem, invents a character as the narrator of a personal inci dent (again, real or imagined by the poet). This character is closely associated with the poet's public self; it is his or her mask, persona, through which a personal experience can be related with both the subjective (and often pathetic) expression of the confessional voice and the objective stance a poet takes when narrating an account of an imagined char acter. The modernist archetype for this mode is Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley." The Self-Effacing Mode, which also uses "I" as its 36 principal speaker, attempts to depersonalize the voice of the poet's public self in order to render a seem- : ingly objective account of a personal experience (actual or invented) of that self; the depersonalized voice acts to control the tone of the poem so that if pathos is evoked in the reader, it derives from the incident depicted by the poem, not the voice (as it often does in the confessional mode). More common, however, the poem will contain themes of absence, self-alienation, and its "I" speaker will attempt to define himself or herself within the context of these themes. The poet who writes in this mode attempts not actually to obliterate his or her public self from the poem, but to transcend that public, sincere, voice to become inconspicuous in order to effect a seemingly objective voice, one illustrative of the world this public self finds so alien. Poets covered in the period of this study (roughly, the late 1950s to the present, with the exception of the poetry of Weldon Kees which precedes that date) tend to write in all three modes; most betray a marked preference for one over the other two, but it is rare for a poet to practice one voice exclusively. I intend to illustrate my thesis by examining the work of three poets major to this study, one for each mode, and also show how each writes in all three modes. In addition, for each mode I will analyze 37 the work of two other poets whose verse I will treat only in the mode of voice I have chosen it to exemplify. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Robert Lowell will be the major figure for the confessional mode, with James Wright and Robert Bly supplementary; John Berryman for the persona mode, with Weldon Kees and Galway Kinnell; and Mark Strand for the self-effacing, with Charles Simic and David Ignatow. Of particular note: my definition of "confessional" may vary from its current usage--but that varies widely, too. Phillips, in one of the first discussions of the mode, wrote that "Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg eschew personae altogether" (9), but to the contrary, each adopts the "persona" of his public self as the speaker of his confes sional verse so that James Merrill is correct in observing that confessionalism "is a literary convention like any other, the problem being to make it sound as if it were true," that is, to sound sincere, as I would amend Merrill's remark. About confessional poets, Louis Simpson wrote in A Revolution in Taste: It is common to think of [Sylvia Plath] as a woman bent on committing suicide and her poems as confessions. M. L. Rosenthal labeled her a "confessional poet," along with Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, and Anne Sexton. The term, applied to poets as different as these, can mean very little— in fact, is misleading, for it does not take into account Lowell's deliberate 38 self-portraiture, Ginsberg's "hallucinatory- mystical" experiments, Roethke's writings about nature, or Berryman's invention of "Henry." It misses the most important thing about Sylvia Plath, her conversion of life into art. The only poet whom Rosenthal's term defines adequately is Anne Sexton who, indeed, placed "the literal self . . . at the center of the poem" so as to reveal her "psychological vulnerability and shame." . . . Plath writes about her life but her poems are works of art, the images going down to a level of feeling that is shared by others. . . . ; The poems make connections with "the language of the tribe"; this is what distinguishes them from confessional writing. (120-21) Simpson properly identifies Lowell's and the others' work of the confessional mode as "deliberate self-portraitures," however misguided he may be in regarding Sexton's as an authentic voice. David Ignatow, one of this study's self-effacing poets, wrote in his Notebooks: "Obviously, I'm not a confessional poet. I feel no guilt or hatred or consuming love that must be allowed to spill over. Any guilt or love or hatred that I feel is subjected to contemplation" (qtd. in New Naked Poetry 112). And Snodgrass has said to David Dillon: ". . . my poems aren't confessional. That has to imply that one is talking about some kind of forbidden activity and doing it in a rather lurid way--like a confessional magazine or something like that" (219). Simpson, Ignatow and Snodgrass have differing con ceptions of the term "confessional poet," and each differs from mine. A poem using the confessional mode of voice 39 does not have to "confess" anything as Ignatow suggests it does— particularly "in a rather lurid way" as Snodgrass thinks— nor does the poem's subject need be autobiograph ical; but the voice requires, at the least, a semblance of a personal experience that is plausible, and it must be sincere in the presentation of that experience in Lionel Trilling's sense— that the poet must represent his or her speaker and experience to us in believable fashion. The confessional voice may be closely associated with the poet s private self, as I have defined it, but it is the poet s public voice used with the knowledge that his or her poems audience is the public; the poet successfully evoking pathos, then, is the confessional poet "weeping with one eye on the camera," as Simpson remarked. Sincerity will distinguish, ultimately, the confessional mode of voice from the self-effacing, as we shall see. This study is one of criticism; that is, it asserts a theory I will attempt to prove by my analysis of the work of representative poets. The reasons for my selecting these poets are stated in the chapters in which their works are treated. As indicated previously, not all poetry writ ten in this country since the late 1950s concerns the self, or is personal poetry, one attempting answers to what Emerson called the "burden" of the individual: to define himself in relation to his immediate surroundings, his community, and the age in which he finds himself belonging. 40 Consequently, many of the best known poets of our day are not mentioned in the following chapters, or if they are, only briefly and usually derogatorily by the poets whom I do include--poets concerning themselves with the self are often not sympathetic to those whose primary focus is on form, say, or the direction of "the lyric," or popular philosophy, or anything else besides the self; Bly, there fore, will derogate the work of John Ashbery, as he did in an interview with Wayne Dodd; "Ashbery has become an utterly academic poet. Academic poetry in the fifties was recognizable by emotional anemia and English meter. Now it is recognizable by fake French surrealism and emotional anemia. In Ashbery there is no anger, there is no world" (299), and David Ignatow will say things like; "John Ashbery is not dealing with this subject [self] at all. Neither is a critic like Harold Bloom. They are critics of literature, they are writers of literature; they are not writers of life" (Open Between Us 63). Disregarding aesthetic favoritism, I have excluded such well known poets as Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and James Merrill from this study simply because they have not writ ten enough about the self; nor do these poets have, in most of their work, an identifiable voice. In their poetry of images, or ideas, or lyricism, the voice is indeterminate and therefore cannot be traced to any mode. W. S. Merwin is excluded for this reason— even though Strand, Kinnell 41 and others speak well of his work. This may raise the issue for my exclusion of poets who do write of the self and whose voice is clearly distinguishable in their work. But this study is not a survey of the poets of personal verse; rather it posits the critical assumption that any woman or man writing of the self does so in one of the three modes of voice I have identified, that the poets I do use in the study are exemplary of anyone writing in these modes. In this regard, then, I have not excluded any poet, for her or his aesthetic, or technique of voice, is represented by the work I have chosen to discuss. My only criteria of selection were that the poets clearly reflect the practice of the mode (which I believe they do) and that their national identity was American not origin, that is, for Strand was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada, and Simic in Yugoslavia. A final word before turning to those poets: since Lowell, Wright, Berryman and Kees are dead— nearly half the poets whose work I discuss in the ensuing pages I have concluded with a chapter which examines a few younger poets presently writing personal poetry to determine whether the use of voice in the confessional, persona and self-effacing modes has continued in today’s practice, or has died with the older poets. In addition, I have updated the work of the poets I treat in Chapters II through IV who are still living--that is, I discuss their most recent 42 poems— in order to comment on their continuing, or discon tinuing, uses of voice in their personal poetry through 1986. But enough of what is to come; it is time to let the poets and their poems speak for themselves (to that end, I defer to quoting both extensively) and make their voices known. 43 CHAPTER II THE CONFESSIONAL MODE The confessional voice of personal poetry is best represented by Robert Lowell's work. Not only did Lowell admit that his personal poems were autobiographical, but— given the amount of factual evidence concerning his life that is available— these poems often can be documented as representing some of his personal experiences. The voice of these poems, therefore, is confessional in the sense that it acts as the voice of the public Lowell who is narrating parts of his autobiography in verse. Also, in order to create a tone of sincerity— which is, as we learned from Trilling in the previous chapter, the presentation of personal experiences as believable, plausible, even though the speaker of these poems depicting such experiences may not be representative of the poet's authentic (private) self— Lowell used certain rhetorical techniques in his verse such as a simple sentence syntax common to prose (personal pronoun subject, verb, object), a more conversational dic tion, and a narrative structure. We find the following lines in randomly selecting from the first few poems of Life Studies; "I saw our stewards go / forward ..." "I left the City of God . . ." "I heard the El's green 44 girders . . ." "I chartered an aluminum canoe . . "I sat on the stone porch . . . " Within the context of each poem from which these lines have been culled, the speaker is the sincere Lowell. Once we have accepted the speaker's integ rity— that is, the sincerity, honesty, candor— we can accept a poem as confessional even if our assumption cannot be supported with biographical data; the assessment of the speaker's sincerity must be approached through the poem's technique, not the poet's intent. Lowell's poems of the confessional mode which can be traced to an autobiographical origin are constructed in much the same way as those which cannot; consequently, the technique of craft, the principle of his aesthetic, rather than a "source," serves to indicate whether his poems are confessional. This means of determination is the primary basis for my analysis of the poetry of James Wright and Robert Bly, whose personal poems— together with Lowell's— will help substantiate the conclusions I reach about the confessional mode. Lowell uses the confessional voice in his personal poems as a method of self-exploration. In some poems, the voice, the "I" in the poem, acts as the principal catalyst necessary for the representation of the poem's theme, or acts as the central character in the dramatic situation of a poem. In others, the voice is an observer of events or landscapes that do not include the "I"— either as a catalyst 45 or character— within the context of the poem. In these poems the basis for self-exploration derives from the pecu liar manner in which the voice (the speaker of the poem) observes the event or landscape; this, too, can reveal the self that is defined by such observation. In either type of use, though, the confessional voice is that of the poet chronicling his public self's personal history, using that self— as Phillips informed us— "as a poetic symbol around which is woven a personal mythology," a work Lowell empha sized when he altered his poetic style from formal versifi cation to vers libre. I. Lowell's change in his aesthetic approach was correla tive with his concern for the self, as Jay Martin has sug gested : Settling in Boston in 1954 with a view toward rediscovering some roots, he made a start on a prose autobiography. He became interested in psychoanalysis, particularly in Freud. Now, "Freud seemed the only religious teacher" to him. He began giving poetry readings, and "more and more [he says] I found that I was simplifying my poems. ..." His readings loosened his tight, difficult forms; and his interest in autobiography and self encouraged respect for prose ("less cut off from life than poetry is") and diminished his interest in highly rhetorical poetry. In short, he became interested in the discovery, the inven tion, and the definition of his self; and he attempted to incorporate into his work the con temporary forms, myths, and metaphors which describe the individual imagination. (230-31) So it was that five years after this initial period of acute 46 interest in "the discovery, the invention . . . of the self” Life Studies was published, a book when reviewed by Rosenthal that received such criticism as: ". . . my first impression while reading Life Studies was that it is impure art, magnificently stated but unpleasantly egocentric— somehow resembling the triumph of the skunks over the gar bage cans. Since its self-therapeutic motive is so obvious and persistent, something of this impression sticks all the way" (154). But for Lowell, his poetry written in a new (to him) style— even if intended as a kind of psychoanalysis as both Martin and Rosenthal propose— was foremost the appropriate manner by which to render his autobiographical accounts in verse. He said to Frederick Seidel: " . . .if a poem is autobiographical you want the reader to say, this is true. . . . the reader was to believe he was getting [in Life Studies] the real Robert Lowell" (349), the real Robert Lowell, that is, which is the poet's self as repre sented in those same poems. That Lowell intended this self as sincere (as opposed to authentic) is evident by his sug gestion that "the reader was to believe" it was truth he or she was reading; these experiences based on Lowell's auto biography, then, had to be veracious— they had to present an "illusion of veracity" (as Dave Smith will remark about James Wright's poems later in this chapter). Lowell's change in style from Lord Weary's Castle (1946) may have been to ensure that his concern for self 47 ("his interest in autobiography," as Martin wrote) would not be obscured by the poetic forms of that book, even though those poems— written more than a decade before the publication of Life Studies--showed Lowell's early predilec tion for self-definition. "The major modes of Lord Weary's Castle," Martin has argued, "are (1) the definition of the individual through suprapersonal structures and (2) the dramatization of. the self's terrifying alienation from these through the divorce of observation from feeling and of sensibility from culture" (221). Yet Allen Tate focused his remarks on the obvious sur face changes in form in the poetry of Life Studies from that of Lord Weary's Castle, and when he read it in manu script, admonished Lowell not to publish the book: . . . all the poems about your family, including the one about you and Elizabeth, are definitely bad. I do not think you ought to publish them. You didn't ask me whether they ought to be pub lished, but I put the matter from this point of view in order to underline my anxiety about them. . . . The free verse, arbitrary and with out rhythm, reflects this lack of imaginative focus. Your fine poems in the past present a formal ordering of highly intractable materials: but there is an imaginative thrust towards a sym bolic order which these new poems seem to lack. The new ones sound to me like messages to your self . . . and you are letting these scattered items of experience have their full impact upon your sensibility. (qtd. in Hamilton 237) Tate's remarks illustrate the apparently unresolvable dis parities between the poetic sensibilities of the New Criti cal school and personal poets of open form that were dis- cussed in the first chapter. Tate and John Crowe Ransom 48 had significantly influenced the younger Lowell. Ransom, Martin writes, "set the self-consciously Aristotelian, anti-Romantic, ceremonious, and politically orthodox intel lectual tone. Ransom's New Gritical emphasis on wit and paradox, Tate's 'attempts to make poetry much more for mal . . . to write in meters but to make the meters look hard [as Lowell said] and make them hard to write'"--among other influences— "permanently affected" Lowell's poetry (213-14). Tate, then, was correct in observing that Lowell's more pronounced concern for autobiography altered his artistic sensibility; Lowell had to find a way to order his poetry now that form alone could not dictate "when to stop rambling," as he remarked to William Carlos Williams. However, the narrative structure— an organizational method implicit in any autobiographically based work--often pro vided the closure he sought, a structure which thwarted his reliance on the more "symbolic order" Tate urged, but also one which helps in establishing the sincerity of the piece— essential for the success of any poem of the confes sional mode, as already has been noted. Poems from Lord Weary's Castle such as "Winter in Dunbarton," "Mary Winslow" and "In Memory of Arthur Winslow" are personal in that they express the poet's familial loss. The speaker of "In Memory of Arthur Winslow"— using "Arthur" as the initiating impulse for self-contemplation— "achieves," as Martin has noted, "a dramatic ecstasy of 49 awareness; and mediating between the closed and open worlds he speaks for himself," (222) so that even the more formal verse of this volume could include Lowell1s personal analy sis of selfhood, of the self in relation to Arthur Winslow^-us Winslow even. Yet Eliot's impersonality theory— as adapted by Tate and Ransom— informed Lowell's aesthetic at this point, it seems, (even in these more per sonal poems) to the extent of relegating the importance of the speaker's role in the poem as secondary to its subject, and often to the syllable count; Eliot's other dictum— that "poetry must not stray too far from the ordinary everyday language which we use and hear"— was pretty much ignored by the Lowell of Lord Weary's Castle. In contrast to this earlier style, here are passages from the poem "Dunbarton," one of many that is based on Lowell's autobiography included in Life Studies: When Uncle Devereux died, Daddy was still on sea-duty in the Pacific; it seemed spontaneous and proper for Mr. MacDonald, the farmer, Karl, the chauffeur, and even my Grandmother to say, "your Father." They meant my Grandfather He was my Father. I was his son. On our yearly autumn get-aways from Boston to the family graveyard in Dunbarton, he took the wheel himself— like an admiral at the helm. . . . We stopped at the Priscilla in Nashua for brownies and root-beer, and later "pumped ship" together in the Indian Summer. . . . [t/o] 50 Grandfather and I raked leaves from our dead forebears, defied the dank weather with "dragon" bonfires. . . . In the mornings I cuddled like a paramour in my Grandfather's bed, while he scouted about the chattering greenwood stove. [t/o] The setting of this poem is clear; we are told it is a particular autumn at Dunbarton and the family burial site, the autumn "when Uncle Devereux died." The season in this poem is marked by raking and burning the fallen leaves. In "Winter in Dunbarton," from Lord Weary’s Castle— a poem of similar setting (although, as the poem's title informs us, the season is different and it is the object of the poem)— winter was seen as "fat with muck and winter dropsy." One difference between the two poems (which marks their contrasting styles) is that in "Dunbarton" Lowell relies on action to make the setting more visual; he uses action verbs rather than nouns such as "muck" and "dropsy." The speaker of "Dunbarton," who is the adult Lowell— represented by the confessional "I"— remembering a childhood experience, conveys the world of Dunbarton as seen by Lowell the child. This is accomplished partly by the narrative structure of the poem; the story begins with the drive from Boston to Dunbarton, mentions the stops along the way, and ends inside Grandfather's house. Each of these points in the narrative is characterized by an action exciting and impressionable to a child: during the 51 car ride, Grandfather (the child's father substitute; Lowell's father was a naval commander--here Grandfather is "like an admiral at the helm"), "chuckling over the gas he was saving, / . . . let his motor roller-coaster / out of control down each hill," and once they stop for brownies and root beer; at Dunbarton they make bonfires, the child captures salamanders, and so forth. Unlike "Winter in Dunbarton" in which the time of the cat's death— the centra] catalyst for that poem's objective correlative— is unclear (we are not certain whether an adult speaker is remembering back when, in childhood, the cat died, or if in adulthood the cat's death spawned memories of the past— nor is this necessary, for the poem's intention is to present the cat as the principal object acting to evoke a certain winter), the dominating presence of the speaker in "Dunbarton"— often as the center of action— defines the poem's dramatic situa tion, which is the uncle's death and the absence of the child's real father. Scene and object, then, are the foci of "Winter in Dunbarton" whereas the speaker is the primary focus of "Dunbarton" in that the poem's drama ultimately relates to the speaker's reaction to it. "Dunbarton" is a poem which takes the speaker's self as its subject; the story and con cerns presented in the poem are the speaker's. (In "Winter," the cat and the season are the poem's bi-focus.) The speaker Lowell, as the child in "Dunbarton," was 52 affected by the death of his favorite uncle, who died just when his father was away. His grandfather, therefore, provided the love he needed ("I cuddled like a paramour / in my Grandfather's bed"), and the Lowell speaker felt that he, in return, solaced his grandfather in the time of mourning the loss of a son: "My grandfather found / his grandchild's fogbound solitudes / sweeter than human society." This bond between grandfather and grandchild, coupled with the child's "Daddy on sea-duty in the Pacific,' led the adult Lowell speaker to conclude that his grand father was, just then, "my Father. I was his son." Since "Dunbarton" is personal, self-exploratory, the voice— recognizably "the real Robert Lowell"— is the center of the poem, not scene or form or symbols as in "Winter." That is, "Dunbarton" serves as our first example of the expression of Lowell's "real" public self; the voice is of the con fessional mode because the narrative structure, the poem's dramatic focus resting on the speaker, and the speaker's sincerity of tone each contributes in recounting an experi ence of seeming veracity— that is, "Dunbarton" is confes sional not solely because the poem's subject is inextricably linked to Lowell's autobiography. The poem, which relates a believable personal incident, uses "I" as its speaker so that the speaker is directly identified with that which he depicts--which is the premise of any poem of this mode, as suggested by the definition explained in Chapter I. 53 Although Lowell is now regarded as a poet of auto biography, few poems written before Life Studies clearly betray his exploration of self (as does "Dunbarton"), even though many moved toward such personal examination— the poems from Lord Weary's Castle, for example, previously mentioned. As he became more preoccupied with his "self- therapeutic motive," Lowell increasingly emphasized the prose-like clarity of his poetry, as Martin has informed us and as seen by his change in diction from "Winter in Dunbarton," published first by Ransom in a 1945 issue of Kenyon Review, to "Dunbarton" from the 1959 Life Studies. Regarding the work of Williams as the influence for his new style (he wrote to Williams: "I feel more and more tech nically indebted to you . . ."), Lowell reduced signifi cantly the number of symbolic allusions in his poems, and his diction moved closer to Eliot's call for "ordinary everyday language." He made these alterations in his aesthetic to free his work of the complexities common to what he termed as his "old New Critical religious, symbolic poems, many published during the war." He found that "audiences didn't understand" these poems and confided that: "I didn't always understand myself while reading [others' poems]." Specifically, as he gave readings, Lowell changed some of the components of prosody such as line measure in those New Critical poems he had published years before. These changes came at a time when "poetry 54 reading was sublimated by the practice of Allen Ginsberg. . . . Much good poetry is unsuited to audience- performance; mine was incomprehensible," (25) he told Ian Hamilton in an interview. Lowell explained to Seidel what he then did: "I went on a trip to the West Coast and read at least once a day . . . and more and more I found that I was simplifying my poems. If I had a Latin quotation I'd translate it into English. If adding a couple of syllables in a line made it clearer I'd add them, and I'd make little changes just,impromptu. . . . I began to have a certain dis respect for the tight forms. If you could make it easier by just changing syllables, then why not" (345)? This is not to argue, however, that one style is supe rior to the other (as many commentators have done), or that— as already noted— Lowell's more formal verse could not be personal. Robert Hass remarked: . . . I still find myself blinking incredulously when I read— in almost anything written about the poetry— that those early poems "clearly reflect the dictates of the new criticism," while the later ones are "less consciously wrought and extremely intimate." This is the view in which it is "more intimate" and "less conscious" to say "my mind's not right" than to imagine the moment when The death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears [t/o] The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail, And hacks the coiling life out . . . which is to get things appallingly wrong. (6) And Jay Martin properly asserts that: 55 Lowell's poetic manner has changed dras tically . . . His earliest verse was character ized by a tone of baroque exaltation . . . By the sixties, Lowell's poetry had experienced many modifications. No longer oratorical and less pointedly symbolic, it might be dramatic . . . Or intensely personal, even confessional— as in "Fourth of July in Maine" . . . Despite such striking external shifts, all of Lowell's work exhibits the same preoccupations. His basic subject has always been the fate of selfhood in time, and his basic method the examination of the convergence in man of past history and present circumstance. (210-11) I would add to these remarks that the Lowell of Life Studies, and after, increasingly explored the convergence in himself of his own past history, and therefore used the confessional mode of voice to define that self in verse. Because Lowell's blatant aesthetic transformation accompanied his interest for self— work which many poets, who came into prominence after Lowell, regarded as the pre cursor of their personal verse of the confessional mode— it will be useful to trace briefly the development of this aspect of his technique. Both the poetic climate of the late 1950s and Lowell's introspection contributed to his style change. Contrary to Tate's argument that the personal poetry written in open forms lacked an "imaginative focus," Lowell's subject— his self— provided the imaginative impulse for his work, and the loosened forms helped to shape it into the type of "understandable" poetry he wanted to write. The poetry of Life Studies originated from autobiographical prose pieces Lowell begun in 1955--at his therapist's 56 suggestion--to help him recover from the breakdown he experienced the year before. The idea was that prose was more relaxing for Lowell to write; he was to avoid the long periods of unrelieved excitement that usually accompanied his writing poetry. "His new therapist had encouraged him to adopt a strict daily regime. . . . The prose 'reminis cences' were a way of cementing Lowell's new, timetabled calm— prose, Lowell found, need not thrive on bouts of high 'enthusiasm'" reports Hamilton (220). So Lowell originally intended to present in prose all the autobiographical mate rial of Life Studies. But he "found it got awfully tedious working out transitions and putting in things that didn't seem very important but were necessary to the prose continu ity. Also," he told Seidel, "I found it hard to revise" (346). The surviving prose piece is "91 Revere Street," Part Two of Life Studies. Later, in 1971, he was to reflect on what he termed "meter and matter": when the matter of his poetry was auto biographical recollection, he chose a "formless," prose like construction, but when it encompassed public affairs, he required a "fixed form." He told Hamilton: "Much of Life Studies is recollection; Notebook mixes the day-to-day with the history. ..." And referring to his fourteen-line stanza units of Notebook (revised version 1970), he stated, "I didn't find fourteen lines handcuffs. I gained more than I gave. It would have been a worry never to have 57 known when a section must end; variation might have been monotony. Formlessness might have crowded me toward con secutive narrative" (13). Lowell's implication is that his autobiographical poetry, which is written in open forms, is "formless" and therefore requires a narrative structure to order it. Of course since his intention in Life Studies was to tell part of his life's story in verse, he had to assume the narrative approach— often, as it is applied to certain groups of poems in Life Studies, a "consecutive narrative" sequence, though not necessarily a day by day account. Because he wished to keep the "public" subjects of Notebook from becoming a type of narrative, daily jour nal, Lowell believed that his consistent use of the more regular stanza units, rather than his narrative, would pro vide the form. So the choice of subject dictated the form of his poetry written after the early collections. Concerning the personal poems of Life Studies, Lowell made this comment in his essay "After Enjoying Six or Seven Essays on Me," written just before his death in 1977: I found I had no language or meter that would allow me to approximate what I saw or remembered. Yet in prose I had already found what I wanted, the conventional style of autobiography and reminiscence. So I wrote my autobiographical poetry in a style I thought I had discovered in Flaubert, one that used images and ironic or amusing particulars. I did all kinds of tricks with meter and the avoidance of meter. When I didn't have to bang words into rhyme and count, I was more nakedly dependent on rhythm. After 58 this, in the Union Dead, I used the same style but with less amusement, and with more composition and stanza-structure. Each poem was meant to stand by itself. This stronger structure would probably have ruined Life Studies. Which would have lost its novelistic flow. Later on in For the Union Dead, free verse subjects seemed to melt away, and I found myself back in strict meter, yet tried to avoid the symbols and heroics of my first books. (114) These remarks are particularly insightful because they are made from the advantageous perspective of Lowell's reflect ing back on the body of his work after he was some years distant from it. He reaffirms that metered verse would not accomodate his autobiographical subject matter which he wanted conveyed in the conversational manner of prose, and structured in a narrative of "novelistic flow." And when his subjects shifted to something less personal— as in some of the poems in For the Union Dead (1964)— he returned to "strict meter." This practice further supplements his theory regarding the use of the fourteen line stanza in Notebook. As he commented in his essay in Naked Poetry: "The joy and strength of unscanned verse is that it can be as natural as conversation or prose, or can follow the rhythm of the ear that knows no measure. Yet often a poem only becomes a poem and worth writing because it has struggled with fixed meters and rhymes. I can't understand how any poet, who has written both metered and unmetered poems, would be willing to settle for one and give up the other" (124). 59 The "rhythm of the ear" that Lowell mentioned relates back to his conclusion (as stated in the passage about Life Studies) that his "avoidance of meter" and of "rhyme and count" resulted in a dependence on rhythm— which is to note that his verse in open forms remained "poetic," artful, as opposed to being "bad prose hacked into arbitrary line- lengths," to use Ezra Pound's phrase. In his interview with Seidel after Life Studies was published, Lowell remarked that his poems in that book were no less crafted than his earlier poems in meter and rhyme, and no less hard to write: They're not always factually true. There's a good deal of tinkering with fact. You leave out a lot, and emphasize this and not that. Your actual experience is a complete flux. I've invented facts and changed things, and the whole balance of the poem was something invented. So there's a lot of artistry, I hope, in the poems. Yet there's this thing: if a poem is autobiog raphical . . . you want the reader to say, this is true. (349) The effect of presenting the "real Robert Lowell," then, sometimes required straying from the autobiographical facts. It seems Lowell knew what Bruce Weigl— a contemporary per sonal poet— contends: that "for a poet, relying too heavily upon autobiographical detail, structure, context, or strategy can be a dangerous thing. Such a dependence can lull the writer into focusing too much attention on being true to actuality and not enough attention on the poem itself: on the language and on the possibilities of 60 surprise that should always accompany the act of writing poems" (113). These remarks of Weigl, when writing of a book of personal poems by another contemporary poet, illu minate Lowell's reasoning. At present, it is common for poets working in open forms to comment on how grammatical phrases should mark line-breaks: do not, they contend, end a line with a preposition. Others rely on the "breath line," practicing their theory that a line only should be as long as can be read aloud in a single breath; some argue for more complex syntactic units to measure the line, and so forth. Consequently, contemporary personal poetry— much of which betrays Lowell's influence--really is not com pletely "free," but is often restricted to these technical principles; yet it remains "open," not confined to specific rhyme and meter schemes. These aesthetic guides originated in part from Lowell who governed his personal poetry with his special artistry, the "rhythm of his ear"— which many Life Studies reviewers failed to notice— and in order to maintain this rhythm at times meant sacrificing or altering his autobiographical details; this is why Lowell's personal voice is sincere, but hardly authentic. Lowell sensed that by abandoning the meter and rhyme forms, he would become "nakedly dependent on rhythm," and he trusted to his ear to regulate the sound of his personal poetry. But--although many reviews were favorable— several critics felt that the Life Studies poems had neither form 61 nor rhythm, and some were reluctant even to call it poetry. The book was first published in England by Faber and Faber and most of the British reviewers felt that Lowell's verse suffered by the style change from his earlier work. Frank Kermoae, in his essay in The Spectator (May 1, 1959), remarked that "the sequence 'Life Studies,' which is the greater part of this book, strikes one as the work of a poet so sure of his powers that he does not recognize the danger of lapsing into superior doggerel when he too luxuriously controls it." And Philip Larkin wrote that the poems of the "Life Studies" section of the book were "curious, hurried, off-hand vignettes, seeming too personal to be prac tised . . . " (The Manchester Guardian Weekly, May 21, 1959). When the book was published in the United States, most reviews were cautious to endorse Lowell's new style of "prosaic quality," as Richard Eberhart termed it, even though he praised the book in general. Rosenthal (in The Nation, September 19, 1959) called it "impure art." I write of these comments to illustrate how critics assumed that Lowell's personal poetry in open forms was a lessening of the art; and, aided by Lowell's own remark about the "form lessness" of his autobiographical poetry, many believed that, matters of the self were best left to prose. Conversely, however, in studying the art of the poetry in Life Studies, we see that personal poetry can in fact be "formed" by language rhythms and by the use of a 62 confessional voice. We know that Lowell made poetry from his autobiographical prose. Not only did he transform that prose into verse, but his first drafts were often in tra ditional forms. He said to Seidel: . . . when I was writing Life Studies, a good number of the poems were started in very strict meter, and I found that, more than the rhymes, the regular beat was what I didn't want. I have a long poem in there about my father, called "Commander Lowell," which actually is largely in couplets. Well, with that form it's hard not to have echoes of Marvell. That regularity just seemed to ruin the honesty of sentiment, and became rhetorical; it said, "I'm a poem"— though it was a great help when I was revising this orig inal skeleton. I could keep the couplets where I wanted them and drop them where I didn't; there'd be a form to come back to. (345-46) Lowell made at least two significant points here about the style of his personal poetry: his foremost intention was to preserve the integrity of the poem (the "regularity" of a fixed form "just seemed to ruin the honesty of senti ment") , and his work in open forms did not disregard entirely some elements of the fixed form— the rhymed cou plet for example— which he considered useful in crafting the poem. Here are two passages from the first stanza of the final version of "Commander Lowell": There were no undesirables or girls of my set, when I was a boy at Mattapoisett— only Mother, still her Father's daughter. . . . And I, bristling and manic, skulked in the attic, and got two hundred French generals by name, from A to V— from Augereau to Vandamme. I used to dope myself asleep, naming those unpronounceables like sheep. 63 The "four-foot" measures are gone; the syllable count varies greatly from one line to the next— from fifteen to five— and Lowell does not adhere to any regular foot stress much more than a line at a time. But he does retain many of his end-rhyraes, and most of the poem is written in these modi fied couplets. The rhymed couplet is the most obvious argu ment to disclaim the charge that Lowell's use of language in Life Studies is without rhythm, that it is the language of prose, not poetry. Yet these rhythms do not detract from the speaker's sincerity in presenting the poem either. Lowell also sustained rhythms in other poems in the book by the more subtle methods of internal line rhymes, alliteration and assonance. The third stanza of "Skunk Hour" uses all three: The season's ill— we've lost our summer millionaire, who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean catalogue. His nine-knot yawl was auctioned off to lobstermen. A red fox stain covers Blue Hill. The "ill/Hill" rhyme neatly encloses the stanza, and also correspondingly rhymes with "millionaire," "L. L. Bean" and "yawl." Lowell's heavy use of the alliterative "1" sound in "lost," "leap," "catalogue" and "lobstermen" also relates to the "11" rhyme pattern. And the "a" and "o" assonance of "His nine-knot yawl / was auctioned off to lobstermen" creates the sound of speech of the summer millionaire with his New England accent. Speaking aloud "nine-knot yawl" is 64 difficult to do without sounding like a New Englander, in fact. And "Skunk Hour" nearly forces one to read it aloud; the "s" sounds in "season's," "summer" and "seemed" running through the stanza— ending with "fox stain covers"— paces slowly one's enunciation and thereby forces the resemblance to Maine speech. So Lowell's aesthetic provides his readers with a better sense of his subject as well as gives his poeir. the "form" of sound and rhythm he felt it needed. Sometimes for Lowell, his poem's subject dictated a form which uti lized these devices of sound— devices which establish the tone of sincerity. He could never make his poems completely "naked"; that is, he could not write without some use of sound or rhyme because, as Hamilton has written, "rhyme and meter were for him very close to being the 'natural speech' that William Carlos Williams and his followers were always call ing for. The iambic pentameter was not an external, imposed literary method; after three books, it had become compulsive utterance. And it was probably harder for Lowell to discard rhymes than to invent them" (231-32). All his theorizing over "meter and matter" may be misleading then; although his distinction is sound, Lowell's personal poems are not quite formless— even if they are without strict meter— nor are they less artful than his public poems. He said: "the style of autobiography . . . used images and ironic or amusing particulars . . . tricks with meter ..." The 65 careful diction of his personal poems— the sounds created by the order of words, the conversational tones of the language— helps to identify the voice. The form Lowell's poetry takes often is determined by its content; so a poem from Life Studies in open form with an "I" narrator usually has a confessional voice, relating an experience derived from Lowell's personal history— even if some of the details are not wholly factual. As we have seen from the comparison of "Winter in Dunbarton" to "Dunbarton," it is Lowell's direct use of autobiography as part of his aesthetic as well as his language use that ultimately formulates the voice of his personal poetry. Rhyme and sound are used in his personal poems to help clarify the meaning and center the poem around its speaker. Both "Commander Lowell" and "Skunk Hour" reveal highly personal matter, and both use different poetic devices to create their particular sounds. In "Skunk Hour" Lowell used the sound of the poem as part of his subject in order to evoke a better sense of his characterization; in "Commander Lowell" he relied on the rhymes to help form the poem. In either case, all parts of his aesthetic--the forms, rhythms, etc.— contribute to the making of a. dis tinctive voice in his poetry of "autobiography and reminiscence." The various components of Lowell's open form aesthetic all work toward the common concern of conveying his 66 autobiography, and it is this purpose that distinguishes the voice of his personal poetry from the voices of his earlier work, his "American version of heroic poetry." Lowell wrote in "After Enjoying Six or Seven Essays On Me": Looking over my Selected Poems, about thirty years of writing, my impression is that the thread that strings it together is my auto biography, it is a small-scale Prelude, written in many different styles and with digressions, yet a continuing story— still wayfaring. (113) His concern for a personal history returned Lowell back again and again to the writing of autobiographical poetry. After Life Studies was completed, he said: "I don't think that a personal history can go on forever, unless you're Walt Whitman and have a way with you. I feel I've done enough personal poetry. That doesn't mean I won't do more of it, but I don't want to do more now." But For the Union Dead, his next book, opens with such personal poems as "Water," "The Old Flame" and "Middle Age." It is true that For the Union Dead is less intimately autobiographical than the section of "Life Studies" poems in the previous col lection, but the voice in most of the poems in Union remains sincere, "the real Robert Lowell." In a reading he gave at the Poetry Center of the New York YM-YWHA in April 1968, he said: The poems I'm going to read have this peculiarity that they're all in the first person and the first person is me, not an imaginary me though you always lie a bit and invent. He then proceeded to read the following poems from Union: 67 "The Mouth of the Hudson," "July in Washington"— in both, he said, "the person isn't very important, it's an observer. . . . There's two things I like very much: an "I" that's yourself more or less so you can feel what you're saying possibly, and the place that is a place you can take in in some way"— and "Middle Age," a poem, he said, "about my father. And I think when someone's died, when your father's died, that perhaps your different mem ories you have of him merge into one theory. He was in his early thirties when I first remember him, and he was sixty- two when he died. But I remember him as something— as some composite age which would have been forty-five. When I wrote the poem I was forty-five myself, and then it's very easy . . . to identify with him, to feel I was walking in his shoes and sort of doomed to the same advantages and disadvantages in character." So his practice of personal poetry continued in Union; some poems were personal in the sense that he knew well the places described in them, and some were more directly personal like "Middle Age" in which Lowell's seeing himself in his father's role engenders the impetus for what finally becomes a type of self-definition. Lowell's distinction between the "I" as observer of place and the "I" as the primary focus of the poem provides an effectual starting point for an analysis of his confes sional voice in the autobiographical poetry of Life Studies and For the Union Dead. Let us begin with two poems that 68 have Lowell's personal voice as their centers, both from Life Studies: "Waking in the Blue" and "Memories of West Street and Lepke." Begun in early 1958 during his first week in the locked ward Lowell occupied at McLean's Mental Hospital outside Boston, "Waking in the Blue" initially describes the attendant and other occupants of the ward, then in the final stanzas fixes on the Lowell speaker, the voice of the poem: The night attendant, a B. U. sophomore, rouses from the mare's-nest of his drowsy head propped on The Meaning of Meaning. He catwalks down our corridor. . . . Absence I My heart grows tense as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill. (This is the house for the "mentally ill.") What use is my sense of humor? I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties, Once a Harvard all-American fullback, (if such were possible!) still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties, as he soaks, a ramrod with the muscle of a seal in his long tub . . . he thinks only of his figure, of slimming on sherbert and ginger ale— more cut off from words than a seal. This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall McLean's; the hooded night lights bring out "Bobbie," Porcellian '29 a replica of Louis XVI without the wig— redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale, as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit . . . These victorious figures of bravado ossified young. . . . [t/o] [t/o] [t/0] After a hearty New England breakfast, I weigh two hundred pounds 69 this morning. Cock of the walk, I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor's jersey [t/o] before the metal shaving mirrors, and see the shaky future grow familiar in the pinched, indigenous faces of these thoroughbred mental cases, twice my age and half my weight. We are all old timers, each of us holds a locked razor. Again, the rhymes and off-rhymes are present in some of the unmeasured couplets— kill/ill, ale/seal, faces/cases, timers/razor. And some lines also contain sounds of allit eration and assonance, though occasionally just barely (the "s" and "t" rhythms of "I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor's jersey," for example, are not as apparent perhaps as the "ol" sound in "redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale"). Yet the effect of the poem is close enough to Lowell's desired conversational prose of novelistic flow: "roly-poly," "hearty New England breakfast" and "cock of the walk” typify the cliched speech abundant in conversa tion . The narrative— Lowell waking in the morning, observing the others, having breakfast— structures "Waking in the Blue"; there is a gradual progression toward the poem's climax, which is Lowell's realization that "each of us holds a locked razor," a direct comparison between himself and his fellow patients whom he has just depicted rather dis paragingly. Even though the final two lines nearly make a measured, end-rhymed couplet, they retain the conversational manner which creates an intimate communication between______ 70 Lowell and us; we are privy to his new self-awareness— here he "weeps with one eye on the camera" as Simpson remarked of confessional verse in general. "Each of us" could then mean that everyone is mentally imbalanced in some way; no one is perfectly sane. Because we know that the voice is that of Lowell's public self, the situation he describes at McLean's and his assessment of his mental condition at the time of his stay there are sentimental, and this establishes, in part, the sincerity of that voice. The prose-like qualities of con versational tones of language and narrative progression, which allows for the presence of the speaker in the poem (just as it did in "Dunbarton"), create the intimacy between the voice and reader upon which the success of the poem's climax is dependent. These qualities, then, help to make the voice of the confessional mode— the "I" speaker's direct expression to us of a seemingly veracious experience. In the poetry about the self written in the confes sional mode, the aesthetic principles— such as conversa tional language and narrative— work together to illuminate the personal voice; and, more particularly, in the personal poems of Lowell, we know enough of his life to recognize his experience in them which, combined with his admission that his "I" is not an imagined narrator but himself (albeit his public self), reveals a confessional voice: the poet, who is the voice of the poem, speaking as himself, his sincere self. It is part of Lowell's aesthetic, too, to select carefully which autobiographical details to include in "Waking in the Blue." He does not, certainly, portray all the patients who were with him in the ward, but only those who best reflect certain physical aspects of himself or his own behavioral tendencies: Stanley, who "thinks only of his figure," is "more cut off from words than a seal"; and "roly-poly" Bobbie "swashbuckles about" naked. Although— as I have mentioned— Lowell started this poem in his first week at McLean's, he was frustrated with his attempts; the language was too relaxed, chatty, and lacking the fine rhythm of the published version which he did not complete until months after his release. Conse quently it would have been easy for Lowell to regard him self, at least momentarily, "cut off from words" like Stanley. And Lowell struts in front of the shaving mirrors, regarding himself as the "cock of the walk" when earlier he calls Bobbie's swashbuckling a display of "bravado." Stanley is vain about his figure; Lowell is proud to be a strong two hundred pounds, able to put away "a hearty New England breakfast." Lowell, in the final stanza, realizes his "shaky" future which he sees reflected in his fellow patients' "pinched, indigenous faces": he is one of them, revelling in youthful accomplishments (one of the "victo rious figures"), every bit as "thoroughbred" as the other mental cases from Harvard and the Porcellian Club. In the 72 final lines, then, the speaker Lowell is as "naked" as Bobbie; that is, he stands before himself stripped of the illusion that, because he is half their age and twice their weight, he is better off. Neither his sense of humor nor how he views others can set him apart from them. Each men tal patient must shave before a metal mirror, not glass, and each "holds a locked razor"; no one is regarded more sane than another. Lowell balances this poem (recall his statement that he altered the facts in his autobiographical verse so that "the whole balance of the poem was something invented") between Stanley, Bobbie and his self he depicts in the poem, the result of which is a final centering on the personal voice— the speaker— of the poem. So the last lines are acutely personal, intense, pathetic even, because of their tone of honesty as well as their placement at the end of a balanced narrative— both resulting from Lowell's aesthetic decisions while making the poem. This point will become even more important later in the chapter when I dis cuss Wright's and Bly's personal poetry without the aid of the extensive biographical information that is available on Lowell. "Memories of West Street and Lepke" is constructed in a similar manner as "Waking in the Blue." Lowell's recollection in verse of his (factual) imprisonment at West Street begins with his fellow inmates, and his . relationship to them. Here is most of the poem: 73 Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning, I hog a whole house on Boston1s "hardly passionate Marlborough Street," where even the man scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans, has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate, and is a "young Republican." I have a nine months' daughter . . . These are the tranquillized Fifties, and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime? I was a fire-breathing Catholic C. 0., and made my manic statement, telling off the state and president, and then sat waiting sentence in the bull pen beside a Negro boy with curlicues of marijuana in his hair. Given a year, I walked on the roof of the West Street short enclosure like my school soccer court, and saw the Hudson River once a day through sooty clothesline entanglements and bleaching khaki tenements. Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz . . . so vegetarian, he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen He tried to convert Bioff and Brown, the Hollywood pimps, to his diet. . . . they blew their tops and beat him black I was so out of things, I'd never heard of the Jehovah's Witnesses. "Are you a C. 0.?" I asked a fellow jailbird. "No," he answered, "I'm a J. W." He taught me the "hospital tuck," and pointed out the T shirted back of Murder Incorporated's Czar Lepke, there piling towels on a rack, or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full of things forbidden the common man: a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm. Flabby, bald, lobotomized, he drifted in a sheepish calm, where no agonizing reappraisal jarred his concentration on the electric chair— hanging like an oasis in his air of lost connections. . . . _________________________ Jail, a [t/o] [t/o] fruit. and blue. 74 It is necessary to recount some history before discuss ing the poem. Lowell's date for his induction in the army was September 8, 194 3. As early as December 1941, he had been trying to enlist but had been turned away on six sepa rate occasions due to his poor vision. Yet after the seventh physical examination— and with the United States now in the middle of the war— the army found Lowell fit to serve. The day before he was to report, however, he wrote to President Roosevelt refusing "the opportunity," he said, "you offer me . . . for service in the Armed Forces," and he filed a Declaration of Personal Responsibility as a conscientious objector with the U. S. District Attorney in New York. He told the President: "You will understand how painful such a decision is for an American whose family traditions, like your own, have always found their fulfill ment in maintaining, through responsible participation in both the civil and the military services, our country's freedom and honor." He expounds these sentiments in his Declaration; claiming that his participation in the war would not be "responsible," he argued: . . . members of my family had served in all our wars since the Declaration of Independence: I thought— our tradition of service is sensible and noble; if its occasional exploitation by Money, Politics and Imperialism is allowed to seriously discredit it, we are doomed. . . . In 1941 we undertook a patriotic war to preserve our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor against the lawless aggressions of a totalitarian league: in 1943 we are collaborating with the most unscrupu lous and powerful of totalitarian dictators to 75 destroy law, freedom, democracy, and above all, our continued national sovereignty. . . . I can not honorably participate in a war whose prosecu tion, as far as I can judge, constitutes a betrayal of my country. (qtd. in Hamilton 86-9) These last remarks help to explain Lowell's change in atti tude from two years earlier concerning his service in the army. As a consequence of his refusal, Lowell was sentenced to one year and one day in the Federal Correctional Center at Danbury, Connecticut. He was held for a few days in the West Street Jail in New York before being transferred to Danbury, and the tough jail proved to be a shocking and lasting experience for the "American whose family tradi tions" resembled Roosevelt's. An inmate of West Street at the time Lowell was there remembers: Lowell was in a cell next to Lepke, you know, Murder Incorporated, and Lepke says to him: "I'm in for killing. What are you in for?" "Oh, I'm in for refusing to kill." And Lepke burst out laughing. It was kind of ironic. (qtd. in Hamilton 91) Knowing this history augments one's understanding of "Memories of West Street and Lepke," just as the biograph ical documentation supplemented the reading of "Waking in the Blue." It suggests a confirmation that the voice of the poem is narrating an experience from the poet's auto biography. Knowing something of Lowell's upbringing also illuminates his choice of details in the poem: Boston's "hardly passionate Marlborough Street," the "bull pen," the 76 Republican filth scavenger, and the "Negro boy with curli cues of marijuana in his hair," a pacifist, the pimps, a Jehovah's Witness, Lepke— a varied assortment of places and characters. In an early draft of the prose autobiography he worked on in 1955--material that he later drew from for his Life Studies poems— Lowell wrote that he reflected on his rather privileged childhood while recovering from one of his breakdowns: . . . after six or seven weeks at the Payne- Whitney Clinic, my bluster and manic antics died away. Images of my spoiled childhood ached inside me, and I would lean with my chin in my hand, and count the rustling poplars below me, which lined the hospital driveway and led out to the avenues of Manhattan, to life. (qtd. in Hamilton 221) In "91 Revere Street," writing of one of those images of his childhood, Lowell described his physical education at the private Brimmer School he attended: "On the roof of our school building, there was an ugly concrete area that looked as if it had been intended for the top floor of a garage. Here we played tag, drew lines with chalk, and chose up sides for a kind of kids' soccer" (26). Although Joseph Bennett in Hudson Review (1959) thought Lowell's poems betrayed a snobbishness (" . . .we visit an insane asylum for Porcellian members; our jail in New York reminds us of the soccer court at St. Mark's school"), one of Lowell's intentions— in these "self-therapeutic" poems— was to contrast his spoiled upbringing with what he experienced 77 in adulthood, and thereby learn, as he did finally in "Waking in the Blue," that being educated in private schools cannot prevent mental collapse, nor, as "Memories" indicates, prepare one for sharing a cell with pimps and murderers. Rather than remaining a snob, the poems show how Lowell changed, how these experiences of incarceration helped to "unspoil" him, so that as he reflected back on them while at the Payne-Whitney Clinic, his "spoiled child hood ached inside" him in contrast. Aside from these facts of biography, his poetry tells us that he was trying to overcome a spoiled childhood whose trappings extended to adulthood: in "Home After Three Months Away," he says "I keep no rank nor station"; and a close reading of "Memories" reveals that Lowell acknowl edged the contrast between his privileged lifestyle and that of others not listed in the Boston Social Register, as Lowell's family was. The poem's narrative, formed in part by a flashback, allows for a reverie which concludes with the speaker's understanding that he has matured because of his time in jail. So that now, long since freed and back in his Boston home, he can appreciate his privileges, but not as a spoiled child might. The biographical material on Lowell, then, regarding this instance, is superfluous; the poem's narrative structure allows for the inclusion of any background information necessary to understand "Memories." 78 As the poem begins, the narrator Lowell is at leisure: only teaching one day a week, he has sufficient time to read and lounge in his pajamas in a large house he "hogs" in a (then) fashionable area of Boston ("hardly passionate Marlborough Street" is a line of William James). This sit uation initiates the speaker Lowell's memory of the time he spent in prison where his cramped living quarters were not so ideal. He reflects on his "seedtime" (from Book I of Wordsworth's Prelude: "Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up / Foster'd alike by beauty and by fear"), his time of growth, which— now that he is forty— he can be "posi tively ironic about," as Louis Simpson suggested in A Revolution in Taste. (Simpson regarded Life Studies as Lowell's "portrait of an artist as a young man," and "Memories" makes this claim reasonable.) Lowell's descrip tion of his seedtime, dating from the 1940s which were more turbulent for him than the "tranquillized Fifties" (an allusion to a phrase of John Foster Dulles who called the era a tranquil time), includes calling himself "a fire- breathing Catholic C. O.," making a "manic statement, tell ing off the state and president"— the reasons for his being jailed. The roof of the West Street Jail, he remembers, was "a short enclosure," which he compares to Brimmer's soccer court ("an ugly concrete area"), not St. Mark's grass field as was suggested. Here, Lowell's reverie not only takes him through the steps of his seedtime maturation 79 but, much like Henry Adams, attempts to link his education (both in and out of school) with his experience of jail; the contrast shows that very little of it prepared him for West Street and the events that led him there. Lowell "yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz," which provides the clue indicating that he was concerned with the ontological knowledge claims of Aristotlian metaphysics, with the "con nections" of how he arrived at one place from another. And this sets up the contrast between himself (the self of the poem) and Lepke: Lowell sits in a large house with plenty of books and other possessions; Lepke is satisfied with "his little segregated cell" with his "portable radio, a dresser, two toy American flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm"— this last detail contrasts with Lowell's using religion to break from his country rather than "tying" the two together as Lepke has done. Lobotomized, Lepke cannot remember his seedtime so he drifts "in a sheepish calm" unable to reappraise his past, but only looks forward to the future of the electric chair which for him is an "oasis in his air of lost connections"; Lowell, unlike Lepke, is able to retrace his development, and regards his own reappraisal as "agonizing" but ironic in comparison to the fate of Lepke. In stating that Lepke is not bothered by any "agonizing reappraisal," the insinuation following is that Lowell is so burdened, which is one of the poem's themes. That by tracing his personal history in the poem, 80 the self depicted hoped to better define his present cir cumstance— a first time father at age forty— but instead this exploration uncovered his "spoiled" upbringing. The speaker tells us that he told off the president, that he had never heard of the Jehovah's Witnesses so consumed as he was by his own Catholic conversion, that he did not know how to make his bed properly, and so forth. So his seed time, the speaker Lowell realizes, was about as pampered as that of the "man scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans" who "has two children, a beach wagon, a help mate, and is a 'young Republican.'" But the fact that he is now able to see it as such, as an image of his "spoiled childhood aching inside" him, indicates that he has matured by the experiences, making him less spoiled. The flashback technique of "Memories" helps us to read the poem in this way. Like "Waking in the Blue," the poem concerns the speaker Lowell in the process of defining himself; the nar rator of "Waking" comes to a sudden self-revelation, whereas the narrator of "Memories" is in the act of discovery. Lowell's "confession"— if any— in "Memories" is confiding in us that he considers his past agonizing. The final image of Lepke concentrating on his execution— which he finds as refreshing, beautiful and sustaining as an oasis— contrasts with the speaker's memories of the past. Lepke doesn't remember his past, and this the Lowell speaker envies. In these "self-therapeutic" poems of Life Studies, the self 81 depicted by Lowell has progressed from overcoming an atti tude of smugness towards the other mental patients to realizing he is their equal (in "Waking in the Blue") to envying a fellow inmate, desiring perhaps his own "sheepish calm" (in "Memories"). It is this sense of self-therapy in Life Studies that forces the voice into confession, which implies of course, that someone— a reading audience— is listening; the expressions of self-analysis, then, are necessarily confes sional: "What use is my sense of humor?" and "We are all old-timers, / each of us holds a locked razor." ' ("Waking"); "Ought I to regret my seedtime?" and "I was so out of things ..." ("Memories"); "I keep no rank nor station. / Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small." ("Home After Three Months Away"); and "My mind's not right. . . . I myself am hell . . ." ("Skunk Hour") are a few examples. In each of these poems, the confessional tone of voice is accomplished by its use of "I," the narrative structure and the conversational language working to create the intimacy and sincerity necessary for the success of any personal poem of the confessional mode. We accept these pronounce ments as sincere even though many are poetic artifice taken from other poems; "I keep no rank nor station" is an allu sion to Hamlet and "I myself am hell" is what Satan says in Paradise Lost. These principles of aesthetics separate the private, authentic Lowell (who in actuality did spend time 82 at McLean's and West Street) from the public representation of the self— a sincere one— -who consciously makes these aesthetic selections in this verse of self-exploration. This distinction becomes especially important in identifying a confessional voice if the poet's biography is unknown. The narrator of "Memories"— whether or not we accept him as Lowell speaking in his own, private voice— makes simple prose statements like "I hog a whole house," "I have a nine months' daughter," "I am forty," "I was a fire-breathing Catholic C. 0.," etc. Given the reference to being Catho-' lie, these statements assume a tone of delivery that one might make to a priest in the confessional: "I confess that I hog a house, I am forty ..." Nevertheless, he confesses these things with a sincere attitude, in "ordinary everyday language," which draws us close to him. And we get even closer when he allows us in on his reverie, the flashback to the past. So that even if we knew nothing of Lowell's life, "Memories" would remain a poem of the con fessional mode because the speaker openly reveals personal details which we accept because he has won our trust through his diction, sentence syntax and use of narrative. In both "Waking in the Blue" and "Memories," the focus is, ultimately, the narrator: how he assimilates into his self-definition the experiences he depicts in the poems. This is one use of the confessional voice in personal poetry. Another is having the voice act as an observer, a 83 recorder of an incident or scene, but without comment as to how it relates to the narrator’s sense of himself. In this way, the poem unveils something of how the confessional speaker thinks by revealing what he chooses to observe. These poems are of the confessional mode because they pre sent openly the unsheathed perceptions of the narrator, the poet's public self, even though Lowell said he changed many actual details for the poem's sake. Two examples provided by Lowell, both from For the Union Dead, are "The Mouth of the Hudson" and "July in Washington." In "The Mouth of the Hudson," the narrator is completely removed from the land scape and the people he describes: A single man stands like a bird-watcher, and scuffles the pepper and salt snow from a discarded, gray Westinghouse Electric cable drum. He cannot discover America by counting the chains of condemned freight-trains from thirty states. . . . His eyes drop, and he drifts with the wild ice ticking seaward down the Hudson . . . A Negro toasts wheat-seeds over the coke-fumes of a punctured barrel. Chemical air sweeps in from New Jersey, and smells of coffee. Across the river, ledges of suburban factories tan in the sulphur-yellow sun of the unforgivable landscape. As Lowell has informed us, this poem is written "in the first person and the first person is me . . . an observer," 84 his public self as represented by the poem. The view from the mouth of the Hudson River is not that of the "single man" whose presence begins the poem; rather the poem’s voice is Lowell's watching this man, then the "Negro," the chem ical air and the factories. The single man, who "stands like a bird-watcher," drops his eyes and follows the ice down river while the voice continues to observe other people and aspects of the landscape. "The Mouth of the Hudson" explores Lowell's relation ship to the land in which he finds himself. He interprets the "counting the chains of condemned freight-trains" as the single man's attempt to "discover America." Yet since the poem is in the first person, we are not allowed the opportunity to hear the single man think for himself; the psychology of counting the freight-trains in order to find America, then, is the voice's imposed on the single man. So the concern expressed in the poem by the speaker is his concern for the country whose landscape has become one of "condemned freight-trains," "chemical air" and "a sulphur- yellow sun. " That the landscape affects the narrator, the confes sional voice, is shown more directly in "July in Washington," in which the first person observer enters the poem: The stiff spokes of this wheel touch the sore spots of the earth. 85 On the Potomac, swan-white power launches keep breasting the sulphurous wave. . . . [t/o] On the circles, green statues ride like South American liberators above the breeding vegetation . . . The elect, the elected . . . they come here bright as dimes, [t/o] and die dishevelled and soft. We cannot name their names, or number their dates— circle on circle, like rings on a tree— but we wish the river had another shore, some further range of delectable mountains, distant hills powdered blue as a girl's eyelid. It seems the least little shove would land us there, that only the slightest repugnance of our bodies we no longer control could drag us back. This poem, which expresses a disillusionment with the Eisenhower administration, is constructed to allow the voice directly into the dramatic situation about half way through. The city of Washington,, D. C., planned in concen tric circles, is described as the speaker sees it in mid summer: the Potomac, otters and raccoons, and, "above the breeding vegetation," equestrian statues where some of the circled streets intersect. This is the setting for our country's policy makers, "the elect, the elected" (a sardonic pun on Puritan leaders) who "come here bright as dimes, and die dishevelled and soft." These are the people who have come to Washington excited with new ideas for change, but, in these "tranquillized Fifties," they actually accomplish very little and eventually lose their enthusiasm. But the 86 large wheel of government remains, touching "the sore spots of the earth," which of course alludes to the "wheels" of the planned circles of D. C. and also to Dante. So the landscape, seemingly pastoral and apart from the throngs of politics, becomes the metaphor for the current administra tion from which the Lowell speaker would like to be removed. "We wish the river had another shore . . . of delectable mountains"— another pun on Bunyon— of which he claims is within reach if only something could awaken them from tran quillity, give them "the least little shove." In this way, the voice is able to relate the landscape to the men who govern it, and he can define better his place and power within this environment: the people can remain in the dream land of "distant hills powdered blue as a girl's eye lid" until, the voice tells us, "only the slightest repug nance of our bodies / we no longer control could drag us back." In this world where a mediocre administration end lessly grinds on, serving a public so tranquil they do nothing to change it, people have no control over their destinies, no longer in control of their bodies even. The speaker as an observer of landscape, then, whether a character in the poem (as in "July in Washington") or not (as in "The Mouth of the Hudson"), provides a way for the personal voice of Lowell to explore an area of self definition without using a narrative of an autobiographical experience that can be documented as such, as was the case 87 in "Waking in the Blue" and "Memories of West Street and Lepke." Lowell's aesthetic, then, identifies the voice of his personal poetry as confessional; his biography clarifies certain references in the poems' text and it corroborates our reasoning, yet Lowell's use of an "I" speaker— one that is sincere, one that recounts plausible personal experiences— to define his public self by means of the poem (in that the poet's public self defines itself by the expe rience it relates) is finally that which determines the use of voice in the confessional mode. The poetry of James Wright will illustrate further this concept. II. James Wright began using a more personal voice in his books The Branch Will Not Break (1963) and Shall We Gather at the River (1968); like Lowell, Wright first wrote poems— collected in The Green Wall (1957) and Saint Judas (1959)— that displayed his concern for literary diction, an intel- lectualized surface of elegance and irony, and exhibited a traditional use of meter, rhyme and stanza patterns. He commented to William Heyen and Jerome Mazzaro in 1972: "I was trying to learn how to write in what I call a clas sical way, and I wanted to subordinate whatever devices of language I could control to a single theme in each poem" (137). However, these early poems seem to betray that con tent and theme apparently were of secondary importance to Wright; he concentrated, rather, on portraying an objective tone of speaker in relating his subject. In those poems in which the speaker was identifiable (that is, having a pres ence in the poem as opposed to an omniscient voice alone), Wright used either an "I" narrator possessing a distanced voice and taking a formal stance, or a persona. But his poetry of the 1960s showed a move inward, toward a confes sional voice; these poems were now more concerned with theme and content, which necessitated a clarity of expression to be attained even at the expense of the formal verse he had been practicing. This echoed the situation Lowell had come to with his personal poetry. In a 1975 interview with Paris Review, Wright spoke of the change in his style as a result of his struggles— both personal and artistic: After I finished [Saint Judas] I had finished with poetry forever. I truly believed that I had no more to do with this art. . . . At that time I had come, for personal reasons but also for artistic reasons, to something like a dead end. I was in despair at that time, and what usually has consoled me is words— I've always been able to turn to them. But suddenly, it seemed to me that the words themselves had gone dead, I mean dead in me, and I didn't know what to do. It was at that time Robert Bly's magazine, which was then called The Fifties, appeared. . . . He made it clear to me that the tradition of poetry which I had tried to master, and in which I'd come to a dead end, was not the only one. He reminded me that poetry is a possi bility, that, although all poetry is formal, there are many forms, just as there are many forms of feeling. (48-9) 89 His poetry following Saint Judas broke, as he says, from "the tradition of poetry which I had tried to master," yet the penultimate poem of that book, "At the Executed Murderer's Grave," which is formally end-rhymed— albeit irregularly--points toward the examination of self that was to come in his poetry following it. The "grave" in the title is George Doty's, a rapist and thief who was executed for murdering one of the girls he abused. But as Wright's personal speaker recounts this story for us in his poem, he tries to understand his relationship to Doty and, par ticularly, the reason for his own guilt over Doty's execu tion : 1 My name is James A. Wright, and I was born Twenty-five miles from this infected grave, In Martins Ferry, Ohio, where one slave To Hazel-Atlas Glass became my father. He tried to teach me kindness. . . . 2 Doty, if I confess I do not love you, Will you let me alone? I burn for my own lies. The nights electrocute my fugitive, My mind. I run like the bewildered mad At St. Clair Sanitarium . . . Pleased to be playing guilty after dark. 3 I pity myself, because a man is dead. If Belmont County killed him, what of me? His victims never loved him. Why should we? And yet, nobody had to kill him either. It does no good to woo the grass, to veil The quicklime hole of a man's defeat and shame. . . . [t/o] 6 Staring politely, they will not mark my face 90 From any murderer's, buried in this place. Why should they? We are nothing but a man. 7 Doty, the rapist and the murderer. Sleeps in a ditch of fire, and cannot hear; And where, in earth or hell's unholy peace, Men's suicides will stop, God knows, not I. . . . Wrinkles of winter ditch the rotted face Of Doty, killer, imbecile, and thief: Dirt of my flesh, defeated, underground. Dave Smith wrote of this poem that "Wright's employ ment of biographical details which are verifiable, the con fessional element, was obvious and demonstrated the poetry of personality. However, the syntactical skill and supple ness, the suspensions and juxtapositions, the rigorous cadence and tight rhymes drove against the poem's sponta neity. Wright created a character in whom we could place trust, a mature and sympathetic and ironic voice. He wrote and published three versions of the poem as he worked it toward the illusion of veracity and away from the dead voices of the past" (xvi). This "poetry of personality" is, finally, the mark of James Wright's confessional voice "in whom we could place trust." Wright putatively related the following story to a class about "At the Executed Murderer's Grave," and because it illustrates something of his personality, I quote it at some length: A few years ago I received a letter from a woman who lives in my home town of Martins Ferry, Ohio. . . . She mentioned some of her favorite poems of mine but said there was one poem in par ticular— "At the Executed Murderer's Grave"— which she could never understand. . . . Well, the woman said she could not accept this poem. 91 Her words were something like, "I was a young girl then and I remember that Doty case quite well. It was vicious and sadistic. Not only did Doty murder the young woman, but he beat her so badly that her skull was cracked and half her brain was scattered. Still, in your poem, you somehow find sympathy for Doty and question the morality of the society that ordered his death. Well, as far as I'm concerned, George Doty was a disgusting human being who got exactly what he deserved. Knowing the facts as you do, I can't understand how you could feel any differently." As you might guess, I thought about this woman's letter for a long while and I tried writing something back to her to clarify the poem. I must have written four or five separate letters but never mailed any of them. In the end I sent her a note thanking her for her letter without even mentioning the Doty poem. But in one of those letters which I never mailed I hit the nail right on the head. I told her that as far as I was concerned there was no doubt that Doty, as she had put it, had gotten "exactly what he deserved." I was not trying to defend or excuse him. What the poem tries to say is simply this: I pray to God that I don't get exactly what I deserve. (Serchuk 88-9) That no crime is wholly individual was a favorite Wright theme. He ended the poem: "Doty, killer, imbecile, and thief: Dirt of my flesh, defeated, underground." Human beings are of one flesh, the Wright speaker says in the poem, and as he stands over Doty's grave knowing full well "for whom the bell tolls," he too feels "defeated, underground," where his flesh, like Doty's, has turned to dirt. Therefore an execution of a murderer, even, is an act of suicide, and "where . . . men's suicides will stop, God knows ..." But the public self which Wright defines by the experience related in the poem came to that under standing through the process of examining his guilt over 92 Doty's execution. He begins the poem by stating the facts of which he is certain: "My name is James A. Wright," etc. In attempting to define the reasons for his guilt, he examines himself, who he is, where he came from— a father who taught kindness even though he likely could have become embittered because he was a "slave to Hazel-Atlas Glass," which is a rather dark pun on the incident of Jim Crow who was freed in Martins Ferry. Remembering his father's teaching is one reason for his guilt; Wright is "kind"— enough so to feel remorse. The voice of the poem gives the "illusion of verac ity"; like Lowell's realization that he is no better than the other mental patients in "Waking in the Blue," Wright's compassion leads to his realization that even though he really is better than Doty, he still does not want what he deserves— he wants mercy. For both Lowell and Wright, a poem which concludes with a revelation of the speaker con cerning his self— one which helps that speaker define him self more clearly— becomes an open confessional revealing the (sincere) self's most intimate struggles with personal inquiry. For any poem to be successful in this, the sin cerity of the speaker must be established, even though it may be ambiguous and ironical as the confessional voice of Lowell and Wright both are. As seen in Lowell's poems of this mode, one way for the poet to establish the integrity, or sincerity, of the voice he uses is through craft— the 93 way the poem is constructed. In "At the Executed Murderer's Grave," Wright disre gards Eliot's directive (which Wright learned at Kenyon College from his first poetry teacher, John Crowe Ransom) to avoid labeling emotions, to allow instead the poem's images and objects to evoke them. But Wright, assuming a confessional voice and tone in this poem, has his speaker state openly: "I burn for my own lies," "I pity myself," and so forth. This is one of the aspects of Wright's craft that make his confessional speaker believable, sincere, as Serchuk has remarked: "For me, Wright's work was the embod iment of all that poetry could and should be. Simple. Direct. Understated. Visionary but shy. As formal as the imagination dictated without ever sacrificing cleanness or the natural rhythms of speech. Wright's poetry never bored me, and, more importantly, I believed him. Casting aside every professional dictum concerning the separation of the artist from his specific creation, I believed Wright com pletely, unashamedly. For me, his poems were not merely convincing. As MacLeish's 'Ars Poetica' demanded, they were" (85-6). It is difficult indeed to find Wright unbe lievable (that is, not sincere) when he opens with: "My name is James A. Wright, and I was born . . . in Martins Ferry, Ohio," and continues to add enough factual details (place names like Hazel-Atlas Glass, Belmont County, and circumstances of the Doty case) which give credence to 94 everything else, true or not— that is, the voice remains sincere even though the speaker may be like that of Whitman when using factual details, such as saying he was with John Paul Jones. We have the sense, however, that we are getting the real James Wright--to paraphrase Lowell'— not only because he suggests his is the authentic voice of the poem (by opening with "My name is James A. Wright"), but his use of the "natural rhythms of speech" and the seeming veracity of experience convinces us throughout that his voice is one of candor. The "personal dead end" that Wright mentioned in the Paris Review interview is reflected by the speaker of "At the Executed Murderer's Grave." The struggling to justify an execution, and the resulting suffering over moral and ethical concerns, perhaps completed for Wright all that could be properly expressed in poetry. Consequently, fol lowing that book, he remarked in his essay "From A Letter": "the words themselves had gone dead" for him. And regarding the artistic malaise he mentioned, the story Wright told about the poem's meaning clearly has more-impact than the poem itself, written in what he later called "the rhymed iambics which no fashionable poet would be caught dead writing these days" (287). But when Robert Bly reminded him that "poetry is a possibility," as he told Stitt, "that although all poetry is formal, there are many forms, just as there are many forms of feeling," he found that open 95 forms helped him to express "something," he says, "that I think I wanted to say from the beginning. And that, unfor tunately, being damned as I consider myself, I felt I had to say or I would die. I think that most of the people who are alive in the world right now are very unhappy. I don't want people to be unhappy, and I'm sorry that they are. I wish there were something I could do to help. I'm coming to face the fact that there isn't much I can do to help. And I think I've been trying to say that ever since I've started to write books. That's what my books are about" (50). This is one theme of "At the Executed Murderer's Grave," and the sense of personal unhappiness in that poem resonates to include all men and women, all their suffering. So Wright's conception of himself ("being damned as I con sider myself") shaped his vision of everyone ("I think that most of the people who are alive in the world right now are very unhappy," he said); it is an individual conception originating from self-exploration, which he makes universal by imposing it on "most of the people who are alive in the world." That Wright's personal anguish extended to his personal poetry is important to remember as we continue discussion of his confessional voice. He remarked: "I loved Saint Judas best because I came to terms with my own pain then.” But, if that is clear in the poetry of that collection, he achieves it mostly by allowing a third person voice, a persona, or an historical 96 or mythological character (as used in the title poem, "Saint Judas") to speak for him. In his books following, however, he increasingly relied on a confessional voice, the presence of his public self in the poem. Since Wright regarded himself--including, of course, his own fears and unhappiness— as representative of "most people," his per sonal poetry, then, is an exploration of the self which depicts an universal consciousness as defined by his own vision. Two poems from The Branch Will Not Break will illustrate this, "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" and "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota." The Wright speaker acts as an observer in "Autumn," as Lowell did in "The Mouth of the Hudson"; unlike Lowell's poem however, which focused on specific individuals, Wright makes general assertions and then applies them to the people of his poem en masse: In the Shreve High football stadium, I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood, [t/o] And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel, Dreaming of heroes. All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home. Their women cluck like starved pullets, Dying for love. Therefore, Their sons grow suicidally beautiful At the beginning of October, And gallop terribly against each other's bodies. The voice of this poem is personal in that— like "The Mouth of the Hudson"— the thought process of the observer is 97 revealed. The poem represents the speaker's thoughts; and, as this (confessional) speaker sits watching a high school football game, his observations move from the more specific, the regional, to the general: from "Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville" and the "night watchman of Wheeling Steel" to the universal assessments that "all proud fathers are ashamed to go home" and "their women cluck," "their sons grow suicidally beautiful." The poem allows us to witness this progression, and the final assertion, prefaced by the conclusive "therefore," returns the speaker back to the football game at Shreve High where the poem began. The speaker thinks first about the men who work at the steel mills in the area, then assumes that since they are in the stadium watching the game, they are the fathers of the boys playing. Regardless whether the men are or not, the people in the stadium initiate the speaker's thoughts of first the "Polacks," then the "Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood" which in turn leads him to theorize that they are "ashamed to go home," that "their women cluck like starved pullets, dying for love," and that, therefore, the men "dreaming of heroes," watch their sons "gallop terribly against each other's bodies." It is a personal voice which depicts a scene as the narrator observes it and, in doing so, gives us his psychoanalytic interpretation of the men he sits among in the stadium, their sons and wives. The voice is not self-therapeutic as was Lowell's, but interpretative of the society and the people of which he is a part. In "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota," the voice is more self-centered, con cerned with the place of the speaker among nature: Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk, Blowing like a leaf in green shadow. . . . To my right, In a field , of sunlight between two pines, The droppings of last year's horses Blaze up into golden stones. I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life. Recall Wright's statements: "I don't want people to be unhappy, and I'm sorry that they are. I wish there were something I could do to help. . . . there isn't much I can do . . . That's what my books are about." According to Wright's view, the speaker's personal realization in "Lying in a Hammock," that "I have wasted my life," could be declared by most people since most are "very unhappy." For anyone who has failed, like himself, to find solace in the solitude of a pasture, to be appreciative of nature, life has been wasted. Viewing the "bronze butterfly," the "golden stones," and the floating chicken hawk, the speaker feels he should have spent more of his life learning to share in this natural world. Wright said to Stitt: "Human beings are unhappily part of nature, perhaps nature become conscious of itself. Oh, how I would love to be a 99 chickadee! But I can't be a chickadee, all I can be is what I am. I love the natural world and I'm conscious of the pain in it. So I'm a nature poet who writes about human beings in nature. I love Nietzsche, who called man 'the sick animal'" (47). Wright's statement is inclusive; he refers to "human beings" rather to himself solely, and he emphasizes that Nietzsche saw every man as "sick." "Lying in a Hammock" illustrates the shortcomings of human beings, their "sickness" which is that of wasting their time away from nature, and in so doing, the poem iden tifies a principal reason for man's suffering. So the poem can serve as a method to introduce people to another, natural side, of themselves even if only transmuted to the printed page; it is one way Wright could help alleviate the human suffering, the sickness he regarded as universal. The Branch Will Not Break, then, is "about" both his speak er's realization that he could not help much as well as the failed attempts in trying. In specific reference to the last line of "Lying in a Hammock," Wright said, in an interview with Dave Smith, that Americans (again, the implied "all") have a tendency to waste, and that he has tried to teach his students otherwise: American critics think that last line is a moral, that it is a comment which says I have wasted my life by lying in a hammock. Actually, behind everything in my general thoughts and feelings was the idea that one of the worst things in 100 American life is waste. I think that our tendency to waste is a truly dreadful one. I have told my students that one of the most horrifing things to me is to stand, being my age, and look at a class of nineteen and twenty-year-old people who are trying to read a passage of say, Milton or Shakespeare and to see their faces saying it is a waste of time. They don't see how precious their lives are. (29) In "Lying in a Hammock" the personal voice, as an observer, begins by describing the outside world with seem ing objectivity, then finishes introspectively; the speaker of "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" expands his thoughts to make universal judgments. Since Wright believed that his own despair was a condition shared by most people, his personal poems assume a broad significance. Wright wanted to be a shaman of sorts, to help people; he therefore wrote of his own experience of suffering and his methods of coping with it perhaps to suggest by implication that any one's unhappiness could be dealt with similarly. And, as the loss— the waste— described in "Lying in a Hammock" indicates, man must become closer to nature, commune with it in order to heal. One example of the Wright speaker healing his sickness through nature is manifested in the comic poem "Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me": Relieved, I let the book fall behind a stone. I climb a slight rise of grass. . . . I close my eyes for a moment, and listen. The old grasshoppers Are tired, they leap heavily now, 101 Their thighs are burdened. I want to hear them, they have clear sounds to make. [t/o] Then lovely, far off, a dark cricket begins In the maple trees. The confessional voice— immediately recognizable as such by the veracity of experience it describes, its sincerity, syntax and use of the personal pronoun "I" as subject in a majority of the phrases— states that certain human sounds of speech are depressing, a feeling which can be relieved by listening to the sounds of "the old grasshoppers" and "a dark cricket." I do not mean to suggest that these poems ("Lying in a Hammock" and "Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry") are not personal in the sense that they express Wright's concern of self— they are; they relate to Wright's private circumstance (the speaker Wright's), but not exclusively as Lowell's confessional poetry often did. Rather, because Wright con sidered himself a representative man and saw his unhappiness as a microcosm of everyone's, his personal poems are repre sentative "confessionals," revealing what he believed to be diffuse themes, applicable to both himself and others. Some of his personal poetic meditations are, in effect, public pronouncements. "A Blessing," near the end of The Branch Will Not Break, shows how the speaker finds a joy in the company of horses, how nature— as in "Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry"— can rejuvenate the speaker. The poem also betrays 102 the speaker's assumption that his anguish, his lonesomeness, are conditions that extend not only to other humans but to the horses as well. "A Blessing,” then, combines the two elements characteristic of Wright's personal poetry of this collection: that the personal voice speaks of conditions germane to the many, and that nature offers the best way to alleviate the common anguish. In this poem, two ponies welcome the intrusion of the speaker and a friend into their field: Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. And the eyes of those two Indian ponies Darken with kindness. They have come gladly out of the willows To welcome my friend and me. We step over the barbed wire into the pasture Where they have been grazing all day, alone. They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness [t/o] That we have come. They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. [t/o] There is no loneliness like theirs. . . . I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, For she has walked over to me And nuzzled my left hand. . . . And the light breeze moves to me to caress her long ear [t/o] That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist. Suddenly I realize That if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom. The speaker interpolates the ponies' actions in human terms: their eyes "darken with kindness," "they have come gladly out of the willows to welcome my friend and me," "they can hardly contain their happiness that we have come," "they bow shyly." The ponies are viewed as such by the speaker, 103 but the voice is so assured that the scene described is credible. Even though the ponies may have come to the speaker and his friend thinking they brought something for them to eat, say, the speaker sees it as an indication of their welcoming him; and the ponies' movements— the Wright speaker having assigned human characteristics to them--are seen as shy bows. Further, the speaker attributes to the ponies what may be his own feelings; in doing so, he has again assumed that his feelings are universal, and he has imposed them even on the ponies. They are, he says, lonely, and glad for com pany. So overcomed at giving affection to one of the shy, lonely ponies, the speaker feels he has reached a momentary nirvana. Yet, more likely, it is the speaker who is lonely and therefore comforted by the pony rather than acting to comfort her. Either way, Wright demonstrates in this poem that the common bond we all share— human or animal— is loneliness, which brings the pony and the speaker together, and that nature (at least for human beings) can ease the pains of this particular sickness. Wright, then, in The Branch Will Not Break began with his speaker's personal realization that he has wasted his life in "Lying in a Hammock" and finished with a life-fulfilling experience so completely satisfying that he could die at that moment and "break into blossom." 104 Although Wright may have assumed that his confessional voice spoke for "most people, who are very unhappy," no reader would deny that the poems of The Branch Will Not Break— regardless of any all-embracing intentions— concern specific places, circumstances and people which make them resoundingly personal of the Wright self acting as the speaker of these poems. If any poem seems less so, more common to all, as does "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio," it is due to the authoritative stance the voice assumes, using inclusive phrases like "the proud fathers," "their women." Yet, though it may seem to relate informa tion impartially, it is still the vision of one only: the confessional speaker rendering his judgment of the people of the Ohio Valley. Wright may have thought his personal consciousness represented a universal one, but his poems remain essentially private because his speaker turns first to himself for answers— just as he began with personal facts to begin his reasoning in "At the Executed Murderer's Grave." Wright said to Stitt that his poems of The Branch Will Not Break came from his life, from his artistic and personal labors of self-understanding: At the center of that book is my rediscovery of the abounding delight of the body that I had forgotten about. Every Friday afternoon I used to go out to Bly's farm, and there were so many animals out there. There was Simon, who was an Airedale, but about the size of a Great Dane. There was David, the horse, my beautiful, beloved 105 David, the sway-backed Palomino. Simon and David used to go out by Bly's barn. David would stand there looking out over the corn fields that lead onto the prairies of South Dakota, and Simon would sit down beside him, and they would stand there for hours. And sometimes, after I sat on the front porch and watched them, sometimes I went and sat down beside Simon. Neither Simon nor David looked at me, and I felt blessed. They allowed me to join them. They liked me. I can't get over it— they liked me. Simon didn't bite me, David didn't kick me; they just stayed there as they were. And I sat down on my fat ass and looked over the corn fields and the prairie with them. And there we were. One afternoon, a gopher came up out of a hole and looked at us. Simon didn't leap for him, David didn't kick him, and I didn't shoot him. There we were, all four of us together. All I was thinking was, I can be happy sometimes. And I had forgotten that. And with those animals I remembered then. And that is what the book is about, the rediscovery I didn't hate my body at all. I liked myself very much. (49-50) The poems in that book reflect Wright's self-rediscovery, much in the same way as the poems in Life Studies reflect Lowell's. Peter Stitt has written of Wright's book in his essay "James Wright: The Quest Motif in The Branch Will Not Break": "The basic strategy Wright employs in [the book] is that of a quest. In his search for happiness, for comfort, for consolation, and for sustenance, the poet turns from the city to the country, from society to nature, from human beings to animals, and from a fear of the finality of death to a trust in immortality. The,struggle has the stamp of authenticity; the speaker of the poems is the poet himself— not some persona he has created— and the poems are based on his own life" (66), as evidenced in part 106 by Wright's retrospection concerning his stay as the Bly farm. Yet Stitt in this passage misperceives the nature of Wright's poetic voice; it is not himself, not authentic. That the poet represents himself and that his poems are based on his own life are two different perceptions and conceptions, as I have tried to show. In Wright's next book, Shall We Gather at the River, the stark confessional voice dominates. That voice can be categorized as either one that speaks of the self directly, or one that speaks to another person, "Jenny." Three poems from that book, "Gambling in Stateline, Nevada," "Outside Fargo, North Dakota" and "Lifting Illegal Nets by Flashlight," will serve to illustrate Wright's methods of using the confessional mode of voice as a means of self- examination; then two other poems, "To the Muse" and "The Idea of the Good," written to Jenny will show how Wright uses the confessional voice in his "private" communications with a loved one. The voice and subject of "Gambling in Stateline, Nevada" create the semblance of credibility; they make the poem as seemingly autobiographical as any of those in the "Life Studies" section of Lowell's book. The poem follows a narrative, and employs the same syntax identifiable in other confessional poems: The great cracked shadow of the Sierra Nevada Hoods over the last road. ___________ I came down here from the side of 107 A cold cairn where a girl named Rachel Just made it inside California And died of bad luck. Here, across from the keno board, An old woman Has been beating a strange machine In its face all day. Dusk limps past in the street. I step outside. It1s gone. I finger a worthless agate In my pocket. As was important in Lowell's "Waking in the Blue," the people chosen by the first person narrator to occupy this poem reflect his own, sad mood. In reality, there are other people. The "confession" is an assemblage that is phenome nological, then. The intent of this poem is to convey emotion, and that is achieved because the personal, the confessional, voice elicits pathos from the reader. There is a sadness in the voice of the speaker watching the personified dusk limp, then fade, in knowing that a young girl, Rachel, died of bad luck, that an old woman has been, like the speaker, unlucky in gambling. Leonard Nathan has explicated "Gambling in Stateline, Nevada" in his essay "The Private 'I' In Contemporary Poetry": "It seems perfectly clear that the poet in this poem is attempting to speak in his own voice"; that is, the poet is the speaker— James Wright speaking in his public voice. Nathan qualifies his assertion by rightly arguing that: 108 . . . the James Wright who wrote this poem is not the same James Wright who is speaking in the poem. . . . The real James Wright is not wholly alone and friendless, even if his only friend were the publisher of his poem. James Wright, the poet, has created James Wright, the wandering unfortunate, out of a large field of possibili ties: for instance, traditional poetic models for melancholy, as well as the actual melancholy he himself has no doubt experienced. The James Wright in the poem is a fiction, an artful and persuasive illusion of reality, and we accept him partly because we know he is a work of art, as well as part of reality. If he were too much art we would cry insincere and dismiss him. (95) The content of the poem, then, does not need to be based on verifiable autobiography in order for the poem to be of the confessional mode— which employs a speaker who is seemingly the poet himself, whether that speaker is actually the poet or a rejection of that self, an altered version of the poet as is Wright’s and Lowell's (where the poet has "lied a bit and invented" as Lowell remarked). In either case, pathos— as shown in the poems by both Lowell and Wright— can be evoked. "Outside Fargo, North Dakota" brings together the con fessional voice and the poet, who could be a created "narrator" of the poem, not necessarily Wright: Along the sprawled body of the derailed Great Northern freight car, I strike a match slowly and lift it slowly. No wind. Beyond town, three heavy white horses Wade all the way to their shoulders In a silo shadow. Suddenly the freight car lurches. The door slams back, a man with a flashlight 109 Calls me good evening. I nod good evening, lonely And sick for home. Although the "I" in this poem is used, particularly in the last two lines, to indicate the composer of the poem, who confesses that the narrator is himself, it should not be assumed that that composer is Wright. Robert Hass argues against such an assumption. Of the last, lines of "Outside Fargo, North Dakota," he writes: They were not written by the poet who is lonely and sick for home, they were written by the man who noticed that the poet, sitting in his room alone, recalling a scene outside Fargo, North Dakota, nods when he writes down the greeting of his imagined yardman, and catches in that moment not the poet's loneliness but a gesture that reveals the aboriginal loneliness of being— of the being of the freight cars, silos, horses, shadows, matches, poets, flashlights. (27) Hass supports my argument that the autobiography, or sup posed autobiography, need not be verified in order to establish the poem's voice as confessional: the voice, whether Wright's or Wright's imagined poet, sounds sincere and gives the illusion of veracity which is vital if the poem is to elicit pathos from the reader. Like the voice of "Gambling in Stateline, Nevada," the voice of "Outside Fargo, North Dakota" sincerely confesses a personal feeling: feeling unlucky, worthless in "Gambling"; feeling lonely in "Fargo." The difference in the voice of each poem is that a reader of "Gambling"is left to assume, because of the poem's 110 sincerity, that the narrator is an altered James Wright, whereas a reader of "Fargo,” like Hass, because the poem ends with the poet— actual or imagined— in the act of writ ing it, knows that the narrator is the poet; he does not have to assume so as Nathan does in "Gambling." The only question left, then, concerning the narrator of "Fargo" is whether Wright had his actual self in mind or an imagined self, as Hass has implied. The voice of each poem is self- scrutinizing: the poet's loneliness is reflected in the scene he is composing in "Fargo"; in "Gambling" the narrator's worthlessness is parallel to the other charac ters ' . "Lifting Illegal Nets by Flashlight" is based on an experience that can be proven to be autobiographical, unlike either "Gambling" or "Fargo." Like those poems, the narrator openly admits his emotional state— anguish: The carp are secrets Of the creation: I do not Know if they are lonely. The poachers drift with an almost frightening Care under the bridge. Water is a luminous Mirror of swallows' nests. The stars Have gone down. What does my anguish Matter? Something, The color Of a puma has plunged through this net, and is gone. [t/o] This is the firmest Net I ever saw, and yet something Is gone lonely Into the headwaters of the Minnesota. As with most of Wright's personal poetry, the speaker is Ill not afraid to label his emotions, and this, as has been true of each poem we have seen, adds to the illusion of the speaker's integrity. In this poem, the voice is not assump tive as it was in "A Blessing"; the speaker does not impose his emotional state on the fish and claim that they are feeling the way he is. Now the speaker is more humble: "I do not know if they are lonely," he truthfully admits, and he relegates his own feeling: "What does my anguish matter?" The act of poaching makes the speaker forget his anguish, which is the "something" that goes "lonely into the headwaters of the Minnesota." So nature again relieves the speaker's suffering, but the experience does little for the carp trapped in the nets. In "A Blessing" both the pony, presumably, and the man (the poem's speaker) were joyous because of the shared experience. The focus of "Lifting Illegal Nets by Flashlight" is not the act of communing with nature (as it was in "A Blessing"), but the speaker's emotional state which moves from anxiety ("the poachers drift with an almost frightening care under the bridge") and anguish to satisfaction. And it is the con fessional voice which allows us to witness this change as the speaker experiences it. Although the voice of this poem sounds no more or less sincere, more or less believable, than the voice of "Gambling in Stateline, Nevada" or that of "Outside Fargo, North Dakota," it is based on fact. Annie Wright, James's 112 wife, remembers her first trip to the Bly farm: [Bly] thought and acted on impulse. Out of nowhere came the joking compliment to James. "If you keep publishing poems about illegal fishing nets, James Wright, I'm going to have the game warden after me." . . . as we passed the open door of a storeroom on the second floor, Robert pointed to a big fishing net on the floor. "That's the very net, Annie. That's the illegal fishing net." (79) Knowing that the event depicted in the poem by a confes sional speaker is based on an autobiographical experience of the poet, however, does not necessarily mean that the emotions of the speaker— the anguish, the joy--were those of Wright when he and Bly went poaching carp. He told Bruce Henricksen that his poetry "may be autobiographical in the sense that I suppose anybody's poetry is autobiog raphical, but I don't think it's confessional" (299). This suggestion, then, illuminates Nathan's argument about the speaker of "Gambling," that the melancholy of that poem's speaker is a combination of traditional poetic models for melancholy, as well as the actual melancholy he himself has no doubt experienced"; so too can be assumed of "Lifting Illegal Nets by Flashlight," which attests to the credibil ity of the confessional voice. The voice must create an illusion of the veracity of the world of the poem in order for it to be credible, to elicit pathos, regardless whether or not the emotions of the speaker or the situation described can be verified as fact. And the three poems we have just seen do emit, through the power of each poem's 113 voice, a truthfulness, a believability of the scenes and emotions they depict. In response to Dave Smith's question whether the speaker of his poems was an artificial, or created, speaker, or the "actual James Wright," Wright replied: "Sometimes it is an artificial voice and some times it is a direct voice" (35). But the confessional voice can be used in whichever one Wright chooses. Like the autobiographical poems of Lowell, dictionr syntax and the credibility of the narrator work in establishing the voice as confessional; an admission of verification by the poet is not necessary. In the poems "To the Muse" and "The Idea of the Good" (the first poem of the "New Poems" section which follows Shall We Gather at the River in his Collected Poems), Wright's speaker uses the forum of the poem as an open confessional. The voice of "To the Muse" speaks directly to "Jenny," who has drowned herself in the Ohio River. The following is from the final stanzas of that poem: Oh Jenny, I wish to God I had made this world, this scurvy And disastrous place. I Didn't, I can't bear it Either, I don't blame you, sleeping down there Face down in the unbelievable silk of spring, Muse of black sand, Alone. I don't blame you, I know The place where you lie. I admit everything. But look at me. How can I live without you? Come up to me, love, 114 Out of the river, or I will Come down to you. Here, the speaker does not need to concern himself with his credibility; the poem is a direct communication of the nar rator to his dead lover, and the reader is privy to this confessional. He reveals such intimate thoughts as: "I admit everything," "How can I live without you?" and the most intimate admission, "I will come down to you." Jenny is the muse of the poet who is the speaker of the poem. In "The Idea of the Good," the speaker-poet again addressing Jenny, states his disregard for the readers of his poems; his sole concern is to speak to Jenny, as this last half of the poem indicates: Jenny, I gave you that unhappy Book that nobody knows but you And me, so give me A little life back. Or at least send me the owl's feather Again, and I promise I will give it To no one. How could I? Nobody else will follow This poem but you, But I don 11 care. My precious secret, how Could they know You or me? Patience. "That unhappy book" refers to Shall We Gather at the River, a collection of poems about which Wright said to Stitt: I was trying to move from death to resurrection and death again, and.challenge death finally. Well, if I must tell you, I was trying to write about a girl I was in love with who has been dead for a long time. I tried to sing with her in that book. Not to recreate her; you can't recreate anybody, at least I can't. But I 115 thought maybe I could come to terms with that feeling which has hung on in my heart for so long. The book has been damned because it is so care fully dreamed. (52) To accomplish his scheme, Wright used the confessional voice as a means of self-exploration which revealed his personal speaker's emotions, and to convey personal thoughts to a deceased loved one. Another way Wright uses the confessional voice is to bring two characters into a poem— that is, one besides the narrator— and allow the voice to reveal to the reader the narrator's thoughts regarding the other character. Whereas the more private confessional voice, such as in "The Idea of the Good," excludes the reader's concerns, this voice shields his thoughts from the other character but lets the reader know them. An example is "Hook" from To a Blossoming Pear Tree (1977): I was only a young man In those days. On that evening The cold was so God damned Bitter there was nothing. Nothing. I was in trouble With a woman, and there was nothing There but me and dead snow. I stood on the street corner In Minneapolis, lashed This way and that. Wind rose from some pit, Hunting me. Another bus to Saint Paul Would arrive in three hours, If I was lucky. Then the young Sioux Loomed beside me, his scars Were just my age. 116 Ain't got no bus here A long time, he said. You got enough money To get home on? What did they do To your hand? I answered. He raised up his hook into the terrible starlight And slashed the wind. Oh, that? he said. I had a bad time with a woman. Here, You take this. Did you ever feel a man hold Sixty-five cents In a hook, And place it Gently In your freezing hand? I took it. It wasn't the money I needed. But I took it. The similarities of the narrator and the young Sioux are clearly drawn: both have had trouble with women and are now alone, and both show compassion for one another. Wright commented in "From A Letter" of such a structure: "If any principle of structure can be disentangled from the poems that I have written in free verse, it is, I suppose, the principle of parallelism, a term which of course need not be limited to a strictly grammatical application" (287). Although parallel as the narrator and the Sioux are, the major difference is that the Sioux only speaks to the narrator, while the narrator speaks both to the Sioux and to the reader. The first three stanzas address the reader; the narrator is setting the opening of his story. The two 117 men talk, then the poem closes with the narrator speaking directly to the reader: "Did you ever feel a man hold / Sixty-five cents / In a hook, / And place it / Gently / In your freezing hand?" And following that rhetorical ques-\ tion, the voice assumes an ironical tone, confiding in us: "I took it. It wasn't the money I needed. But I took it." This is not confessional but ironical in that he does not tell us what he did need, if not the money. In reviewing Wright's aesthetic, then, we have seen how he used the confessional voice to speak for his readers (in "Lying in a Hammock"), to speak for his public self in ("Lifting Illegal Nets by Flashlight"), to another person .("The Idea of the Good") and now to the reader in "Hook." In Robert Bly's personal poetry, the confessional voice often will speak to the poet himself— a use of that voice which Wright did not choose to employ. III. When Robert Bly was asked by Joseph Shakarchi: "Traditionally, poets have been characterized as seers or visionaries, especially in ancient times. Snyder has said that he sees the poet's role in society as being that of the shaman— the tribal healer, or 'medicine man.' Do you see yourself along any of those lines at all?" he responded In News of the Universe, I remarked the most helpful addition to thought about in the last thirty years has been the concept of the poet 118 as a relative of the shaman. I think it's very helpful, and I like it better than the concept of the poet as a seer, or the poet as a carrier of moral values. I don't know how far as an "edu cated man" I am a shaman, or how far my poetry relates to all that, but I feel the health of it. (232) Like Wright's intentions regarding "Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me" and "A Blessing," Bly intends some of his poetry as public instruction on how to live better. "Three Kinds of Pleasures" and "Return to Solitude," which are the opening poems of his first published collection Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962), will serve to illustrate Bly's theory behind instructive verse which is expressed by him in these remarks to Shakarchi: "I understand the poem to be a container of energy, and the more kinds of energy in the poem the better. Some poems have Taoist energy, which is more related to shamanism and wilderness. In the Confucian world, you give instruction in a poem; the poem lays out certain rules to help people live decently" (233). "Three Kinds of Pleasures" suggests that pleasure is derived from personal experience: I Sometimes, riding in a car, in Wisconsin Or Illinois, you notice those dark telephone poles One by one lift themselves out of the fence line And slowly leap on the gray sky— And past them, the snowy fields. II The darkness drifts down like snow on the picked corn fields [t/o] In Wisconsin: and on these black trees 119 Scattered, one by one, Through the winter fields— We see stiff weeds and brownish stubble, And white snow left now only in the wheeltracks of the combine. Ill It is a pleasure, also, to be driving Toward Chicago, near dark, And see the lights in the barns. The bare trees more dignified than ever, Like a fierce man on his deathbed. And the ditches along the road half full of private snow. [t/o] Each of the "three kinds of pleasures" is defined by the experience depicted in each of the three stanzas: the first is the pleasure derived from projecting one's imagina tion on the landscape, the second is found in a wholly sub jective perception of the landscape, and the third type of pleasure is making a private claim on the landscape which is set in a public arena. The differences are subtle and perhaps are obscured by the similarity of the winter, mid- Western state setting of each stanza, each experience. Yet only in the first stanza does Bly's speaker see part of the landscape in something of surrealistic terms. The tele phone poles follow the fence line of the field which is next to the road, then they break from the fence line and ascend a mountain, which makes them seemingly appear to "slowly leap on the gray sky." Beyond the mountain, Bly's speaker assumes, lay snowy fields. He has made the land scape appear as he imagines it to be: it is an illusion that the telephone poles lift "themselves out of the fence 120 line"; they are already in place, yet the rapid movement of the car following the fence line makes them appear to ascend. In the second stanza, the speaker selects certain details of the landscape— the black trees scattered through the fields, stiff weeds, the wheeltracks of a combine— and implies that they are representative of "the picked corn fields in Wisconsin." The "pleasure" defined by this scene, too, is subjective. Viewing "stiff weeds and brownish stubble and white snow left only in the wheeltracks of the combine" is an individual pleasure; the scene evokes a pleasure in the speaker. That the details of the landscape move from the general to the specific, from the cornfields in Wisconsin to the wheelmarks in one particular field, indicates the subjective turning of the stanza. The third stanza, unlike the previous two, brings the suggestion of people into the landscape. Although the other stanzas included signs of civilization--such as tele phone poles, combine tracks--in their descriptions of winter fields, now, getting closer to Chicago, seeing the lights in the barns, Bly's speaker invokes a more public setting. What is pleasurable to him is that even though he is nearing the masses of people in Chicago, he sees the "bare trees more dignified than ever . . . and the ditches along the road half full of a private snow," private because it 121 signifies for him the pleasures of winter solitude he found in the other stanzas. The images of these winter scenes evoke pleasure, and it is this feeling— the emotion— which is common; when Bly uses "you" or "we" in this poem, he is suggesting that the emotion is part of our "collective unconscious" (a phrase Bly borrowed from Jung), not necessarily the objects depicted or the experiences described. This practice is contrary to Pound's objectivist theory (and practice) that an image, "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time" as he defined it, could be evoked by the presentation of an object which the reader knows. Bly spoke of the difference as that of a "picture" and an "image"; he told Kevin Power: "I make a distinction between the picture, on the one hand, in which there are simple objects from the outer world, and an image. An example of the former might be Pound's line when he saw people coming out of the Paris metro and compared them to 'petals on a wet black bough'— where one object is being compared to another object--whereas an example of what I'd consider to be an image would be Bonnefoy's 'an interior sea lighted by turning eagles'" (81). Pound would have regarded "Three Kinds of Pleasures" as unsuccessful because the objects, the experiences in winter in Wisconsin and Illinois, are not universal. But Bly's speaker takes his personal experiences and projects them as universal: 122 "Sometimes, riding in a car, in Wisconsin or Illinois, you notice ..." What "you" notice is the emotion, the pleasure, of the speaker because the poem has penetrated into the reader's unconscious long enough for an emotion to be evoked. The following remarks by George Lensing and Ronald Moran summarize Bly's poetic theories, which help explain how poems can work on one's unconscious: "A poem is something that penetrates for an instant into the unconscious," declares Robert Bly in a stipulative definition. The remark summarizes three principal phenomena at work in the nature of poetry as he would have it. First it is a poetry which "penetrates" beneath the ordinary levels of rational discourse. In his more recent comments, Bly has begun to investi gate certain physiological elements involved in this movement within the brain itself. Because it is a poetry that is introspective, tranquil, and profoundly personal, it is one that does not look to others in its quest for knowledge. Too often, insists [Bly], Americans have produced a "poetry of things," rather than of the self— thus accounting for the bankruptcy of the Imagist tradition, for example. . . . One of the "great traditions" of poetry, reiterates [Bly], is pre cisely the "going deeply into oneself ..." The poem . . . penetrates "for an instant" the unconscious. This second element, the fact that the poem is temporary and instantaneous in its touch with the unconscious, invites a certain brevity in the length of the poem. . . . The means by which the unconscious if "for an instant" awakened is that of the image, or rather, the leaps from one image to the next. . . . he insists that the image is not an external picture but the key to the unconscious, the third element in Bly's definition of the poem. . . . The fecundity of the subjective life reveals itself through the poem; a pursuit that is rational or objective only leads astray. One's response to the flow between images may be couched in rational terms, but the response itself remains emotive. (59-61) 123 The speaker of "Three Kinds of Pleasures" responds emotion ally to the scenes of winter landscape, and, if the reader reacts similarly, it is in recognition of the speaker's emotional response. Since Bly regards the poet as a "relative of the shaman," his personal poetry of the confessional mode must necessarily be directed outward even though it is often meditative, introspective. Bly accomplishes this in two ways: first, like Wright, his speaker allows the reader in on his private musings— that is, he says: "Sometimes, riding in a car . . . you notice those dark telephone poles ..." thereby making his personal experience a seemingly common one— and secondly, Bly's use of the image, which is emotive, enables the reader to relate to the feel ing the poem depicts rather than the scene or situation. The "energy contained" in this kind of poem, such as "Three Kinds of Pleasures," is what Bly terms the "Taoist energy, which is more related to shamanism and wilderness." The poem following "Three Kinds of Pleasures" in Silence in the Snowy Fields, "Return to Solitude," is of the Confucian world where, Bly says, "you give instruction in a poem; the poem lays out certain rules to help people live decently. . . . I consider it to be a good form of energy, a true form of energy, if the instruction is intelligent." In "Return to Solitude" Bly instructs the reader how to relate to the images of his poems, how the 124 reader can respond to them emotionally. The title gives the first step of instruction: solitude. Bly regarded "going deeply into oneself, and returning like an explorer, perhaps saddened forever, but with strange kinds of knowl edge" one of the "great traditions" of poetry. And solitude provides the best means for composing poems of this tradi tion; Bly has said to Kathy Otto and Cynthia Lofsness: "My advice to anyone if he wants to write is to go and live by himself for two years and not talk to anyone" (53)--which is precisely what he did as a young poet. This advice and action, reveals the value Bly places on solitude and silence; both are necessary for the making of poems in the great tradition and both are important in the process of a poet's self-discovery. If a reader wants to share in the emotions the poet has experienced in "going deeply into himself," he must, at least momentarily, become part of the world of the poem by allowing the images to penetrate his unconscious. The reader can accompany the poet— that is, the poet's self as represented in the poem— in his "return to solitude" by reading the poem produced from a stay in solitude and silence; the reader can experience the effects of such a stay because the poet relates them to him. The poem "Return to Solitude" is supposed to render an impres sion that is "temporary and instantaneous in its touch with the unconscious": 125 I It is a moonlit, windy night. The moon has pushed out the Milky Way. Clouds are hardly alive, and the grass leaping. It is the hour of return. II We want to go back, to return to the sea, The sea of solitary corridors, And halls of wild nights, Explosions of grief, Diving into the sea of death, Like the stars of the wheeling Bear. III What shall we find when we return? Friends changed, houses moved, Trees perhaps, with new leaves. The poem presents three distinct images, one in each stanza: an ominous night, moonlit, which marks "the hour of return" to solitude; a surrealistic sea of death that is comprised of "solitary corridors," "halls of wild nights," and "explosions of grief," all describing one's mind which is revealed to the person "going deeply into himself"; and the final image comes back from the surrealistic world of the mind and returns to objects of the real world— friends, houses, trees--all changed by time, and having experienced the return to the solitude of the mind, one's perception has altered as well. The first two images are portentous, but the final image, which suggests things change with time and perception, shows how mild the result of solitude can be. The surreal image of the second stanza is intended to penetrate the reader through his collective theogonic 126 unconscious, proposed by Jung and which Bly adopts. That theory, as Bly as applied it to his poetics, has been summarized by Paul Breslin as follows: "In the collective unconscious, religion, magic, and myth continue to live for us as they do for primitive peoples, through the production of archetypal images in dreams, fantasies, and works of art" (362). Bly’s speaker posits the "solitary corridors" and "halls of wild nights" as archetypal images to awaken our collective unconscious of the self, discovered when we spend enough time in silence and solitude and "go deeply into ourselves." These archetypal images, then, are sup posedly recognizable by the reader so that he need not have experienced the silence and solitude of the poet in order to share in the poet's emotive experience. The poem brings the image to the reader so that "the collective unconscious . . . continues to live for us." In preserving the archetypal images for us, the poet— through his persona], speaker--is something of "the tribal healer," related to the shaman. The poet, then, has directed his private medi tation outward; he is able to share what he has discovered in solitude. In "Three Kinds of Pleasures," Bly's speaker addressed the poem to "you" because he knew he was express ing common emotions; in "Return to Solitude," he used "we,” a collective narrative voice, to express common images relating to the collective unconscious. 127 Charles Molesworth provides a summary of Bly's theories concerning the subjective, emotive image that is operative in "Return to Solitude": In a series of reviews and essays in The Sixties, Bly, in conjunction with James Wright, erected a theory concerning the "subjective image," pro duced by the workings of the transrational mind, charged with mythical resonances, and bearing the major responsibility for organizing the poem's energies. This image . . . resulted more from a special gathering of consciousness than from any purely verbal manipulation; it came from a region beyond syntax, and it had powers more than gram matical. To write such poetry, one needed a carefully plotted surrender, and to read it required a discipline less passive than deeply meditative. "But at last, the quiet waters of the night will rise. / And our skin shall see far off, as it does under water." Bly's own images are often liquid and cold, like lake waters soundless and dark, and the poems are often filled with gazes of deep snow. They end with suddenly opened vistas, consoling with something like infinite regress ("Our ears hear tinier sounds, / Reaching far away east in the early darkness.") or vague indefinable threats ("The doors are open, many are called to silence"). (115) The "special gathering of consciousness" embodied in the image is indicative of the archetypal suggestions inherent to "the sea of solitary corridors, / And halls of wild nights," for example, which require a disciplined reading "less passive than deeply meditative." Reading the poem on its more literal level, "Return to Solitude" offers public instruction on how to obtain the "three kinds of pleasures" found in winter landscapes: by driving alone and in silence, one can better appreciate the natural vistas; and when a person learns appreciation 128 of nature, he has learned something of living more decently— the poem's intention behind such Confucian instruction according to Bly. Besides having a poem "lay out certain rules to help people live decently," Bly's personal poetry also can instruct by example. Like Wright's personal realization in "Lying in a Hammock," Bly sometimes makes a personal experience public via a poem in order to show others how or how not to live. "Learn from my experi ence," James Wright seems to have said in "Lying in a Hammock," and Bly's poems will more often seem to say: "Live as I have lived." Three poems from Silence in the Snowy Fields, which are representative of that volume, will illustrate this: "Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River," "Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter," and "Solitude Late at Night in the Woods." In a 1974 reading, recorded by the Watershed Foundation under the title For the Stomach, Bly introduced "Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River" as follows: "I'd been living in a friend's house. He was trying to sell the house, or I was trying to sell it for him. And I had been alone a week without talking to anyone. And then I got in my car in the middle of the summer and drove one hundred- fifty miles or so through the soybean fields in Minnesota, finally ending up at the Lac Qui Parle River." The poem follows a narrative which ends when the speaker's drive is over: 129 I I am driving; it is dusk; Minnesota. The stubble field catches the last growth of sun. The soybeans are breathing on all sides. Old men are sitting before their houses on car- seats [t/o] In the small towns. I am happy, The moon rising above the turkey sheds. II The small world of the car Plunges through the deep fields of the night, On the road from Willmar to Milan. This solitude covered with iron Moves through the fields of night Penetrated by the noise of crickets. m Nearly to Milan, suddenly a small bridge, And water kneeling in the moonlight. In small towns the houses are built right on the ground; [t/o] The lamplight falls on all fours in the grass. When I reach the river, the full moon covers it; A few people are talking low in a boat. The voice of this poem is confessional: the prose sentences are syntactically the same as Lowell's and Wright's confessional voice poems, the "I" narrator is credible, sincere, and the narrative is plausible, realis tic. If the intention of this poem is to instruct people— in this instance to be happy--by example, then the poet must be certain of presenting a believable narrative and a credible voice. Regardless of any didactic intention, the credibility of the voice must be established, too, if Bly does not want the reader to think this to be other than an actual experience. The images of "Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River" are similar to those of "Three Kinds of Pleasures"— the 130 stillness of the darkening night, the quiet of the open fields, the privacy of solitude— and they work to create a special sensitivity in the speaker of the poem so that his perception of an ordinary event such as "a few people talk ing low in a boat" takes on extraordinary emotive meaning. Unlike Lowell's "The Mouth of the Hudson" and Wright's "A Blessing," the speaker's perception is entirely without personal interpolation or comment. He records exactly what he sees. His perception grows increasingly more exact as he drives from Willmar to Milan, moving from the general statements like: "Old men are sitting before their houses on carseats in the small towns" to the more focused, specific: "When I reach the river, the full moon covers it." So the clause following— "a few people are talking low in a boat"— is a culmination of the speaker's specific ity. The emotion, the peaceful happiness, the speaker felt at that moment is conveyed through the image of the scene, unadorned with personal embellishments. For Bly, as we have learned from "Three Kinds of Pleasures," the scene devoid of the narrator's interpolation is enough to convey the poem's emotional energy. Although it is a poem of personal experience, a reader has been instructed in at least two things in "Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River": that any moment in a person's life, a simple drive even, can reflect one's emotions, and that one can learn to find beauty in what he 131 sees— what he actually sees, not what he brings to his perception. Commenting on Beowulf, in his essay "Looking For Dragon Smoke," Bly makes clear his intentions regarding images and the emotions they can evoke: "That leaping— really a leaping about the psyche— is what disappeared [in poetry after Beowulf]. The corridors to the uncon- : scious . . . gradually became blocked off in Europe. . . . Our task is . . . to continue to open new corridors into the psyche by association" (161-64). The associative "leaps of the psyche" that Bly's speaker asks of his readers in "Return to Solitude" can be extended to include making associations between Bly's— Bly's speaker's— personal experience and our emotive experience, his sensi tivity and how it might apply to us. At the conclusion of his essay "I Came Out of the Mother Naked" in Sleepers Joining Hands (1973), he wrote: "I see my own poems and the poems of so many other poets alive now fundamental attempts to right our own spiritual balance, by encouraging those parts in us that are linked with music, with solitude, water, and trees, the parts that grow when we are far from the centers of ambition" (50). As Bly has learned to move "from the centers of ambition," he has recorded his experi ences in poetry and offers them to the public (of which "Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River" is one example) in an attempt "to right our own spiritual balance." 132 "Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter" is similar in this regard. Bly's personal speaker is at complete peace in doing this simple, private task, which he makes public: It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted. [t/o] The only things moving are swirls of snow. As I lift the mailbox door, I feel its cold iron. There is a privacy I love in this snowy night. Driving around, I will waste more time. The speaker's sincerity in this poem derives from the implication that although he is speaking to himself, he allows us to overhear. Whereas Wright's "Lying in a Hammock" concludes with a personal— but highly ambiguous-- revelation ("I have wasted my life") as deduced from the speaker's observations of nature— influenced as they are by his internal attitude— Bly's speaker has already decided his course of action for the immediate future— it does not come to him as a revelation— and he announces it to himself "Driving around, I will waste more time." Wright's speaker believed he wasted his life by not communing with nature; yet Bly's use of "waste" is ironic— he is enjoying the privacy in the night, "wasting time" in doing that which the Wright speaker regrets not having done. In "Solitude Late at Night in the Woods," the speaker declares his joy to the reader, and again recreates his private world of solitude for public display via the poem: I The body is like a November birch facing the full moon And reaching into the cold heavens. 133 In these trees there is no ambition, no sodden body, no leaves, Nothing but bare trunks climbing like cold fire! II My last walk in the trees has come. At dawn I must return to the trapped fields, To the obedient earth. The trees shall be reaching all the winter. III It is a joy to walk in the bare woods. The moonlight is not broken by the heavy leaves. The leaves are down, and touching the soaked earth, Giving off the odor that partridges love. The first stanza could be read as the speaker's relating his personal philosophy regarding Taoist leanings, revealed to him while in solitary meditation in the woods. He feels freed of human ambition, like the autumn trees. Although, as the poem indicates, the speaker has reached the analogy between his own body and the November birch trees, he makes his reasoning all-inclusive by using the definitive phrase "the body." In this way, he immediately brings the reader into his world of solitude. The walk alone in the trees, late at night, is contrasted to his leaving the woods until spring; during the winter, he will no longer feel like one of the trees that will continue "reaching [into the cold heavens] all the winter." He unashamedly states his joy in the third stanza in a typically confessional— in that it is sincere— tone: "It is a joy to walk in the bare woods." Again, by implication, the tacit urging is to live as the speaker, to find joy in solitude. 134 The emotions that Bly experienced in his moments of silence and solitude are labeled openly as he recreates these moments for us in his poetry. That he has made them public— allowing us to share in the experiences— indicates the poems' instructive intentions in addition to revealing Bly's use of the confessional voice to speak inward, as if to himself, rather than outward--although in essence, since his poems are public, his thoughts are directed outward. And the emotions conveyed will carry the voice beyond the personal. "The heart center"— Bly's phrase from a reading he gave for the Watershed Foundation--is where poetry can be felt emotionally which is, as he has informed us, the intended result of his images. In "Three Kinds of Pleasures" and "Return to Solitude," images worked in tandem with the narrative or the scene depicted in order to evoke an emotional response in the reader that was similar to the Bly speaker's. In other, shorter poems, the very moment that the speaker experienced the emotion is recreated in a brief image. Such is the case in "A Late Spring Day in My Life," "Love Poem," "Watering the Horse" and "In a Train." Simulating an instance when the speaker found silence, "A Late Spring Day in My Life" is a brief scene which evokes the quiet and the peace he felt at that moment, although sullied with his peculiar perception of what he wishes to see: 135 A silence hovers over the earth: The grass lifts lightly in the heat Like the ancient wing of a bird. A horse gazes steadily at me. Bly's speaker first states that he is describing a moment of silence, then he uses a simile to show how quiet, how silent it then was: "like the ancient wing of a bird," which image suggests a quietness. The speaker ends with a flat statement: "a horse gazes steadily at me" which is both an indication of stillness and an attempt at portray ing the scene objectively, without personal interpolation or simile. "Love Poem" attempts to render how "we" feel when in love, yet the speaker's individual experience shows through When we are in love, we love the grass, And the barns, and the lightpoles, And the small mainstreets abandoned all night. It is precisely the familiar Bly (the public Bly) markings in the poem— the grass and barns, the small, abandoned mainstreets— that make this poem apparently personal; yet the Bly speaker's individual experience when in love, his feeling, is universal. He intends the poem to penetrate the reader on that basis. The speaker directs "Watering the Horse" and "In a Train" more inward. Like "Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter," though, he lets us overhear his private conversa tions with himself. "Watering the Horse" depicts a moment of clear vision for the speaker: an anagnorisis that 136 reveals a deep, personal value which, for an instant, makes his perception focused: How strange to think of giving up all ambitionI Suddenly I see with such clear eyes The white flake of snow That has just fallen in the horse's manel The exuberance of these statements— ending with exclamation marks (most likely a result of Neruda's influence)— is intended as the means by which the images can penetrate more directly to the heart center. The tone of "In a Train," although one of less excitement, is no less sincere. The speaker continues to reveal his emotions by describing a scene in sparse terms, with a perception focused on the objects rather than simile: There has been a light snow. Dark car tracks move in out of the darkness. I stare at the train window marked with soft dust. I have awakened at Missoula, Montana, utterly happy. [t/o] Like "Three Kinds of Pleasures," the emotion is known to the reader even though the experience of waking on a train in Montana may not be. Each of these four short poems relies on an imagistic evocation of emotion for its significance; and each uses an intimate experience to show how it is common to all— either by suggesting a universal feeling as "Love Poem" does, or by indicating how a private moment can be shared emotionally as does "In a Train." The emotions are defined by outbursts, exclamations rather than the subtle "objective correlative" method because getting 137 the poem to the heart of his reader is most important to Bly in his personal poetry. In doing so Bly chooses a speaker that seemingly "confesses" much about his self, his vision and personal relationship to nature, not all of which is joyous. The darker side of the emotions is expressed in "Depression," from Silence in the Snowy Fields, and "Snow banks North of the House" from The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981)— a book which shows how Bly's artistry has changed over the years. The last stanza of "Depression" describes the Bly speaker's feeling in objective terms; that is, depression is defined in reference to objects, and so the reader is left knowing the extent of the speaker's depression (at that moment) by his intended actions, what he says he wants to do: Now I want to go back among the dark roots; Now I want to see the day pulling its long wings; I want to see nothing more than two feet high; I want to see no one, I want to say nothing, I want to go down and rest in the black earth of silence. [t/o] The prose phrases are end-stopped, and syntactically indicative of the confessional voice. The emotion has already been labeled in the title, so the dramatic situa tion of the poem reveals how the speaker feels, or intends to act, in such an emotional state. Like the other poems, the speaker intends the confessional voice in "Depression" as a means of speaking to himself; just as he articulated 138 for himself in "Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter" his future action— "Driving around I will waste more time"— the speaker tells himself what he feels like doing, which, at least partially, probably will be his immediate behavior: seeing no one, saying nothing— and we are allowed to hear this personal conversation the speaker has with himself. "Snowbanks North of the House" begins with the speaker at home looking at the snowbank, then his thoughts move out ward and he makes general statements about the culture of our time by telling a specific story. In this poem, which carries the speaker's saddened mood in its tone, narrates a story that is archetypal, and so the speaker ends the poem speaking to his readers, rather to himself: Those great sweeps of snow that stop suddenly six feet from the house . . . Thoughts that go so far. The boy gets out of high school and reads no more books; the son stops calling home. The mother puts down her rolling pin and makes no more bread. And the wife looks at her husband one night at a party, and loves him no more. The energy leaves the wine, and the minister falls leaving the church. It will not come closer— the one inside moves back, and the hands touch nothing, and are safe. The father grieves for his son, and will not leave the room where the coffin stands. He turns away from his wife, and she sleeps alone. And the sea lifts and falls all night, the moon goes on through the unattached heavens alone. The toe of the shoe pivots in the dust . . . And the man in the black coat turns, and goes back 139 down the hill. No one knows why he came, or why he turned away, and did not climb the hill. Due to the particular air currents, snowbanks are formed around the house, leaving a path between it and the drifts of snow. This is a peculiar phenomenon of nature, and the speaker equates that with his thoughts— that is, his poems— which "stop suddenly" so the speaker must trust the instinctive leaps of his psyche, and his reader's associa tive leaps, to continue them. The speaker's thoughts leap from the snowbanks to the outline of his story which is intended as representative, as common of today: the boy who reads no books after high school, the loss of family closeness, the loss of religion. These people have not "reached" all the way, like the snow; they have stopped trying. The "one inside" is afraid of touching, afraid of emotion, so does nothing— which results in an ultimate loss of relationships, indicated by a specific family: the son separated from his father by death, the wife separated from her husband. These losses occur as a consequence of fate, here represented by the man in the black coat, an ominous presence. In the poem, fate— or death— turns his back on this family because it is not needed; they have brought death of various sorts on themselves. Bly has used a confessional voice in this poem— by means of his speaker's personal contemplation— in order to assess a general cultural condition as he sees it. This 140 poem, different from those in which the speaker Bly speaks to himself, uses the confessional voice to reveal the speaker's personal thoughts and personal judgment in a nar rative that is directed to an audience. Whereas "Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter" presents the speaker's pri vate consciousness that may contain emotive images germane to the reader, "Snowbanks North of the House" presents the speaker's understanding of a universal consciousness, a story that is public and archetypal. Although the story generates from the speaker's thoughts and is relayed through his personal perception, it ends with a universal truth— death— and is therefore relevant to the reader's conscious mind rather than to his unconscious, as were the emotive images of "Three Kinds of Pleasures" and "Return to Solitude." The structure of "Snowbanks," which is primar ily a narrative one, helps to give a universal sense to the poem's theme. Bly will rely on narrative in his prose poems rather than on an emotive use of images when his sub ject is public matter, even though it pertains to himself as well. In 1975 Bly said to Rochelle Ratner when asked about the differences between the prose poem and other kinds of poems: I think that the prose poem appears whenever poetry gets too abstract. The prose poem helps bring the poet back to the physical world. We see many poems in magazines today with a sort of mental physical world. Such poems contain 141 "flowers," "trees," "people," "children" . . . but the body doesn't actually perceive in that way. The body never sees "children playing" in a playground. The body sees first one child with a blue cap, then it sees a child with a yellow cap, then it sees a child with a snowsuit . . . the body sees detail after detail. An instant later the mind enters and says: "That is children playing." (115) The effect of prose allows the details to accumulate with enough of a pause in between them for the mind to catch up with the perception and connect the details to the action. In a prose poem, images need only relate to the physical world, according to Bly, rather than evoke emotional responses via the unconscious. But images which are used to recreate the physical world can be emotive as well, and it is this type that are more often found in Bly's prose poetry such as "The Dead Seal Near McClure's Beach." That poem is based on Bly's real experience of finding a seal dying as a result of an oil spill off the northern California coast. He made these remarks about the poem at the Watershed Foundation reading: "A few years ago my wife and I and my family were living on the Point Reyes peninsula near San Francisco at the time of the oil spill in the San Francisco Bay. And kids came out from San Francisco and worked very hard to save the birds. And a couple of weeks later I was walking along the shore and saw a dead seal. Seals are killed by kerosene derivatives that get into the liver. Nothing can be done for them." The plot, or dramatic situation of the poem, then, is admittedly 142 autobiographical; it represents Bly's individual experience (as recounted by his speaker of the poem) yet has broader implications extending beyond the personal. Here is the full text of "The Dead Seal Near McClure's Beach": 1 Walking north toward the point, I come on a dead seal. From a few feet away, he looks like a brown log. The body is on its back, dead only a few hours. I stand and look at him. A quiver in the dead flesh. My God he is still alive. A shock goes through me, as if a wall of my room had fallen away. His head is arched back, the small eyes closed, the whiskers sometimes rise and fall. He is dying. Here on its back is the oil that heats our houses so effi ciently. Wind blows fine sand back toward the ocean. The flipper near me lies folded over the stomach, looking like an unfinished arm, lightly glazed with sand at the edges. The other flipper lies half under neath. The seal's skin looks like an old overcoat, scratched here and there . . . by sharp mussels maybe . . . I reach out and touch him. Suddenly he rears up, turns over. He gives three cries, like those from Christmas toys. He lunges toward me. I am terrified and leap back, although I know there can be no teeth in that jaw. He starts flopping toward the sea. He looks up at the sky, and he looks like an old lady who has lost her hair. He puts his chin back down on the sand, arranges his flippers, and waits for me to go. I go. 2 Today I go back to say goodbye; he's dead now. But he's not— he's a quarter mile farther up the shore. Today he is thinner, squatting on his stomach, head out. The ribs show more— each vertebra on the back under the coat now visible, shiny. He breathes in and out. He raises himself up, and tucks his flippers under, as if to keep them warm. A wave comes in, touches his nose. He turns and looks at me— the eyes slanted, the crown of his head like a leather jacket. He is taking a long time to die. The whiskers white as porcupine quills, the forehead slopes, goodbye brother, die in the sound of waves, forgive us if we have killed you, long live your race, your innertube race, so uncomfort able on land, so comfortable in the sea. Be comfort- able in death then, where the sand will be out of your 143 nostrils, and you can swim in long loops through the pure death, ducking under as assassinations break above you. You don't want to be touched by me. I climb the cliff and go home the other way. The seal looking "like a brown log," "like an old lady who has lost her hair," his flipper "looking like an unfin ished arm," his skin "like an old overcoat" are some of the details in part one of the poem that are seen with "the body." Perception "of the body," rather than "of the mind," according to Bly, is necessary to recreate the physical world through the poem. The prose allows for these details. Each simile reveals the association the speaker registered through his perception as he came upon the scene. That is, Bly attempts to recreate his experience for us in this poem by recording the "leaps" his mind made, manifested by the associative similes; he records his initial impressions of the situation before his mind caught up with his observa tions. Yet the poem relates the details of the "mental physical world" as well (important to keep in mind in terms of the actual): the moment after the speaker sees "a quiver in the dead flesh," he realizes the seal is still alive, and that recognition is a "shock," he says, "as if a wall of my room had fallen away"— which is still an asso ciative simile— but then, as his mind assimilates all that he has seen, he comes to a rationalized understanding: "Here on its back is the oil that heats our houses so effi ciently. " We learn that the seal is not dead at the moment 144 the speaker does; with him, we simultaneously witness his shock and discover that his perception has been faulty. Like "Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter," we overhear the speaker's remarks to himself, but in "The Dead Seal" we also witness his mind's reactions to his observations as they occur. After his mind assimilated the details of the situation at McClure's Beach, the speaker was able to render some tentative explanations for the seal's death. He now has had time enough to appraise the scene and reach a conclusive judgment. At this point in the poem, the speaker seems more aware of his readers. Because of the ethical issue (gather ing oil for our comfort at nature's expense) he wishes to convey, he reverts to the "mental physical world," the world of ratiocinated statements rather than assumptive compari sons. "Here on its back is the oil that heats our houses so efficiently," a remark so well articulated, so unlike the associative details he used to recreate his sense of shock, that it is "of the mind" rather than "of the body." As the narrative continues in the poem's second part, the speaker addresses his readers in a manner similar to "Snowbanks North of the House." He is only mildly surprised at finding the seal still alive, and the prose quietly reflects his reactions: "Today I go back to say goodbye; he's dead now. But he's not— he's a quarter mile farther up the shore. Today he is thinner, squatting on his 145 stomach, head out. . . . He is taking a long time to die." These are statements of assessment, derived from details "of the mind." On the second day of his experience, the speaker comes to McClure's with preconceived notions— "I go back to say goodbye, he's dead now"— since his perceptions are no longer "of the body"; he has passed the stage of recording his initial impressions without interference from the rationalizing mind. The details, therefore, such as "he is thinner, squatting on his stomach" are not accompa nied by simile as were the details arising from the body's reactions in part one; they are calculated since the speaker's mind has had the time to assess the seal's con dition. The seal is thinner, a ratiocinated conclusion, rather than appearing as "an old lady who has lost her hair," which is a reactive, associative detail "of the body." The poem ends in dialogue: first the speaker addresses the seal, asking the animal to forgive mankind, then to the reader: "I climb the cliff and go home the other way," which completes the prose narrative. "The Dead Seal" employs several types of the confessional voice: the una bashedly personal voice telling us of an autobiographical experience of the poet, the introspective voice addressing himself, the public voice raising ethical questions in the readers' behalf, and the voice of an active participant in the poem addressing another— in this instance the seal. 146 We have seen these uses before— Lowell's personal confes sional in "Memories of West Street and Lepke," the intro spective voice of "Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter," the ethical concern voiced in Wright's "At the Executed Murderer's Grave," and the dialogue in his "Hook"— yet never together in one poem. The prose narrative of "The Dead Seal" allowed for this blend of differing voices because the details, which help to make up the illusion of veracity of the experience, are presented more slowly, in various stages of the speaker's perception, than they can be in the briefer, imagistic poems intended to penetrate the reader's unconscious for an instant. The details of the prose poem are shown in conjunction with their assimilation in the Bly speaker's mind. The voice changes at the differ ing stages of assimilation. These types of consciousness, and subsequent changes in voice, are further explored in This Tree Will Be Here For A Thousand Years (1979), introduced with Bly's essay "The Two Presences." He describes the poem of "two-fold consciousness" which can begin with a human concern, such as sadness and guilt over a dying seal, then reveal itself more fully, becoming transparent, so that the consciousness of whatever is described by the poem is exhibited. Bly explains: More and more I notice a sort of ground tone audible under the words of poems. The ground tone in these poems is the consciousness out there 147 among plants and animals. One day sitting depressed in a cabin on the shore of a small lake, I wrote about the depression: Mist: no one on the other shore. It may be that these trees I see have consciousness, and this desire to weep comes from them. Many people who think about it believe that the desire to weep comes entirely from inside us. Conservatives in these matters declare that human intelligence stands alone facing a world that appears sometimes hostile, sometimes inviting, but that actually possesses neither intelligence nor consciousness. Many ancient Greek poems, on the other hand, suggest that human beings and the "green world" share a consciousness. Each of the poems [in This Tree Will Be Here For A Thousand Years] contains an instant, sometimes twenty seconds long, sometimes longer, when I was aware of two separate energies: my own consciousness, which is insecure, anxious, massive, earthbound, persistent, cunning, hopeful; and a second con sciousness which is none of these things. The second consciousness has a melancholy tone, the tear inside the stone, what Lucretius calls "the tears of things," an energy circling downward, felt often in autumn, or moving slowly around apple trees or stars. . . . I've come to believe . . . that it is important for everyone that the second consciousness appear somehow in the poem, merged or not. It's time. The "human" poem can become transparent or porous at the end, so that the city, or objects, or the countryside enters. (9-10) The shamanistic impulse in Bly requires that his poems help "everyone" by revealing that a second consciousness exists as a separate energy, of which he becomes more aware when in solitude or private meditation, as expressed by his speaker in these stanzas from "Six Winter Privacy Poems": 4 Sitting Alone There is a solitude like black mudl 148 Sitting in this darkness singing, I can't tell if this joy is from the body, or the soul, or a third place. 5 Listening to Bach There is someone inside this music who is not well described by the names of Jesus, or Jehovah, or the Lord of Hosts I In each, the speaker senses a "separate energy" in a spir itual form deriving from outside his self. In "Sitting Alone," the joy may come from a third place, in "Listening to Bach," the spiritual energy, the "someone," is inside the music. The speaker makes clear in both stanzas that he is not projecting his consciousness on the objects or emotions, but that they carry their own presence, their own energy: the joy he experiences in "Sitting Alone" does not necessar ily come from him, just as his desire to weep in the poem about depression does not come from entirely within himself; there is a presence inside the music which moves the speaker spiritually in "Listening to Bach," and "Sitting Alone" describes the two-fold consciousness, the separate energies, which help define the self more completely. 9 "Reading in Fall Rain" illustrates the Bly speaker's awareness of this consciousness, which includes both his own and that coming from outside: The fields are black once more. The old restlessness is going. I reach out with open arms to pull in the black fields. All morning rain has fallen 149 steadily on the roof. I feel like a butterfly joyful in its powerful cocoon. * I break off reading: one of my bodies is gonel It's outdoors, walking swiftly away in the rain I I get up and look out. Sure enough, I see the rooster lifting his legs high in the wet grass. The poem's first part is imagistic, emotive, in the manner of the poems of Silence in the Snowy Fields, the companion volume of This Tree Will Be Here For A Thousand Years. Bly has written: "... the two books make one book. Like the earlier poems, these poems try to achieve 'two presences' by adopting the line with simple syntax ..." While read ing and meditating, the speaker feels joyful, yet when he stops reading in the poem's second part, he feels part of his consciousness, a separate energy, "walking / swiftly away in the rain." His joy, that arose from the two-fold con- . sciousness, does not derive strictly from his experience of reading all morning "while rain has fallen / steadily on the roof"— which is the emotive image— but partly from the objects that comprise the image: the rain and the fields. The "presence" of joy leaves the speaker at the moment he stops his reading-meditating, and enters the rooster. The "old restlessness" that has left, thereby making him joyous, is not entirely of his own energy, his own consciousness; 150 the moods, the emotions come from a blend of the two ener gies. The rooster "lifting his legs / high in the wet grass" is as seemingly joyous as the speaker was in the poem's first part; joy can spring from the consciousness contained in the wet fields. Bly remarked that he sometimes admires the poems of This Tree Will Be Here For A Thousand Years "for their quality of doubleness, of the complicated consciousness, the presence in them simultaneously of two presences. The mood is impersonal, as in all works of art that are interested in some consciousness beside the author's." It will serve us to remember these words when discussing the self-effacing poems of Chapter -IV, yet, although Bly is correct in suggesting that art, in order for it to be appreciated by others, requires some measure of impersonality, his poems are personal in the sense that they explore the origins of emotions, and help to define an individual consciousness. Bly's use of the confessional voice in these poems, then, like Lowell's, is self-exploratory. Whereas the voice of the imagistic poems intending to penetrate the reader's unconscious was assured, orchestrating an emotive response by conjuring archetypal imagery, the voice describing the two-fold consciousness is, necessarily, a questioning one which is indicative of the poem's subject, "the complicated consciousness, the presence in [the poem] simultaneously of two presences." Lowell and Wright, although using the 151 confessional voice in several ways, never permitted any of their various voices to appear uncontrolled, unsure of their subjects. For Bly, learning more of the self and of one's consciousness is his subject, about which no poet can be fully certain— as the personal poems discussed in this chapter teach us. IV. Mark Strand's "Shooting Whales" and John Berryman's "The Ball Poem" use many aspects of the confessional voice we have been identifying. "Shooting Whales," from the "New Poems" section of Strand's Selected Poems (1980), uses the narrative structure that Bly used in "The Dead Seal Near McClure's Beach," but in verse form rather than prose. The Strand speaker recalls an incident from his childhood in this poem and, in the manner of Lowell's "Dunbarton," the voice attempts to simulate that of Strand speaking as a child— that is, from the child's perspective. Consequently/ the tone is one of a child's fright, insecurity? so whereas "Dunbarton" ends with the child Lowell proclaiming his feeling of warmth and security: "I cuddled like a paramour in my Grandfather's bed," Strand's poem ends with the child alone in his bed, afraid and unable to sleep: When the shoals of plankton swarmed into St. Margaret's Bay, turning the beaches pink, we saw from our place on the hill the sperm whales feeding, 152 fouling the nets in their play, and breaching clean so the humps of their backs rose over the wide sea meadows. Day after day we waited inside for the rotting plankton to disappear. The smell stilled even the wind, and the oxen looked stunned, pulling hay on the slope of our hill. But the plankton kept coming in and the whales would not go. That's when the shooting began. The fishermen got in their boats and went after the whales, and my father and uncle and we children went, too. The froth of our wake sank fast in the wind-shaken water. The whales surfaced close by. Their foreheads were huge, the doors of their faces were closed. Before sounding, they lifted their flukes into the air and brought them down hard. They beat the sea into foam, and the path that they made shone after them. Though I did not see their eyes, I imagined they were like the eyes of mourning, glazed with rheum, watching us, sweeping along under the darkening sheets of salt. When we cut our engine and waited for the whales to surface again, the sun was setting, turning the rock-strewn barrens a gaudy salmon. A cold wind flailed at our skin. When finally the sun went down and it seemed like the whales had gone, my uncle, no longer afraid, shot aimlessly into the sky. 153 Three miles out in the rolling dark under the moon’s astonished eyes, our engine would not start and we headed home in the dinghy. And my father, hunched over the oars, brought us in. I watched him, rapt in his effort, rowing against the tide, his blond hair glistening with salt. I saw the slick spillage of moonlight being blown over his shoulders, and the sea and spindrift suddenly silver. He did not speak the entire way. At midnight when I went to bed I imagined the whales moving beneath me, sliding over the weed-covered hills of the deep; they knew where I was; they were luring me downward and downward into the murmurous waters of sleep. The poem follows a linear narrative, and contains complete, lyrical sentences, often one to a stanza. The sincerity of the first person speaker, the plausibility of the poem's dramatic situation, and the syntax are indicative of the confessional voice. "Shooting Whales" marks a distinction from Strand's earlier work, which is characterized by wit, unrealistic plot circumstances, and an impersonal, detached narrator. (Those poems will represent the uses of voice in personal poetry of the self-effacing mode analyzed in Chapter IV.) John Berryman's "The Ball Poem," from The Dispossessed (1948), is a personal poem in which the voice projects indi- vidual concerns on the subject. In this way, it is like 154 Wright's "A Blessing" where the speaker attributes his own emotions to the ponies. The voice of "The Ball Poem," in which the first person speaker addresses himself, weighs the loss of a boy's ball against his own losses and desola tion. The boy is never actually addressed by the speaker and therefore cannot be consoled by the speaker's reasoning. The speaker who seemingly intends his remarks for the boy betrays his self-pity, but attempts to hide his personal emotions in words of consolation for another person. The speaker of the poem, upon witnessing the boy lose his ball, reveals his private fears while describing the boy's sup posed emotional reaction to his loss: What is the boy now, who has lost his ball, What, what is he to do? I saw it go Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then Merrily over— there it is in the water! No use to say 'O there are other balls': An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down All his young days into the harbour where His ball went. I would not intrude on him, A dime, another ball, is worthless. Now He senses first responsibility In a world of possessions. People will take balls, [t/o] Balls will be lost always, little boy, And no one buys a ball back. Money is external. He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes, The epistemology of loss, how to stand up And gradually light returns to the street, A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight, Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark Floor of the harbour . . I am everywhere, I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move With all that move me, under the water Or whistling, I am not a little boy. Although the first person speaker understands that the boy 155 "senses first responsibility" and learns "how to stand up" to the loss, the speaker cannot bear his own loss; he is not a little boy. This passage from John Haffenden's biography of Berryman suggests that Berryman's personal self-pity of the time was reflected in the poems of The Dispossessed: At the end of February 1944, [Berryman's] appointment at Princeton ended, the cue to a more intense phase of despondency at unemployment. "Each year," he wrote, I hope that next year will find me dead, and so far I have been disappointed, but I do not lose that hope, which is almost my only one. I despair, placed as I am, of making anyone very happy, my own griefs are deep, ineradi cable , and my hope of writing something of value, while it has not vanished, dwindles. In the lake of the heart, storm, the fragments of the houses of my youth. He became so accustomed to self-pity that the fatalism of such statements took on a disinter ested air, as if spoken of a third person. It was characteristic of his attitude that he should have espoused the poetry of Aragon . . . where a bitter sentimentality and personal defeatism vis-a-vis the war in Europe harmonized with Berryman's own sense of affairs. Many of the poems that Berryman was to write for a while— later included in The Dispossessed— followed Aragon's example and tone. He intended to see the conflicts of his own soul mirrored in the European holocaust. (152) Given Berryman's despair during the time he wrote "The Ball Poem," the loss of the boy's ball can be read as inciting the Berryman speaker's fear of impotence. "Another ball is worthless," he would tell the boy, "People will take balls, / Balls will be lost always, little boy, / And no one buys 156 a ball back." But the Berryman speaker is not a little boy, as he says in the last line, and now when his "ball" is lost, it is of adult consequence. Another entry in Berryman's notebooks at about the time "The Ball Poem" was composed offers some corroboration to this reading: Extreme gloom. The end of my 30th year. I may do something hereafter, or later something some thing [sic] already done may show as worth while, but it does not appear so. My talent lost, like my hair, sex crumbling like my scalp. Disappoint ment & horror. And the collapse of will: self distrust, contempt, sloth, & paralysis. Every thing begun . . . everything abandoned. Every day I wish to die. (qtd. in Haffenden 156) The voice of "The Ball Poem" is confessional, focused on the "I" speaker— a personal one— rather than the boy. The voice masks its own concerns with the boy's circumstance (just as Berryman's fatalistic "statements took on a disinterested air, as if spoken of a third person"), yet as the poem's final lines indicate, the personal, "self-pitying fatalism" of the speaker emerges as the dominant theme of the poem. This poem, although using the confessional voice, serves as a rather fitting prelude— in that the speaker shields his concern by the narrative of the boy's incident— to the ensuing discussion of the persona mode in the next chapter, a mode exemplified by Berryman's work. 157 CHAPTER III THE PERSONA MODE John Berryman is the obvious representative poet of the persona mode because of his sustained work in using his per sona "Henry" as the speaker of his long book of verse, The Dream Songs (1969), and because of the amount of biographi cal evidence available that can be used to suggest some meaningful parallels between Berryman and his persona. This evidence informs us, too, of the differences separating Berryman's actual life experiences from how he chose Henry to represent them. Berryman's use of the persona mode allows the poet to reveal his emotions and to express his most personal desires— all through the voice of a persona who is the poet's alter ego and is nearly, though not entirely, indistinguishable from the poet himself. The persona voice, though, gives Berryman the freedom to say in his verse anything he likes, show any emotion, muse over an^ subject, and escape the accusation of having written infe rior verse— a charge often aimed at those writing in the confessional mode— for it is "Henry," albeit a weakly dis guised Berryman, and not "John Berryman with a social security number" (as he used to say), who is sentimental, nostalgic, introspective— reconditely so. 158 Yet this single voice of "Henry" accounts for 'differing perspectives; in The Dream Songs, Henry refers to himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, and in each the tone of voice is different and used for varying purposes as we shall see. Other poets experimented in slightly different ways with the persona mode. Weldon Kees has a more subtle per sona in "Robinson" in that we cannot be certain whether Robinson's experiences correlate directly to Kee's own life. Given the sparse biographical information on Kees, we cannot assume any parallels between him and his persona as readily as with Berryman and Henry. However, Kees regarded his Robinson as a representative man, an archetype of modern man confronted with the fears of imminent extinction. This use of the persona voice presents another method of self-examination: the behavior of the one, who is typical of the many, including of course the poet, is explored in the poetry through the voice of the persona. Different in his thematic concerns as well as his aesthetic approach to the persona voice, Galway Kinnell explores the possibilities of changing not merely into another mask, but altogether from the human form into animal form. From this persona, with its shifting perspective, Kinnell attempts to augment his self-knowledge, particularly in order to overcome his fear of dying. 159 All three poets found, through the persona mode, a means to express ideas about the self: Kees and Kinnell use the persona to voice their concerns about an individual's worth, the value of his life, in a modern world that seems to them growing more alien daily; and Berryman discovered that he could write about himself, about his personal feelings, under the guise of a persona voice, something he could not <jo for much of his writing career in his own personal voice. I. John Berryman's first wife, Eileen Simpson, remembers that Berryman did not like talking about himself, even in conversations with close friends. In the following passage, she writes of his and Delmore Schwartz's contrasting behavior in this regard: After one of these long evenings (which some times lasted six or seven hours), John often wondered aloud how it was that he, who with other people was so articulate, was so silent with Delmore. There was little mystery about that, it seemed to me: If the four of us were ^ together, or there were guests at the Schwartzes', the talk was literary and John did almost as much talking as Delmore. It was when it was just the three of us, and Delmore's conversation was autobiographical rather than bookish, that John (though keenly interested in what Delmore had to say) was likely to be silent. The natural thing would have been for him to talk about his family too, but it was a subject about which he was reticent in the beginning, even with me. He rarely mentioned his father. His mother, who was so actively involved in his life that he couldn t have left her out of his conversation had he wanted to, he talked about in the present tense. About their clashes of personality, the most he 160 permitted himself to say with anyone outside the family was a comically exasperated, "My mother I" when she had done something outrageous. So Delmore's candor about the flaws in Harry Schwartz's character, his efforts to dis tance himself from Rose's hysteria, and his bluntness in describing the defects of her per sonality, astonished John. Once, pushed beyond endurance by something his mother had done, Delmore said he hated her. John, who had learned his catechism well, was shocked. One must honor one's father and mother. He was struggling to honor his. (36-7) That Berryman was reticent in discussing the "flaws" of his parents' characters and that he chose to "honor" them perhaps out of religious obligation even, does not, however, satisfactorily explain why he, unlike Schwartz, was not disposed towards talking about his own autobiography. Certainly Berryman "talked" freely of his personal life in his creative work. A striking example of this can be found in an early prose work. First I will quote Simpson's account of a particular experience of Berryman's then show how he portrayed it in fiction. Simpson recounts the inci dent, which Berryman told her about, as follows: One night, on his way home to Lexington Avenue, he cut across Union Square and stopped by a cluster of men to listen to a dispute. Before he knew what was happening, he was caught up in an argument about the entrance of the United States into the war. When he tried to inject reason into the "savage" argument, the ringleader told him to shut up, and called him a Jew. John's objection that he wasn't a Jew but a Catholic enraged the leader, who shouted at him, "You like a Jew, you talk like a Jew, you are a Jew," and challenged John to disprove the charges by reciting the Apostles' Creed. Partly because by^ now John, too, was angry, partly because he hadn't, said the Creed in years, he could recall from his 161 days as an alter boy only phrases of the Latin— proof, the leader told the crowd, that John was a Jew. The crowd, which was convinced by the leader's reasoning and thought there was nothing further to be said, lost interest and drifted off to join other groups. (7) This, now, is from the last part of Berryman's story "The Imaginary Jew," published in 1945: Looking around I saw sitting on a bench near me a tall, heavy, serious-looking man of thirty, well dressed, whom I had noticed earlier, and appealed to him, "Tell me, do I look Jewish?" But he only stared up and waved his head vaguely. I saw with horror that something was wrong with him. "You look like a Jew. You talk like a Jew. You are a Jew," I heard the Irishman say. . . . "Now listen, you Jew. I'm a Catholic." "So am I, or I was born one, I'm not now. I was born a Catholic. . . . " "Yeah?" said the Irishman. "Say the Apostles' Creed." Memory went swirling back, I could hear the little bell die as I hushed it and set it on the felt, Father Boniface looked at me tall from the top of the steps and smiled greeting me in the darkness before dawn as I came to serve, the men pressed around me under the lamps, and I could remember nothing but visibilum omnium . . . et invisibilium? "I don't remember it." The Irishman laughed with his certainty. Even allowing for the likelihood of Simpson's remembering the "fictional" story better than Berryman's telling her of his encounter (which probably accounts for the similar dia logue in the two), it is clear that Berryman found a medium which allowed him to overcome his reticence of discussing his autobiography. The first person narrator of "The Imaginary Jew," when attempting the Apostles' Creed, thinks of his days serving Mass for Father Boniface. So, too, did 162 Berryman serve for the same priest; in an interview with Pgte;c Stitt, he saidi "X had a strict Catholic training. I went to a Catholic school and I adored my priest, Father Boniface. I began serving Mass under him at the age of five, and I used to serve six days a week. Often there would be nobody in the church except him and me" (319). Berryman in fact seemingly had a penchant for recording his memorable experiences directly into his prose fiction. In his novel, Recovery (posthumously published in 1973), the first person narrator, Dr. Alan Severance, tells a fellow patient about the time he was distraught at not being allowed to leave the hospital in order to lecture his university class: ". . .1 was really in despair. The goddamn class met at one-fifteen, it wasn't even clear that I could get my secretary on the phone in time, much less the Director, and besides what could they do? I sweated. Meanwhile the tone of the Group had metamorphosed in one second. They were all con solation, advice, sympathy, even praise. I couldn't understand it and did not give two ounces of gerbil-dung. I simply did not know what to do, in my opinion nothing could be done. . . . You see the lecture was on the Fourth Gospel, I gave a weird course over there sometimes, outside my own College.^ Somebody suddenly said, 'Vin's trained in divinity 1 and there was Vin looking hot-faced at me saying, 'I'll give your lecture for you.' I felt stunned. I said, 'You're not serious.' 'Oh yes I am,' he said. I still couldn't believe him--him. I had hit him very hard two times that morning. You re not kidding me?' I said, having a sense of about to fall off my chair or just fly out the window^ backward. 'No, no, I'll do it— if necessary, I 11 teach it in Greek!' I saw he meant it, Mary-Jane, God Almighty. I said, 'I could kiss you!' He said— he's a maniac— 'Well, do,' and so help me 163 I leaned across Keg (who, it vaguely and irritably even in that moment came to me, was laughing) and Vin and I embraced and kissed cheeks.” (47-8) In speaking of an experience from his life that was for him a manifestation of "the idea of a God of rescue," Berryman recounted for Stitt the following scene, which took place while he was in group therapy: Then I was in real despair. I couldn’t just ring up the secretary and have her dismiss my class-- it would be grotesgue. Here it was, eleven—thirty, and class met at one-fifteen. I didn't even know if I could get my chairman on the phone to find somebody to meet them. And even if I could, who could he have found that would have been quali fied? We have no divinity school here. Well, all kinds of consolations and suggestions came from the group, and suddenly my counselor said, "Well, I'm trained in divinity. I'll give your lecture for you." And I said, "You're kidding!" He and I had had some very sharp exchanges. I-had called him sar castic, arrogant, tyrannical, incompetent, theat rical, judgmental, and so on. He said, "Yes, I'll teach it if I have to teach it in Greek!" I said, "I can't believe it. Are you serious?" He said, "Yes, I'm serious." And I said, "I could kiss you." He said, "Do." There was only one man between us, so I leaned over and we embraced. (318-19) Berryman recorded in his fiction even the details of this experience: the time the class met, the dialogue, the expression of joy and relief. It was obviously memorable to Berryman, but the incident carried a spiritual signifi cance for him also. He continued: "Well, when I thought it over in the afternoon, I suddenly recalled what has been for many years one of my favorite conceptions. I got it from Augustine and Pascal. It's found in many other people, 164 too, but especially in those heroes of mine. Namely, the idea of a God of rescue. He saves men from their situations, off and on during life's pilgrimage, and in the end" (319). This was precisely the epiphany that Berryman's fictional protagonist Severance was trying to explain to Mary-Jane in Recovery. Apparently Berryman felt that his critical work could serve as a means of expressing his personal concerns as well as his fiction could. Eileen Simpson believes that Berryman saw himself reflected in the life of Stephan Crane, whose biography Berryman was writing in 1949; she reports of that time: Freud had the answer, John told me, trembling with excitement after reading the paper called "A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men." The danger was that if Freud explained Crane's behavior, he also threatened to explain John's. For, more and more, John saw similarities between Crane's life and his own. Crane had lost his father early, had been raised by a strong-minded mother who had favored him in a way that under mined his adult relationships with other women. He had been an apostate whose strong conscience tortured him over his sexual behavior. He had felt a need, as Mark Van Doren had written, to live, at least as an artist, in the midst of all but unbearable excitement." He, too, had been pulled toward suicide. When John wrote such sentences as "His force the boy got from his mother," he wondered if he was writing biography or autobiography. (186) So the critical studies as well as the fiction reflected his personal experience. The former perhaps even unconsciously became a vehicle for self-expression, and certainly was much more subtle than the 165 self-representation in his fiction, but still acted as an outlet. Yet Berryman only gradually came to use his verse as such. He began to inject himself consciously into his poetry when composing Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956) in the form of a character in the poem whom Berryman simply called "the poet." Although some of his earlier work made use of the confessional mode of voice (as seen in "The Ball Poem" discussed in Chapter II), Homage was the first poem in which Berryman purposefully incorporated himself in his verse as a character in the guise of "the poet." Similar to the reported self interest he found in the Crane biography, Berryman was obsessed with Homage to the point where, Simpson recalls, "Mistress Bradstreet was vividly present in the apartment at all hours of the day and night (John's working schedule). Her life was so intertwined with ours it was sometimes difficult for him to distinguish between her and himself, between her and me. After years of childlessness . . . [Bradstreet] becomes pregnant. It had been to remove the one possible physical impediment to my conceiving that I had just undergone elective surgery, and returned from the hospital full of optimism . . . an optimism which, in the face of John's ambivalence, was highly unrealistic" (224). It is fair to suggest, then, that Berryman chose subjects for study which mirrored his personal situation— at least as suggested by Simpson in regards to the Crane and Bradstreet projects. Or it could 166 have been that Berryman's intense involvement with his work made them seem to him self-reflective. Simpson reports further that as Berryman progressed with Homage, Anne Bradstreet began sounding more like Simpson herself, and "the poet," more like Berryman: Parts of the dialogue between the poet and Anne had a familiar ring. How many times had John awakened in a fright, saying something not far from: I trundle the bodies, on the iron bars, over the fire backward & forth, they burn; bits fall. I wonder if ] [ killed them And I, attempting to reassure him, had said, at greater length and unpoetically: — Dreamsl You are good.-- How many times had we taken opposite sides on the question: Does God exist? Would Anne, with her greater knowledge of Scripture, be more suc cessful at convincing him, as. he yearned to be convinced, than I had been? (227) Yet in the poem, the "I" must still be regarded as "the poet"— and not Berryman— who is a speaker that appears first, to open Homage, and remains to the poem's ending. That is, "the poet" is as much a character, a fiction, as the Bradstreet character who has an affair with the twen tieth century poet. It is not necessary to assume, however, that Berryman is "the poet" in order to suggest that Homage marked the appearance of a character as a speaker used to voice Berryman's own concerns and to reveal something of his personal life. 167 Even in a poem that is principally about someone else about Anne Bradstreet— Berryman could not merely create a separate voice exclusively his subject's. In Homage he brought in "the poet" and fused his voice with Bradstreet's, as William Martz has argued: As a poem of personal caring, with consequent emphasis on personal identity, Homage also immediately defines itself as a poem distinctly and appealingly modern in subject and in theme. But the personal identity is the combined identity of the poet and Anne, the union, if you will, of past and present. Although the voice of the poet opens the poem and thus provides a framing point of view for what follows, the two voices blend, modulate from one to the other, and, though often distinct, are finally one voice, a voice of pas sion and caring, which is the final identity sought, and an emblem of our common humanity. (27) Berryman was mostly in agreement with this perspective, for as he said in an interview with Richard Kostelanetz: "The 'I' of the twentieth-century poet modulates into her voice" (345). The poet as character, intended as a persona by Berryman to narrate Homage, may be more inclusive however of the actual poet John Berryman. He explains his use of the pronoun "I" in the passage below taken from his essay "One Answer to a Question: Changes"; and although he was referring to "The Ball Poem," I believe his remarks may be applicable to his use of pro nouns in all his verse. (He once told Life magazine [July 21, 1967] that "if I were sitting around praising 168 myself . . . I would claim to understand the pronoun better than any other living writer.") . . . a commitment of identity can be "reserved," so to speak, with an ambiguous pronoun. The poet himself is both left out and put in; the boy does and does not become him and we are confronted with a process which is at once a process of life and a process of art. A pronoun may seem a small mat ter, but she matters, he matters, it matters, they matter. Without this invention . . . I could not have written either of the two long poems that constitute the bulk of my work so far. If I were making a grandiose claim, I might pretend to know more about the administration of pronouns than any other living poet writing in English or American. (326-27) The "poet himself"— in reference to "The Ball Poem"— means Berryman himself, unlike Homage where a character who is a poet is part of the poem, its movement and dramatic situa tion. In either case, however, Berryman has suggested that the "I" is ambiguous, a pronoun that "matters" because it could refer to both subjects of a poem: both the boy and the "I" speaker in "The Ball Poem," and both the poet and Anne Bradstreet in Homage. It is evident that Berryman, whether or not in the guise of a persona as "the poet," could not keep from blending the "I" with his subjects and therefore modulating them into a single voice. As similar to his work on the Crane biography, where at times he puta- tively "wondered if he was writing biography or autobiog raphy," and his work on Homage, which led to Bradstreet's life becoming "intertwined" with his own to the point where reportedly "it was sometimes difficult for him to 169 distinguish between her and himself," Berryman projected ihimself on his subjects. The work, consequently, lost its separate "identity," becoming instead— to. borrow from Martz's phrase— a personal identity which is the combined identity of the poet and subject. Berryman simply could not leave himself, his "personal identity," out of his work. What he wrote in his essay "'Song of Myself1: Intention and Substance" about Whitman's use of "I" reveals his conception of that pronoun, how it operates in verse, and his intentions for it in his own work: For Whitman the poet is voice. Not solely his own— let us settle this problem quickly: a_poet's first personal pronoun is nearly always ambiguous, but we have the plain declaration from Whitman that "the trunk and centre whence the answer was to radiate . . . must be an identical soul and body, a personality— which personality, after many considerings and ponderings I deliberately settled should be myself— indeed could not be any other." I would sorrow over the credulity of any one who took this account-of-the-decision-as- conscious to be historical; but I am convinced of the reality of the decision. A voice, then, for himself and others; for others as himself— this is the intention clearly (an underlying exhibi tionism and narcissism we take for granted). What others?— Americans, man. A voice— that is, expressing (not creating)--expressing things already in existence. (2 30) Berryman’s "I," functioning the way he sees Whitman's operating, is not wholly personal but something like "the poet" of Homage, a persona— a voice "for himself and others; for others as himself." But he does not exclude entirely the personal side of the "I." Rather, it, like the I. of Whitman which Berryman emphasizes, is a pronoun both 170 universal (for others) and individual (as himself). That he intended his remarks concerning Whitman's "I" to include the personal is evident in the following passage taken from the same essay: "'Leaves of Grass' ..." [Whitman] says, "has mainly been the outcroppings of my own emotional and personal nature— an attempt, from first to last, to put a Person, a human being (myself, in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century, in America,) freely, fully and truly on record." I call your attention to an incongruity of this formulation with Eliot's amusing theory of the impersonality of the artist, and a contrast between the mere putting-on-record and the well-nigh universal current notion of creation, or making things up. (230) Berryman's "Henry" of The Dream Songs, perhaps similar to Whitman's "voice" in that it is one expression of the consciousness of the age, can be viewed as the voice of his— Henry's— and Berryman's age as well, a voice expressive of the Zeitgeist. John Haffenden, in his introduction to Berryman's posthumous Henry’s Fate & Other Poems, 1967-1972 (1977), suggests this comparison of Henry with Fitzgerald's characters: "F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed that all his characters, filtered through his own mind and personality, belonged to the consciousness of the race, and that he could not keep the truth out of his work. The same might be said of Berryman vis-a-vis Henry's role in The Dream Songs, pausing only to exclude the conceit of Fitzgerald's remark" (xv-xvi). This seems much the same observation that Berryman made of Whitman: a voice for oneself and others, because it originates from the individual, it-- 171 is necessarily a voice for others— a; universal expression of Zeitgeist— that is personal, one point of view. And this is how Berryman conceived of art. A poet begins with a personal subject, a concern for the self, in order to serve the creation of poetry. Louis Simpson's ideas about an author's personal voice may further clarify this point; even though he was speaking of writers in general, Simpson's remarks in A Revolution in Taste seem relevant to Berryman: . . . what I have called the personal voice is an expression of character. And character is some thing made. The self that appears in the novel or poem has been constructed according to certain aesthetic principles. This version of the self is not intended to direct attention upon the author but to serve the work of art. The purpose is to create a symbolic life, a portrait of the artist that will have meaning for others and so create a feeling of community, if only among a few thousand. (169-70) To this end— so that "a symbolic life, a portrait of the artist that [could] have meaning for others Berryman created a persona in his verse character, Henry, who could represent the universal consciousness. The personal voice in his poetry is "the soul, Berryman told Kostelanetz, separate from himself: All the way through my work is a tendency to regard the individual soul under stress. The soul is not oneself, for the personal "I, me with a social security number and a bank account, never gets into the poem; they are all about a third person. I'm a follower of Pascal in the sense that I don't know what the issue is, or how it is to be resolved— the issue of our common human life, yours, mine, your lady's, everybody's; 172 but I do not think that one way in which we can approach it, by the means of art, coming out of Homer and Virgil and down through Yeats and Eliot, is by investigating the individual human soul, or human mind, whichever you prefer— I couldn't care less. I have tried, therefore, to study two souls in my long poems. (345) For Berryman, who feels that the study of the individual soul or mind will not resolve "the issue of our common human life," an investigation of a more "objective" soul or mind— in so far that all his work is "about a third person" because he considers his "I" as such— is the best means of expressing more universal concerns. Given his rationale, then, the voice of Berryman's work is always of the persona mode, whether in the guise of Henry, or another "third person" by which he means his use of "I." And the "souls" in his long poems, of course, refer to the Bradstreet of Homage (where the poet's voice "modulates" into hers) and to Henry of The Dream Songs. This distinction— between the "I" as the poet, the author of the verse, and the "I" as a persona, a third person— is one that Berryman insisted on making. Henry, a "third person" in the truest sense, is a.persona, a voice through which Berryman speaks, and he, Henry, is thus representative of a universal soul or mind. Nevertheless, in the course of a single interview (with Stitt for Paris Review) Berryman made the following contradictory statements about Henry: 173 I think the model in The Dream Songs was the other greatest American poem— I am very ambitious— "Song of Myself"— a very long poem, about sixty pages. It also has a hero, a personality, himself. Henry is accused of being me and I am accused of being Henry and I deny it and nobody believes me. (307) Then he modified his stance: Suppose I take this business of the relation of Henry to me, which has interested so many people, and which is categorically denied by me in one of the forewords. Henry both is and is not me, obviously. We touch at certain points. But I am an actual human being; he is nothing but a series of conceptions— my conceptions. I brush my teeth; unless I say so somewhere in the poem— I forget whether I do or not— he doesn't brush his teeth. He only does what I make him do. If I have succeeded in making him believable, he per forms all kinds of actions besides those named in the poem, but the reader has to make them up. That's the world. But it's not a religious or philosophical system. (309) Still later in the interview, the following exchange took place while discussing Homage: The great exception was this; it did not occur to me to have a dialogue between them— to insert bodily Henry into the poem . . . Me, to insert me, in my own person, John Berryman, I_, into the poem . . . Interviewer: Was that a Freudian slip? Berryman: I don't know. Probably. (311) So in 1970, fourteen years after the publication of Homage, Berryman— who was careful to note the "I" character of that poem as "the poet," distinct from himself— not only admits that his "character" was actually himself, but also con fuses himself with Henry, which was the very idea he had adamantly denied. One may take into consideration Berryman's mental health problems induced by his alcoholism 174 which he endured around the time of this interview, but this complex matter of who Henry represents was not clear, it seems, even to the author in good health. The confusion is due mostly to Berryman's desire to create a ■ universal voice— the way he believed Whitman had done— speaking for others, but about his personal experiences, which neverthe less he regarded as representative of his time. Yet for an analysis of the persona mode of voice, it will not be necessary to determine conclusively whether or not Henry is in fact Berryman, whether or not Henry is no more than the poet's pseudonym. For our purposes it will be most useful to regard Henry as Berryman's persona; that is, Berryman recounts his selected autobiography through Henry, and, because it is in the form of a third person speaker (Henry), Henry as persona achieves for Berryman the voice of a universal soul or mind. Henry can claim as much authority in this role as can Whitman's "I," according to Berryman, because one person's history is at least a com ponent of the consciousness, or the soul, of the age. As Jascha Kessler has written, Henry is "someone who has to take the praise and blame merely because he is there, in that body. Berryman calls him Henry, as if to imply that he himself is not Henry, though he may be carried along with him," (34) just as, at times, Berryman's personal his tory is recorded through Henry. 175 Those critics who disclaim Berryman's prefatory note to His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968) , the second volume of The Dream Songs, which says that Henry is "an imaginary character (not the poet, not me)," are not quite convinced that Berryman could remove himself from his poem simply by giving the central character a name other than his own. Jo R. Porterfield writes of that preface that "Berryman is evasive. We detect a certain nervousness in the’vehemence of that 'not the poet, not me.' Reading the poetry we become increasingly skeptical of the trustworthiness of our guide in the preface" (33). Christopher Ricks, in his review of The Dream Songs, wrote: "'An imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry': anybody credulous enough to take Berryman's word for it would be incapacitated from taking Berryman's words. But at least his egomaniacal hilarities, glooms, puzzlements are not drawling vanity or sober-sided grandiosity" (314). But while Ricks suggests at the end of this remark that the creation of Henry has succeeded in providing some measure of objectivity to Berryman's personal and "egomaniacal hilarities," Robert Lowell, writing in New York Review of Books, makes it clear that he feels Henry is_ Berryman without question, and that Berryman intended it that way: "Anything he has seen, over heard or imagined can go in [The Dream Songs]* The poems are about Berryman, or rather they are about a person he calls Henry. Henry is Berryman seen as himself, as poete 176 maudit, child and puppet. He is tossed about with a mixture jof tenderness and absurdity, pathos and hilarity that would have been impossible if the author had spoken in the first person" (31). So Lowell states an alternate reason for Berryman's use of Henry: aside from the poet's intention for a third person, a universal voice,.Berryman could mix "tenderness and absurdity, pathos and hilarity" all in. the guise of a persona. And if any part of the poem is too . tender, pathetic, etc., it is not a shortcoming of Berryman's poetic skills, but evidence of artistic inten tions which have Henry behaving in certain ways. The critic Charles Molesworth lends credence to Lowell's observation with his following remarks: In the ironic balance between display and evasion, Berryman's Henry appears a master.- Here, in a late Dream Song, he talks to himself about himself, an occupation the confessional poet is often at pains, though unsuccessfully to avoid: — Oh, I suffer from a strike & a strike and three balls: I stand up for much, [t/o] Wordsworth and that sort of thing. The pitcher dreamed. He threw a hazy curve, I took it. in my stride S t out I struck, lonesome Henry. These songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. [t/o] They are only meant to terrify and comfort. Lilac was found in his hand. Here Berryman is simultaneously Casey at the bat and the poet laureate; self-parody and self- glorification jostle each other with knowing wit. The offhanded irony of "and that sort of thing" occurs often in the Dream Songs and is the 177 extension of the mixing of modes that becomes the work's characteristic signature. (6 8) With Henry as the speaker of the poem, Berryman can "glorify" himself; poems using the confessional voice would'- appear too self-indulgent if such a glorification were attempted, and the self-effacing poems (which we will examine in the next chapter) would not consider it. Henry, then, was an outlet for Berryman, one which allowed him to say anything, express any emotion in his poetry and label it a poetic device, an aesthetic intention. When Kostelanetz asked him, after the publication of The Dream Songs, whether he was now finished with Henry, Berryman replied: "Well, mostly I'm through with Henry, but the minute I say that, pains course through me. I can't bear to be rid of that admirable outlet, that marvelous way of making your mind known to many other people" (341). And as it turned out, Berryman continued to use Henry as a voice in his work throughout his life; some of these poems have been posthumously published in Henry's Fate & Other Poems (1972) for example, the book he was working on just before his suicide; and many others are yet uncollected. The persona mode of voice for Berryman was his way of speaking his mind, showing his emotions— something he was so reticent to do either in conversation when a young adult or in the first person of the confessional mode in his poetry, excluding the poems of Love & Fame (1970). And 178 Berryman was aware that his use of the third person— at least in Recovery— acted as the medium for himself. Haffenden, quoting from Berryman's journals, suggests that "his novel Recovery, a strictly autobiographical work, is in large part a redaction of his own hospital diary. Speedily drafting that work, he became aware at an early stage that Severance, the hero, 'often unconsciously thinks of himself in the 3rd person, as I do. Let this stand, when it happens. Maybe even use it.' (The same conscious ness of himself as a third person had informed the technique of The Dream Songs)" (402). Berryman once confided, reports the poet Michael Dennis Browne, that, "There is a fiendish resemblance between Henry & me." And Browne suggests that "the creating of a persona is for the conscious mind both unwelcome, in some sense, and a necessary extension of it. In the case of Henry, all kinds of material previously inaccessible was released and swarmed into the poems, much of it fearful, all of it vital. So much that previously was inexpressible could now find a voice as the whole range of invention and language widened" (79).^ To illustrate how the persona can function as an extension, or representation, of the poet's voice, I will concentrate on a particular type of poem recurrent through out The Dream Songs: the elegy. The elegies are signifi cant to the work, as A. Alvarez noted in his review of it: "[Berryman] has written an elegy on his brilliant 179 generation, and in the process, he has also written an elegy on himself." But before showing how Berryman used the per sona mode of voice to grieve in verse for those of his generation who died young— and often violently or tragically— some biographical background is necessary. In February 1942, Berryman and his close friend and Harvard colleague, Delmore Schwartz, went to New York to visit Eileen Simpson, Berryman's fiancee at the time. She recalls the genuine, brotherly concern Schwartz showed for his friend, though often displayed in an affected manner: Without a trace of the shyness I thought I had seen at first, [Schwartz] continued in a ban tering manner to play the role with John of a worldly-wise advisor to a naif who didn't know how to look after himself. Sancho Panza and Don Quixote was the way they characterized this part of their relationship. John jaywalking, John being undiplomatic with his publisher, John being stand-offish with his colleagues, John moving from Cambridge to Boston (as he had done following our summer together in New York). This last had isolated him from the academic community, Delmore said to me, anc had been bad for his career. "It's not good for John to be so much alone. He's a recluse, you know." (10) Although Schwartz attempted to mask his concern with his manner of expression, he obviously felt that Simpson should be apprised of his friend's situation; his insinuation was clear that, as Berryman's future wife, she should help him pursue his "career." 180 One year later, when Berryman (now married) was at Princeton, a more solemn Schwartz betrayed his deep affec tion for his friend. He felt Berryman had changed, and accused him, together with R. P. Blackmur, of acting strangely, as Simpson recalls: What may have been strange to Delmore was the relationship that had developed between Richard and John, a relationship Delmore knew about through the two men's letters but experienced for the first time when they appeared together. He felt that his two old friends had become close in a way that excluded him. Richard and John read and criticized each other's writing in the way Delmore and John had done at Harvard. ("Slow? There never was a man as slow as Richard," John said, "but my God, what a reader!") And although, because of the difference in generation and Richard's natural reticence, they never developed the kind of intimacy Delmore and John had shared, they saw each other far more often, and were, at the time of this meeting, as close intellectually as two men could be. What had begun on John's side as awe had changed into admiration and affection. Delmore also claimed that John had changed/ "You're wearing a new suit," he said accusingly. (88-9) Schwartz's reference to the new suit was his implication that Berryman, under Blackmur's influence, had turned into a "proper Princetonian." Schwartz, jealous that he appar ently had been supplanted by Blackmur as Berryman's best friend and personal advisor, felt even more protective of Berryman than before, but now his approach was that of an equal, a close friend, rather than an older and wiser brother. 181 Berryman accepted. Schwartz's show of friendship and responded similarly. When Schwartz needed help later on in their relationship when both men's lives were more turbulent, 'Berryman provided it. Haffenden, in his biography of Berryman, records this 1962 incident; Berryman remained a steady friend even though Schwartz— showing signs of the mental breakdown that was imminent— was extremely abusive of him: A large party was held one night at Stuart Udall's. Kate [Berryman's wife] did not go, for her ankles were swelling from her pregnancy. Later that evening Berryman and Richard Wilbur called her from a police station. Word had come during the party that Delmore Schwartz had been arrested for drunkenness and was in jail. When Berryman and Wilbur went to investigate, it turned out that Schwartz had gone berserk in his room, had torn the telephone from the wall, and had hurled an ashtray through the window. The police thought he was only drunk and kept him six hours, but he was more mad than drunk. Discharged at last, he was not at all grateful for being rescued: for one thing, his belt had been taken away from him. He abused Berryman violently and was heard with perfect patience. Berryman was equally unruffled when Schwartz stole a taxi booked by Wilbur and himself and left them with a long walk in the early hours of the morning. Schwartz, sloppily dressed but carrying his umbrella, arrived in a state of bedraggled ferment back at the hotel. Victoria, who loved him, was forbidden to enter the room. "Go and sleep with Berryman1" he screamed at her. In any event, Berryman stayed in Wilbur's room, and Victoria with Kate. In the morning Schwartz received his money and left town. Throughout the incident, as Richard Wilbur recalls, Berryman was a solici tous and loyal friend. Dream Song 149, one of Berryman's elegies for Schwartz, records that: "I got him out of a police-station once, in Washington, the world is tref / and grief too astray for tears." (312) 182 These soap-operatic accounts illustrate that throughout their adult lives, Berryman and Schwartz were close and cared for one another more so than ordinary friends commonly do. So when Schwartz died, as Haffenden has noted, one way Berryman expressed his grief was to write elegies, collected in His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (which later became the last two—thirds of The Dream Songs), which he dedicated, in part, "to the sacred memory of Delmore Schwartz." Part VI of The Dream Songs, then, begins with a long elegy for Schwartz in the form of several, separate, poems. However, Dream Song 157, near the end of the sequence, states in its opening line that they represent "Ten Songs, one solid block of agony . . ." which shows that Berryman clearly intended that grouping as a single verse unit. (Actually, it was thirteen, not ten, songs by the time he finished his lamentation: Dream Songs 146-158.) It is an elegy that is useful in demonstrating the ways Berryman employed the persona mode of voice. In Dream Song 146, the first of the sequence, the first person speaker explains that the subject of deceased acquaintances provides the necessary drama in order for "Henry," not the poem's "I" speaker, to lament Schwartz s passing: These lovely motions of the air, the breeze, • tell me I'm not in hell, though round me the dead lie in their limp postures 183 dramatizing the dreadful word instead for lively Henry, fit for debaucheries and bird-of-paradise vestures only his heart is elsewhere, down with them & down with Delmore specially, the new ghost haunting Henry most: though fierce the claims of others, coimedela crime [t/o] came the Hebrew spectre, on a note of woe and Join me 0. Henry's thoughts and the thoughts of the "I" speaker seem to merge in the first stanza, making them a single, unified voice whereby the speaker refers to himself in the third person by the name of Henry. This is what Berryman would want us to believe, as indicated in his introductory remarks to The Dream Songs: "The poem . . . is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry . . . who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about- him self sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second . . ." However, in the elegy for Schwartz the first person speaker is distinct from Henry. In the opening of the poem, the first person speaker is listless, as though dead. He knows he is alive, however,| because the "lovely motions of the air, the breeze" tell him he is "not in hell" even though he is surrounded by the deac who "lie in their limp postures." So as the first person speaker languishes, Henry is said to be "lively." And there is another distinction marking the two as separate. Henry grieves for "Delmore specially, the new ghost" while the first person speaker is preoccupied with 184 thoughts of his own death. This is the poem’s last stanza: 'Down with them all!' Henry suddenly cried. Their deaths were theirs. I wait on for my own, I dare say it won't be long. I have tried to be them, god knows I have tried, but they are past it all, I have not done, which brings me to the end of this song. The fact that the first person speaker knows he is not in hell, as he reveals to us in stanza one, is the catalyst which brings Henry into existence in this poem; the two have similar thoughts because Henry is created by the poem's speaker. Henry's thoughts are revealed to us by the "I," the poem's speaker, and told to us as though from Henry's point of view. In the final stanza, Henry, in an angered tone, cries that he is finished, for the time, thinking of others' deaths, especially Schwartz's. It is time now for the first person speaker to contemplate his own. But it was Henry who acted as the vehicle which brought the first per son speaker from a listlessness while regarding 'the dead in their limp postures" to a more active involvement with him self, as manifest by his preoccupation with his own death. Even having accepted Berryman's insistent claim that the I in The Dream Songs is always Henry, "not the poet, not me," (yet many critics, as previously noted, have contended that he protests too much; but Helen Vendler, in her Part of Nature, Part of Us, seems to have struck a compromise with her suitable line: "Henry is not Berryman, but neither is Henry not-Berryman,") the two voices— that is, the two 185 points of view, the first person speaker's and Henry's— are distinct, each a separate persona able to express what the other cannot. Henry is lively when the first person speaker is not; Henry cries, "Down with them all!" without motive (seemingly, but which however allows for the first person speaker to repress his thoughts about others in order to concentrate on himself. Whereas in the first stanza, his thoughts were on the dead "round" him (confused as to whether they were actually with him or merely in his head, he wondered if he were in hell, but finally concluded other- jwise), in the last stanza his concern is solely personal. Henry, in stanza two, tried unsuccessfully to think of the instead, his own death, and his "heart . . . elsewhere, down jwith them / & down with Delmore specially, the new ghost / •haunting Henry most. ..." Henry, then, was "down with them" in "hell," thinking of them, but the first person speaker adopts Henry's cry, "Down with them all!" which the speaker now interprets as a call for the repression of •haunting ghosts in favor of self concern, his personal death-wish. When confronted with the news of a friend's death, Berryman, like the "I" of the final stanza, often grew introspective and turned towards notions of his own death, or his father's suicide. Perhaps this was his means of deflecting his sorrow; more likely, rather, it suggests his preoccupation with himself. Haffenden records that "when 186 Saul Bellow's father died Berryman had told Bellow with ^apparent impersonality: 'My father died for me all over again last week, in a terrible dream which when I analyzed it turned out to be about him not dying at once, as I was told he did (he shot himself, on an island in Florida where we lived, when I was twelve), but living a while unable to move or call out for help, but then in the dream he said "saved"— as of his soul, I mean. His father's death is one of the few main things that happens to a man, I think, and it matters greatly to the life when it happens, I can't help feeling that you are lucky to have had yr father for so long, and then just to have seen him again as A says you did. The trouble with a father's dying very early (not to speak of his killing himself) is not so much just his loss as the disproportionate & crippling role the mother then assumes for one.'" (274) Although there is a fleeting attempt at consolation, (Berryman keeps the focus of his remarks on how, through adulthood, he had been affected by his father's suicide. When Theodore Roethke died, Berryman wrote to Ralph Ross: I was slugged . . . and for the first time I revise the 2nd of the Songs for him I'd been reluctantly & despairingly working at. That is the last "free" Dream Song. I send it to you. I don't know what its fate will be. But I imagine it will be around a while. I sent it to Beatrice, his widow, with a letter pseudo- consoling. . . . I haven't decided who to give it to yet; I'm tempted by Kenyon . . . (qtd. in Haffenden 331) He indeed may have been "slugged" by Roethke's passing, but apparently it was difficult for him to console Beatrice, just as he neglected to console Bellow; he was instead more concerned about where to publish the poem he wrote in com memoration of Roethke. And when he learned of Robert Frost's 187 jdeath, Berryman's initial reaction was: . . it's scary. Who's number one? Who's number one? Cal is number one, isn't he?" (Haffenden 319) which of course betrayed his iintense competitiveness rather than any remorse for a fellow poet's passing on. When Randall Jarrell died, Berryman wrote to William Meredith that "Randall's death.hurt me— shock and sorrow to Mackey, please. Everybody is dying— I personally am dying of diarrhoea & nerve-ends." Yet, Haffenden offers a reasonable explanation for Berryman's seeming callousness. "On the other hand," he writes, "Berryman may have chosen to avoid any show of sentimentalism by such a brisk, if unfortunate, transition. In the early part of 1966 , Yale University organised a memorial for Jarrell, with about a dozen speakers; Richard Eberhart remembers emphatically: 'Berryman was pretty far gone when I saw him last at the Yale Jarrell memorial. He was pathetic. I felt sorry for him but also felt that he should not have appeared in public.' Robert Penn Warren recalls, in contrast, that 'Berryman's witty, funny, and moving remarks made a profound impression . . . he was coherent, amusing, and effective— in spite of, or because of, his favorite beverage.'" (332) Obviously Berryman was confused anytime he learned of a death-particularly a close friend's death— and his inconsistent, and often inappropriate, reactions to these deaths were spawned by conflicting emotions relating to his 188 father's suicide, thoughts of his own suicide, and ambiva lent feelings towards his deceased friends. Haffenden con tinues : In one respect, he enshrined his friends as . . . "the sacred dead," who offered him no further competition and unquestionably received his jealous identification. But he could express himself with a seemingly equal emotion for those who were not his friends, especially if their deaths were violent, or suicidal like Sylvia Plath's, and triggered both an old manner of grief for his father and his theory about the dispensation of his own life. He could arrogate the dear dead to himself as emblems, and sometimes expressed a grief in excess of familiarity. There is no reason at all to doubt the reality and intensity of his mourning, however, since it was proper only to himself. Yet there is an ambiva lence evident in the degree to which those deaths readily served Berryman as copy for his verses. (331) He did not know Ernest Hemingway, but Berryman wept when he learned of the death; Berryman associated Hemingway's suicide with his own father's--which perhaps explains the reason he could "express himself with a seemingly equal emotion for those who were not his friends"— and this, in turn, became the subject of Dream Song 235: Tears Henry shed for poor old Hemingway . . . Save us from shotguns & fathers' suicides. It all depends on who you're the father of if you want to kill yourself— a bad example, murder of oneself . . . Mercy! my father; do not pull the trigger or all my life I'll suffer from your anger killing what you began. So Henry's expression of grief in verse for Hemingway— for someone Berryman did not really know— could be as sorrowful, 189 as mournful as for someone Berryman knew intimately because both kinds could engender grief, the reality of which and "intensity of his mourning . . . [were] proper only to him self." And both the deaths of close friends and of others could be suitable as material for verse because Berryman associated all suicidal or otherwise tragic deaths with his personal history. Berryman, through Henry then, can shed tears for Hemingway because both he and Papa were sons of fathers who committed suicide. In real life, conversely, Berryman sometimes chose "to avoid any show of sentimentalism" for those he knew well. This attitude of course carried into his verse; when he used the first person voice in the elegies of The Dream Songs, it was often a voice attempting to sound personally untouched by the death, the subject of the poem— and to this end, it seems at times a playful voice, bringing wit and irony to the elegiac reminiscences. At the Jarrell memorial referred to earlier, for example, Berryman ended his remarks (which Warren found "witty, funny, and moving") by reading .Dream Song 121, of which the first two stanzas follow: Grief is fatiguing. He is out of it, the whole humiliating Human round, out of this & that. He made a-many hearts go pit-a-pat who now need never mind his nostril-hair nor a critical error laid bare. He endured fifty years. He was Randall Jarrell and wrote a-many books & he wrote well. Peace to the bearded corpse. His last book was his best. His wives loved him. 190 He saw in the forest something coming, grim, but did not change his purpose. "Grief is fatiguing" for the poem's speaker, which means that it is bothersome as well as difficult and emotionally tiring to mourn the death of a friend. The opening line of the elegy, then, establishes a curious tone of a seriousness— indicative of heart-felt grief— combined with an irony which perhaps is intended as a means to remain in emotional control, to suppress the speaker's true agony. All forms of grief and all causes of grief are fatiguing, at any rate, so at least now in death Jarrell is "out of it, / the whole humiliating Human round"— grief causing human round. So even though this expression of grief may be fatiguing for the speaker, the initial sentiment expressed in the poem— that Jarrell is free of grief— is devoid of irony. Yet the following sequence of lines seems ill chosen, filled as they are with details inappropriate in content and diction of a traditional elegy. "He made a-many hearts go pit-a-pat" is a line that end-rhymes with the one previous, but surely "pit-a-pat" was not chosen merely to conform with the rhyme scheme; it sets the nearly irreverent tone of the rest of the stanza, lines which suggest Jarrell was vain about his appearance and prideful of his literary acumen— -his worrying over the chance of making a "critical error." These "griefs"— minding his nostril hair, having an error exposed— are those for which, 191 the speaker ironically informs us, we can be thankful Jarrell is spared in death. In the second stanza the irony is more subtle, but still prevalent. There is little mention of Jarrell's personal life during his "fifty, endured, years" other than that "his wives loved him." Instead, the speaker concen trates on Jarrell's professional life, the fact he "wrote a-many books & he wrote well." The elegy at this point, if the language and tone are discounted, reads more like a literary commemorative found in a little magazine (ending as it does with "his last book was his best") rather than a public memorial in verse. This could be attributed in part to the speaker's willful detachment "to avoid any show of sentimentalism." But a more likely reason for the seemingly mundane content of this stanza is the speaker's clever phrasing, which is purposely ambiguous. It is likely that the "many books" Jarrell wrote refers literally to his work and figuratively to episodes in his life, suggesting each was another "book" marking an event in his fifty years— many of which, such as his wives who loved him, he "wrote well." In accordance with this reading, then, the book he last wrote, the best one, alludes to his accidental death / probable suicide. (Jarrell, having been recently released from psychiatric care, was strolling one late night when fatally struck by a car; many people closest to him, including Berryman, believe he threw himself in the car's 192 path.) That it was suicide rather than an accidental death would appeal more to Berryman, as we have seen, and that it was regarded by him as Jarrell's finest act, his last and best book, if we are to follow this interpretation, may have been self-projection. As with all the elegies, as Haffenden has informed us, "there is no reason to doubt the reality and intensity of [Berryman's] mourning . . . since it was proper only to himself." Berryman's elegy for one of his closest friends (recall Eberhart's observation that he was "pretty far gone . . . he was pathetic" at Jarrell's memorial) is, however, suspi ciously free of Berryman himself and his own emotional effusion; in its place we find mildly disturbing jingles and pathetic ironies. Yet we also know from Robert Penn Warren that Berryman apparently masked fairly successfully his suffering over Jarrell's passing. Berryman, as evident from the many examples of his ostensible callousness in times of friends' deaths, doubtlessly could not publicly mourn very well— he may not have had the capacity to do so— which perhaps accounts for the inconsistency of emotions he displayed. In his verse elegies, however, he commonly incorporated both types of behavior. His self-concern, which initially reads as an uncaring detachment, is manifest in his use of irony, and his emotional involvement, in which his unre strained grief overrides his concern for poetic conventions, 193 is much devoid of that irony. The elegy sequence for Delmore Schwartz uses both; the first person speaker is, usually, the more detached and ironic expression, and Henry's point of view is employed as the voice of grieving. The two are brought together in the first of that sequence, Dream Song 14 6, as we have already seen. Let us now return to the Schwartz elegy with this back ground knowledge of Berryman's complex reactions to friends' or others' violent deaths. Dream Song 146 ends with the "I" awaiting his own death; his thoughts of his deceased friends, "Delmore specially," are not of mourning but of begrudging their being "past it all": "I have tried to be them, god knows I have tried, / but they are past it all, I have not done, / which brings me to the end of this song." The line "dramatizing the dreadful word instead / for lively Henry" in stanza one acts to bring self-pity to the first person speaker in the final stanza. Yet the next Dream Song (147) is spoken entirely from Henry's perspective, and con sequently the focus of the poem shifts back to grieving Schwartz's death: Henry's mind grew blacker the more he thought. He looked onto the world like the act of an aged whore. [t/o] Delmore, Delmore. He flung to pieces and they hit the floor. Nothing was true but what Marcus Aurelius taught, 'All that is foul smell & blood in a bag.' He lookt on the world like the leavings of a hag. Almost his love died from him, any more. His mother & William 194 were vivid in the same mail Delmore died. The world is lunatic. This is the last ride. Delmore, Delmore. High in the summer branches the poet sang. His throat ached, and he could sing no more. All ears closed across the heights where Delmore & Gertrude sprang so long ago, in the goodness of which it was composed. [t/o] Delmore, Delmore! Like the elegy for Jarrell, this poem has several end-rhymed couplets, but their content suggests a profoundly mournful tone rather than one of black humor. Henry's more serious tone can be attributed to Berryman's close friendship with Schwartz and, perhaps, to the unusually tragic circumstances surrounding his death— of which Eileen Simpson provides a graphic portrait: Delmore, a recluse, who had once been "flagrant" with "young male beauty" and so gifted that it was thought he would be the star of his genera tion, had fallen dead in a hallway outside his squalid room in a fleabag hotel in Times Square. The heart attack that took him was neither easy nor quick. He had been "tearing his sorry clothes" for over an hour before the noises of struggle attracted attention. . . . At the morgue, because "there were no readers of modern poetry" around, as Saul [Bellow] wrote of his character Humboldt, Delmore's body lay unclaimed for two days. (244) As "Henry" thinks of all this, he considers how unjust the world is, a world he now regards as "an act of an aged whore," "the leavings of a hog," and he uses a line of Shakespeare to express further that a world that could take Schwartz in such a manner is one which, as "Marcus Aurelius taught, / 'All that is foul smell & blood in a bag.'" 195 Unlike the Jarrell elegy where the world was viewed merely as "humiliating," Henry, his mind "blacker the more he thought," believes in this poem that the world is disgusting and debased for leading Schwartz to his awful death. In the second stanza, Henry recalls how he learned of Schwartz's dying. Berryman, in fact, had been working on his study of Shakespeare when he received a letter from his mother and the news about Schwartz. Consequently, "His mother & William" were "vivid" to Henry "in the same mail Delmore died." That "this is the last ride," the latest death in a succession by people of his generation, including Roethke, R. P. Blackmur, Jarrell and "in between" Sylvia Plath (Dream Song 153), results in Henry's apparently unrestrained grieving: "The world is lunatic. This is the last ride. / Delmore, Delmore." (Eileen Simpson amends "Henry's" list, however, mentioning that Berryman "was so cross he named Richard [Blackmur], who was not of their generation, and forgot Dylan [Thomas], who was.") Henry then recalls the more pleasant times of Schwartz’s youth in the final stanza, which is the first of the ensuing remembrances of scenes from earlier days of "heights where Delmore & Gertrude sprang / so long ago, in the goodness of which [his poetry] was composed." As Simpson saw it: John grieved and grieved for Delmore, and was haunted by the way in which his old friend had died. If there was no one to claim Delmore's body, and only a handful of people to follow it to the cemetery, there are the Dream Songs to 196 mourn his death— "Ten Songs, one solid block of agony,"--in which John cried out his anguish. The years of estrangement faded. The scenes of their youth became vivid again. It was the Delmore of the Cambridge days whom John tried to put in the place of the anonymous man who had been taken to the morgue. It was the fellow poet who had been his chief support during his own years of failure and obscurity. The one solace John offered himself was the belief that as long as poetry was read, Delmore would not be forgotten. (245) It is true that in this one solid block of agony Henry for gets the trying times the two men had later in their relationship, their "years of estrangement," and concen trates, rather, on "the Delmore of the Cambridge days," the one trying to orchestrate Berryman's career, the one demon strating an uncommon closeness to his friend; yet the first person speaker, who, as we have seen, drifts in and out of the sequence, remembers Schwartz going berzerk and Schwartz's unwarranted accusations as well as the more pleasant Harvard years. The middle part of Dream Song 149, from the "I's" point of view, provides an example: In the brightness of his promise, unstained, I saw him thro' the mist of the actual blazing with insight, warm with gossip thro' all our Harvard years when both of us were just becoming known I got him out of a police-station once, in Washington, the world is tref and grief too astray for tears. . . . in New York: he sang me a song 'I am the Brooklyn poet Delmore Schwartz Harms & the child I sing, two parents' torts' when he was young & gift-strong. The first person speaker of the opening elegy related 197 Schwartz's death to his own misery; so, too, does the "I" in Dream Song 14 9 keep bringing himself in: "when both of us were just becoming known." Unlike the reminiscences from Henry's point of view of the early days at Harvard (which was Berryman's choice for personal reflection according to Simpson), the "I" recounts Schwartz's more troubled times: his arrest for drunkenness in 1962 while attending the National Poetry Festival in Washington, and his subsequent false indictment of his girlfriend for sleeping with Berryman. Nor can this first person speaker resist imply ing, in the poem's final line, that Schwartz's poetic gift vanished with age. Berryman may have "cried out his anguish" in the elegy, as Simpson suggested, but he did so as Henry; the "I" remained concerned principally with him self. The final stanza of 150 returns again to the quality of Schwartz's later work: "I'd bleed to say his lovely work improved / but it is not so." Henry, in 147, avoids mention of whether or not Schwartz's poetry diminished: "High in the summer branches the poet sang. / His throat ached, and he could sing no more." The emphasis is on the beauty of his singing "in the summer branches"; that his "throat ached," which prevented him from singing, does not neces sarily suggest a later decline in the quality of his verse. But the first person speaker clearly distinguishes the early work as superior poetry. The "I," then, may be more closely 198 aligned with the competitive Berryman, the one afraid that Lowell, rather than himself, was "number one" after Frost’s death. In his elegies, Berryman portrayed several sides of his complex personality; he was able to capture his mixed reactions to his friends' deaths by using a bifurcated voice: stated simply, Berryman through Henry, found a per sona who "grieved and grieved for Delmore"; as the "I," Berryman could articulate his other, self-centered thoughts surrounding a tragic death. Andrew Hudgins has argued that "one of the major struc tural devices of The Dream Songs . . . is the dialectic of opposites which do not synthesize or resolve, but rather exist in conflict, in ebb and flow, in cyclical movement. One quality will be predominant at one moment, the other the next. When the opposites, be they body and mind or the drive-to-life and the drive-to-death, are present in Henry's psyche, they do not cancel out one another; they clash ferociously, and Henry can barely contain them" (93). Hudgins then adds a qualifier: "Keeping ever in mind Henry's protean nature, I am reluctant to divide up Henry neatly into body and mind, though those do seem to be two discrete and unintegrated aspects of Henry's psyche" (95). Hudgins's argument extends my reasoning even though he neglected to distinguish the separate voices within Henry. As we have seen, the "I" is clearly different in thought and expression from those of Henry's point of view. Although 199 Henry is revealed to us through— to use a term common to prose— an "omniscient narrator," it does not seem likely that that narrator is the "I," even though Berryman insists it is. Their perspectives are too dissimilar; their reactions to Schwartz's death too unidentical. The voices in the elegies represent sound examples of Berryman's structural device of "the dialectic of opposites which do not synthesize." Consequently they are not different aspects of a single voice, but two voices. We can even accept that Henry sometimes refers to himself in the first person, sometimes in the third, yet as he does so, he adopts a separate voice for each. It is clear that Berryman's personality, his varied reactions to his friends' deaths, required different voices for expression in verse. The "I" in the Schwartz elegy, then, is as much part of Berryman's persona as the voice speaking from Henry's point of view; Berryman uses this bifurcated scheme for his persona in order to express the differing sides he found within him self. What he often could not do in real life— stop think ing of himself in times of mourning— he could have Henry do in The Dream Songs; and he still found a way, through his use of a first person speaker, to use those times for self reflection. Berryman was not solely one or the other, but more like Hudgins's description of the dialectic in The Dream Songs: he existed "in conflict, in ebb and flow, in cyclical movement." 200 An illustration of this, the "ebb and flow" of the con flicting voices together in movement, is Dream Song 151 in which the first person speaker calls attention to his own lack of sensitivity regarding Schwartz's death; in this poem, the "I" hurries the elegy along before he "forgets" Schwartz, but Henry comes into the end of the poem "sick and heartbroken." Dream Song 151 clearly demonstrates the division of voice and the conflicts operative within them: Bitter & Bleary over Delmore1s dying: his death stopped clocks, let no activity mar our hurrah of mourning, let's all be Jews bereft, for he was one He died too soon, he liked 'An Ancient to Ancients' [t/o] His death clouded the grove I need to hurry this out before I forget which I will never He fell on the floor outside a cheap hotel-room my tearducts are worn out, the ambulance came and there on the way he died He was 'smart & kind,' a child's epitaph. He had no children, nobody to stand by in the awful years of the failure of his administration He was tortured, beyond what man might be Sick & heartbroken Henry sank to his knees Delmore is dead. His good body lay unclaimed three days. Like the "I" of Dream Song 121 (the elegy for Jarrell), the first person speaker of this poem uses playful rhymes, such as "mar our hurrah," and is nearly mocking in certain lines, "let's all be Jews bereft, for he was one." The "I" needs "to hurry this out before I forget / which I will never," lines indicative of the first person speaker's tone and 201 level of grief. Although the "I" may be truly grieving, he expresses it through irony, black humor, and flippant or otherwise disrespectful remarks and diction. Yet as Schwartz's death is recounted, the voice gradually trans forms to one more serious; this is the voice speaking from Henry's point of view, as seen in such lines as: "Sick & heartbroken Henry sank to his knees / Delmore is dead." This display of mourning is in marked contrast from the earlier lines, the first person speaker's, such as "let no activity mar our hurrah of mourning" and "I need to hurry this out before I forget." The first person speaker can be serious— as we have seen in the first poem of the elegy sequence— but only when he relates the subject to his personal concerns. When the subject of the elegy is mourning a deceased friend, the "I" does so mockingly, ironically; yet when the "I" diverts the focus of the elegy on himself, he is more solemn and devoid of irony. Just as Berryman used the occasion of Roethke's death as material for a new Dream Song-— one he regarded highly ("I imagine it will be around a while," he wrote to Ralph Ross)— the first person speaker in 15 7, near the end of the sequence, indicates that his grieving over Schwartz ends when it has been exhausted as material for his verse: "Ten Songs, one solid block of agony/ / I wrote for him, and then I wrote no more. / His sad ghost must aspire / free of my love to its own post ..." This sounds as though it 202 could have been spoken from Henry's point of view; the seriousness, the sentiment is close to that of Henry's, but it is so because the "I" is speaking now of his most serious subject--himself, his own verse, his own love which he is seemingly capable of dispensing at will. Although there are no biographical accounts recording Berryman's behavior upon learning of Schwartz's death, it is reasonable to suspect that his reactions were as varied as those he showed over any violent or tragic death. He might have— as he did with Bellow— made insensitive comments, or he might have directed the conversations of Schwartz's tragedy toward talk of him self. It is probable, too, that privately and publicly Berryman, like Henry, "sank to his knees" sick and heart broken. By having Henry address himself in the first person and sometimes in the third in The Dream Songs, Berryman, through Henry, was able to "cry out his anguish," as Eileen Simpson remarked, in a way that incorporated many of these probable emotional responses to Schwartz's death. Berryman's persona mode of voice is one solution to the problem of a Romantic kind of weeping in verse identified by Leonard Nathan in his article "The Private ' I' in Contem porary Poetry," which is that an unabashed show of sentimen talism (that can occur rather often in a poem of the confes sional mode of voice) obscures the poetry, the art of the piece. Berryman felt that suffering was essential to good poetry. Howard Munford remembered that once, in India, 203 Berryman rose from his sick bed and: proceeded to give a lecture different from any thing he had done previously, a stunning discourse on the springs and nature of poetry. For weeks, he said, the Indians had been telling us that America had never produced any poetry, that the Indians were the most poetic people in the world, but that what he had seen of Indian poetry led him to believe that what passed for poetry with them was a loose kind of spiritual sentimentality. "Now," he said, "I'm going to tell you something about what poetry really is." He quoted from Rilke and Lorca and then gave some English para phrases. One of these was from "The Song of the Blind Man" and his paraphrase went something like this: "My eyes were two sacred fonts in which the Devil has stirred his finger." His point was that much of the greatest poetry sprang from the pain and anguish of human experience— which he went on to illustrate from a wide range of Western poetry. The audience was enthralled and would have held John in excited conversation indefinitely had his weakness not forced him to stagger out of the room and back to bed. (qtd. in Haffenden 266) And Berryman, even though he suffered much anguish in his lifetime, wanted even to suffer more, so that he too could continue to create "what poetry really is." In the last interview before his death, Berryman told Stitt: My idea is this: The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business. . . . And I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will probably largely depend . . . on being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia At that point, I'm out, but short of that, I don't know. I hope to be nearly crucified. (322) Henry became Berryman's outlet for expressing such anguish. It is Henry, "an imaginary character . . . a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has 204 suffered an irreversible loss," as Berryman indicated in his prefatory note to The Dream Songs, who has been "knocked in the face, and thrown flat," and whom Berryman spoke through. His use of the persona in this way allowed Berryman to employ his grief as an aspect of his craft in a more objective way than he could have in the confessional mode of voice. Donald Justice has written of the difference and how Berryman achieved this objective stance: His subject was the self, often enough the self involved with history. But his personal exposures have a different feel about them than those of his contemporaries. No matter how painful and honest they seem, they have first been subjected to the pressures of his art. Events, however catastro phic, are valued not so much for themselves as for what they can be made into, in words and music. The impersonality of the art remains, therefore, as important as the personality of the poet. (qtd. in Browne 83-4) Berryman's suffering over his many friends' premature deaths led him into the elegies— which comprise one, unifying, theme of The Dream Songs— hut he was able to subject his emotions, his memories, "to the pressures of his art” by inventing Henry as his speaker, a persona mode of voice which ensured that "the impersonality of the art" remained as important to the poetry as the personality of the poet. II. Although Weldon Kees was born in the same year, 1914, as Berryman, the two men were not contemporaries in the sense that, say, Lowell (1917-1978) and Berryman were. But 205 in approach to voice, they were far closer than Lowell and Berryman, who shared a friendship, but not an approach to poetry. Whereas Lowell and Berryman knew each other, had actually begun their friendship early in each's literary career, shared similar tastes in poetry and a love for Shakespeare, and reviewed— always favorably— one another's books, among other things, Kees probably only knew of Berryman, if at all, as a- frequent contributor to the same literary magazines in which his own verse was-beginning to appear. Kees's poem "The Lives," which was included in his last book, Poems 1947-1954 (1954), was initially published in the August 1948 number of Partisan Review, for example, a magazine Berryman had been reviewing for; the previous month's issue carried Berryman's "A Peine Ma Piste," a review of T. S. Eliot: A Selected Critique edited by Leonard Unger. If, therefore, the two men never met— which is likely considering that Kees, disgusted with New York (where, besides a poet, he had several one-man shows of his abstract-expressionist paintings, and played the jazz piano at a few fashionable clubs) and its literati, moved to San Francisco in 1951— nor exchanged theories about poetry and favorite writers and recommendations of whom to read, as Berryman and Lowell had done, it is interesting that Kees and Berryman developed artistically more closely than Berryman and Lowell. The poetry of Kees and Berryman in the persona mode bind them as "contemporaries," then, more so 206 than merely their chronology: both show Eliot's influence on their work (Eliot's "Prufrock" was the model for Kees's "Robinson," as we shall see, and in type for Berryman's "Henry," although Berryman eschewed Eliot's theory of impersonality in art [in the Partisan Review article just mentioned] and made Henry very personal), and both were concerned with voice— more so than Lowell who, as mentioned in the last chapter, straightforwardly announced: "the first person is me, not an imaginary me"— as bordering on the personal-autobiographical and the impersonal-fictional. Kees almost immediately learned to control the tone of his poems, and it is because of this that his voice seems to move effortlessly between the personal anguish, or confes- sionalism, of Berryman's "Henry" and the more cynical voice of Berryman's "I" of the elegies who seemed detached from the mourning. As an example of Kees's choosing an appar ently personal subject to be narrated in an impersonal tone of voice, let us look at an early poem, "For My Daughter," from his first collection, The Last Man (1943): Looking into ray daughter's eyes I read Beneath the innocence of morning flesh Concealed, hintings of death she does not heed. Coldest of winds have blown this hair, and mesh Of seaweed snarled these miniatures of hands; The night's slow poison, tolerant and bland, Has moved her blood. Parched years that I have seen [t/o] That may be hers appear: foul, lingering Death in certain war, the slim legs green. Or, fed on hate, she relishes the sting Of others' agony; perhaps the cruel Bride of a syphilitic or a fool. 207 These speculations sour in the sun. I have no daughter. I desire none. The consistent tone of voice throughout the poem— before we learn that the speaker actually has no daughter as well as the final lines— is characteristic of Kees’s work. As the speaker quietly muses over the tragic possibilities that await his daughter who must live in this civilization, he carefully avoids betraying any emotional outrage he might easily feel in remembering his own "parched years." And the revelation of his last remarks is similarly devoid of emo tional display. Kees has therefore combined a personal subject matter with an impersonal voice— that is, one that is consistent in its tone, evenly recording the speaker's thoughts without showing any emotional intensity which might lie behind those thoughts. The speaker does not desire to have a daughter because the world is presently terrible, and it will be the same when she grows into an adult, if not get worse: "foul, lingering / Death in certain war." But these thoughts of the speaker remain "speculations," nothing more, even if they "sour in the sun." His thoughts of horror, of his daughter, "fed on hate," relishing "the sting / Of others' agony; perhaps the cruel / Bride of a syphilitic or a fool," are spoken in the same, quiet voice— evocative of a scene depicting the speaker lazily musing over his random thoughts as he sits in the sun— as those, more serene, speculations about-his—imaginar-y_daughterJ-S_ey-es-,_and_the__Ilinnocence_of— 208 [her] morning flesh." Of Kees's voice in "For My Daughter"— in much of the poet's work— Donald Justice has written: Kees is original in one of the few ways that matter: he speaks to us in a voice or, rather, in a particular tone of voice which we have never heard before. In the early poems, it is true, there are echoes of other poets. But almost immediately he found his proper tone. Already in his first book it can be heard in such a poem as "For My Daughter," with the terrible but quiet shock of its last line. And almost always his is a quiet voice. That will not seem very surprising until one pauses to consider how very bitter are the things this quiet voice has to say. (ix) This quiet tone that Justice has described, which does not change as the speaker moves from line to line in "For My Daughter," is remarkably the same for most of his poetry. It derives from Kees's control over his subjects, no matter how they might change within a poem, like "For My Daughter," or from poem to poem; and he achieves such control because he adopts the same attitude--or his speaker adopts the same attitude— -towards each subject: a bitterness of the world that is reflected in anything encompassed in Kees's poetic vision. Justice continues: For Kees is one of the bitterest poets in history. "Others," wrote Kenneth Rexroth, "have called themselves Apocalyptics, Kees lived in a permanent and hopeless apocalypse." Yet he appears to accept whatever is, however terrifying or ridiculous it may seem, with the serenity of a saint. The wall cracks; the stain spreads; he does not budge from his chair. This calm in the face of a certain doom, the most characteristic attitude of his poetry, is the ultimate expression of the bitterness at the center of his work; it is also a curious anticipation of the atomic despair 209 so familiar now, though arrived at by Kees some years before the bomb. (ix) The theme of "For My Daughter," a resentment of the modern life where unexpected horrors await, and a bitterness towards life itself, growing old and dying, will recur through Kees’s later work. Rexroth's remark about Kees having "lived in a perma nent and hopeless apocalypse" suggests, somewhat, a parallel with Yeats's "The Second Coming," although Yeats certainly did not believe in a permanent extinction as Rexroth appar ently thought Kees did. Rather, as Yeats explained in A Vision (1925), the dissolution of civilization— the apoca lypse-— marks the end of one cycle in history and the sub sequent beginning of another. He wrote: "What if the irrational return? What if the circle begin again?" If so, the surviving humans "may be about to accept the most implacable authority the world has known," and that irra tional, implacable authority takes the figure of a "rough beast, its hour come round at last" in "The Second Coming." Even though Yeats believed that civilization is regen erative and Kees suggested that it is probably not, "For My Daughter" alludes to a kind of rough beast as one factor in his daughter's future years: "foul, lingering / Death in certain war, the slim legs green." Yeats's beast was shaped "with lion body and the head of a man"; Kees's, with "slim legs green." Yeats's influence on Kees's poem is more 210 pronounced when we examine Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter," which followed "The Second Coming" in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921). Yeats's speaker of that Jpoem is caring for his newly born daughter, who is sleeping while it storms outside. Here is the second stanza of "A Prayer for My Daughter": I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour [t/o] And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower, And under the arches of the bridge, and scream In the elms above the flooded stream; Imagining in excited reverie That the future years had come, Dancing to a frenzied drum, Out of the murderous innocence of the sea. Her future years arising from "murderous innocence" follows Yeats's visions of the future depicted in "The Second Coming." Yet the central difference between this poem and Kees's is voice. Yeats, whose daughter, Anne Butler, was born on February 26, 1919, first published this poem in June 1919. Its voice is of the confessional mode because of the many allusions to this personal life— including a line in refer ence to Maud Gonne: "Have I not seen the loveliest woman born"— and because of the tone of the "I" speaker, which is, like Lowell's confessional voice, pathetically evocative. Kees's "I," however, only alludes to his personal life to the extent that the poem reflects; that is, Kees did not have a daughter, as the "I" informs us in the last line. And the poem does not intend to evoke pathos in the reader; 211 the finality of the last statement is too certain, too assured, in order to be used to induce pathos, as perhaps Yeats's stanza functions in "A Prayer for My Daughter." Rather, Kees's last line is cold, "bitter," yet consistent with the tone of the rest of the poem. The voice of Kees in "For My Daughter," therefore, is not confessional in the manner Yeats's is, but it is not entirely impersonal. The "I" reveals a personal fact of Kees's existence: he had no daughter. He was also pessimistic about our civilization's future, A review by Kees appeared in the July 18, 1955 issue of New Republic entitled "How to be Happy: Installment 1053" in which he wrote: "In our present atmosphere of distrust, violence, and irrationality, with so many human beings mur dering themselves— either literally or symbolically ..." and so forth. On that day Kees's car was found abandoned on the Golden Gate Bridge where, presumptively, he leapt to his death. That is to say, he was very capable of having such thoughts as those recorded by the speaker of "For My Daughter." The voice, finally, not personal, not of the persona mode--in the sense of Whitman's "I" that Berryman was fond of citing— is one that eliminates any possibility of pathos (except our possible pathos for such a bitter man) by its "quiet" tone, which, we have seen, is a result of his restrained emotional expression, his calmness and even ness of tone. 212 "Kees's 'I' is certainly not always to be taken auto- biographically— it is far more frequently the voice of a detached observer or poet-figurewrites the critic William Ross, author of the only book-length study of Kees's work to date. He continues: . . . because it is the world that is absurd and not just a single individual or group, Kees is able to become part of a tendency that M. A. Rosenthal notes is common among several poets of Kees's generation. He can become a confessional poet without becoming intimately autobiographical. That is, he can speak with deep passion and anguish about his doubts concerning the value of existence, without rooting those doubts in per sonal experiences. The sources of his pessimism, Kees is convinced, lie in the objective universe, not in some hypothetical psychological damage done to him in the past. It is part of Kees's cosmo politanism, in other words, to assume that he is talking about problems we all face and therefore to see no need to parade idiosyncratic experiences in front of us, or, by and large, to assume that a Freudian psychoanalytical explanation of his or his characters' behavior is in order. (43-4) Ross's remarks can be applied to our discussion of "For My Daughter," a poem in which Kees certainly does not display any personal, "intimately autobiographical" emotions nor openly parades "idiosyncratic experiences in front of us" since the poem's theme, one expressive of the speaker's malaise in its most mild interpretation, or of his "profound hatred for a botched civilization," as Donald Justice wrote of Kees's work in general— "Whitman's America come to a dead end on the shores of the Pacific"— derives from Kees's vision of the world, his pessimism, rather than isolated autobiographical experiences. He differs from the 213 "confessional poet" who is "intimately autobiographical" in that his attitude is imposed on any of his personal life. The poet of the confessional mode rather attempts to under stand life, develop an attitude towards it, even, by using his autobiographical experiences as a means of interpreta tion. Such is the case with Lowell's asking: "Ought I to regret my seedtime?" Kees, in "For My Daughter" or most of his poetry, assumes, as Ross says, "that he is talking about problems we all face," and therefore avoids the personal, idiosyncratic, concerns and experiences. Kees's quiet tone, then, results from both his restraint in emotional display— or a consistency in the level of emotional rhetoric, tone, etc. in the poem— and his impersonal detachment from the poem's subject. This imper sonality that moves between the fictional and autobiograph ical, the quiet pessimism and perhaps the "profound hatred," is achieved because Kees acts as a spokesperson for that which he considers to be general, universal concerns and attitudes, those which happen to be his, but not exclusively,, wholly personal. Kees's first book of poems also showed his propensity for his special kind of satire; often we cannot enjoy the cutting humor of it because it is used as another way to express his hopelessness for an intolerable present and an even more bleak future. But this satire further contributes to Kees's controlling his tone which makes the poem's 214 speaker less of a personal, unique, voice, and one that is more representative of the general condition of our "botched civilization." An example is his poem "The Speakers": "A equals X," says Mister One. "A equals B," says Mister Two. "A equals nothing under the sun But A," says Mister Three. A few Applaud; some wipe their eyes; Some linger in the shade to see One and Two in neat disguise Decapitating Mister Three. "This age is not entirely bad." It's bad enough, God knows, but you Should know Elizabethans had Sweeneys and Mrs. Porters too. The past goes down and disappears, The present stumbles home to bed, The future stretches out in years That no one knows, and you'll be dead. What begins as a satire of a philosophical debate between three intellectuals, whose names are as seemingly as random as their arguments are vapid, ends in a gruesome murder. "Mister Three" is decapitated by the other two because his conclusion is, in part, obviously verifiable; "A" of course equals itself, if nothing more, although it could stand for something in addition, which "Mister Three" never considers. This action is juxtaposed with the speaker's remarks in the second stanza. The opening line of dialogue, "This age is not entirely bad," is spoken by an unidentified person, although we learn later in the stanza that it is supposed to have been T. S. Eliot, whose theory about literary tradition is contradicted by the speaker of Kees's poem. Whereas Eliot held the 215 English Renaissance in high esteem, particularly in compari son to the state of literature in his time, Kees's speaker reminds him that the Elizabethans were no less decadent than contemporary man; and he uses Eliot's own examples of modern decadence to suggest the comparison; "Sweeney," who was described by Eliot in terms of an ape and who behaves as one might, as manifest by his unrestrained sexual desires, and "Mrs. Porter," who earns her living by operating brothels in which, it is hinted, she puts her own daughters to work. These are the kind of people who inhabit the modern world, suggests Eliot, but they are no different from those to be found among the Elizabethans counters Kees (through his speaker); the two are enacting a mock philosophical debate here, just as the three "Misters" did in stanza one. The present age may not be entirely bad according to Eliot because, using his "mythic method," one may infuse contem porary literature with the golden past, even though his mythic method also reveals that contemporary myths and figures pale in comparison to those in the past literary tradition. That Eliot, Kees assumes, never considered the Elizabethans to have such depraved persons as Sweeney and Mrs. Porter in their culture, one which he believed much superior to his own, makes him as vulnerable as "Mister Three" who, like Eliot, was only partially correct in his theory. What the speaker knows, and tells Eliot, is that: 216 "The past goes down and disappears .../... and you'll be dead." If the parallel to "Mister Three" is extended to include his manner of death, then the poem presents a most peculiar kind of satire: Eliot, who was of course alive in 1943 when the poem was published, will eventually be decapitated despite his marvelous theories— theories which were obviously shunned by Kees. They offered little opti mism for the future of a civilization already too far beyond repair to Kees's mind. Eliot's "The Waste Land," to use another example, proffers some spiritual hope, but Kees would have rejected it, as he did any solution. His severe pessimism of the present— much more pronounced than Eliot's— dominated over any suggestion of a panacea; Kees's bitter vision of the world prevented him from accepting any recourse other than suicide. Yet his dark vision is sup pressed in the final stanza of "The Speakers" by Kees's use of satire, which aids in keeping his tone more quiet rather than outraged. The last four lines are lyrical, but as they comprise the final quatrain of the poem, are also vaguely reminiscent of a nursery rhyme— another characteristic of Kees's odd sense of satire. Still, it is in these lines that the speaker's bleakest thoughts are revealed, quietly so: The past goes down and disappears, The present stumbles home to bed, The future stretches out in years That no one knows, and you'll be dead. 217 The present is ineffective in that it can do nothing more than grope towards the end of its day ("home to bed"); and no one knows anything of the future other than it brings the certainty of death. Kees is_ bitter, but satire keeps his emotions in control in his verse, and his tone "quiet." Having seen how Kees's tone is the combined result of his rhetorical control of voice through means such as satire and his imposition of impersonality on his poems, or, more appropriately, his consideration of his speaker as a uni versal, representative, voice whose concerns and outlook are shared commonly by everyone of this civilization, let us now turn to Kees's more specific use of the persona mode of voice as he employs it in his poems about "Robinson," his representative man. Robinson first appeared in Kees's second volume, The Fall of the Magicians (1947), in a poem entitled simply, "Robinson." The other three poems per taining to Robinson, "Aspects of Robinson," "Robinson at Home," and "Relating to Robinson," were included in the last book Kees published before his death, Poems. 1947-1954 . Together, the four poems comprise a continuity of subject and voice uncommon to the rest of Kees's work. Robinson is less an alter ego of Kees than Henry was of Berryman, but is still closely enough a side of Kees, an "outlet" (as Berryman said of Henry), to warrant Donald Justice's remark that Robinson should be considered as Kees's "typical man," which, as we have seen, means "everyman," including the poet 218 himself, for Kees assumed he wrote of "problems we all face," not of individual confessions. And Robinson also reminded Kenneth Rexroth of Kees— to a certain extent; he wrote: Where the narrator of Weldon Kees's poems is in the third person he is sometimes given a- name: Robinson— modern 'man at the end of his rope. Kees is only distinguishable from his hero by his pity. However, he himself, as narrator-hero, is not lost beyond the end of night in a world of shoddy failures and low life. He.is Robinson Crusoe, utterly alone on Madison Avenue, a stranger and afraid in the world of high-paying newsweeklies, fashionable galleries, jazz concerts, highbrow movies, sophisticated revues— the world in which Weldon Kees was eminently successful. When he said, in these gripping poems, that it filled him with absolute horror, he meant it. (2 36-7) One point of clarification: Rexroth is referring to Robinson, not Kees, when he states that "he . . . is not lost beyond the end of night ..." The Robinson Crusoe allusion is an openly inviting one to make because of the four poems1 theme as well as the name of their narrator- hero, a collective theme that is consistent with Kees's other work: the rejection of all cures for the malady of contemporary life, of which "The Speakers" was an early example. William Ross argues that Kees's "apparent rejec tion of psychoanalysis is not simply the rejection of an explanatory mode, however; it is also the rejection of a solution or cure. Kees . . . knows no cures, rejects all solutions. It is therefore not surprising that Donald Justice can call him 'one of the bitterest poets in history.' 219 This bitterness or anguish, established primarily before the second world war, was to carry over beyond the war years and make Kees one of the chief examples of postwar, postnuclear- bomb angst," (44) which is to paraphrase Justice's remark regarding the nature of Kees's bitterness, that it is an "anticipation of the atomic despair so familiar now, though arrived at by Kees some years before the bomb." Robinson Crusoe, then, is an appropriate analogy in that, to quote Ross, he "was cut off from the rest of humanity by geog raphy. Our modern hero [Kees's Robinson] is cut off from the rest of humanity by his solipsistic perception" (112). Kees believes his "typical man" is the last of his race, "cut off" not merely from humanity because of his perception— he rather believes that his perception is simi lar to everyone else's— but from the civilization humanity has known since its inception. With such a view of the modern world--that it is the end— the future cannot hold any promises and the past is meaningless; to Robinson, there fore, Eliot's theories relating the present to past tradi tions and speaking of hope for the future are of course absurd, prone to failure, as is anything Robinson, in his state of "postwar, postnuclear-bomb angst," is likely to encounter in this horrible modern world. A comparison of Kees's Robinson to Crusoe, as Rexroth and Ross have done, is however less enlightening to our purpose of demonstrating Kees's use of the persona mode of 220 voice than a comparison of Robinson to Berryman's Henry, a comparison about which Sharon Libera has written the follow ing general summary: Like Berryman's Henry, of whom one is surely reminded, Robinson is urbane, materialistic, not self-scrutinizing so much as serving as the vehicle for the writer's detached and ironic observation of himself and his world. Kees's suicide as well as his preoccupation with death and personal futility make the parallel with Berryman more than casual. The poems' plain manner sets them apart from the Dream Songs, though they are far from conservative since their realism functions only to provoke questions about what is actual. (155) Robinson is Kees's invention of a character that is used in the persona mode in two principal ways: in a general application in the sense that Robinson, typical man, acts as the persona for everyone living the horrors of civiliza tion, and in a more private sense in that he acts as an out let for the narrator's personal, even idiosyncratic, con cerns. This second use for Robinson is clearly evidenced in the final poem of the sequence, "Relating to Robinson," in which he is shown to be the narrator's Doppelganger. Robinson, therefore, provides an outlet for the narrator of the poetic sequence, the four "Robinson poems," a narrator whom we should not assume is Kees himself. It will become evident in the ensuing discussion of "Relating to Robinson" that the narrator "in the third person" (as Rexroth referred to it), who as the speaker of each of the four poems has been describing Robinson to us, is none other than Robinson, 221 as Rexroth thought: "where the narrator . . . is in the third person he is sometimes given a name: Robinson." In "Robinson," the first poem, we encounter Robinson solely through the perspective of the third person narrator because Robinson is actually absent for the entirety of the poem: The dog stops barking after Robinson has gone. His act is over. The world is a gray world, Not without violence, and he licks under the grand piano, [t/o] The nightmare chase well under way. The mirror from Mexico, stuck to the wall, Reflects nothing at all. The glass is black. Robinson alone provides the image Robinsonian. Not only does the dog's barking stop after Robinson leaves, but everything stops: the mirror stops reflecting, the objects in the room cease to exist because nothing can gar- . ner their image. "His act is over," refers to the dog's act of barking; he now sleeps under the grand piano— which cannot be reflected in the black mirror— where he has night mares. Even a dog, Kees seems to be saying, cannot escape the horrors of modern life— the nightmare being symptomatic of such life. That the world is gray suggests both that it is confused, neither black nor white, and that it exists only within the confines of the gray matter of the brain; that is, "Robinson alone provides the image Robinsonian." Robinson believes the world does not exist when not recog nized by the mind (when he is not in the room, the mirror reflects nothing at all), which of course accords with one 222 tenet of Berkeley's philosophy and which clarifies Ross's remark that Robinson's is a "solipsistic perception." (Solipsism is used here, I believe, as a collective term meaning that the self, only, is existent; Robinson can know just that which he perceives, just as the self— in Berkeley's theory— can know nothing but its own adaptations. Consequently, the Robinsonian "image" is "all of the room," its contents of which are enumerated in the following stanzas: walls, curtains, Shelves, bed, the tinted photograph of Robinson's first wife, [t/o] Rugs, vases, panatellas in a humidor. They would fill the room if Robinson came in. The pages in the books are blank, The books that Robinson has read. That is his favorite chair, [t/o] Or where the chair would be if Robinson were here. All day the phone rings. It could be Robinson Calling. It never rings when he is here. The objects which fill Robinson's rooms are meaningless— they are nothing; they do not exist for him in his absence. "They fill the room" only when he returns, bringing to them, as Robinson does, his personal and special associations. The glass of his mirror is black until he sees himself in it or remembers the occasion of purchasing it in Mexico; his books are blank until he reads them or remembers having read them. These objects do exist literally when Robinson steps out of the room, yet apart from him and the meaning he brings to each; on their own they fail to produce an image 223 of his personality, his selfhood. Only Robinson can. The poem ends with the suggestion of the disparity between any object, or thing, of itself and those objects to which Robinson's mind can bring special associations: Outside, white buildings yellow in the sun. Outside, the birds circle continuously Where trees are actual and take no holiday. Things outside Robinson's room— the buildings, birds, trees— are "actual," just as those inside are, yet they are not part of Robinson, his image, and therefore can take no holiday (that is, cease to exist) from his mind. They do not intrude into Robinson's "solipsistic perception" of the world because they hold no special significance for him, just as the telephone— another possible intrusion from outside— holds none; it only rings when he is not home to answer it. "Robinson" is a description of a protagonist who does not appear in the poem. It establishes a sense of Robinson by depicting a world from which he is absent. The third person narrator accomplishes this because it speaks from Robinson's point of view and knows how his dog behaves, how his possessions seem to appear, when he is home and when not. In this, that the point of view of the poem's voice is Robinson's, the poem "Robinson," like any Dream Song which had as its voice a third person narrator speaking from Henry's point of view, narrating how he mourned, and so on, is of the persona mode. 224 "Aspects of Robinson" depicts mainly the public life of Robinson and shows that he is a debonair man who moves easily with the fashionable crowd of the city: Robinson at cards at the Algonquin; a thin Blue light comes down once more outside the blinds. Gray men in overcoats are ghosts blown past the door. The taxis streak the avenues with yellow, orange, and red. [t/o] This is Grand Central, Mr. Robinson. Robinson on a roof above the Heights; the boats Mourn like the lost. Water is slate, far down. Through sounds of ice cubes dropped in glass, an osteopath. [t/o] Dressed for the links, describes an old Intourist tour. — Here's where old Gibbons jumped from, Robinson. Robinson walking in the Park, admiring the elephant. Robinson buying the Tribune, Robinson buying the Times. Robinson Saying, "Hello. Yes, this is Robinson. Sunday At five? I'd love to. Pretty well. And you?" He is distinct from the collective mass of "gray men in overcoats" whom he regards as "ghosts blown past the door" of the Algonquin; he is comfortable "above the Heights," walking about, accepting social invitations. There are many public "aspects of Robinson," although each seems to demon strate his appearance of success. In the first three stanzas, his name is stated ten times, probably not for rhythmic effect, but to emphasize the many roles of Robinson the public man. A different side, or aspect, of Robinson is revealed by each situation he encounters; he is "typical modern man," and as such, has many roles even though so far they seem to be reflective of only one part of modern life, the apparently successful, the leisurely, side. 225 But this representation quickly changes in the next lines where we see that the private Robinson, though still with some elan, is vulnerable to other aspects: Robinson alone at Longchamps, staring at the wall. Robinson afraid, drunk, sobbing Robinson In bed with a Mrs. Morse. Robinson at home; Decisions: Toynbee or luminol? Where the sun Shines, Robinson in flowered trunks, eyes toward The breakers. Where the night ends, Robinson in East Side bars. [t/o] Robinson's success cannot make him less alone, afraid; he gets drunk, commits adultery (the "Mrs." seems to suggest this), decides between reading Toynbee and taking luminol to induce sleep as if they were the same. He is representa tive man who enacts many roles during the course of a day and night. There is the implication, too, that these sides of the private Robinson constitute a truer representation of who he is: a product of modern life, this "botched civiliza tion." In the poem's last stanza, the narrator describes Robinson's public attire, and states that it is an affecta tion, a covering, of himself: Robinson in Glen plaid jacket, Scotch-grain shoes, Black four-in-hand and oxford button-down, The jeweled and silent watch that winds itself, the brief- [t/o] Case, covert topcoat, clothes for spring, all covering His sad and usual heart, dry as a winter leaf. Like anyone in modern life, no matter what the possessions, the clothing, Robinson, finally, is alone, unable to love, "his sad and usual heart, dry as a winter leaf." This 226 stanza illuminates Rexroth's remark, that "Kees is only dis tinguishable from his hero by his pity," for Robinson is a pathetic figure here, the model for which is Eliot's "Prufrock" who was overly concerned about his public appearance: With a bald spot in the middle of my hair— (They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!') My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin— . . . Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. Just as Profrock covers himself, hides his bald spot by parting his hair a certain way, rather than uncovers himself— and this is why he is afraid of women, of entering into a relationship— Robinson, when in public, is concerned with how he covers himself. The dress of Prufrock, the necktie and pin or the white flannel trousers, could easily be worn by Robinson when making his way about the city. And both end the day sadly, their hearts dry; they are modern men suffering from the afflictions of modern life. They are similar, further, in that the poets, Kees and Eliot, regard their respective protagonist with some pity. "Robinson at Home" complements "Aspects of Robinson" in that it shows him in his private surroundings. In this sense it presents another, solitary, aspect of Robinson, yet because we find him sleeping in the poem, we cannot 227 learn how he acts when around his personal belongings to which, as the poem "Robinson" indicated, he brings his special associations. In each of the three poems discussed so far, then, Kees gives us but very few glimpses of Robinson: in the first, he was absent from the poem, in "Aspects," he was careful to maintain his public exterior, or image, except for the short scene of his drunkenness, and now in "Robinson at Home," he is shown to us by the night mares he dreams: Curtains drawn back, the door ajar. All winter long, it seemed, a darkening began. But now the moonlight and the odors of the street [t/o] Conspire and combine toward one community. These are the rooms of Robinson. Bleached, wan, and colorless this light, as though All the blurred daybreaks of the spring Found an asylum here, perhaps for Robinson alone, Who sleeps. Were there more music sifted through the floors [t/o] And moonlight of a different kind, He might awake to hear the news at ten, Which will be shocking, moderately. This sleep is from exhaustion, but his old desire To die like this has known a lessening. Now there is only this coldness that he has to wear. But not in sleep.— Observant scholar, traveller, Or uncouth bearded figure squatting in a cave, A keen-eyed sniper on the barricades, A heretic in catacombs, a famed roud, A beggar on the streets, the confidant of Popes— All these are Robinson in sleep, who mumbles as he turns, [t/o] "There is something in this madhouse that I symbolize— This city--nightmare— black--" 228 He wakes in sweat To the terrible moonlight and what might be Silence. It drones like wires far beyond the roofs, And the long curtains blow into the room. The coming of spring offers little promise to the hopeless Robinson. This poem continues the pathetic depiction of Robinson begun in the closing stanzas of "Aspects." The light of spring, rather than suggestive of vernal images, or the renewal of nature, is "colorless" like "blurred day breaks," a time when it is neither wholly dark nor light. This "bleached, wan and colorless" light finds "asylum" in Robinson's rooms; it is the way he perceives something that should be serene. But to Robinson, the spring days need asylum because he sees them as either horrific in themselves and as such in need of confinement, or as needing refuge from the horrors that exist outside his rooms. Regardless as to which, he closes his mind to these "daybreaks of the spring" because they do not bring with them a moonlight or a music which might wake him. He is unsure of his identity in his dreams; the night mares suggest a loss, rather than confusion, of selfhood, for he is many persons: scholar, hermit, heretic, confidant of Popes, etc.— one self contradictory to the next. None resembles anything like the Robinson of the other poems. "All these are Robinson in sleep, who mumbles as he turns, / 'There is something in this madhouse that I symbolize— / This city— nightmare— black— " What he symbolizes is 229 precisely that which he has dreamed: a nightmare of people who inhabit a city of horror, a loss of self-identity reflected by a night whose moonlight is terrible, not peace ful, and whose silence "drones" disconcertedly rather than soothingly. He "wakes in sweat" knowing that he, alone in his "madhouse" of mind, symbolizes humanity of this time, that he is representative man— in all his various guises— but one, like Crusoe, cut off from the rest of civilization. In the final poem of the sequence, a terrified Robinson walks through the streets trying to inform others of his vision for the future. Yet "Relating to Robinson" focuses on the narrator, how he relates to Robinson, and in this, that Robinson himself is not highly visible in the poem, it is much like the others. The narrator, though, knows Robinson intimately enough to imply that Robinson is his Doppelganger— and might well have been throughout the sequence. The narrator first encounters Robinson while walking along a deserted street in the evening: Somewhere in Chelsea, early summer; And, walking in the twilight toward the docks, I thought I made out Robinson ahead of me. From an uncurtained second-story room, a radio Was playing There's a Small Hotel; a kite Twisted above dark rooftops and slow drifting birds. [t/o] We were alone there, he and I, Inhabiting the empty street But the narrator is not certain whether he sees Robinson, or 230 someone else, for he remembers that Robinson usually spends his summers out of town. When Robinson stops walking to gaze into the window, the narrator almost calls out his name, believing it must be him, but concludes: There was no chance. Just as I passed, Turning my head to search his face, His own head turned with mine And fixed me with dilated, terrifying eyes That stopped my blood. His voice Came at me like an echo in the dark. The men face one another, their heads turning to meet each's searching face simultaneously as if each- knew how the other would turn his head. The narrator actually is looking at himself, perhaps reflected in the store's window, and he recognizes terror in his Doppelganger's eyes because he already anticipates his words: "I thought I saw the whirlpool opening. Kicked all night at a bolted door. You must have followed me from Astor Place. An empty paper floats down at the last. And then a day as huge as yesterday in pairs Unrolled its horror on my face Until it blocked— " Running in sweat To reach the docks, I turned back For a second glance. I had no certainty, There in the dark, that it was Robinson Or someone else. The block was bare. . . . The moment the narrator faces his worst fear— Robinson, and what Robinson has to say— it vanishes; this makes the Doppelganger theory a plausible one. But even if in actuality they are two men, Robinson, having experienced the terror of his age, still remains representative man, the persona of all men and women of a modern life which renders 231 them identity-free and insane— feeling at home only in the madhouse of their minds ("Robinson at Home")— and one which promises more terror, "the whirlpool opening." Robinson is the spokesperson for his time. Although what Robinson says is not that frightening, it is enough to terrify the narrator, to make him sweat and run away. Just as Robinson anticipated the narrator looking at him earlier, the narrator anticipates how Robinson will finish speaking, and quickly leaves before allowing him to. The narrator is able to understand the horror implicit in what RobinsOn has already said, to read the terror in his eyes. The poem ends with the scared narrator hurrying West, finding no comfort in what should be the peaceful scene of the lights coming on across the bay where "boats moved silently and the low whistles blew"— just as Robinson, in "Robinson at Home," took little recognition in the coming of spring and no comfort in the moonlit night. In that Kees, bitter with his New York life, "hurried West" to San Francisco, where he found life no better, some parallels could be made between the poet and his "typical man," Robinson. Yet rather than assuming any based on incomplete— at best— biographical information, we should regard Robinson, as an everyman figure, functioning as a general persona— for Kees, for the first person narrator of the Robinson sequence (if in fact different than Robinson himself), for anyone, "typical man" or woman. Given Kees's 232 tone and themes of his other work as we have discussed them, it is more than reasonable to view Robinson as such. Kees, therefore, differs in his use of the persona mode of voice from Berryman's use of Henry in that Robinson is an outlet speaking for everybody, not for the poet alone. Kees regarded his private concerns to be common, to all; so, too, must his persona be. Whereas Robinson's final remarks bespeak a hopelessness for a botched civilization, Galway Kinnell's persona will present a possible solution which offers some hope for modern life. Ill. Commenting on Emily Dickinson's poem, "I Heard a Ply Buzz When I Died," Galway Kinnell wrote in his essay "The Poetics of the Physical World": Of course, it is repulsive that a fly come to you, if you are dying and if it may be a corpse fly, its thorax the hysterical green color of slime. And yet in the illumination of the dying moment, everything the poet knew on earth is transfigured. The fly appears, alive, physical, voracious, a last sign of the earthly life. It is the most ordinary thing, the most despised, which brings the strange brightening, this last moment of increased life. (135) Kinnell's interpretation of "I Heard a Fly Buzz" expresses the same themes operative in his own verse as well. That one's awareness of mortality leads to a more fulfilling life, particularly--as suggested in his explication of the 233 Dickinson poem— the experience of "the dying moment" which is a "strange brightening, this last moment of increased life," has been Kinnell's principal thematic concern since as early in his work as What a Kingdom It Was (1960). Among other poems about death, that volume included one of Kinnell's most memorable pieces, "Freedom, New Hampshire," an elegy for his brother who died prematurely. The poem, as David Young explains, "gives us three sections in which we watch the two boys encountering birth, death, and the generative energies of nature in the country setting where they grew up. In the fourth section, these experiences are recapitulated as the poem moves on to the experience of human loss and grief . . ." (242-43). In much of the work succeeding "Freedom, New Hampshire," it is not merely death that is explored, but the subsequent "generative energies of nature" which follow. The subject of any poem, Kinnell continued in "Poetics," is the thing which dies. Zeus on Olympus is a theological being; the swan who desires a woman enters the province of poetry. In 'Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani,' so does Jesus. Poetry is the wasted breath" (135). Poetry for Kinnell must represent the loss, "the wasted breath," but in doing so making that loss an illumination of life. Death of this life could mean the beginning of another kind of life, or at the very least, of a new experience. A loss, then, should be celebrated, for it is at the moment it 234 occurs, at the instant of gasping "the wasted breath," which ■makes, for Kinnell, the essence of poetry. Even so, death is not welcomed solely because it pro vides the thematic core of a poem, or because it is the possible beginning of a new experience awaiting after life. Rather, death calls attention to the last moment of life, making it— as Kinnell wrote of Dickinson's poem— one "last moment of increased life." While indicating, in "Poetics," how he attempts to use the subject of death in his poetry, Kinnell remarked: "That we endure only for a time, that we know this, is the thrilling element in every creature, every relationship, every moment" (136). These are the themes Kinnell works with in his poetry, the most clear example of which is his book-length poem, The Book of Nightmares (1971): and because his themes are often the reason for his working in a particular mode of voice, it will be useful to examine how they operate in that book. The epigraph to The Book of Nightmares, which follows, is taken from Rilke: But this, though: death, the whole of death,— even before life's begun, to hold it all so gently, and be good: this is beyond description! In an interview with Wayne Dodd and Stanley Plumly, Kinnell explained the meaning of this passage in relation to The Book of Nightmares: This passage appears after the dedication to Maud and Fergus [Kinnell's children]. From one point 235 of view, the book is nothing but an effort to face death and live with death. Children have all that effort in their future. They have glimpses of death through fatigue, sleep, cuts and bruises, warnings, etc., and also through their memory of the nonexistence they so recently came from. They seem to understand death sur prisingly clearly. But now time passes slowly for them. It hardly exists. They live with death almost as animals do. This natural trust in life's rhythms, infantile as it is, provides the model for the trust they may struggle to learn later on. The Book of Nightmares is my own effort to find the trust again. I invoke Maud and Fergus not merely to instruct them, but also to get help from them. (45-6) Given that the book was intended as both instructional and as a quest to regain the "natural trust in life's rhythms" (the rhythms, that is, of life to death and then, maybe, to another kind of life, or perhaps not— just the rhythm of life to death if the regenerative qualities of nature remain unconsidered in this context), The Book of Nightmares remains unbalanced in favor of its didactic side in that whatever Kinnell learns about recapturing this trust, this acceptance of the naturalness of death, is recorded for his children's use so that they too, when adults, can benefit from his acquired knowledge. For the children will of course increasingly move away from that understanding as they grow toward adulthood, even though they presently "seem to understand death" having so recently come from the "non- existence," which Kinnell compares to the sphere of death. Consequently, at the end of the first section, "Under the Maud Moon," Kinnell tells his daughter that the book can 236 offer some guidance and instruction when she reaches the age one begins to fear death, to mistrust it, having forgotten any inherent inclination to regard death as a natural rhythm of existence. And that age is, as implied in "Under the Maud Moon," sometime in adulthood when the death of one's parents, when feeling "orphaned/" engenders thoughts of this kind. He gives his daughter these instructions, which act as the prelude for his own quest, his "effort to find the trust again": And in the days when you find yourself orphaned, emptied of all wind-singing, of light, the pieces of cursed bread on your tongue, may there come back to you a voice, spectral, calling you sister1 from everything that dies. And then you shall open this book, even if it is the book of nightmares. What Kinnell hopes the book will do for her (and his son, Fergus, who is addressed late in the poem) is allow her to submit to the calling, the voice speaking "from everything that dies," and to see it as something natural and benevo lent rather than as a menacing specter. The book is then mostly concerned with Kinnell' s trying to free himself from his acquired— that is, his adult— behavior in order to understand his primordial instincts. One such instinct is of his time in the womb, a time of 237 "nonexistence" that Kinnell believes was an early "glimpse of death" we each had. His use of Rilke's line, the whole of death, even before life's begun," is well chosen in corroborating this notion. And poetry, Kinnell feels, can be used as a means of self-exploration— even a way of recalling primordial instinctive behavior; through it, a better understanding of the self can result. In his preface to Walking Down the Stairs, he wrote that poetry is "a form of expression in which there is at least the possibility of finding oneself as one is" (xiv). To that end, The Book of Nightmares presents a method how: shedding the adult dread of dying, and learning to relinquish life. The principal "nightmare" is losing life; the way to end that fear is to come to an understanding, to trust in it. If one can learn to let go of this human fear--and in doing so transform, at least in thought, into a more primitive being, an animal, perhaps--then one entertains the "possibility of finding oneself" in the most natural form, "as one is." In this sense, Kinnell reiterates one of the basic tenets of religion--Eastern or Western--which holds that one must retain a child's perspective in order to comprehend the mysteries: losing oneself to find oneself. He begins his quest (the book's second section) with recalling how easily a hen accepts death, the hen seemingly "longing only to die": 238 Sprawled on our faces in the spring nights, teeth biting down on hen feathers, bits of the hen still stuck in the crevices— if only we could let go like her, throw ourselves on the mercy of darkness, like the hen, . . . the breastbone risen up out of breast flesh, until the fatted thing woozes off, head thrown back on the chopping block, longing only to die. Kinnell, in remembering his experiences in killing fatted hens, assumes they welcome death. The hen easily surrenders her life, "lets go to the mercy of darkness." And this is the knowledge for which he quests— "if only we could let go like her." The last verse of this section, then, finishes with an admonishment to himself: Listen, Kinnell, dumped alive and dying into the old sway bed, a layer of crushed feathers all that there is between you and the long shaft of darkness shaped as you, let go. Even this haunted room all its materials photographed with tragedy, even the tiny crucifix drifting face down at the center of the earth, [t/o] even these feathers freed from their wings forever are afraid. He must "let go" of two fears in order to regain his trust in life's natural order: his fear of dying, and his fear of losing the self he has become, the civilized man who recog nizes a crucifix as a religious symbol and who lives 239 among— who cannot live without— "materials photographed with tragedy." Every material possession of mankind is "photo graphed with tragedy" because it came into being as a result of the decimation of the natural; that is, the "old sway bed," for example, upon which the "Kinnell" of the poem lies in this verse passage is made of "crushed feathers freed from their wings forever." All that he is used to, the com forts of civilized life, religion, etc., stands between him and "the long shaft of darkness," which is his natural self; it is because of mankind's becoming civilized that he distrusts and fears the natural rhythms of the world. His rationale is that by overcoming the desire for, and the dependence on, rooms, materials, religion, he will more closely resemble his primordial self, which for Kinnell could be either the fetus of the womb, or something like Neanderthal man— both are primitive states of being, and both now seem of the distant past; mankind for too long has used its "materials" as the sole means of its existence. He begins the actual journey back to this more primitive .state in the next section of the book, "The Shoes of Wandering," where he says he is "frightened / I may already have lost / the way: the first step, the Crone / who scried the crystal said, shall be / to lose the way"— that is, to become more childlike in the sense of learning to trust one's natural inclinations; Kinnell's civilized self tells him to be frightened of his "wandering." He begins to leave behind 240 some aspects of his present self, though, in that he takes the counsel of the Crone who tells him "to lose the way"; she has supplanted his Christianity in providing spiritual guidance. Also, she gave him instruction orally, which is ■more natural, and "primitive," in the sense that religious or other instruction was, in pre-Gutenberg times, conveyed in this manner. Although Kinnell could have found the same message in the Bible— the basis for his religion as civi lized man— the Crone "scried the crystal" for it, an image that evokes the mysticism of pre-Christianity. After journeying for a time, he finds a "path among stones" where he realizes that his wish to become more primitive will end— in the same way that each stone's desire to be a star will end— with a "falling back, knowing / the sadness of the wish / to alight / back among the glitter of bruised ground." Because he does not fully learn how to "lose himself," The Book of Nightmares offers little instruction to his children; it remains, as its title sug gests , a record of the fears Maud and Fergus can expect to encounter as they grow up, as their knowledge of the "non- existence" fades while they become increasingly older and more civilized. That he did not reconcile his present, civilized, self with the primordial being he sought, and that he did not regain his trust in life's rhythms cora- pletely— although his fear of death is lessened because of his spiritual quest— accounts for the ambivalence of his 241 words of instruction to his son upon birth, in the final section of the poem, "Lastness": A black bear sits alone in the twilight . . . He sniffs the sweat in the breeze, he understands a creature, a death-creature watches from the fringe of the trees, finally he understands I am no longer here, he himself from the fringe of the trees watches a black bear get up, eat a few flowers, trudge away, all his fur glistening in the rain. And what glistening! Sancho Fergus, my boychild, had such great shoulders, when he was born his head came out, the rest of him stuck. And he opened his eyes: his head out there all alone in the room, he squinted with pained, barely unglued eyes at the ninth-month's blood splashing beneath him on the floor. And almost smiled, I thought, almost forgave it all in advance. [t/o] This passage begins with a portrait of a solitary black bear, and ends with Sancho Fergus making his way out of the womb, which is his initial experience with existence as civilized man. And the two are related: at the moment the bear understands that he is some kind of "death-creature," watch ing a black bear, Fergus's head appeared from the birth canal. The poem suggests a closeness of man and animal; and particularly, it points to a shared consciousness between Fergus and the bear. The bear senses a "death-creature" which is Fergus about to be born, and who, in this pre-birth state, is capable of reason: "finally he understands / I am 242 ■no longer here," no longer the black bear he thought he was who sniffed a "death-creature"; this "death-creature," he realizes, is himself. Once a part <pf the bear, the "non existent" being who shortly will be Fergus— recall that Kinnell referred to his children's time in the womb as a time of "nonexistence"— is now separate from it and can only watch as the bear trudges away. The message from Kinnell is that pre-civilized man not merely shares common traits with animals, but actually begins as an animal, as a bear for example, because the animal is not conscious of death as something to fear; man, when he acquires his life becomes a "death-creature" because he begins to learn life's night mares, one which is the fear of dying. Fergus leaves the "nonexistence," which is a bear-like consciousness, for human life. In the next stanza, Kinnell again makes clear the parallel of his son and the bear: When he came wholly forth I took him up in my hands and bent over and smelled the black, glistening fur of his head, as empty space must have bent over the newborn planet and smelled the grasslands and the ferns. Fergus has "black, glistening fur" on his head; the bear was last seen by the "death-creature" trudging away, "all his fur glistening / in the rain." 243 Although Kinnell may be certain of the relation between the bear and his son, he is not certain that he has resolved all the nightmares of life or whether he has learned any substantive answers from his quest: "Is it true / the earth does not last?" he asks himself while •holding Fergus, waiting for him to begin crying and thus start his life. "Stop," he suddenly commands Fergus, "Stop •here. / Living brings you to death, there is no other road." But he ends the section, and the poem, undecided what he wants for his son: This poem if we shall call it that, or concert of one divided among himself . . . Sancho Fergus! Don't cry! Or else, cry. On the body, on the blued flesh, when it is laid out, see if you can find the one flea which is laughing. Even the final four lines are ambiguous. It is not clear whom Kinnell, the poet, is addressing, the "Kinnell" speaker of the poem or the "Fergus" character--both are personas in the poem, of course. These lines' meaning could be that the flea on the dead body is laughing because it is happy— which would suggest that death has finally been accepted as part of life's rhythms, that it is nothing to fear— or that the flea is mocking the seriousness which human beings take in worrying about an unavoidable matter. For Kinnell, however, 244 absolute answers are secondary to the search for them (because they remind him of his mortality which, as he said, is the essence of poetry and the means by which life can be more intensely illuminated. This last section of The Book of Nightmares is, in theme, similar to Emily Dickinson's "I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died" in that it attempts to imagine the "increased life," the heightened feeling, one experiences for the world upon leaving it. And what brings this "strange brightening, this last moment of increased life" (as Kinnell wrote of the Dickinson poem), is the knowledge that it is about to be left behind forever. But it is the transcendence from a pre-birth existence to life, and then to death, that Kinnell is most interested in, and it is this concern that leads him to broaden his conception of selfhood, of which he remarked in an interview with A. Poulin, Jr.: In some great poems, like "Song of Myself," a reader is taken through one person into some greater self; there is a continual passing into the "death of the self," to use that phrase. It's one of the things that makes "Song of Myself" glorious. As we read this poem, we have to open ourselves if we are to get anything at all out of it. When we come to the lines "I was the man, I suffered, I was there," we already understand what it is to disappear into someone else. The final action of the poem, where Whitman dissolves into the air and into the ground, is for me one of the great moments of self-transcendence in poetry. In one way or another, consciously or not, all poems try to pass beyond the self. The best poems are those in which you are not this or that person, but anyone, just a person. If you could go farther, you would no longer be a person but an animal. If you went farther still you would be 245 the grass, eventually a stone. If a stone could speak your poem would be its words. (22-3) Berryman and Kinnell each take from Whitman's poem the con ception that his own use of "I" embraces a larger realm than just his individual self. Berryman saw it as a representa tive pronoun, a persona in the sense that the "I" means everyone; Kinnell feels that Whitman accomplished his "I" to "pass beyond the self," Whitman having "dissolved" in "one of the greatest moments of self-transcendence in poetry." But whereas Berryman believed Whitman to retain himself in his "I," which is inclusive of all men, Kinnell believes that Whitman was able to finally transcend his own self in favor of becoming "not this or that person, but any one, just a person." And although it may seem impossible to transcend one's self beyond a person to an animal (non human) state or to that of the grass or a stone, Kinnell, because of his conviction that poetry is a means of self exploration, that poetry is "a form of expression in which there is at least the possibility of finding oneself as one is," uses the persona mode of voice to attempt a transcen dence of the self beyond a person to an animal. In answer to Mary Jane Fortunato's question on the kind of "nature poetry" Kinnell was writing, he remarked: I don't think the distinction between "nature poem" and "urban poem" is useful any longer. The idea that we and our creations don't belong to "nature" comes from .the notion that the human is a special being created in God's image to have • dominion over, all else. We are becoming aware 246 again of our connection with other beings. That's hopeful, since for several centuries our civiliza tion has done all it could to forget it. (17) In analyzing the last section of The Book of Nightmares we have already seen one "connection" between man and animal in Kinnell's poetry— the human consciousness (Fergus's) emerged from the black bear, separating them forever. The purpose, then, of achieving a self-transcendence— at least in the poem— is to attempt a reconciliation between the two, to connect that which "our civilization has done all it could to forget." The poems in Body Rags (1968) try to show the imany similarities humans have in common with other animals so that civilized man may recall some of these forgotton ties. "Lost Loves," appearing early in the first part of that collection, sets the principal theme for many of the poems. The first person speaker lay dreaming "on ashes of old volcanoes" where he remembers experiences and people that had special significance for him in his life: "Mole Street. Quai-aux-Fleurs. Francoise. / Greta. 'After Lunch' by Po Chu-I. / 'The Sunflower' by Blake." And here, in the first stanza, he laments the passing of his life because it will mean the end of these memories (thus, "lost loves"), leaving no opportunity for new ones. In the second stanza, however, as he continues "baking / [his] deathward flesh in the sun," he finds solace in his realization that the end of this life means the passing into another stage of 247 existence: And yet I can rejoice that everything changes, that we go from life into life, and enter ourselves quaking like the tadpole, his time come, tumbling toward the slime. [t/o] In this inverted personification, Kinnell attributes animal development to humans. The tadpole, "his time come," gropes his way "toward the slime," toward becoming a frog. (The tadpole slowly sheds its outer, protective covering— which is slimy, mucous— freeing the developing frog: first the back legs penetrate the mucous covering, then the front, the head, and last, the tadpole's tail dissolves.) The "slime" in the stanza also refers to the pond, the new life the frog has been born into, and which the "quaking" tadpole is hesi tant to begin. Humans, too, will have their time come when they must pass into another stage. Their development, Kinnell suggests, may not be as visible or physical as the tadpole's; it occurs, finally, when they understand that one can rejoice over having to die, or losing loves, because "everything changes." And the change Kinnell says humans make is like that of the tadpole's: "we go from life / into life, // and enter ourselves / quaking." Kinnell's use of "I" is intended as the voice of "any one, just a person." In that his "I" is not a specific person— himself, say— distinguishes it from the confessional 248 mode. Further, like Berryman's "I" and Whitman's, it acts as a "third person" in the sense that it could be "anyone," and it therefore is more largely representative than it would be if confined to one, personal, point of view. That Kinnell intends his "I." to act as a representational voice aligns his practice closely with Berryman's; yet where Berryman often denied that his personal self (the John Berryman with a social security number, who brushes his teeth) was the persona he created for the poems, Kinnell acknowledges portraying autobiographical-experiences in his verse, but using those experiences to suggest that what is one man's history is common to all. He remarked to William Heyen and Gregory Fitz Gerald: Often a poem at least starts out being about one self, about one's experiences, a fragment of auto biography. But then, if it's really a poem, it goes deeper than personality. It takes on that strange voice, intensely personal yet common to everyone, in which all rituals are spoken. A poem expresses one's most private feelings; and these turn out to be the feelings of everyone else as well. The separate egos vanish. The poem becomes simply the voice of a creature on earth speaking. (6) "Lost Loves," then, is just such a poem, one in which Kinnell begins with a seemingly personal moment— an auto biographical fragment, perhaps-— of musing over his private loves: favorite poems, people and places he has been. But the poem's universality of theme makes the one, personal, feeling "common to everyone." When the speaker of that poem says "I can rejoice that everything changes," the "I" is 249 speaking for everyone, and therefore the phrase that follows, "that we go from life into life, and enter ourselves," is inclusive of everyone, hence the "we" and "ourselves"; the "separate egos" of the personal "I" and that of "them," in reference to all others but the personal self, have— as Kinnell suggests— vanished in this poem. Kinnell clarified, to Dodd and Plumly, his use of the "I" as meaning "anyone, just a person," or, to use Berryman's reference, as meaning another, "third," person: I haven't consciously invented a protagonist or mask. Yet the act of writing a poem that one hopes will speak for others as well as oneself tends to create something like a persona. So Whitman becomes "a kosmos, one of the roughs." And even Wordsworth, in The Prelude, who tries to write accurate autobiography, becomes a kind of exemplary case. (50-1) With this in mind, let us now return to the other poems in Body Rags that concentrate on the "I" as a voice speaking "for others as well as oneself," and in which animals become fused with this "I." In "Night in the Forest," the first person speaker pon ders his and his companion's natural origins; in the first stanza, which follows, the speaker compares his sleeping companion to a larva in a cocoon: A woman sleeps next to me on the earth. A strand of hair flows from her cocoon sleeping bag, touching the ground hesitantly, as if thinking to take root. The cocoon, a silky, protective covering spun by larvae 250 during one stage of their development, is the metaphorical agent for the sleeping bag; the woman's strand of hair "touching / the ground hesitantly, as if thinking / to take root" is the same gesture a larva takes when deciding upon the best place to attach itself in order to begin spinning • its cocoon. The forest, being close to nature, seems to allow the speaker to make this comparison, but he ends the poem with one more unlikely: I can hear a mountain brook and somewhere blood winding down its ancient labyrinths. The parallel of the brook and blood "winding / down its ancient labyrinths" calls forth that the speaker feels some how more aware of his primordial beginning at this moment in the forest as if this night has metaphorically transformed him and the woman back to more natural states of existence. Again, as in "Lost Loves," characteristics of animals (here, insects or worms) are attributed to the human woman. And, if the "I" of this poem "speaks for others," this closing stanza implies that each of us shares a common heritage that has been recalled by a lone person spending a night in the forest. In each of the last two poems of Body Rags, "The Porcupine" and "The Bear," Kinnell makes a direct associa tion between the first person speaker and the poem's title animal. In reference to that collection, Kinnell told Heyen 251 . . there are many animals in my poems. I've wanted to see in themselves and also to see their closeness to us" (5). In both poems, the speaker is drawn close to the animal by witnessing its death, and in doing so the speaker assumes the animal's experience of dying; the speaker, then, becomes the animal, as Kinnell remarked to Dodd and Plumly: For me those animals had no specific symbolic correspondence. I thought of them as animals. Of course I wasn't making zoological portraits. "The Porcupine" tries to establish explicit connections between us and porcupines. In both "The Porcupine" and "The Bear" the one speaking actually becomes the animal. Whenever we identify with some thing or some animal, it at once begins to represent us or some aspect of us, and so is on its way to becoming a symbol, even if exactly what it represents can't be specified. (56) Not only does the speaker become the animal in each poem, but in doing so becomes representative of man1s primitive origin, which we know Kinnell to mean some existence that is pre-human— a bear-like existence in Fergus's case. Let us turn to the poems themselves in order to make these general assertions more clear. In the second section of "The Porcupine," the speaker outlines the ways in which humans are like porcupines: In character he resembles us in seven ways: he puts his mark on outhouses, he alchemizes by moonlight, he shits on the run, he uses his tail for climbing, he chuckles softly to himself when scared, he's overcrowded if there's more than one of him per five acres, [t/o] his eyes have their own inner redness. 252 This is one of the few instances of the book where Kinnell (neither personifies the animal nor, in an inverted personi fication, attributes animal traits to man. There is much comedy in these lines in which the speaker simply states what he has perceived to be seven characteristics of the porcupine that resemble man's. Although some may apply to selected humans (feeling overcrowded if more than one per five acres, for example), it must be remembered that Kinnell believes that, in a poem, "one's most private feelings turn out to be the feelings of everyone else as well," that the seemingly personal is common to everyone. The implication here, as it was in The Book of Nightmares, "Lost Loves," and "Night in the Forest," is that humans are not much different than animals. The speaker therefore "connects" humans to animals in an attempt to show "their closeness to us. " In the poem's next section, the speaker describes those things that the porcupine "adores": Adorer of ax handles aflow with grain, of arms of Morris chairs, of hand crafted objects steeped in the juice of fingertips, of surfaces wetted down with fist grease and elbow oil, of clothespins that have grabbed our body-rags by underarm and crotch . . . The porcupine adores wood forms crafted by man, preferring these artificial shapes to wood in natural forms; anything that man has made, it seems, the porcupine adores because he 253 enjoys the taste of man's smell, "the juice of fingertips," the "fist grease and elbow oil," and the smell of "underarm and crotch" that seep into clothespins. The speaker is amazed that the porcupine finds the natural beauty of the forest unappealing, boring even, and that instead he is "astonished" by man's "hand crafted objects": Unimpressed— bored— by the whirl of the stars, by these he's astonished, ultra- Rilkean angel! for whom the true portion of the sweetness of earth is one of those bottom-heavy, glittering, saccadic bits of salt water that splash down the haunted ravines of a human face. Kinnell explicated■this passage for us in response to an interview question of Margaret Edwards: I was thinking--as I seem to do often— of the Ninth Elegy, where Rilke tells how the angels are attracted by ordinary, earthly things. The porcu pine eats anything with salt in it— generally things we've handled a lot, that the salt of our. sweat has soaked into. So, like Rilke's angels, the porcupine loves axe handles, doors, chair arms, and so on. A porcupine once ate the insula tion off all the wires in my pickup truck, for the road salt. But it's mostly wooden things they like. Once they actually ate their way through the cellar door of this house. If they had climbed the stairs into the house itself, they would have reduced the place to rubble, since it is splashed— floor, walls, and ceiling--with my sweat. As it happened they didn't get in, because they ate down the cellar stairs on the way up. Farmers regard them as pests, and kill them on sight. (111-2) The section following, then, begins a narrative of a porcupine's death from having been shot three times by a 254 farmer. The speaker watches the porcupine fall from the tree where he was "dozing" when the farmer shot him on sight: "On / the way down it tore open its belly / on a •broken / branch, hooked its gut, / and went on falling." That night, after witnessing this shooting and the subse quent bloody death of the porcupine (upon landing on the ground after its fall, the porcupine "sprang to its feet, and / paying out gut heaved / and spartled through a hun dred feet of goldenrod / before / the abrupt emptiness"), the speaker remembers a passage from the Avesta, ancient scriptures of Persia: The Avesta puts porcupine killers into hell for nine generations, sentencing them to gnaw out each other's hearts for the salts of desire. The punishment for killing a porcupine--if the reason is because its desire for human salt is bothersome--is that of being given that very desire. These porcupine killers will crave "each other's heart / for the salts." These lines, and the succeeding stanza, suggest two of Kinnell's consistent themes: that humans are closely related to animals; in hell, they act like porcupines— they are punished by having to act in the same way they punished the porcupines for behaving— and, second, that an act of one human is attributable to all, that one person's experience— even though it may be an individual act— is common to 255 everyone, just as the "I" is a representative voice. In the lines that follow, the speaker has trouble get ting to sleep because of the guilt he assumes for the farmer's killing of the porcupine, and when he does, his nightmarish dreams turn him into a porcupine: I roll this way and that in the great bed, under the quilt that mimics this country of broken farms and woods, [t/o] the fatty sheath of the man melting off, the self-stabbing coil of bristles reversing, blossoming outward— a red-eyed, hard-toothed, arrow-stuck urchin tossing up mattress - f.eathers, pricking the woman beside me until she cries. Although a metamorphosis has occured, complete with the speaker having acquired quills which prick the woman beside him, some of his "character traits" remain unchanged— such as being "red-eyed" and "hard-toothed"— because they are common to both humans and porcupines, as indicated in an earlier stanza in the poem; also his "pricking" the woman is a sexual suggestion, something the speaker can do either as a porcupine or a human. And the speaker-turned-porcupine now has an overwhelming desire to eat that which tastes of human salt so tears apart the bed, "tossing up mattress feathers" in his hungry assault on it. The following stanza presents the speaker in a curious state of existence; that is, as he describes some of his life's experiences, those of his human life and those of his 256 life as a porcupine become inseparable. How he has lived as a human also comprises his history as a porcupine: In my time I have crouched, quills erected, Saint Sebastian of the scared heart, and been beat dead with a locust club on the bare snout. And fallen from high places I have fled, have jogged over fields of goldenrod, terrified, seeking home, and among flowers I have come to myself empty, the rope strung out behind me in the fall sun suddenly glorified with all my blood. His being beaten "with a locust club / on the bare snout" and having "jogged / over fields of goldenrod," for example, parallel the experience the porcupine underwent when shot and killed by the farmer. But they also represent, meta phorically, those things in life the speaker faced as a human; also, the speaker, who in his human form witnessed the dying of the porcupine, relives that experience in the form of a porcupine {albeit one that can speak). What he saw as a human, he now, as a porcupine, has experienced. The speaker's conception of his selfhood, then, has embraced that of the porcupine whom he saw killed. Therefore, the speaker does not merely transform into a porcupine--as Gregor Samsa transformed into a gigantic insect in Kafka's story— he rather "joins" with one in particular, the one he saw die that day, making their separate lives one life, one 257 history— as long as the speaker continues this dream. The speaker goes beyond becoming an animal to "connect"'with it, actually, as Kinnell suggested. And this union has allowed the human speaker to expand his self-awareness, his notion of selfhood, so that the civilized human can perchance regain his trust in "life's natural rhythms," learn to over come the nightmare of dying— something that adult humans fear but nevertheless bring freely to troublesome porcupines. The speaker-porcupine in the final stanza, having learned what it is to die as the porcupine did, expresses the vision and feelings of the porcupine, how the natural world appears to him upon his death. The speaker, or poet, can end the poem with this final vision from the porcupine's perspective because he has entered fully the scope of the porcupine's existence and thus his own: And tonight I think I prowl broken skulled or vacant as a sucked egg in the wintry meadow, softly chuckling, blank [t/o] template of myself, dragging a starved belly through the lichflowered acres, where burdock looses the arks of its seed and thistle holds up its lost blooms and rosebushes in the wind scrape their dead limbs for the forced-fire of roses. The speaker-porcupine is "softly chuckling" as he advances towards death; it is not to be feared. In these dying moments, there is an illumination, an increase in the inten sity of life, a concentration on the regenerative energies 258 of nature, so much so that even the "dead limbs" of the rosebushes are seen in the eyes of the dying speaker- porcupine as "the forced-fire of roses," not as something dead and permanently lost. The human, because he has con nected with the porcupine in this strange way, has learned what Kinnell said about "I Heard a Fly Buzz," that in "the dying moment, everything the poet knew on earth is trans figured. . . . which brings the strange brightening, this last moment of increased life." The range of the persona mode of voice has been extended by Kinnell to include the "extra-human," not just the.non-human animal. The speaker-turned-porcupine is, if viewed in light of Kinnell's theories as previously out lined, now more of a complete human being, one having reached back and connected with his primordial notion of self. And in the next poem, "The Bear," these themes are again explored using the persona mode of voice in much the same way. "The Bear" is a narrative poem, structured in seven parts and, like "The Porcupine," the human speaker through his dream transforms into an animal; unlike "The Porcupine," however, the speaker is directly responsible for killing the bear. The "I" of the poem then is both the universal voice, the Whitmanesque representative "person, anyone," whom Kinnell hopes "dissolves" like the "I" of "Song of Myself" in a moment of self-transcendence, and the voice, moving 259 even further beyond this transcendence, of the animal, the bear. The voice of this poem is of the persona mode in that the animal is the mask for the "I" and the "I" is a mask for all humans because it is, like the Whitman voice of "I was the man, I suffered, I was there" where he "dissolves into the air and into the ground" and finally to "disappear into someone else" (Kinnell’s analysis), the voice of the one, individual experience which evokes feelings common to every one. Let us turn to the poem to see how the voice functions in this way. The first section opens the narrative with the speaker coming upon "some fault in the old snow" that the bear has used for hibernation during the winter. The speaker "glimpses bits of steam" and recognizes those vapors as the smell of bear: In late winter I sometimes glimpse bits of steam coming up from some fault in the old snow and bend close and see it is lung-colored and put down my nose and know the chilly, enduring odor of bear. The speaker has done this before; he "sometimes" comes across a hibernating bear while outdoors "in late winter," which implies that soon the bear will awaken. The steam rising from the fault is the sleeping bear's exhalation of breath, which is to the speaker an "enduring odor." It endures in the mind of the speaker as well as being a 260 lingering scent. The bear is nearly awake, yet still asleep, which will be associated with the "nonexistent" state of pre-birth later in the poem; consequently, the bear's odor is something the speaker "knows," both because he has smelled it before and because it holds a special recognition for him, a "chilly" glimpse, perhaps, into his pre-birth existence. This becomes more evident much later in the poem, however. In the next section, the dramatic action of the poem begins. Knowing that the bear will soon rise and search for food, the speaker plans his hunt: I take a wolf's rib and whittle it sharp at both ends and coil it up and freeze it in blubber and place it out on the fairway of the bears. The speaker is engaged in a primitive form of bear hunting— one still practiced by certain Eskimos in this country. In the ensuing stanzas, the speaker describes his tracking of the bear, beginning when the wolf's rib wrapped in blubber "has vanished"— that is, when the bear has eaten it: And when it has vanished I move out on the bear tracks, roaming in circles until I come to the first, tentative, dark splash on the earth. The hunter finds the bear's trail, which is marked for him by the bear's spitting up of blood caused by the sharpened wolf's rib he has swallowed, and follows him: 261 And I set out running, following the splashes of blood wandering over the world. At the cut, gashed resting places I stop and rest, at the crawl-marks where he lay out on his belly to overpass some stretch of bauchy ice I lie out dragging myself forward with bear-knives in my fists. [t/o] In tracking the bear, the speaker mimics the behavior of the animal: he rests when the bear does, crawls where the bear crawls. In the next section, the reason for the hunter's diligence is made apparent: On the third day I begin to starve, at nightfall I bend down as I knew I would at a turd sopped in blood, and hesitate, and pick it up, and thrust it in my mouth, and gnash it down, and rise and go on running. The hunter tracks the bear because he is starving; he is motivated by his instinct of survival which generates his impulse to eat the bear's blood-sopped turd, in which the wolf's rib is concealed, to sustain him until he can get something more. This is in contrast with the farmer's gratuitous killing of a porcupine dozing in a tree. The bear finally dies in the poem's next section just as the hunter catches up with him: On the seventh day, living by now on bear blood alone, I can see his upturned carcass far out ahead, a scraggled, [t/o] steamy hulk, the heavy fur riffling in the wind. & — , ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 262 I come up to him and stare at the narrow-spaced, petty eyes, the dismayed face laid back on the shoulder, the nostrils flared, catching perhaps the first taint of me as he died. The bear's "catching the taint" of the one responsible for his death parallels the speaker's smelling the bear's odor at the beginning of the poem which originated the hunt; in that the speaker refers to his own scent as "taint," he betrays his guilt over having killed the bear, in a particu larly deceptive way, in order to survive. Because the bear was hungry, he ate the wolf's rib thinking it was blubber only; and the bear having done so in turn enables the speaker to allay his own hunger, which he does as described in the following stanza; I hack a ravine in his thigh, and eat and drink, and tear him down his whole length and open him and climb in and close him up after me, against the wind, and sleep. Having been starving for days, the speaker madly gorges himself on the bear blood and flesh, and he wildly mutilates the remaining carcass to use it as protection from the cold. Here, wrapped inside the dead bear (and having eaten the wolf's rib earlier) the speaker begins his dream in which he becomes the bear he has just killed: And dream of lumbering flatfooted over the tundra, stabbed twice from within, 263 splattering a trail behind me, splattering it out no matter which way I lurch, no matter which parabola of bear-transcendence, which dance of solitude I attempt, which gravity-clutched leap, which trudge, which groan. The speaker, presently experiencing in his dream the same pain he brought to the bear, notes that even if he were to transcend himself, he would still remain "stabbed twice from within," still splatter a trail behind him. That is, even though the bear (the original animal, not the speaker- turned-bear) may have succeeded in his "bear-transcendence" and become the speaker, say, or any human, he would still feel the pain the way the - speaker does now. The bear cannot escape the destruction of the wolf's rib already inside him, and the human cannot escape the burden he must carry for having killed the bear. The dream continues to its end in the next section: Until one day I totter and fall— fall on this stomach that has tried so hard to keep up, to digest the blood as it leaked in, to break up and digest the bone itself: and now the breeze blows over me, blows off the hideous belches of ill-digested bear blood and rotted stomach and the ordinary, wretched odor of bear, blows across my sore, lolled tongue a song or screech, until I think I must rise up and dance. And I lie still. The breeze brings his own smell, "the ordinary, wretched odor," back to him and it "blows across" his tongue, acting 264 as an agent for a song— or a poem. He believes this to be his own scent because, still dreaming, he of course is a bear. But actually, it belongs to the real bear— who is .not dead, but still in hibernation in the fault of the old snow— and it brings the speaker out of his reverie which, as it turns out in the next stanza, he has been experiencing all along. He has not hunted and killed the bear; the hunt and the speaker's subsequent dream were in fact an imagina tive flight. He has not left the site of the bear in hibernation which he came upon in the first stanza. The "odor of bear" brought about a "song" in that it led to a reverie which became the making of a poem. The speaker "awakens," then, to both the dream within his daydream and from the daydream itself: I awaken I think. Marshlights reappear, geese come trailing again up the flyway. In her ravine under old snow the dam-bear lies, licking lumps of smeared fur and drizzly eyes into shapes with her tongue. And one hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me, the next groaned out, the next, the next, ■the rest of my days I spend wandering: wondering what, anyway, was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived? [t/o] This last image of the dam-bear cleaning her cubs after birth, "licking / lumps of smeared fur / and drizzly eyes into shapes"--a manifestation of the generative energies of 265 nature— leaves the speaker questioning why he envisioned killing this bear while actually in the presence of her delivering her young. So he spends the rest of his days "wondering" about this apparent contradiction which com prised the poem’s dramatic situation. The "sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood" refers to the connection the speaker made with the bear both while hunting it--eating its blood to keep from starving, crawling as the bear did, etc.— and when "becoming" the animal in his dream, making it his persona; in both instances, the speaker has bonded with the bear's life, pain, vision of the world. For Kinnell, the essence of a poem is "the wasted breath," that which dies. In becoming a dying bear in his dream, the speaker increases the intensity of his life; he experiences an illumination of the moment, culminating in the cubs' birth. And their birth begins— as it begins all humans' and animals'— their first stage of dying (another parallel in the poem's careful symmetry). The speaker has broadened his notion of selfhood through the persona mode of voice. "The Bear," appearing last in Body Rags, which immediately preceded The Book of Nightmares, can be viewed as the prelude of the Fergus section of that latter collection. The bear from which Fergus separates, when he gains his pre-birth consciousness, symbolizes humans' primitive origin, the final existence before consciousness and before birth. In "The Bear," the 266 speaker connects— "infuses"--with this notion of his origin by assuming the persona of the animal, and he therefore learns something about— enough to keep him questioning for the rest of his days— his own "nonexistence," the time of his pre-birth. In this, Kinnell's purpose for the poem is much that of Bly's intention for archetype recognition (although Bly achieved his in the confessional mode of voice). Kinnell intends the speaker of "The Bear" to voice con cerns we all share— in a similar sense to Berryman's inten tion for Henry as the spokesperson of his age— and to experience that for which we have a common feeling. Any "autobiographical fragment," as with Berryman/Henry, or any idiosyncratic notion of self and origin, as with Kinnell/ animal personas, may begin as the personal, but if the poem is successful in "touching others' feelings" as Kinnell thought his "I" poems must do, it extends outward to become perhaps even a universal expression. By using the persona mode of voice, Kinnell has propelled the personal vision to move beyond the human into the animal realm, and thus has enlarged the world of the individual "I," regardless whether or not it is a Whitmanesque, representative voice. Some poets who use mainly another "voice" or mode, like Lowell and Strand, also find reason to use the persona IV 267 mode at times. Lowell was given the nickname "Caligula" while he was at St. Mark's and it stayed with him--at least as the shortened "Cal"--all his life. In his poem "Caligula," from For the Union Dead, he used what he termed his "namesake" as his persona: My namesake, Little Boots, Caligula, you disappoint me. Tell me what I saw to make me like you when we met at school? I took your name— poor odd-ball, poor spoiled fool, It/o] my prince, young innocent and bowdlerized I The poem's voice, which begins in this passage as confes sional, merges into its subject and transforms into the voice of the persona: "I took your name— poor odd-ball, poor spoiled fool ..." Both the Caligula whom Lowell discovered in his bowdlerized texts and the young Lowell at St. Mark's can fit the description of "poor odd-ball, poor spoiled fool," and it is just such a description of Caligula that allows Lowell to identify himself with the ancient Roman. Once this merging of the two has been established in the poem, Lowell can employ Caligula for his mask as a means of self-exploration without being con fessional. For example, when he depicts Caligula's suffer ings, he also expresses his own: What can be salvaged from your life? A pain that gently darkens over heart and brain, a fairy's touch, a cobweb's weight of pain, now makes me tremble at your right to live. I live your last night. Sleepless fugitive . . . Consequently, the subject of Lowell's poem, Caligula becomes the persona through which Lowell can comment on himself. 268 His poem "The Nihilist as Hero," from History (1973), presents a similar use of the persona mode: Life by definition breeds on change, each season we scrap new cars and wars and women. But sometimes when I am ill or delicate, the pinched flame of my match turns unchanging green, [t/o] a cornstalk in green tails and seeded tassel. . . . [t/o] A nihilist wants to live in the world as is, and yet gaze the everlasting hills to rubble. The nihilist is the subject of the poem; that he is a "hero" means that he is also the poem's protagonist. The speaker identifies with the subject of the poem: "A nihilist wants to live in the world as is, / and yet gaze the everlasting hills to rubble," which is precisely what the speaker wants when he says; "Life by definition breeds on change. . . . But sometimes when I am ill or delicate, / the pinched flame of my match turns unchanging green." As in "Caligula," the speaker uses the poem's subject as a persona; and it is this persona, this nihilist, which illuminates for us the speaker's vision of the world. The nihilist and the poem's speaker are "heroes" because they both want to witness change which "breeds life": the speaker says "we scrap new cars and wars and women"— the "we" of course includes the nihilist--and the nihilist wishes to "gaze the ever lasting hills to rubble." The nihilist, therefore, can be viewed as a persona for the speaker since his remarks and those of the speaker's are essentially identical. More like Kinnell than Lowell, Mark Strand uses an 269 animal persona in his poem "Eating Poetry," from Reasons for Moving, hut unlike Kinnell, Strand, uses it more surrealisti— cally and to convey a sense of the absurd: Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry. The librarian does not believe what she sees. Her eyes are sad and she walks with her hands in her dress. The poems are gone. The light is dim. The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up. Their eyeballs roll, their blond legs burn like brush. The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep. [t/o] She does not understand. When I get on my knees and lick her hand, she screams. I am a new man. I snarl at her and bark. I romp with joy in the bookish dark. The narrator-dog, as the poem's voice, assumes the human characteristic of speech, yet does not read poetry. In that. his senses are skewed in comparison with the human librarian's, his pleasure derives from eating, not reading, poetry. The voice of "Eating Poetry" sounds human and appears to be so, but then transforms ("I get on my knees and lick her hand"), acts more like a dog, and finally triumphs over the horrified librarian. In Strand's poetic world— of which we shall see more in the next chapter the surreal is significant; it is a world in which a dog's 270 perception often can be more true than a human's. To survive in such a world portrayed in poetry as a kind of "theatre of the absurd," a world in which dogs are "coming up" to control the library, one must adopt the appropriate persona. 271 CHAPTER IV THE SELF-EFFACING MODE The previous two chapters have shown the different inodes a poet can use to project himself in his verse in order to achieve an expression of self that otherwise would be not possible apart from these modes. That is, when using the confessional voice, a poet is free to explore his personal life and history, knowing, however, that his pri vate revelations of autobiography will be shared publicly with his reading audience. The persona mode presents an alternative; the poet who uses this voice chooses to sheath himself— his emotions, his experience--by allowing his nar rator (who often will have a name other than the poet's own: Mauberley, Henry, Robinson) to speak for him so that the poet's private self-reflections need not be tempered to the anticipated response of his audience. The self-effacing mode of voice offers yet another option for the poet engaged in self-examination: it attempts to be impersonal while speaking of personal con cerns. Whereas the poets of the confessional and persona modes propel themselves into their poems, the poet of the self-effacing mode selects a voice and technique intended to absent himself from his poem. . ___________ 272 Mark Strand, who will serve as the exemplary poet of the self-effacing mode, has directed much of his poetry to themes of personal absence and nullity. To correspond to these themes, he has tried to efface himself from his poetic voice. Of course, no poet can actually "efface"— obliterate— himself from his poem; any poem is a direct manifestation of the poet's presence, or, as Richard Hugo, in his essay "Statements of Faith," once said in commenting on an idea of Williams: ". . . writing [is] a slow, accumulative way of accepting one's life as valid. . . . When you write you are momentarily telling the world and yourself that neither of you need any reason to be but the one you had all along" (72). Yet the poet working in the self-effacing mode can appear to be exploring matters of the self with an objectivity that neither the confessional nor persona voice can accomplish. Because the self-effacinc poet regards himself distinct from the personal self he portrays in the poem, he might be said to write of biograph ical, rather than autobiographical, matters, which is per haps as close to self-effacement a poet can attain. Strand uses this mode of voice to explore his relationship to contemporary life and to understand his identity, his self- concept, in a world that he sees— having long become familiar with the post-nuclear angst which made the world one of terror to Kees— in surreal, but not horrific, terms. In a world that is surreal, or absurd, it is Strand's 273 notion, one must remove himself far from it in order to discover one's role in relation to the world. Whereas Strand begins his search for this discovery outside his personal experience in the world, Charles Simic arrives at the self-effacing voice in an opposite manner; Simic begins with his personal experience, but because the world is seemingly surreal to him, he grows increasingly alienated from it, and eventually his personal relationship to the world becomes impersonal. Speaking of how to recreate his life experiences in his poetry, Simic told Richard Jackson: I find that in my own poems I tend to abandon the original cause or the visible aspects of the original cause and follow wherever the poem leads. That's why my poems often seem impersonal. It is not clear who the "I" is. It doesn't seem neces sary for me to equate that "I" with myself. I follow the logic of the algebraic equation of words on the page which is unfolding, moving in some direction. (22) The identity of Simic's "I" is not clear because it cannot be "equated" with his personal experience. Therefore, unlike the confessional voice which can be attributed to the poem's speaker (whether it is the poet or the poetic, personal self he has created for the public audience) and the persona voice which belongs to a specific poetic character (like Henry or Robinson) or narrator (the "I" as universal spokesperson), the voice of the self-effacing mode is impersonal, belonging to no one— or group— discernible. Simic does not intend his "I" as himself or 274 anyone else because in a world which renders experiences impossible for him to record in his poetry--as the confes sional and persona poets do— a personal voice would be inappropriate; Simic does not have a personal relationship to that which he experiences in the alien world of the absurd, as we shall see later in the chapter. Having a more definite sense of the world as "real," rather than surreal, which is to say, regarding personal experience as neither something from which to retreat (as Strand does) nor to abandon (as Simic does), David Ignatow uses the self-effacing voice to expand from a complete absorption in his own person in order to extend his con ception of self outward to his relation to the community. As the critic Ralph J. Mills, Jr. has written: Ignatow constantly explores his inner life, carrying what he finds into the light, bearing whatever pain it may cause him. But such self- examination is just one side of the coin in his poetry; the second side involves him in the lives of others, for his aim, beyond the earliest poems, is to become a poet of the city, specifically, of New York, to make himself, as he says, "the meta phor of his community." Awareness of identity and of self-integrity depend not simply upon the ability to scrutinize with honesty and care one's inward being but also on the capacity for extend ing the self outward into immediately surrounding existence. "My kind of writing forces me to go out among people," Ignatow remarks. "I'm not a social poet. I'm a poet of individuality and I only know my individuality by interacting with others. I can't do less than respond as I'm made to respond by environment. Yet I'm con scious, as a poet, of exactly what's happened to me." Precisely here, at the margin of daily existence, where the self encounters others or turns away to look within, the elements of his 275 experience take the shape of a unique poetic articulation. (374) Ignatow differs from the persona poet, whose "I" voice acts universally as representative of the modern person, in that he is able to leave his "awareness of identity and of self integrity"— by using the self-effacing mode of voice— in order to become "the metaphor of his community" in an attempt to extend this concept of self-identity "outward into immediately surrounding existence." That he accom plishes this will be shown by an analysis (to come later) of specific poems, but let us now turn to Mark Strand's concept of selfhood and how it functions to establish his method of self-effacement in his poetry. I. In his short collection of idiosyncratic musings in verse form, The Sargeantville Notebook (1973), Strand included the following curious statement: "The ultimate self-effacement is not the pretense of the minimal, but the jocular considerations of the maximal in the manner of Wallace Stevens." Strand admittedly has long admired Steven's work, and read Stevens even before beginning to write his own poetry. (He once remarked to Wayne Dodd: "I discovered I wasn't destined to be a very good painter, so I became a poet. Now it didn't happen suddenly. I did read a lot, and I had been a reader of poetry before. In fact, I was much 276 more given to reading poems than I was to fiction and the book that I read a lot, and frequently, was The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens" [55].) Perhaps Strand, in com menting on what constitutes the "ultimate self-effacement," regards Stevens as a belated Romantic poet, as does Harold Bloom, in that the ostensibly private reflection, which is the subject of the poem, expresses emotions or ideologies that are in fact diffuse. I make this parallel by suggest ing that Strand means "the minimal" to be the private, or individual, concern so that a pretense of such occurs when a poet argues for his own life experiences as reflective of a larger than personal theme, and that his phrase "the jocular considerations of the maximal" means the viewing of global concerns with some degree of wit, with a touch of the absurd. A poet betrays his "pretense of the minimal" when he tries to be an impartial observer, a chronicler, of an event he has witnessed or of a landscape he has seen; his presence in the poem— his personal "I" speaker— negates his intended impartiality, or objectivity, towards his subject. In Chapter II we have seen this "pretense of the minimal" in Lowell's "The Mouth of the Hudson," where the speaker regards "the single man's" and "the Negro's" con cerns as his own finally. Strand reads Stevens, however, as having successfully avoided such pretense by his constructing poems that begin about another's concerns, then move outward to embrace 277 universal questions: "Peter Quince at the Clavier," "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," and "The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage" are a few examples from his early work. These jocular titles lead us to poems of "maximal" subject matter; in each, Stevens's presence is not visible. Each poem concentrates on the individual named in its title; consequently, Stevens's discussion of universal matters is filtered through his representation of these paltry and jocular characters. Yet these poems of Stevens employ a particular individual— Peter Quince, the "Oncle," the Nude— (and none acting as a persona) in order to achieve his measure of self-effacement. In this sense, these figures are like dramatis personae. Yet Strand's objective is to achieve the same extent of impartiality, and impersonality, while using an "I" speaker that is neither a persona (that is, a representative "I" speaking in behalf of all) nor one that is entirely confessional. Another phrase from The Sargeantville Notebook explains how such an "I" can function in personal poetry: "The poet could not speak of himself, / but only of the gradations leading toward him and away." If the poet explores that which leads toward him and away from him, he will come to a better understanding of himself. Strand has recently written further about this in "A Statement About Writing": 278 Ideally, it would be best to just write, to suppress the critical side of my nature and indulge the expressive. Perhaps. But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious— never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving. And because it has no power, let alone appetite, for self-scrutiny, it fits the reductive, dominating needs of the critical side of me. The more I think about this, the more I think that not writing is the best way to write. Whether I admit it or not, I write to partici pate in the delusion of my own immortality which is born every minute. And yet, I write to resist myself. I find resistence irresistible. (317) His use of the phrase "which is born" is ambiguous; it could likely mean that his delusion of immortality is that "which is born every minute," or, perhaps, that his immor tality is born every minute that he writes. Whichever one results, his stated goal is to "resist" himself. Because his expressive part is blind to every thing except that which is self-serving, his critical side is necessary for self-scrutiny, self-definition (which, according to Strand's notion, is reductive), and it is this side that "dominates." The need for self-scrutiny, for self-definition, is separate from the self-serving impulses, It is this critical side that helps Strand control the tone of his poems which in turn contributes to the seemingly absence of self, or rather, the impersonal voice, of the "I" speaker. Strand, in concentrating on self-scrutiny (the critical side of his nature), can resist himself; that is, he can resist the more personal, intimate, tone which is expressive and self-serving. For this reason, that he 279 writes to resist himself, Strand, as we shall see later in the chapter, mocks the extremely personal indulgences of poets like Adrienne Rich or Anne Sexton, to name but two. Although self-definition is reductive, and therefore mostly contrary to self-scrutiny— in that one should, presump tively, expand one's self-awareness through such scrutiny, not limit oneself to a single, finite, definition--it can not be avoided since it is a "dominating need" of Strand's critical nature. Consequently, he does attempt self-definition in his work, yet it is neither finite nor reductive. Strand's speaker defines himself by all that he is not. Consider this early poem, "Keeping Things Whole" from Reasons for Moving (1968)— this poem (with the title "A Reason for Moving") was included originally in his first book, Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964), a limited edition--in which the "I" speaker defines himself by his absence: In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing. When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body's been. We all have reasons for moving. 280 I move to keep things whole. Strand's sparse use of words, regular syntax and simple prose sentences (six comprise the poem) are appropriate aesthetic choices; each helps to reflect the speaker's feeling of absence. The poem's content is the speaker's self-scrutiny which leads to his self-definition: "I am what is missing." The speaker characterizes himself by a description of absence; he defines himself in terms of that which is not present: "In a field / I am the absence / of field." Yet the poem enumerates particulars of the physi cal world: a field, the air; and although the speaker is part of physical reality, he considers himself a void. When standing in a field, he has no relationship to it other than using it to illustrate what he is not. The speaker is obviously alienated from the physical world; he represents a nothingness, someone unable to mark his pres ence: "the air moves in / to fill the spaces / where my body's been." Of this self-definition, Harold Bloom has written: "Beneath the grace, this is desperate enough to be outrageous. This 'I' might wish he were asleep else where as well as here, and so be no man rather than two. His absence seems a void that his presence could not fill, or a wound that his presence could not heal" (135). In Strand's The Monument (1978), prose represented as the work of an anonymous author who addresses his future 281 translator, giving him instructions how the work should be best represented in order to ensure the author's immortal ity, a particular passage (#9) explains further the concept of nothingness. It begins with an epigraph taken from Wallace Stevens's "The Man with the Blue Guitar": . . . Nothing must stand Between you and the shapes you take When the crust of shape has been destroyed. You as you are? You are yourself. It has been necessary to submit to vacancy in order to begin again, to clear ground, to make space. I can allow nothing to be received. Therein lies my triumph and my mediocrity. Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb. I am passing it on. The monument is a void, artless and everlasting. What I was I am no longer. I speak for nothing, the nothing that I am, the nothing that is this work. And you shall perpetuate me not in the name of what I was, but in the name of what I am. Since this passage suggests the absence of the author ("what I was I am no longer" and "the nothing that I am"), that which the author "passes on" in leaving behind his work— his monument— is a "void, artless and everlasting." His work is artless because it is prose— uncomplicated, simple sentence patterns— and everlasting because the translator places it in the world's literary canon. Strand said in an interview with Frank Graziano that The Monument represents a notion of "the desire for immortality": That Sounds rather grand . . . and making fun of it at the same time. I mean there are moments in one's life when one would like a guarantee that he will be read after he's dead. I thought this 282 would be a clever way of doing it; writing a text for the translator who might . . . not be inter ested in the rest of one's work, or maybe just interested in the rest of one's work and telling him don't be, just do this. . . . so I started writing The Monument and it became less and less about the translator of a particular text, and more about the translation of a self, and the text as self, the self as book. (37) The words in themselves may not require linguistic trans lation, but as representative of the author--his immortal self— they do require a translation (in much the spiritual use of the term) into the future, towards immortality. Strand, speaking from the point of view of The Monument's "author," continued, in that interview: "it's more than the things I've written, it's more than the text, it's my self that has to be continued. It's my self that has to be created again; the illusion has to be that I am doing it again, so that the translator in The Monument is my self, takes on an identity. It's not really being read in the future; that's what initiated The Monument. I mean I don't really care one way or the other, in truth" (37-8). What the author wishes to have translated, finally, is nothing: "I speak for nothing, the nothing that I am, the nothing that is this work. And you (he tells his translator] s shall perpetuate me not in the name of what I was, but in the name of what I am"— nothing, whose work is a void. This is one way Strand is "making fun" of his fictional author's desire for immortality. 283 In a later passage (#22) in The Monument, the author more openly discusses the self's absence (and closely fol lowing this passage, the author insists on referring to himself only in the third person, thereby becoming in fact "absent" from his own text): This poor document does not have to do with a self, it dwells on the absence of a self. I— and this pronoun will have to do— have not per mitted anything worthwhile to be part of this communication that strains even to exist in a language other than the one in which it was written. So much is excluded that it could not be a document of self-centeredness. If it is a mirror to anything, it is to the gap between the nothing that was and the nothing that will be. It is a thread of longing that binds past and future. Again, it is everything that history is not. The speaker attains self-effacement in that he removes him self from the restrictions of the present ("What I was I am no longer") and attempts to become that which is expected in the future: "the nothing that will be." In Stevens's terms, "you are yourself" when you have reached the "shape" after "the crust of shape has been destroyed." That is, one understands a knowledge of self when the binding forces, which define oneself presently, are removed and a new shape for the future is created with anything left. This is the speaker's purpose in "Giving Myself Up" from Darker (1970) , in which the chant-like phrasing is incantatory and serves to simulate what might be an Eastern religious meditation of self-negation: 284 I give up my eyes which are glass eggs. I give up my tongue. I give up my mouth which is the constant dream of my tongue. [t/o] I give up my throat which is the sleeve of my voice. I give up my heart which is a burning apple. I give up my lungs which are trees that have never seen the moon. [t/o] I give up my smell which is that of a stone traveling through rain. [t/o] I give up my hands which are ten wishes. I give up my arms which have wanted to leave me anyway. I give up my legs which are lovers only at night. I give up my buttocks which are the moons of childhood I give up my penis which whispers encouragement to my thighs. [t/o] I give up my clothes which are walls that blow in the wind [t/o] and I give up the ghost that lives in them. I give up. I give up. And you will have none of it because already I am beginning again without anything. [t/o] This rather complete list is indicative of many character istics common to Strand's work of self-scrutiny we have discussed so far: it is "artless" because it is lengthy and repetitious (both tire our patience); the intentional craft— that is, his choice of simple prose statements— contributes to this. Richard Howard's remarks about Strand's "Elegy for My Father," from The Story of Our Lives (1973), may help to explain the use of prose in "Giving Myself Up": "Strand divides to conquer, divides the self to conquer the self . . . for the price of experience, experience which Blake has told us cannot be bought for a song, is negation. Which is why Strand writes his lament not in verse but in the very dialect of negation, in prose, the one linguistic medium out to eliminate itself, to use 285 itself up in the irrecoverable rhythms of speech rather than in the angelic (or ecstatic) measures of repetition and return" (599). But Strand's aesthetic in "Giving Myself Up," on closer examination, is one of luscious phrases, increasingly so as the speaker gives up more of himself, so that the very act of self-negation becomes celebratory of his existence. In this poem— as with many of Strand's— the clear images and language can lull the reader away from its more complex intentions. Thematically, then, the poem indicates the speaker's self-divestiture, but its craft can be suggestive of the contrary. Still, the speaker of "Giving Myself Up" sounds like a programmed machine, or someone in a trance, devoid of emotional anguish or excitement, and with an unchanging, stoic personality; although an "I" is indeed giving himself up in the poem, it is an impersonal one, betraying a sub dued wit just once by a quip of sarcasm in the final line. That the speaker begins "again without anything" is his declaring a state of nothingness (which parallels similar declarations: "the nothing that I am," and "the nothing that will be" from The Monument) . Finally, like the speaker of "Keeping Things Whole," the speaker of "Giving Myself Up" is apparently alienated from the physical world because there is no mention of it except in relation to various parts of his body. In giving himself up, the speaker only considers physical reality in 286 terms of his body; he only knows the world in this way. When he gives up his smell, he leaves behind "a stone traveling through rain”; giving up his clothes means relin quishing "walls that blow in the wind," and his lungs are "trees that have never seen the moon." It is a solipsistic perception of the physical world; his place in it is deter mined by his presence or absence. When Graziano asked Strand about solipsism in his work, he replied: "I think a lot of contemporary poetry is solipsistic in that reality is a subjective determination and that we write about our vision of the world as if it were the world" (32). So Strand's definition is close to the metaphysical theory of solipsism which is, succinctly stated, that all real entities (that which we see) are only modifications of the self, states of our mind. This seems reasonably applicable to the speaker of "Giving Myself Up," who may have, in actuality, given up nothing more than his way of viewing himself in relation to physical reality. He therefore is ready to begin "again without anything," which is to say from a fresh perspective, a new state of mind. That Strand manifests his critical side, his nature for self-scrutiny, by his work, and that this inquiry of self, particularly his penchant for "resisting" himself through his themes of nullity and absence and by means of his aesthetics which include an impersonal speaker, one who is stoic and solipsistic, has led Linda Gregerson, in 287 writing of "Giving Myself Up," to remark: When Mark Strand reinvented the poem, he began by leaving out the world. The self he invented to star in the poems went on with the work of divest ment: it jettisoned place, it jettisoned fellows, it jettisoned all distinguishing physical marks, save beauty alone. It was never impeded by per sonality. Nor was this radical renunciation to be confused with modesty, or asceticism. The self had designs on a readership, and a consummate gift for the musical phrase. (90) Except for the suggestion that Strand's musical phrasing (that is, his chanting) is a "consummate gift," I would think this assessment fairly describes Strand's intentions, primarily in Darker. Another poem similar in meaning to "Giving Myself Up" is "The Remains," from the first section of Darker (which is also titled "Giving Myself Up"). In this poem, the speaker empties himself of his life, or continues his "work of divestment": I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets. [t/o] I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road. At night I turn back the clocks; I open the family album and look at myself as a boy. What good does it do? The hours have done their job. I say my own name. I say goodbye. The words follow each other downwind. I love my wife but send her away. My parents rise out of their thrones into the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing? Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same. I empty myself of my life and my life remains. This is perhaps closer in content and tone to Stevens's lines from "The Man with the Blue Guitar," used to 288 introduce The Monument passage concerning the speaker's change to nothingness,which lines were: "When the crust of shape has been destroyed. / You as you are? You are your self." In "The Remains," the speaker pronounces: "I change and I am the same." Like Lowell in "Memories of West Street and Lepke," Strand's speaker traces his "seed time" attempting to determine, as he states, "what I am." The tone of this poem, however, strikingly contrasts with that of the confessional mode of voice. Whereas Lowell's is immediately personal (as documented by the autobiograph ical content of the poem and by the urgency of the voice, the sense of personal drama evoked by the tone of the first person speaker), Strand's tone is controlled to the extent of making the speaker— again— stoic, and his words flat, neither urgent nor passionate. His rhetorical questions (which he proceeds subsequently to answer) and his self revelations as simple pronouncements of fact make Strand's tone here, like that of "Giving Myself Up," one reflective of the impersonality of the speaker. One level of absence has been reached in these poems, then, in that the personal has been removed from the "I." Strand has invented a self "to star" in these poems of self-divestiture; the self invented by Lowell— or any poet of the confessional or persona modes— is one for public representation, to use Trilling's argument, but it remains a personal self that is closely connected to the poet. 289 Strand's poetic self, and the voice of that self, achieve for him the peculiar tone of the poems of Reasons for Moving and Darker, a tone so different from that of the speakers of the confessional or persona modes that it is at once bolting and impressive to most readers. Bloom, on the jacket of Darker, writes: The irreality of Borges, though still near, is receding in Darker, as Strand opens himself more to his own vision. These poems instantly touch a universal anguish as no "confessional" poems can, for Strand has the fortune of writing naturally and almost simply (though this must be supreme artifice) out of the involuntary near solipsism that always marks a central poetic imagination in America. An uncanny master of tone, Strand cannot pause for mere wit or argu ment but generally moves directly to phantasma goria, a mode so magically disciplined in him as to make redundant for us almost all current questers after the "deep image." Others have commented on Strand's "uncanny mastery of tone": Linda Gregerson writes, "Strand undoubtedly studied some thing of tone from Donald Justice, whose perfect elegance is always perfectly double. Justice has polished a surface in order to aggravate the discrepancies between manner and tone, has cultivated, in other words, the inherent ambiguity of perfect manners" (92). Peter Stitt, in his essay "Stages of Reality," feels that the poems from Sleeping with One Eye Open "introduce us, inevitably, to the characteristic speaking voice of nearly all early Strand poems— the consciousness through which everything seen, thought, felt, is filtered. Undoubtedly, this character is 290 i very nearly identical to Mark Strand himself, and yet to equate him with Strand would be to deny the role the imagi nation plays in these, as indeed in all poems, however directly 'confessional' they may appear to the naive reader" (201-2). Of that first collection, Richard Howard, in Alone With America, writes: "By writing an existing language as if it were his own invention, by confiding his endurance of dissolution to traditional discourse, Strand achieves . . . the spooky sense that he is being written by someone else, by something else, an energy his own only in that it moves through him, for it does not proceed from him . . . [these poems] register a collapse, a defeat, a disintegration of the identity they are concerned to dis close, they do so with the tenantless decorum of alienation, of otherness ..." (591-2). And Stanley Plumly, in his review of Darker, observed, "If there is a poetry of the absurd, Strand is its present master. . . . it is the artifice, the revelatory means of Strand's special madness, that defines his intention and achievement. 'The Sleep,' for example, reminds us of nothing really new . . . What is profound, of course, is the execution of the perception, especially Strand's marvelous ability with timing and tone" (79) . Strand, too, is conscious of his voice— which ulti mately determines tone— and felt that in Darker he had achieved some "mastery" of it. When Plumly, in an 291 interview, commented: "I have a greater sense of speaking voice, say, direct to Mark Strand in Darker," Strand replied: "I agree. . . . There are other voices in Reasons for Moving. There are other voices in Darker, too, but I think that I don't rely on them; I think I use them with— I don't want to say greater control— but I use them because I've chosen to" (61), which is to say in essence that in Darker Strand believes he achieved control of voice. In choosing a voice, or speaker, for each poem, he has eliminated the possibility of his subject matter dictating to him which voice to use. (Some subjects— such as Lowell's from the Life Studies poems we have discussed— demand a particular, confessional, voice appropriate to the poem's content.) Strand's Darker poems, however, begin with an impersonal self as its voice, regardless of the individual poem's subject. The voice is "direct to Mark Strand" because it reflects his personal inquiry of the self; his "uncanny mastery of tone" is a result of his poems' sub jects: impersonality, self-negation and absence. But if he is hesitant to "say greater control," he is willing to label his voice as "restrained." In attempting to deter mine the influence other poets have had on his work, Strand told Richard Vine and Robert von Hallberg: "... it has to do with a certain tone, a tone I associate with George Herbert: a kind of restrained, but not withheld, 292 conversational tone, not inelegant, not elegant, and very hard to maintain" (130). Strand's tone, then, is determined by the self he defines in his poems— the impersonal, the self of absence— who is also the poem's speaker. His craft, specifically his use of the impersonal "I," and his subject, the quest for self definition and thus fulfillment, function in tan dem to effect the "restrained, but not withheld" tone. A detailed examination of this unique tone will better define the self-effacing "I." In Strand's early poetry, the speaker's purpose is to discover his place in the contemporary world and his relationship to it. Having found neither (as has been shown in such poems as "Keeping Things Whole" and "Giving Myself Up"), he alters himself--rather than the world— and strives for his other self, a void of a self, one of nothingness, for, as Octavio Paz has written on the jacket of Strand's Selected Poems (1980): "To be alive is to be absent from oneself— -or, an extreme and desperate means of being present to oneself. The poetry of Mark Strand explores the terra infirma of our lives. Fascinated by emptiness, it is not strange that he should conceive the poem as a description of absence; but at the same time his vision continually stumbles against the blunt, obtuse reality of things and beings irrevocably trapped in brute existence." That one self, the one present in the physical 293 world, who is paranoid and alienated, can transform into another self, the "other," absent from any relationship to the world, was suggested by "The Remains," or his poem "The Guardian" which concludes: "Guardian of my death, // pre serve my absence. I am alive." Since tone is determined by the speaker (as I. A. Richards instructed us, it is the attitude the speaker adopts towards the poem's subject) and because the speaker in these early Strand poems defines himself in terms of absence, an impersonal "I"— which is to say the self- effacing voice— results. However, in Strand's poems, sub ject matter is not the sole determination of the voice's tone; the speaker's wit and sense of the absurd also con tribute. In analyzing this tone, let us first consider the speaker's sense of alienation further, then the ensuing pursuit of his "other" or double self— a pursuit resulting from the speaker's alienation— and finally his notion of the absurd. Each operates towards formulating Strand's voice of self-effacement. That Strand's "I" finds the world alien, and himself so afraid he is unable to cope with it, was evident in the poem "Sleeping with One Eye Open" in which the "I" expresses his abject paranoia, as this selection shows: It's my night to be rattled, Saddled With spooks. Even the half-moon (Half man, Half dark), on the horizon, 294 Lies on Its side casting a fishy light Which alights On my floor, lavishly lording Its morbid Look over me. Oh I feel dead, Folded Away in my blankets for good, and Forgotten. My room is clammy and cold, Moonhandled And weird. The shivers Wash over Me, shaking my bones, my loose ends Loosen, And I lie sleeping with one eye open, Hoping That nothing, nothing will happen. Although the speaker's phobias keep him awake, he remains composed enough to tell us of them by way of rather clever, end-rhymed couplets (including forced rhymes and feminine endings), the last three lines comprising a closure rhyming "open," "hoping" and "happen"--hardly the phrasing of an acutely paranoid insomniac. Strand's playful sense of the absurd— evident here by his attributing ingenious speech patterns to his speaker whose "bones are shaking"— informs this otherwise disturbing monologue of a frightened man. The same fears are expressed more solemnly in "When the Vacation Is Over for Good" which concludes with the speaker wondering "just what it was / That went so com pletely wrong, or why it is / We are dying," and in "Violent Storm" (both from Sleeping with One Eye Open) in which the speaker proclaims of the "long night sweeping over these trees" that: 295 for us, the wide-awake, who tend To believe the worst is always waiting Around the next corner or hiding in the dry, Unsteady branch of a sick tree, debating Whether or not to fell the passerby, It has a sinister air. Earlier in the poem, the speaker alludes to the "us" as "nervous or morbid," and their unquieting considerations are held in contrast to "those who have chosen to pass the night / Entertaining friends / And intimate ideas in the bright, / Commodious rooms of dreams." These people are oblivious to the sinister air, apparently; they: Will not feel the slightest tremor Or be wakened by what seems Only a quirk in the dry run Of conventional weather. For them, The long night sweeping over these trees And houses will have been no more than one In a series whose end Only the nervous or morbid consider. In this direful world, the speaker tries to define himself in relation to his place in it. Ultimately finding that he is alienated from any physical part of the world— in a field, he is nothing but the absence of field— the speaker chooses what he believes the last recourse: to absent himself from the world, but to do so without actually dying. Consider "The Guardian," a short poem from Darker, the last lines of which we have already seen: The sun setting. The lawns on fire. The lost day, the lost light. Why do I love what fades? You who left, who were leaving, what dark rooms do you inhabit? Guardian of my death, 296 preserve my absence. I am alive. Only in absence, freed of his former, confining, fear of night, does the speaker feel alive. He now loves the "lost light"; he now chooses to inhabit dark rooms in an effort to preserve his absence from the reality of the physical world. There is a spiritual sense, too, to the reference of the mysterious "dark rooms"; it is in them that the speaker believes he can retain life. The problem, there fore, is one of transcendence; the killing of oneself, or physical death resulting from any means, would preclude discovering the life one finds in absence, in the dark rooms of nothingness. In "The Remains," a poem of self-divestiture as we have seen, the speaker encounters this problem, finds no solution, and finally realizes: "I change and I am the same. / I empty myself of my life and my life remains." Bloom, in his essay "Dark and Radiant Peripheries," has written of this poem that what "remains" is: everything about the self that ought to have only posthumous existence, when the poet will survive only in the regard of other selves. But this dread (which is one with the reality of him) is that already he survives only insofar as he has become an otherness capable of extending such regard. Dread born of spectral duality, dread identical with what Blake called the Spectre of Urthona, is peculiarly an anxiety that shadows poets, and is almost a distinguishing mark of Romantic tradition. "The Remains" is a poem written by Strand's alastor or Spirit of Solitude, his true voice of feeling. Its despairing wish— to be delivered from the self's prison without abandoning a self that can be embraced only when 297 it in prison lies--is repeated throughout Darker in many superb modulations. . . . The mode is phantasmagoria, of which the American master will always be Whitman. . . . Closer to Strand . . . is the Stevens who charted the "mythology of self, / Blotched out beyond unblotching." Strand's peculiar courage is to take up the quirky quest when "amours shrink / Into the compass and curriculum / Of introspective exiles, lecturing," concerning which Stevens warned: "It is a theme for Hyacinth alone." Throughout Darker, Strand's risk is enormous. He spares us the opaque vulgarity of "confes sional" verse by daring to expose how immediate in him a more universal anguish rages . . . (138-9) What Bloom calls "the opaque vulgarity of 'confessional' verse," Strand feels is "the pretense of the minimal," as suggested earlier. Instead, Strand's speaker becomes an "otherness"— which is his final achieving of absence— only after some struggle with his double, in various guises, or this other self, who seeks entrance to (what he calls in "The Guardian") the "dark rooms" which will ensure his absence and thus his life. So afraid of the emergence of this "other" that, at one point, the speaker of "The Tunnel" (from Sleeping with One Eye Open) threatens suicide to scare it away: A man has been standing in front of my house for days. I peek at him from the living room window and at night, unable to sleep, I shine my flashlight down on the lawn. He is always there. . . . I weep like a schoolgirl and make obscene gestures 298 through the window. I write large suicide notes and place them so he can read them easily. . . . When he seems unmoved I decide to dig a tunnel to a neighboring yard. . . . I come out in front of a house and stand there too tired to move or even speak, hoping someone will help me. I feel I'm being watched and sometimes I hear a man's voice, but nothing is done and I have been waiting for days. Again the speaker is frightened, unable to sleep, yet again he retains his wit: he "weeps like a schoolgirl" hoping to discourage his pursuer, and the public display of his "large suicide notes" is a jest aimed towards the "tragic generation" of poets, those whom Berryman elegized in The Dream Songs, and whose verse Bloom criticized as "opaque vulgarity." Strand, I would think, inclines to agree with Bloom, as evident by his contrasting style of voice and by these remarks to Plumly: "... one of the horrifying things about many poets is that they lost, somewhere along the line, in the fervor of the inner debate, the idea of poetry. . . . They become, in fact, 'chroniclers' or 'notators.' They write notebooks or leaflets or what have you" (59). The intent, certainly, of "The Tunnel" is not to chronicle a personal experience, but to explore the terror— here presented in a mildly surreal circumstance— of 299 confronting one's otherness, which nevertheless must be faced eventually if (to use Bloom's phrase) one is to be "delivered from the self's prison without abandoning a self that can be embraced only when it in prison lies," which is to echo Strand's line from "The Guardian": "preserve my absence. I am alive." Strand's speaker, then, faces the challenge of trans cendence, of absenting from himself while still physically alive— what Bloom in referring to "The Remains" called becoming "everything about the self that ought to have only posthumous existence." This transcendence is close to being the "ultimate self-effacement" for one escapes from oneself in order to fill the void of not knowing oneself, and thus not knowing— and, consequently, fearing— one's relationship to the physical world, as Paz wrote: "To be alive is to be absent from oneself— or, an extreme and desperate means of being present to oneself." The world must be illuminated, made less threatening, before the speaker can complete the process of becoming "alive." For Strand, who inverts the notion of one's presence (as one's absence), that which is dark is most illuminating. Darker, finally, traces the process of the speaker's transcendence to the other— a process that includes his abandoning fear and gaining confidence— and in doing so, he reaches an understanding of self-definition. "Mark Strand's vision of [the world] is something like a photographic negative," 300 writes James Crenner. That darkness is inviting to the speaker is shown in the seventh of "Seven Poems," which also serves as Darker's epigraph: I have a key so I open the door and walk in. It is dark and I walk in. It is darker and I walk in. Crenner has written of Darker: "It is as though your daily life has been translated into a haunted house, where the daylight is so bright you can barely make anything out, all bleached to a sameness; then the thunder rumbles and sud denly there is a bolt of darkness in which, for an instant, the heavy furniture and the corpse and the monster stand out clearly. The darker the clearer" (85). The analogy of the haunted house is a becoming one for it suggests the witty and sometimes absurdly surreal vision of the speaker in many of these poems. The process of becoming an "otherness" is that of dis appearing into darkness, for in darkness lies life: The present is always dark. Its maps are black, rising from nothing, describing in their slow ascent into themselves, their own voyage, its emptiness, the black, temperate necessity of its completion. As they rise into being they are like breath. (from "Black Maps") 301 Or, the act of diminishing is one of becoming: Out of breath I will not rise again. I grow into my death. My life is small and getting smaller. The world is green. Nothing is all. (from "My Life") Flowers bloom. Flowers die. More is less. I long for more. (from "The One Song") The double self, the other, is addressed in "My Life By Somebody Else." The speaker, having tried various ways to lure the other out in the open, grows increasingly frus trated; the poem's concluding stanzas follow: The days drag on. The exhausted light falls like a bandage [t/o] over my eyes. Is it because I am ugly? Was anyone ever so sad? It is pointless to slash my wrists. My hands [t/o] would fall off. And then what hope would I have? Why do you never come? Must I have you by being somebody else? Must I write My Life by somebody else? My Death by somebody else? Are you listening? Somebody else has arrived. Somebody else is writing. The two poems previous to "My Life By Somebody Else" in Darker are in fact "My Life" and "My Death"; all three are part of that book's final section which is also titled "My Life By Somebody Else," as if Strand is implying that his speaker, having discovered the means of transcendence earlier in the book (that is, by seeking darkness, by dimin ishing), has now become "somebody else," the otherness he 302 sought. Here Strand has achieved self-effacement on at least three levels: Mark Strand is not projecting himself in this grouping of poems (collectively as "My Life By Somebody Else"), as the confessional or persona poet does; if we can continue to assume that Strand's work has been towards self-divestiture, then the life referred to in these poems is strictly invention, and Strand frequently injects moments that are not quite believable, or which are surreal or absurd, to emphasize the difference between the life presented in the poem by the speaker and the poet's actual (public) life. Further, the speaker of the poems is suggesting that that life is not really his either, but that it is controlled— it is being authored— by somebody else. And still another level of self-effacement is reached when, within the individual poem "My Life By Somebody Else," a separate presence takes over that which the speaker has been writing. If it is necessary, as the speaker wonders, for "My Life" and "My Death" to have been written by somebody else before the otherness can appear, then that otherness, by appearing at the end of "My Life By Somebody Else," has taken control of not just that one poem, but the entire grouping. Both Strand and his speaker have been effaced from these poems. Crenner gives his perspective of the speaker's confrontation with his otherness as he writes of "My Life By Somebody Else," in which Strand, Crenner argues, has 303 "dramatized, with characteristic mastery of tone ('You must have hated me for that' . . .'Was anyone / ever so sad?') the self/self dichotomy," and continues that: One is reminded of Borges' "Borges and I," in which the narrating "I" speaks of the Borges to whom everything real happens and in whom the "I"— rather than in itself— -has its being. The "I" concludes the piece with, "I do not know which of us has written this page." But Strand here goes even Borges one better, beginning with two selves and ending with three (or maybe one)! The proc ess of recording the cat-and-mouse game between the I and the missing self leads to the arrival of a third party, a "someone else" who by the end of the poem is writing the poem. We might recog nize this "someone else" as the only possible union of the other two, a union which takes place only in the act ("writing") of the poem. This is poetry as revelation. (88-9) Strand wants us to think of Borges; in his previous col lection, Reasons for Moving, Strand takes as his epigraph Borges's phrase: "while we sleep here, we are awake else where and that in this way every man is two men." There are several poems following that concern Strand's notion of a double self— one is "The Tunnel" (originally appearing in Sleeping with One Eye Open) we have already seen. Others are "The Whole Story" (also first included in Sleeping with One Eye Open) and "The Man in the Mirror"; none, however, is a "dramatization" in the manner of "My Life By Somebody Else." Instead, each considers the notion of otherness accompanied by Strand's sense of amusement. Strand, when giving a public reading of "The Whole Story," will often tell of the poem's genesis, that as a 304 young poet he showed his work to a much older (and famous) poet who told Strand not to repeat himself in his poems; that advice forms the poem's epigraph: "I'd rather you didn't feel it necessary to tell him, 'That's a fire. And what's more, we can't do anything about it, because we're on this train, see?'" The poem follows: How it should happen this way I am not sure, but you Are sitting next to me, Minding your own business When all of a sudden I see A fire out the window. I nudge you and say, "That's a fire. And what's more, We can't do anything about it, Because we're on this train, see?" You give me an odd look As though I had said too much. But for all you know I may Have a passion for fires, And travel by train to keep From having to put them out. It may be that trains Can kindle a love of fire. I might even suspect That you are a fireman In disguise. And then again I might be wrong. Maybe You are the one Who loves a good fire. Who knows? Perhaps you are elsewhere, Deciding that with no place To go you should not Take a train. And I, Seeing my own face in the window, May have lied about the fire. The poem does not exist solely for its humor although some is rather revealing of human behavior: the speaker, for 305 example, repeats verbatim, in the context of the poem, the dialogue already quoted in the epigraph; that is, the speaker cannot cease repeating himself even in a poem that attempts to justify such refrains, claiming that they are useful in recovering "the whole story." But the large theme operative here concerns the dialogue the speaker has with himself— with his other self, specifically, as the . last lines indicate: he has been talking to his reflection he sees in the window. In his oral introduction to this poem, Strand tries to make us believe the dialogue is between the speaker and the older poet who, thinking the speaker has said "too much," gives him an "odd look." Yet the speaker is attempting to understand his immediate situation of helplessness, and so considers all the possi bilities in order to justify his not being able to "do any thing about it, because we're on this train." The "we" therefore would be the rational self and the emotional, or impulsive, self. Further, the poem is in part a response to the older poet, informing him not to assume that repetition is unintentional and valueless; the speaker comes to some tentative understanding— if that understanding is only an awareness of the endless possibilities of the situation— by conducting this dialogue, complete with the repetitive thoughts and words to which any of us is prone, particu larly when thinking to ourselves. 306 The personal "I" has been effaced by confusing its identity; it has two selves in this poem (maybe several more in a poem like "My Life By Somebody Else"). The con trolled tone— without lineation, the prose is even, unemo tional, matter of fact: "And then again I might be wrong. Maybe you are the one who loves a good fire. Who knows?"— and the speaker's sense of the absurd ("I may have lied about the fire"), that the entire poem has been a hoax, also contribute to the self-effacement of the voice. What Strand would have us believe initially is a poem of personal experience becomes yet another type of self-divestiture poem. "The Man in the Mirror" presents another "self/self" confrontation. This long (five pages) poem— the final one in Reasons for Moving— is seemingly a "dialogue" between the selves, but since we never hear directly from the other self, the man actually "in the mirror," it is more a slow, quiet monologue of the "I" addressing his reflection as "you." Still, the speaker's reflection alone is insuffi cient for a self-confrontation because earlier in the poem, the speaker says "the mirror was nothing without you," then adds later: I remember how we used to stand wishing the glass would dissolve between us, and how we watched our words cloud that bland, innocent surface, 307 and when our faces blurred how scared we were. . . . You never spoke or tried to come up close. Why did I want so badly to get through to you? . . . It will always be this way. I stand here scared that you will disappear, scared that you will stay. The speaker here is not "scared" in the same way as the paranoiac in Sleeping with One Eye Open, but is afraid of losing contact with his otherness and of that which the otherness has to reveal about the speaker's self-identity. In "The Tunnel," the speaker urges the other self to leave; here the speaker is weary of the ensuing consequences if the other does so. The speaker has matured; his tone, not comically absurd, but serious (and without the emotional urgency of the confessional voice), is indicative of the surreal content: "we watched our words / cloud that bland, / innocent surface" of the mirror, rather than the speaker's physical breath, which in turn causes the reflec tion to blur. Strand's aesthetic, his technique of craft, is enmeshed with his themes of self-discovery. To be is to be nothing— which, of course, echoes Stevens's final line from "The Snow Man": the listener, "nothing himself," stands watching the "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." The self-effacing mode of voice serves 308 to define Strand's speaker's growth from alienation to achieving absence from the physical world without physi cally dying, and it mirrors each poem's content. As the speaker becomes less afraid of his otherness, his tone becomes less comic. The speaker's reaction to his estranged world was that of humor, but as he began to better understand his relationship to it, the world seemed less strange, and his place in it more definite ("In a field, I am the absence of field"), no longer befitting a humorous response. Strand told Richard Jackson that "the act of writing is itself a metaphor for the way we relate to the hidden resources of our lives. A truly exciting poem has some thing evasive or mysterious at the core, and it succeeds in suggesting to us that the core is essential to our being. But that core's absence reminds us of how precariously we exist in the universe that evades us, that is always beyond us" (13-14). The speaker of "The Man in the Mirror," ends his monologue by articulating this precariousness. That Strand's craft informs his poems' subject matter is stated best by Strand himself when writing of Donald Justice's work for Contemporary Poets: From the very beginning Justice has fashioned his poems, honed them down, freed them of rhetorical excess and the weight, however grace fully sustained, of an elaborate diction. His self-indulgence, then, has been with the possi bilities of the plain statement. His refusal to adopt any other mode but that which his subject 309 demands— minimal, narcissist, negating— has nourished him. . . . If absence and loss are inescapable conditions of life, the poem for Justice is an act of recov ery. It synthesizes, for all its meagreness, what is with what is no longer; it conjures up a life that persists by denial, gathering strength from its hopelessness, and exists, finally and positively, as an emblem of survival. (818) Strand well could be assessing his own work here; he said to Plumly of Justice: "I've learned a lot from him. And I think he's learned some things from me, too. We share some of the same subject matter and give each other poems— that is, ideas for poems" (66-7). It is true of Strand's technique, too, that he refuses "to adopt any other mode but that which his subject demands— minimal, narcissist, negating," and the mode to convey such subjects is the self-effacing voice, which Strand achieves, as we have seen demonstrated by his poems so far discussed, by his themes of self-definition and his tone. The self-effacing "I" is a matter of technique, but it is a technique available only for use in certain poems whose content allows for it. In "Keeping Things Whole," the "I" is self-effacing because the speaker's definition of himself— the subject of that poem— is one of effacement, or absence from his presence in the physical world. In "My Life By Somebody Else," the "I" is self-effacing because the poem's subject suggests a con fusion of personal identity, an indefiniteness of the speaker-composer of the poem. And in "The Whole Story," the comic tone becomes the subject; the ultimate joke of 310 the poem is the speaker's disavowal of the subject of the fire— that is, his effacement from the poem's original subject. Strand achieves the truly "ultimate" self-effacement in some of his translations, however. In something of the reverse of the intention of the speaker of The Monument, who desires immortality by being spiritually "translated" through his work which survives him, Strand at times leaves behind the author whose poem Strand literally translates. Consider "The Dirty Hand" from Reasons for Moving; follow ing the poem's title, in parenthesis, is the inscription "after Carlos Drummond de Andrade," yet we can assume it is Strand's own composition because he does not indicate otherwise. The poem is, however, neither a response to Drummond, an engagement of poetic dialogue with him, nor an adaptation in, say, the manner of Lowell's Imitations (1961) as might be thought considering the inscription. In 1976, Strand published the following translation of "The Dirty Hand" in Another Republic, in which he presented the poem as a translation of Drummond's. Strand's is very closely a literal rendering; I have compared it to John Nist's literal translation of it in Nist's In the Middle of the Road (1965). Here is Strand's translation from Another Republic: My hand is dirty. I must cut it off. To wash it is pointless. 311 The water is putrid. The soap is bad. It won't lather. The hand is dirty. It's been dirty for years. I used to keep it out of sight, in my pants' pocket. No one suspected a thing. People came up to me, wanting to shake hands. I would refuse and the hidden hand would leave its imprint on my thigh. And I saw it was the same if I used it or not. Disgust was the same. How many nights in the depths of the house I washed that hand, scrubbed it, polished it, dreamed it would turn to diamond or crystal or even, at last, into a plain white hand, the clean hand of a man, that you could shake, or kiss, or hold in one of those moments when two people confess without saying a word . . . Only to have the incurable hand open its dirty fingers And the dirt was vile. It was not mud or soot or the caked filth of an old scab or the sweat of a laborer's shirt. It was a sad dirt made of sickness and human anguish. It was not black; black is pure. 312 It was dull, a dull grayish dirt. It is impossible to live with this gross hand that lies on the table. Quick! Cut it off! Chop it to pieces and throw it into the ocean. With time, with hope and its intricate workings another hand will come, pure, transparent as glass, and fasten itself to my arm. The following is the text of what Strand implies is his own poem, "The Dirty Hand" ("after Drummond") , published eight years prior to the appearance of his translation we have just seen: My hand is dirty. I must cut it off. To wash it is pointless. The water is putrid. The soap is bad. It won't lather. The hand is dirty. It's been dirty for years. I used to keep it out of sight, in my pants pocket. No one suspected a thing. People came up to me, wanting to shake hands. I would refuse and the hidden hand, like a dark slug, would leave its imprint on my thigh. And then I realized it was the same if I used it or not. Disgust was the same. 313 How many nights in the depths of the house I washed that hand, scrubbed it, polished it, dreamed it would turn to diamond or crystal or even, at last, into a plain white hand, the clean hand of a man, that you could shake, or kiss, or hold in one of those moments when two people confess without saying a word . . . Only to have the incurable hand, lethargic and crablike, open its dirty fingers. And the dirt was vile. It was not mud or soot or the caked filth of an old scab or the sweat of a laborer's shirt. It was a sad dirt made of sickness and human anguish. It was not black; black is pure. It was dull, a dull grayish dirt. It is impossible to live with this gross hand that lies on the table. Quick! Cut it off! Chop it to pieces and throw it into the ocean. With time, with hope and its intricate workings another hand will come, pure, transparent as glass, and fasten itself to my arm. Strand makes his claim of authorship based on four changes in Drummond's text: in line three of the second stanza, 314 "Strand's" poem reads "in my pants pocket," his translation of Drummond is "in my pants' pocket" (the poems were published by different presses; 1 am discounting the allow ance for "house style"); in line nine of the same stanza, Strand includes "like a dark slug," which was omitted from his translation; line twelve, also of that stanza, Strand writes "And then I realized" instead of the "And I saw" of his translation; and the last change, in the penultimate line of stanza three, reading "lethargic and crablike" in Strand's "The Dirty Hand" was omitted from his translation. If these differences are slight, they are enough to alter (however slightly) the tone and emphasis of the poem. The voice of Strand's translation of Drummond betrays a Christian sensibility. That is, Drummond clearly means to suggest, in part, "if thy hand offend thee, cut it off" from the Gospel of St. Mark, 9:43. Strand's poem is different— that is, taken from, or "following" Drummond— because Strand now emphasizes, by adding two more lines of description to the hand (making it more definitely metony mic) the slothfulness of the human condition, and, by implication, the desire for something supernatural to replace it. But this is mere justification. Strand has implied that his early version of "The Dirty Hand" is his own poem, not Drummond's. (And such a claim is almost believable given that Strand's flat style— the result of his careful 315 and complete tonal control— makes all his early poems read as though they were themselves translations.) Nothing could be more self-effacing than to remove oneself nearly entirely from the poem— from conceiving it, from actually writing it. Strand uses Drummond to author Strand's poem: the ultimate, and most absurd, act of self-effacement. Strand freely admits to "basing" some of his poems on his reading of others' work. "Reading," he said to Graziano, "is as much a part of experience as walking down the street or talking to people or anything. It's part of life. . . . sometimes I don't know whether I read something or experienced it" (39-40). Strand's "jocular considera tion" is to subvert the essence of the confessional and persona poets who rely so greatly on personal experience. Strand's personal experience of reading others' work— and taking their ideas, that is, their experiences^— becomes the subject of his work. He continued in the same interview: . . . the first of the "Night Pieces" [from The Late Hour (1978) is] a version of a paragraph toward the end of Bleak House. Of course I changed it a lot; turned London and the Thames into New York and the Hudson and I changed a lot of details to make it more contemporary, and I added things of my own. (35) Perhaps, then, that Strand's acknowledgment— "after Dickens" follows the poem's title— is enough to suggest the affinity to the paragraph in Bleak House; its having been altered significantly makes it a genuine Strand poem. 316 But consider our next example, something of "a third 'Night Piece,'" Strand says, "that was based on a reading of Leopardi." That poem, first published in Antaeus (Spring 1978) under the title "Poem After Leopardi," but appearing as just "Leopardi" in his Selected Poems— leaving the reader without a clue to the meaning of the one word title— follows in its entirety: The night is warm and clear and without wind. The stone-white moon waits above the rooftops and above the nearby river. Every street is still and the corner lights shine down only upon the hunched shapes of cars. [t/o] You are asleep. And sleep gathers in your room and nothing at this moment bothers you. Jules, an old wound has opened and I feel the pain of it again. [t/o] You are asleep and I have gone outside to pay my late respects [t/o] to the sky that seems so gentle and to the world that is not and says to me: "I do not give you any hope. Not even hope." Down the street I hear the voice of a drunk singing an unrecognizable song and I hear a car a few blocks off. And I think how things pass and leave no trace, how tomorrow will come and the day after, how whatever our ancestors knew time has taken away. They are gone and their children are gone and the great nations are gone with the noise of their battles that sent clouds of dust and smoke [t/o] rolling across Europe. All is peace and silence: the world is calm. [t/o] And nothing is heard from them. Once when I was a boy, and the birthday I had waited for [t/o] was over, I lay upon my bed, awake and miserable, and very late [t/o] that night the sound of someone's voice singing down a sidestreet, [t/o] wounded me, as this does now. Here is my literal (as closely possible) translation of 317 Leopardi's "La Sera Del Di' Di Festa"; I have chosen to translate the lines Strand retains for his "Leopardi," omit ting but a few lines from Leopardi's Italian text: The night is sweet and clear and without wind, And the moon poses quietly over the roofs And in the middle of the gardens, and reveals In the distance the serenity of every mountain. Oh, my woman, [t/o] Mow every path is silent, and from the balconies Only a rare night lamp is shining. You are asleep, crouched in easy sleep In your quiet rooms, and no care eats at you, And, of course, you have no thoughts of how you have Opened the wound in the middle of my chest. You are asleep: I look towards the sky, which seems benign, [t/o] And I salute it, and salute nature which wounded me once. [t/o] "Hope?" nature said to me. "Hope I deny you . . . Only tears will shine in your eyes." This day was a holiday: but all its fun You have ended with sleep, remembering perhaps In your dreams how many took to you today, How many you took to: it is not my name That comes to your mind. So here I ask What life can I look for . . . Where today are our famous ancestors crying, And the great power and armies and roar of Rome That covered land and sea? All is peace and silence; the world rests, Our passions have subsided. When I was very young, the holiday For which I anxiously awaited came and went, Leaving me in pain, awake, pressing my pillow; And in the late night, a song that rose from the streets, [t/o] Dying little by little into the distance, Pained my heart, as now. Strand eliminates some of Leopardi's verbiage (accouter ments of the early nineteenth century), changes some of the diction to make the poem's sound and setting more contem porary, and ensures that the poem evokes an American, rather than Italian, evening after a holiday. Still, the 318 situation here in "Leopardi" is remarkably that of Strand1s-Drummond's "The Dirty Hand"; there is but slight difference in content, and none in meaning, between Leopardi's piece and what Strand calls his own poem, one "based on a reading of Leopardi"— a very close reading, obviously. Strand's inclusion of this poem in his "New Poems" section of Selected Poems simply as "Leopardi," giving no clear acknowledgment to the poet whose work it is, can be justified if considering that Strand added his per sonal mark to the poem by addressing "Jules," his wife. (Leopardi wrote, "Oh, my woman..") Yet this makes Leopardi's "La Sera Del Di' Di Festa" appear to be Strand's, in the confessional mode of voice— rparticularly since it is placed in his Selected Poems following a grouping of his confes sional poems about his childhood in Nova Scotia— when, in fact, it is Strand at his self-effacing best. In another instance, Strand more subtly seduces us into believing that his poem "For Jessica, My Daughter" from The Late Hour is confessional— he does have a daughter named Jessica (and his Selected Poems is dedicated to her and to Jules)— until we realize that the poem's opening in a wind storm and its theme of a father's contemplating his daughter's future are too similar to Yeats's "A Prayer for my Daughter," although the actual phrasing and specific lines of the two poems are dissimilar. 319 Nothing could be more jocular than to claim authorship of poems one has translated; indeed, the true author has been lost in the translation— as Drummond and Leopardi were, having been supplanted by the Strand who is actually effaced from these same poems. He could well title these: "My Poems By Somebody Else." For Strand, such a claim of authorship is a final dis play of the absurd, of phantasmagoria, which helped inform the controlled tone, a tone necessary in establishing the voice of an impersonal "I," one defined by the degree to which he can achieve absence— from himself, from the physical world. The resulting, self-effacing, voice aids Strand in his personal inquiry into the constitution, the definition, of an individual in a contemporary world to which he feels no relationship or role other than that of filling a void. Such an inquiry— and tentative answers— could not have been effected without his use of the self- effacing voice, for, as we have seen, this voice cannot be distinguished from the self portrayed— and defined--in these poems, whomever it is Strand would have us believe is their author. II. Charles Simic's work, fortunately, does not lend itself to the circulatory— and oftentimes confusing-- exegeses that Strand's poems require. But the two poets 320 do share common characteristics in their work, most notably the exploration of absence and the inquiry into the many, and varying, aspects of the self (besides, of course, their use of the self-effacing voice). In their jointly- authored introduction to Another Republic (1976), an anthology of translations by "17 European & South American Writers" that Strand and Simic edited, they wrote of a theory, on which they collaborated, separating the poets represented in that collection into two distinctive categories: the mythological and the historical. They posited the following: The origins of the mythological vision can be seen in surrealism, which, by concerning itself with the unconscious, found a method for uncover ing and using archetypal imagery. It restored to the familiar world its strangeness and gave back to the poet his role of myth maker. Thus, for the mythological poet the miraculous is close at hand, easily encountered if he pays attention, as he must, since attention is his most important faculty. For him the poem is either a phenomeno logical interrogation, a process by which the archetype is dismantled, as in Ponge, or an elaborate narrative which tells the story of its own formation, as in Popa. For the poets whose vision is dominated by historical consciousness, Cavafy is the great modern ancestor, since he understood perhaps better than any of his contemporaries that in history nothing changes except the names, that there are always victims, always oppressors. For poets like Milosz and Herbert there is no way to forget that despite our utopian ideologies we live in a world of wars, famine, and faith lessness. Such poets bear tragic witness to the social and political events of their time, and their work is characterized by two modes of self- expression: the lyric, which attempts to ennoble the suffering of those who are victimized or estranged; and the comic, which recognizes the 321 absurdity of individual destinies in the presence of the great abstractions of history. (17-18) If the poets whose work appears in Another Republic can be grouped as either representing a mythological vision or an historical consciousness, as the editors suggest, Simic's poetry represents both, oftentimes in a single poem. Consider "History" which opens his collection, Austerities (1982) : On a gray evening Of a gray century, I ate an apple While no one was looking. A small, sour apple The color of woodfire, Which I first wiped On my sleeve. Then I stretched my legs As far as they'd go, Said to myself Why not close my eyes now Before the Late World News and Weather. The historical consciousness represented here is that which is documented in Genesis, of course, and that of the per sonal record of the poem's speaker on a certain evening, a speaker who is a "victim" of destiny, of the history resulting from his first Judeo-Christian parents' indiscre tion. In the way this history is presented in the poem, it is true, "nothing changes": the speaker needs to rest before watching the news; that he is about to watch the news and weather report should remind him that neither 322 would exist had he— that is, his earlier self, the self from which he has descended— not eaten that "small, sour apple" (while no one was looking) "on a gray evening / of a gray century." That he is fatigued and in need of rest is also a consequence of eating the apple, and it emphasizes his mortality— a further consequence. If "History" must be set against Strand's and Simic's theory, it would most nearly reflect the historical-comic classification since it is not lyric but "recognizes the absurdity of individual destinies in the presence of the great abstractions of history." That the speaker who said: "I stretched my legs / As far as they'd go," back on that gray evening of that gray century (meaning, simply, that he tested God's authority), is the very speaker who says the same thing before taking a nap (meaning literally to stretch his legs) is inherently absurd. The destiny--which is mortality— of the contemporary speaker has been determined for him by one of the greatest abstractions in Judeo-Christian history— or myth. For "History" also presents a mythological vision; on one level it repeats the fall of man myth of the early Hebrew cosmogony, Genesis, and on another it uncovers for the contemporary speaker (the one about to nap before the news) an archetypal image. "History" shows that "for the mythological poet the miraculous is close at hand" in that the one voice of the poem is comprised of two separate personages, both however of a common self, one an ancestor 323 of the other, yet joined in a single voice by the miracle of the poem. Much of Simic's work, as "History" proves and as will be shown in greater depth by analyses of poems later in this chapter, presents both a mythological vision to uncover and use archetypal imagery in his poetry and offers an historical consciousness in so doing. Myth and history are inseparable to Simic; he studied what he called "mythic materials" in order to learn the history of myths and people of North America to better understand the mythic consciousness, or "the imagery," as he says, "that is archetypal to this continent." He began by studying "Roethke, and Roethke interested me," Simic continued in his interview with Wayne Dodd and Stanley Plumly, "espe cially for the material from which he created those sequences— folklore, nursery rhymes, and so forth." Then, he explains: . . . I spent years in the New York Public Library reading folklore. . . . and I spent just endless hours pouring through those things, and taking out little notes . . . And when I ran out of that, I started reading books on primitive religions, anthropology, God knows what. Then from that point I moved to the utopian sects, early explorers, settlers. . . . [This material] had to do with a theory that I started developing around that time. It seemed to me that it was necessary to locate the imagery that is archetypal to this continent, some sort of mythic conscious ness that is peculiar to this place. . . . con temporary, but in order to find the contemporary you have to go back. . . . Anyway, it's not so much the question of finding the native archetype, 324 but rather the manner in which that kind of con sciousness works. (208-9) That manner, as that which we noted in Bly's work, is the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious, to which we will return later. But first, an understanding of Simic's use of myth will further illustrate that his poems can be a fusion of the mythic and historic— which fusion is the basis for his self- effacing voice; specifically, he insists that his represen tation of myth, in all its strangeness, be "restored to the familiar world." To accomplish this, his evocation of archetypal imagery (his myth making) is always connected to the real, the physical world; therefore Simic's mythic mode unites with place, an outward manifestation of the histori cal world. Place, though, transcends the historic, as Simic suggested to Dodd and Plumly: "There are certain things that are absent in my poetry on purpose, things that I dis like a lot. It's a prejudice. I hardly ever give place locations, mention any names, specific contemporary refer ences. A sort of Neanderthal atmosphere prevails, though many of the poems have their seed in specific events. The Vietnam War, for example" (216). The allusion to his creat ing a "Neanderthal atmosphere" is appropriate in describing this historic (place)/mythic (time) setting for his poetry; although he is conscious of place, which gives the poem its historical foundation, he declines mentioning it in order to add a mythic, mysterious dimension._________ _______________ 325 Simic began his investigation of archetypal imagery after his reading Roethke1s The Lost Son (194 8) and Praise to the End 1 (1951) , both which contain references to folk lore set aside nature— particularly the soil and flowers— and other, pastoral, images as a means of ontological inquiry which included a use of archetypes. As Simic told Dodd and Plumly, before reading Roethke, "I already had an obsession and interest in minimals, and that kind of gave me the notion that I did have to begin from the beginning, find something in my own life that I understood very well and felt passionately about, something that surrounded me . . . The miraculous is always here . . . The pastoral elements came from . . . We always had, in the family, a romantic notion of going back to the land. We thought of ourselves as peasants" (208). This "romantic notion" gives much of his poetry "a weight of European folkwisdom and mythology," about which Simic continued in the same inter view: "I'm sure, because of my background, those ten years in Yugoslavia [where I was born], that something in the way I see things or select things gives it, if you will, that kind of flavor. What I draw from is not European necessar ily. There is much in American folklore— the riddles, incantations, magic charms, superstitions, proverbs— which most people are not familiar with anymore" (209-10). Simic's perception of the world, from which he bases his culling of archetypal imagery ("the way I see things or 326 select things"), is not exclusively solipsistic, as is Strand's, but empirical to the degree from which it arises out of his personal beginning in Yugoslavia. The mythic is thus joined to the historic in this sense. One other factor, in addition to the knowledge— yet exclusion— of place and the pastoral and folklore elements, helps to make Simic's poems a combination of the mythic vision and the historic consciousness: his allegiance to the physical world. An example is the short "Poem," from his first full collection of verse, Dismantling the Silence (1971) : Every morning I forget how it is. I watch the smoke mount In great strides above the city. I belong to no one. Then, I remember my shoes, How I have to put them on, How bending over to tie them up I will look into the earth. The speaker awakes thinking he is without restriction, free, belonging to no one, then he realizes that he is bound to the earth and that which it imposes on him. Yet the poem's simple title indicates that the subject of "Poem" may act as a metaphor of Simic's philosophy of composition; he begins each day, or each poem, thinking he has no obliga tion to fulfill in writing, so can follow any mythic impulse (the smoke mounting "in great strides above the city" evokes a certain mythic quality), until he remembers his commitment to the earth and the particulars of life in 327 the physical world. Simic remarked, in commenting to Richard Jackson on his notion of an anonymous "I" in his work (which soon will be discussed): What I've always tried to do in these metaphysi cal excursions is to remember the predicament of that "I." I dislike flights of imagination that leave behind the human condition. It delights me to remember this "I" who might be trying to figure out some incredible abstract proposition about the nature of the universe, this "I" who has holes in his socks, perhaps. It is Thoreau1s notion, I guess, of keeping an allegiance to the soil, to our everydayness in the same instant as we experience the transcendental. (2 3) These remarks illuminate Simic's earlier phrase, that he "had an obsession and interest in minimals," a phrase he later clarified as meaning "the essentials, of forks and knives" or other inanimate objects which ensure his "allegiance to the soil, to our everydayness in the same instant as we experience the transcendental." That his poems of this type are concerned with preserving these minimals ("a kind of absolute integrity— essentials") grounds them in the history of "everydayness"; that they are used to uncover archetypal imagery makes them instru ments of a mythic vision. The poem "Stone," which is part of a grouping in Dismantling the Silence of poems using a particular essential of "everydayness" to illustrate an aspect of myth (consider their titles, each revealing the essential, or minimal, as the poem's subject; "Table," "The Spoon," "Fork," "Knife," "My Shoes," and so on), is one such 328 representation of a mythic vision being disclosed to our consciousness through an act of observing the minimal: Go inside a stone That would be my way. Let somebody else become a dove Or gnash with a tiger's tooth. I am happy to be a stone. From the outside the stone is a riddle: No one knows how.to answer it. Yet within, it must be cool and quiet Even though a cow steps on it full weight, Even though a child throws it in a river; The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed To the river bottom Where the fishes come to knock on it And listen. I have seen sparks fly out When two stones are rubbed, So perhaps it is not dark inside after all; Perhaps there is a moon shining From somewhere, as though behind a hill— Just enough light to make out The strange writings, the star-charts On the inner walls. In Chapter III Galway Kinnell, in explaining his rea sons for the necessity of the persona mode of voice, said: "If you could go even deeper, you'd not be a person, you'd be an animal; and if you went deeper still, you'd be a blade of grass, eventually a stone. If a stone could speak, your poem would be its words." But Kinnell only went as far as representing the self as an animal, a bear, never a stone (even though in The Book of Nightmares he suggests that the stone has the spiritual significance of a saint: "stone saint smooth stone . . ."). Simic's "Stone" expresses a desire— similar to that of Kinnell— for a return to the 329 primitive; yet where Kinnell's intent was a change of con sciousness (that is, in the way in which we could perceive of ourselves if "uncivilized" or closer to the death- sphere), Simic's is to uncover our collective unconscious, not hoping to alter us, or our perception, necessarily, but to help us define our relationship to history and myth, to understand how our lives have been partially guided, our destinies formed, by archetypal imagery. That the speaker "is happy to be a stone" declares his allegiance to the soil. And as such, the speaker considers the possibilities of that "life": sustaining strength, a source of fire, of light which leads, perhaps, to "strange writings, the star- charts /On the inner walls" of one's unconscious. Simic's sense of the primitive, then, is atavistic; the mythic vision of the speaker turned stone reveals images inherited from our most remote ancestors, images which have been forgotten by our more immediate ones. Although the last image of the poem reflects a mythic vision of the unconscious, the "I" is still present in "Stone." (Simic said: "It delights me to remember this 'I' who might be trying to figure out some incredible abstract proposition about the nature of the universe . . .") The "I" retains his human, petty, con cerns such as what others might think of him, what their positions are, etc.— "Let somebody else become a dove / Or gnash with a tiger's tooth"; and, although the "riddle" 330 contained inside the stone is the ultimate question in the poem— the "incredible abstract proposition"-^the stone's "outside" riddle, its everydayness, is also considered: that it can absorb the full weight of a cow's stepping on it, that it survives a child's abuse. "Stone” is mythic in that its vision is obscure, abstract ("strange writings, the star-charts"), yet historic because of its speaker's literal link with the soil. "I have ideas," Simic said to Dodd and Plumly. "We live in an age unaware of its miracles, an age unable to incorporate the discoveries of science, psychology, anthropology, etc. into its common consciousness. And I would like to include these in some way. At the same time, I have a horror of abstractions— I dislike wisdom not tested through experience, anything which doesn't have its roots in the soil, so to speak" (214). Simic binds the presentation of his mythic vision to historical consciousness— that is, the physical world— by showing "its roots in the soil" as well as his sense of place and the elements of folklore and anthropology (that we have seen) which inform his work. And a last note regarding "Stone": its mythic dimension derives by evoking the cave writings of early man; in "History" Simic used Genesis to clarify and magnify the actions of his contem porary speaker; the poet takes from all anthropological and folk-myth sources in order to uncover archetypal imagery. 331 The result of a poem which combines mythic vision with historical consciousness is, as has been suggested, a speaker of the self-effacing mode, an impersonal "I." In the introduction to this chapter, Simic was quoted saying that his poems seem impersonal because "it is not clear who the 'I' is." A poem, for Simic, or "any verbal act includes a selection, or conceptualization, a narrowing down," he said. That is, what makes the "I" personal is diminished because the poem reduces the speaker's experi ence in its attempt to conceptualize it. This concept is like Strand's theory concerning his critical nature being reductive in that it is the side best suited for self definition; in defining the self, in exercising the critical over the expressive side, the poem's speaker becomes more impersonal. Following is Simic's justification for his theory that the poem is a "narrowing down" which conse quently produces an impersonal "I" as its speaker, as he told Jackson: Let's say someone has the experience of walking around a swamp at night, sees things he wouldn't see in another place or in the day time, perhaps feels fear, confusion. Now, he would have to be seriously deluded to believe that when he sits down to render all this that he can equal its complexity. Since what he writes doesn't equal the experience, there's this suspicion which becomes a voice, a voice that asks, "What have I experienced?" But let's say he begins to write and arrives at an acceptable equation. The problem is then with a language that is larger than his uses for it. On the one hand, it con tains echoes and resonances he never suspected before he began to write about the experience. 332 So he starts hearing two things. He hears what recreates his swamp experience, but also other things that are unexpected, that point to a dif ferent subject matter, to a different development. Here he has to make some sort of choice. I find that in my own poems I tend to abandon the origi nal cause or the visible aspects of the original cause and follow wherever the poem leads. That's why my poems often seem impersonal. (21-2) To begin from an experience— that is, to take from one's record of personal history--must not be allowed to dominate the poem's intention of expressing a mythic vision. The poet, if his desire is to create a myth or to uncover archetypal--or atavistic— imagery, must not impose his personal self, his history (or experience), on the mythic structure from which he intends to base his mythic vision. Simic illustrates the problem of simply "cataloging the archetypal structures" in order to "introduce mythic con sciousness into poetry" with the example of a Navaho myth: "you can intellectually deduce its form," he told Jackson, "but the content, and the deeper psychological impetus for that content, would be missing. Unless you were a Navaho living when the myth was set, you could only provide a generalized content. I began to realize that these struc tures would be imposed from the outside . . . There was something mechanical and unsatisfying in trying to fit an experience into a deliberate mythic structure" (19-20). Altering the mythic structure in order to make it "fit an experience" would be equally mechanical; the solution, therefore, is to alter the speaker's rendition of his 333 experience (a wholly created speaker "could only provide a generalized content," consequently some measure of empiri cism must be involved in suggesting that from one’s experi ence arises a mythic vision) by abandoning "the original cause or the visible aspects of the original cause and follow wherever the poem leads," even, as it does eventu ally, to the "I" becoming impersonal. The need for the impersonality of the poem's first person speaker is the need of uncovering archetypal imagery, or of expressing the mythic vision, for ontologi cal investigation. The "I" must become less personal even though the impetus for the mythic suggestion may be a per sonal experience, such as walking around a swamp at night. The poet must establish a sense of self-diminishment in the poem's speaker, or, as Richard Jackson wrote in his essay "The Presence of Absence": "Simic1s mode is finally to deconstruct presence, to recede back into the growing region of emptiness . . ." (143). Yet this "deconstruction" is not to imply a complete removal of the presence of self in the poem, for that would make it entirely mythic, abstract, which Simic finds "empty and arbitrary." As always, this mythic intention must be balanced by an infusion of historical consciousness: from those mythic poems, Simic told Jackson, "what was missing was a test of the presence of the human being who accepts the responsi bility of those visions. There is a constant dialectic in 334 my poetry between a longing to take off on abstract flights and my concrete, physical needs. One has to consider the life of the world: the historical dimension, the horrify- ing history of our age. All that intrudes into poems" (23). Simic's poem "Easter," from Charon1s Cosmology (1977), presents a self-diminished "I," one retaining enough pres ence, however, in order to test the mythic vision it voices: A summons because the marvelous prey is fleeing Something to rub out the woods From the blackboard sound of wind and rain A device to recover a state of pure expectancy Only the rubbings only the endless patience As the clearing appears the clearing which is there [t/o] Without my even having to look The domain of the marvelous prey This emptiness which gets larger and larger As the eraser works and wears out As my mother shakes her apron full of little erasers [t/o] For me to peck like little breadcrumbs Jackson in his interview with Simic, after quoting Foucault that "language always seems to be inhabitied by the other, the elsewhere, the distant; it is hollowed by absence," offered to Simic the following explication of "Eraser": Your own metaphors suggest such notions as silence, invisibility. . . . the poem "Eraser" seems to talk about this— there is a "summons" motivated by the flight of a "marvelous prey." The erasing is a means to "recover a state of pure expectancy," to recover traces of what seems absent, the hollowness, the cleared place . . . (22) In "Eraser," the speaker needs to maintain a degree of presence, or consciousness, in order to evoke the clearing _____ 335 that is the domain of the marvelous prey. Simic responded to Jackson's remarks by defining this degree of presence— or absence— of his speaker as an "anonymity." He said: I've always felt that inside each of us there is profound anonymity. Sometimes I think that when you go deep inside, you meet everyone else on a sort of common ground— or you meet nobody. But whatever you meet, it is not yours though you enclose it. We are the container, and this noth ingness is what we enclose. This is where Heidegger is very interesting to me. He describes the division between the world as noth ing, as what he calls the "open," and any act of conceptualizing which restores the world in a particular way. Many of his texts are longings to experience that anonymity, the condition where we don't have an "I" yet. It is as if we were in a room from which, paradoxically, we were absent. Everything is seen from the perspective of that absence. I suppose, in some ways, this is a mys tical vision that brings to me a sense of the universe as an anonymous presence. (22-3) This "anonymous" self is the unconscious, as argued by Paul Breslin, in his article "How to Read the New Contemporary Poem," whose theory concerning Bly's use of images as sug gestive of Jungian archetypes we discussed in Chapter II. Simic's self-effacing "I" is a manifestation of the absence of consciousness; this "I," from whose perspective "every thing is seen," has abolished the conscious self in favor of the collective unconscious. Breslin remarks that in "read ing poetry that depends so much on a revealed symbolism, rather than a symbolism created by the arrangement of the poem or the exploration of a recognizable subject . . . we are asked to dismiss the quotidian world and take refuge in the collective unconscious" (364), which brings us back to 336 Simic's compelling reason for an impersonal "I" in his work: so to reveal a symbolism— that is, to uncover archetypal imagery--unknown to the conscious, the personal, self. Breslin, after citing selections from Simic's "Knife" and Biy's "Turning Inward at Last," concludes: "these poems have . . . a great deal to do with the collective theogonic unconscious proposed by Jung" (361). He continues that this type of poetry "represents a giving up on the outside world, a retreat from psycho-politics into a solipsistic religion of the unconscious," and that this comes "at any cost, even the abolition of social reality and the conscious self" (366). Yet Simic's intention is to uncover archetypal imagery for the outside world, as he remarked to Dodd and Plumly: "I have an idea for a poem which . . . would also be ulti mately accessible to everyone. I feel a certain responsi bility toward other lives because it's the other lives I feel I ought to write about" (217). This differs from Bly's intended use of archetypal representation in that Bly uses his personal self— that is, the confessional "I"— to relate a mythic vision whereas Simic's speaker attempts to tran scend his ego (an abolition of the conscious self, as Breslin has argued) in order to express our collective unconscious. Bly intends these images to help define his personal self; Simic intends them to be joined with our collective historic consciousness so to complement his 337 mythic vision. Simic, then, needs to employ the self-effacing mode of voice to transcend the personal, conscious, self of the speaker; such a voice can better express a mythic vision which is evocative of the archetypal imagery relating to our collective unconscious. However, since Simic wants to keep this impersonal speaker "rooted in the soil," his speaker must take the form of a bifurcated self, as does Strand's. The personal self retains an historic conscious ness; the other self speaks for our unconscious. Simic's "History" showed how the two can function in a poem as a remarkably unified voice. Two poems from Charon's Cosmology illustrate Simic's concept of the other, "The Prisoner" and "Position Without a Magnitude." In the first, the speaker lies with his lover after their picnic lunch, but senses, in this moment of intimacy, that he is a pris oner of his other self— referred to as "he"— an other always present and representative of cosmological knowledge incomprehensible to the speaker: He is thinking of us. These leaves, their lazy rustle That made us sleepy after lunch So we had to lie down. He considers my hand on her breast, Her closed eyelids, her moist lips Against my forehead, and the shadows of trees Hovering on the ceiling. It's been so long. He has trouble Deciding what else is there. 338 And all along the suspicion That we do not exist. This other, although perhaps better understanding of- the nature of the universe— the leaves, the shadows of trees (the speaker only has a Romantic notion of these)--does not comprehend the love the couple shares. And the speaker has not felt the presence of this other for some time; it is suggested that the absence of this otherness can be attrib uted to his doubting the very existence of anything but his own "otherness." Each of us, contends Simic, has a self, that, from its "position of magnitude" like that of a star's, is able to view our other self's "everydayness," our quotidian existence, from a higher perspective. This self is described in. "Position Without a Magnitude," which title is to say that in this poem, the speaker, who is in a position without magnitude, gets a glimpse of what his other self might be: As when someone You haven't noticed before Gets up in an empty theater And projects his shadow Among the fabulous horsemen On the screen And you shudder As you realize it's only you On your way to the blinding sunlight Of the street. This other makes the speaker consider the possibility that he "doesn't have an 'I,'" as Simic was quoted earlier. "Everything is seen from the perspective of that 339 absence"— of which the speaker thinks in "The Prisoner" possibly— "a mystical vision that brings to me a sense of the universe as an anonymous presence." Again, the vision of myth derives from an historical consciousness: the "fabulous horsemen / On the screen" is both present history (in that it is then occurring) and a Biblical allusion (chronicled ancient history). In the universe which the poem depicts, this other, "anonymous presence," is ulti mately responsible for its— the poem's, the universe of the poem's— creation, as Simic suggests in "Description" (also from Charon's Cosmology), in which the poet (who is the poem's speaker) selects, in making his poem, only those images that derive from his "anonymous presence": Among all the images that come to mind, where to begin? Contortions, infinite shapes pain assumes. Some old woman, for instance . . . A corner where a part of myself keeps an appointment with another part of myself. . . . This other part of himself is what finally dictates which images to select, which poems to write. Simic has already told us that his poems seem impersonal because he abandons his personal experience and follows wherever the poem leads, "the logic of the algebraic equation of words on the 340 page which is unfolding, moving in some direction." As "Description" indicates, the poem moves toward the direc tion of the other, and, as Simic said: "That’s why my poems often seem impersonal. It is not clear who the 'I' is. It doesn't seem necessary for me to equate that ’I’ with myself," that is, with the part of himself that is personal, conscious, historical, quotidian. Simic achieves self-effacement in these poems because he moves away from his original, personal, experience towards the language of the poem. And "language," suggests Jackson in "The Presence of Absence," "acts as a force which alienates us from our selves" (138). Although the self has been effaced, it remains in the poem; the other cannot control the universe of the poem entirely, as Simic has argued in his interview with Jackson: I don’t think the author is ever absent. The simple act of selectivity from the vast possi bilities of language and experience introduces the author. Except that for me there is no one "I." "I" is many. "I" is an organizing prin ciple, a necessary fiction, etc. Actually, I’d put more emphasis on consciousness: that which witnesses but has no need of a pronoun. Of course, consciousness has many degrees, and each degree has a world (as an ontology) appropriate to itself. So, perhaps, the seeming absence of the author is the description of one of its mani festations, in this case an increase of consious- ness at the expense of the subject? It’s a possibility. (25-6) There are two ways, then, in which Simic accomplishes the self-effacing mode of voice: the first, as we have seen, is the transcendence of his ego in order to uncover mythic 341 visions of the collective unconscious, and the second is in allowing the language to invoke the presence of the other self, the result of a poem composed of a language, he told Jackson, that "is not mine. . . .there is something that precedes language. . . . there is a state that precedes verbalization, a complexity of experience that consists of things not yet brought to consciousness, not yet existing as language but as some sort of inner pressure" (21). That "something precedes language" brings Simic to the collective unconscious which is revealed through the other, that which awaits beyond the transcendence of the ego. This other, resulting from language (that "acts as a force which alienates us from ourselves") and the universe of the poem, defines the self; "the seeming absence of the author is the description of one of its manifestations," as the dialectic in the poem "Charles Simic," from Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk (1974), argues: Charles Simic is a sentence. A sentence has a beginning and an end. Is he a simple or compound sentence? It depends on the weather, It depends on the stars above. What is the subject of the sentence? The subject is your beloved Charles Simic. . . . What is the object of the sentence? The object, my little ones, Is not yet in sight. And who is writing this awkward sentence? A blackmailer, a girl in love, And an applicant for a job. 342 Will they end with a period or a question mark? They'll end with an exclamation point and an ink spot. [t/o] The structure, or ontological system, used in composing "Charles Simic" (the sentence) depends on the weather, the stars— that is, whichever whims the language dictates. Remember that Simic has said that "the vast possibilities of language introduces the author," who indeed is not "one 'I,'" but several: blackmailer, girl in love— the sense here is of an indefinite list because possibilities inher ent to "the simple act of selectivity" are endless. The tone is slightly condescending: "The object, my little ones, / Is not yet in sight," resulting partially from the poem's catechismic design. The personal self has been effaced because the voice of "Charles Simic," the poem, finally, is an "anonymous presence," invisible, indeter minate, both posing and answering the questions which define the self described by its own poem. The confusion of identity, which is one of Simic's methods to ensure a self-effacing voice, also relates to his concept of otherness, or bifurcated self which, as we have seen, is necessary in establishing a mythic vision from an historical consciousness. The subject of "Ax," from Dismantling the Silence, concerns the displacement of self from the body: Whoever swings an ax Knows the body of man Will again be covered with fur. 343 The stench of blood and swamp water Will return to its old resting place. They'll spend their winters Sleeping like the bears. The skin on the breasts of their women Will grow coarse. He who cannot Grow teeth, will not survive. He who cannot howl Will not find his pack . . . These dark prophecies were gathered, Unknown to myself, by my body Which understands historical probabilities, Lacking itself, in its essence, a future. The "dark prophecies" of the body indicate a return to a primitive self, one that is much similar to-Kinnell's notion of man's "bear-like" existence in his pre-civilized form. The atavistic imagery is suggested, top,in such lines as: "They'll spend their winters / Sleeping like the bears" in caves. In this poem, the otherness, that which uncovers the archetypal imagery for the speaker— the con scious self— is the physical body which here assumes the role of the collective unconscious, as the final stanza reveals. In "Bestiary for the Fingers of My Right Hand," the speaker's confusion of identity suggests further that Simic's "I" is not one, but many actually; the poem betrays the speaker's disparate personality, each finger represent ing a separate facet: 1 Thumb, loose tooth of a horse. Rooster to his hens. Horn of a devil. Fat worm They have attached to my flesh At the time of my birth. . . . 344 2 The second points the way. True way. The path crosses the earth, The moon and some stars. Watch, he points further. He points to himself. 3 The middle one has backache. Stiff, still unaccustomed to this life; An old man at birth. . . . 4 The fourth is mystery. . . . He jumps by himself As though someone called his name. After each bone, finger, I come to him, troubled. 5 Something stirs in the fifth Something perpetually at the point Of birth. Weak and submissive, His touch is gentle. It weighs a tear. It takes the mote out of the eye. That the fingers of his right hand comprise a bestiary— an allegory on the habits of imagined (or real) animals, a form common in Medieval literature— again suggests the atavism revealed by the poem's speaker. And because each finger presents a differing side of the speaker as well as presenting the disparate natures of one another, "Bestiary for the Fingers of My Right Hand" demonstrates the division of the self from the body, just as "Ax" does. Like that poem also, "Bestiary" implies that contained within each self there is a vision of our primitive, animalistic, origin, unknown to our present consciousness, but unveiled by means of an otherness that is our collective unconscious. 345 The conscious self is effaced in order for that otherness to express this vision. In "A Quiet Talk With Oneself," Simic shows more of his comic side. In the "conversation" between the speaker and himself (whom the speaker calls "my friend"), the speaker admonishes his self for not fulfilling his poten tial: "You too were once full of promise, / Only to lapse, woefully, my friend," then gets involved with his own rhetoric in choosing the appropriate images to illustrate his suggestion of the "lapse" in promise, and then says: But I digress. Just like that unfortunate Mr. Poe: Compulsive ratiocination on the subject of the self In the guise of a polar voyage without the means of retreat, [t/o] While the poor ass keeps getting whipped and rained on. The image of the ass is precisely that from which the speaker began his long digression. To completely under stand oneself, it is Simic's position, requires both the historic and the mythic, the conscious self and the (often atavistic) collective unconscious. Yet, like the speaker of "A Quiet Talk With Oneself," Simic is less serious than the confessional voice of the Lowell defining himself in relation to the other mental patients in "Waking in the Blue," or the persona voice of Kinnell suggesting that such self-definition only can be derived by returning to primi tive origins. In the following tacit admission of this comic aspect to Jackson, Simic also betrays his skepticism of his own ontological theories, a skepticism that is 346 one subject of his poem "The Point," about which he remarked: Triangular stories start out and try to retrace their own steps but can't get back to their beginnings so they end up at some distance from the beginning before they return to it; by that time they've traced a strange figure. There's a comic aspect to all this. My favorite is "The Point," the story which takes one step and then immediately has a kind of regret. It's horrified at the whiteness of the page. Since the self-effacing mode of voice is intended to help uncover archetypal imagery, express the mythic vision by returning to the collective unconscious— an imaginary place in itself (the unconscious is not a physical place to which one can return)— all of Simic's self-effacing poems "trace a strange figure"; even in the world of a poem, Simic realizes, any voice may "end up at some distance from the beginning" before returning to its intention. His theories of the unconscious-conscious, the separate selves, then, contain, perhaps, an aspect of comedy with them; they may be slightly absurd even, which is a characteristic- evident from our discussion of Strand's work— of some poems using a self-effacing voice. In the work of David Ignatow to follow, it will be shown that the poetic voice most often identifiable is also of this mode, even though he may have intended it as a per sona "I" speaking as a representative of the community. 347 III. David Ignatow shares with Mark Strand the concept that an exploration of a "darkness," an otherness of self, may lead to an understanding of one's self set in (and trying to survive) a chaotic contemporary world; yet, as mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, Ignatow would like his poetry--that is, what he discovers in his poetry about the self, the individual's role in society— used to benefit the community, not himself exclusively. And, in common with Simic's use of the self-effacing mode, Ignatow's subjects, and many of his images, remain "rooted in the soil," although occasionally both subject and image may flare into the surreal or realm of the phantasmagoric. These charac teristics tread into the boundaries of the confessional and persona modes; each may extend in practice to one or both. Ignatow's work is representative of such extension, but finally the voice that controls the poems to be discussed in the pages following is one that is neither personal— even though it may begin with a personal impulse— nor one that acts as the persona voice of the community, its repre sentative speaker. Rather, Ignatow's voice more often fades, allowing the poem to become one of ideas, as Simic might refer to it, expressive of notions of self and community. He combines the personal with what he perceives to be the public concerns of the community, as he explained in an interview with Scott Chisholm: 348 . . . my father is one element in the work, and guilt is a sense I derive from society itself. I think the whole society is laboring under a sense of predestined guilt. We're Puritan. No matter how you turn it or how you phrase it, we're guilty for cultural reasons— or lack of reasons which the culture withholds from us. I'd say, of course, that guilt is the one driving factor in my work. I am guilty, by all standards of ideal behavior and modes of exist ence, of falling far short of their demands. Of course I'm guilty— like everyone else. It's a guilt I live with, although in my daily life I try hard to act with some kindliness, ease, and love for my fellow man. I try hard to put it into practice, even if it makes me out to be a slow-thinking fool. I'm really working hard within to repress my hostility, my aggressive desire to dominate and direct, and my love to hurt others. I'm American. It's all in the poems. The tension, however, ends there and I use it to defuse the guilt in poems that have as their reference another and more ideal form of conduct. Therefore, you might say the guilt is there to manifest another ideal which we're falling short of. That is the whole point of the guilt— whether or not I use it personally. Of course, I use myself personally. It's a technique that we Americans are using with Walt Whitman as a model. We've been following Walt Whitman in this path— except that we reinvent Whitman's ideals today and try to point to their failure. As individuals, we still use ourselves now as the metaphors of failure of the American ideals. (23-4) This passage helps explain the ostensible ambiguity in Ignatow's mode of voice, and provides the necessary back ground in establishing that voice ultimately as one of self-effacement. Contemporary poets of any mode are usually quick to claim allegiance with Whitman, mostly because of aesthetic preference, as discussed in the introductory chapter; Lowell, and the poets of the 349 confessional voice, may point to Whitman's primary inten tion of celebrating the self, whereas Berryman— as he was quoted— argued that Whitman's "I" is personal only in that it stands as representative speaker of the community. Ignatow's patronage of Whitman is for reasons apparently similar to Berryman's and those poets of the persona voice; however, the vital distinction between Berryman and Ignatow, or any poet of the self-effacing mode of voice, regarding the interpretation of Whitman's "I," can be found in Ignatow's final remarks of the above quoted passage: . . we reinvent Whitman's ideals today and try to point to their failure. As individuals, we still use ourselves as the metaphors . . . of failure of the American ideals," This remains consistent with the poet's intention of using the self-effacing voice to speak for the community; the persona "I" may be said to speak as the community voice. Further, the notion of failure alters, for the self- effacing poet, the persona poet's adaptation of the Whitman "I": for Kinnell, the "everyman 'i'" offers a hope for the future, but Ignatow's bespeaks the hopelessness of the present, a result, he suggests, of our "predestined guilt," our hostility--American "aggressive desire to dominate and direct . . . to hurt others." Ignatow, "by all standards of ideal behavior and modes of existence," fails to satisfy the demands of society, a failure, he says, incurring because of "cultural 350 reasons--or lack of reasons which the culture withholds from us." In such a culture in which nothing is defined, in which only the certainty of societal guilt looms upon its members, it becomes necessary to define oneself, to gain some sense, at least, of one's certainty of person, if only tentatively, even if that means viewing oneself as a nothingness; a void in the culture helps explain why every thing surrounding it does not seem to relate. For Mark Strand's speaker was confused, alienated in an absurd world, until realizing his role of absence, which not merely provided him with a satisfying self-definition, but defined his function in such a world as well: "When I walk / I part the air / and always / the air moves in / to fill the spaces / where my body's been. // We all have reasons / for moving. / I move / to keep things whole." Ignatow, like Strand's speaker who embarks on a search for his purpose in life because existence, to him, without purpose is meaningless, finds contemporary life confusing; it is, he writes in his Notebooks, "as if a game has taken place in which the point is to come back to the very start by a puzzling, different route, and he who succeeds first is left waiting for the others to find their way out of the puzzle, and you are lonely waiting and would like to go back into the middle of the puzzle for the company at least you would find there" (361-62). 351 Whereas Strand's answer to this puzzlement was found in self-definition, Ignatow feels the puzzle is such a large burden that it cannot be solved with a "self-enclosed" conception of existence, but one embodying a self whose relationship to others is clearly marked and one clearly contributory to one’s self-composition, as he recorded in his Notebooks: I can't reconcile myself to the thought that the world has to be . . . each person a self-enclosed existence with little or no connection among us; and yet we resemble each other physically. We communicate with each other for food, love, pro tection, money, status, and a kind of community. . . . I suppose the answer I am looking for is the abandonment of the principle of the individual life in order to give ourselves a larger, stronger basis in community. It cer tainly can't be done as individuals. Dante's answer of individual salvation does not apply to us today. . . . I disagree with the concept that each must find his or her salvation through per sonal trial and error. . . . It is Darwin who shattered any theoretical possibility of the eventual cohesiveness of the world, collaboration and cooperation among species, societies and individuals. (360) The self, consequently, becomes effaced to allow for an integration with the community and with other selves of the community within the universe recreated in Ignatow's poetry. To accomplish "the abandonment of the principle of the individual life," Ignatow must employ the self-effacing mode of voice, not as the Whitmanesque "I" who celebrates his personal life, or the "I" who can be regarded as a persona, a spokesperson, but as an answer, an abandonment (not representation of the self that the persona "I" 352 yields) of the concept of the individual life "in order to give ourselves a larger, stronger basis in community." That Ignatow regards himself alienated from the present world, and therefore— like Strand's speaker— in need of fulfilling an important societal function in order to fuse with the community (and, consequently, the poetry then offers itself as a manifestation of Ignatow having given himself "a larger, stronger basis in community") is evident in his following thoughts from Notebooks: It seems I begin every morning with a sense of my apartness from the world, with an underlying bitterness. I awake to feel it at once as per haps existing already in my awakening sleep, the very process of awakening constituting this sense of apartness and its bitterness. The world looks chaotic and hopeless, living feels useless, if not futile, by comparison with what I have left behind, and most of all my poems try to heal the gap. All are an effort at extending me into the world, to be in contact physically, emotionally, mentally, and imaginatively with my contemporar ies. In a way, it confirms Stevens' argument for the division of the self from the world, the world of chaos outside. . . . I am he who, having fully awakened, would like to reform the past in the present, getting the present to resemble the past in the sense of wholeness in which the past of sleep was lived, a sleep, a kind of death . . . Whitman was another who could not give up the sense of loss at awakening from sleep and put all of his gigantic energies into reforming the world in the image of sleep's condition . . . Stevens . . . may be right in throwing himself back upon his own sense of self to make that the center, the beginning and end of his whole world, instead of the actual world. I am not ready to acknowledge that, not while the need for whole ness is universal. (363-64) Ignatow's philosophy, as expressed in this meditation, at first seems to confirm Strand's idea of a divided self, as 353 suggested in part by the epigraph of Reasons for Moving from Jorge Luis Borges: "while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men." But Strand's speaker, afraid of the other, dark, self--the one of sleep--would rather suffer insomnia than confront that otherness— that is, until he learns to submit to it, that darkness, which allows him to retreat from "the world of chaos outside," making his own sense of self (having recog nized the otherness as an aspect of self) "the center, the beginning and end of his whole world, instead of the actual world," as Ignatow says of Wallace Stevens. And Ignatow, following what he interprets to be the example of Whitman, considers himself the poet "who, having fully awakened, would like to reform the past in the present, getting the present to resemble the past in the sense of wholeness in which the past of sleep was lived," he says, "a sleep, a kind of death, a kind of apotheosis, a catharsis, a sleep within a living, turbulent, formative world." In shunning a retreat from "the actual world" through a complete self-turning inward, regarding one's self as the "center" of the world in favor of a more cathartic experi ence attained by having fused these two sides of self (defined by Ignatow as the self "awakening from sleep," one neither wholly awake nor asleep), Ignatow, it could be argued, shares Simic's goal for a representation of an historical consciousness, for keeping the conception of 354 self (though it is an abstract idea) "rooted in the soil." This idea of self, "a kind of death," is similar to Kinnell's notion for returning to our primordial state of being, yet for Ignatow, this "death," or apotheosis, is an exemplary state of which he intends "the present to resemble." His poems, if they capture this essence by represent ing "the past in the sense of wholeness in which the past of sleep was lived,"— that is, the state of awakening— have then moved towards solving the puzzlement of life, and subsequently they have helped the community in two ways: the one member of society, the poet (or speaker of the poem), is better self-defined, and so relates better to his society (as opposed to extreme introspection, and the division of self from "the world of chaos outside"), and the community benefits because, through the poem, the one member of society is extended "into the world, to be in contact physically, emotionally," etc., as Ignatow says, "with my contemporaries." If this occurs, the community need not be regarded as an alien, confusing, world. And although Ignatow is referring to himself in these remarks, saying that his poems extend himself to the commu nity, he is careful still to "abandon the principle of the individual life in order to give ourselves a larger, stronger basis in community." Consequently, when one member of that community defines himself in terms of two 355 states of consciousness (the self awakening from sleep), he has in a sense given the individual life over for something larger, that which can relate to the many. In keeping with this concept, Ignatow must represent this idea of self in his poetry, and the only means through which he can is the self-effacing mode of voice. It is particularly important, in viewing Ignatow's as work of this mode, to note that the previously cited selections from his Notebooks are helpful in identifying Ignatow from his poetic speaker; in these passages he meditates upon issues most bothersome to him self— that is, when he writes: "I begin every morning with a sense of my apartness from the world," we can be certain he intends that "I" to mean himself, given that these are entries in personal diaries (". . . the Notebooks," writes Mills in the introduction, "were not begun or continued with publication in view but are instead a poet's working journals . . .")— but in the ensuing poetry, a distinction must be made, as always, between the first person speaker of a poem and the poet who composed it, who, as Hugo told us in the introductory chapter, rejected himself in order to compose it. In Tread the Dark (1978) , a title at once suggestive of a comparison with Strand's Darker, a volume which has been shown to largely concern the exploration of the "dark" regions of consciousness, or otherness— as so appropriately termed by Harold Bloom— Ignatow begins with several short 356 poems with subjects by now familiar to us: absence, the divided self; yet the presentation of these subjects is new in that the self-effacing speaker neither fears a confronta tion with his otherness, his unconscious self, as Strand's does, nor seeks to modulate with that otherness in order to gain mythic insight of archetypal imagery as does Simic's. Instead, Ignatow's speaker attempts to shield himself from the central focus of discovery in these poems so that what he learns about the nature of self, about the individual's relationship and responsibility to the community, may be shared. The opening poem, "Brightness as a Poignant Light," illustrates several characteristics of his self-effacing poem: I tread the dark and my steps are silent. I am alone and feel a ghostly joy— wildly free and yet I do not live absolutely and forever, but my ghostly joy is that I am come to light for some reason known only to the dark, perhaps to view itself in me. As I tread the dark, led by the light of my pulsating mind, I am faithful to myself: my child. Still, how can I be happy to have been born only to return to my father, the dark, to feel his power and die? I take comfort that I am my father, speaking as a child against my fatherhood. This is the silence I hear my heart beating in, but not for me. There is a spiritual ambience conjured by the speaker's 357 returning to the darkness; he becomes child-like because he finds that he has been renewed by his excursion into the dark. He is "light" and is able to tread the dark only "by the light," he says, "of my pulsating mind"; that is, the speaker has treaded into the darkest recessions of him self. That he is light— a "brightness"--places him in con trast with the other, the dark and dominant part of his self. The darkness represents his immediate origin, his father, and to continue inward eventually leads to an exploration of the self. He learns that which is true of any self-origin— that he is part of that from which he came: "I take comfort that I am / my father ..." The "father" darkness and "child" brightness are inseparable, two aspects of a single self, for the heart beats to per petuate the life of the darkness, and in doing so continues the life of the speaker. The speaker thinks it is for the darkness that the heart beats, because darkness is the domain of silence, of power, but by entering its realm, by treading the dark, the speaker has reached this very source of power, which is the inward self, the silent darkness of the unconsciousness previously unknown to the "light of the pulsating mind." Ignatow, then, divides the self (as do Strand and Simic) into a self that is known, a conscious self, and one that resides in the shadowy region of the invisible, the unconscious self, or what Simic termed the "anonymous self." Unlike either of them, however, Ignatow's 358 speaker achieves for the conscious self a strengthening, a renewal of spirit, by contacting the unconscious, which is the source of power, the fatherhood. This conscious self, represented as the light, consid ers that the sole purpose in meeting his other was in a preparation for death, which is nature's method of replen ishment (one dies in order to make a place for another). The following untitled poem, from Tread the Dark, continues this notion of death and renewal, and makes natural elements analogous with people: The seasons doubt themselves and give way to one another. The day is doubtful of itself, as is the night; they come, look around, slowly depart. [t/o] The sun will never be the same. People give birth to people, flourish and then die and the sun is a flame of doubt warming to our bodies. Ignatow here keeps returning to the human concern: the seasons "doubt themselves" the way people do; that the sun is a "flame of doubt" which our bodies welcome suggests that we are happy to have life soon end and we are receptive to darkness (which is death) replacing it. The darkness, or death, becomes another means of birth, renewal, life. What began an introspective, self-investigation of the speaker in "Brightness as a Poignant Light" now has more universal application; the darkness on which the speaker treads (and found to be a strengthening source) is equated to nature's seasonal regeneration, and further, to human's 359 generative life, which consequently opens the thought out ward to include the community in a notion begun as self inquiry. That this other— even if it is a death, albeit one that leads to a renewal of life— should not be feared is the imperative of the next poem, "With the Sun's Fire": Are you a horror to yourself? Do you have eyes peering at you from within at the back of your skull as you manage to stay calm, knowing you are being watched by a stranger? Be well, I am seated beside you, planning a day's work* We are contending with the stuff of stones and stars, with water, air, with dirt, with food and with the sun's fire. One self serves to calm the other; both function to "work" on the burden of self-definition, using, like Simic's speaker, cosmological means such as "the stuff of stones and stars." If one finds himself a horror, it is because the "day's work" of such investigation is yet to begin. It does, though, as the ensuing poem "Examine me, I am continuous" indicates, with the speaker addressing the self reflected in the mirror: Examine me, I am continuous from my first memory and have no memory of birth. Therefore was I never born and always have been? As told in my breathing which is never new or tired? Face in the mirror or star hidden by the sun1s rays, you are always there but which am I and who is the mirror or the hidden star? Explain me as you are that I may live in time and die ___________ when T am rjpad . __________________________ 360 The face in the mirror is that of a "star hidden by the sun's rays," or death sphere (compare his earlier line: "the sun is a flame of doubt"— that is, the speaker's desiring death), in that its presence is hidden; it is an anonymous self, one that becomes visible only in darkness, which we know to mean an otherness, that which dominates, the speaker believes, since it holds the answers to the conscious self's questions regarding existence. The speaker arrives at some tentative conclusions, however, in the next poem, "The Two Selves," in which he expresses his desire to "withdraw into a stone," making him the embodi ment of Kinnell's ultimate state of being, and aligning him with Simic*s theory of fusing the conscious self with the unconscious by means of an object of the physical world: I existed before my mind realized me and when I became known to myself it was with the affection for warmth beside a radiator. So you began for me and I will whisper to your self to give in, to surrender, to close in remembrance, and I will give you up and withdraw into a stone, forever known to you. The stone is "forever known" to the otherness because it is an altered state of existence, that darkness reached by the conscious self (the poem's speaker) in having tran scended the ego— as Simic's does in order to penetrate the mythic vision of the unconsciousness— and being transformed to something that is a physical manifestation of the 361 unconscious self, a stone; therefore, the conscious self's withdrawing into a stone is known to the unconscious self because that "light" has before treaded into the dark region of the unconsciousness, and the darkness of the stone, the altered state of the conscious self, is the very realm of the unconsciousness. Yet, as Ignatow says, "to look for the self in oneself" does not much advance any relationship with others of the community. To become a stone, as the speaker does in "The Two Selves," is not enough to satisfactorily explain the puzzlements presented by the universe, as he remarked in "A Dialogue at Compas": . . . to understand is to love, and since we don't understand what it's about, we're confused, and confusions really don't allow for too much love. When we're desperate, we fall back upon those old assertions that Whitman made, that a man is part of the universe and must become identified with the universe. What could be sweeter than thinking of yourself as a tree, as resembling or being identified with a tree, or with the grass or the sun? That's still not enough, you see, it's no longer enough. I can understand why the school of irrelevance exists. And I can sympathize with it because where do we go from our total despair? We go back into our selves. And when you go into yourself actually you lose touch with yourself. That's the paradox. Once you go too far into yourself you lose touch because your self is only found through inter action with others. I know my poetry is filled with this sort of material, and I've worked through it, but the school of irrelevance wants to say that the self doesn't exist any longer as we used to know it. To look for the self in oneself is to lose oneself in oneself. Yet to be related to others is to be related in a con tingent manner, in a highly relative manner, in a deeply careful manner— which doesn't fit with 362 the open, embracing forms that we learned from Whitman. We live tentative lives, and the love that you are thinking of, the love for life, is a love which is surrounded and modified, deeply modified, by caution. (65-6) The ideal, then, is to "go back into ourselves," or define ourselves by means of the darkness within, perhaps, without "actually losing touch with yourself"; this is accomplished by keeping the focus of one's self in its "interaction with others," with its relationship to the community. We have discussed Ignatow's poems in which the personal speaker has been effaced because of his self-transcendence to the region— and subsequent state of "existence" (the stone)— of the otherness, the life-giving aspect of the self, anony mous to one's conscious self. Yet these were poems largely of self-definition, of the speaker, in essence, losing himself in his self, poems which do nothing-— as Ignatow suggests— for the condition of the community in a time marked by bewildering irrelevancies and absurdities. One reaction a poet can have is to ignore the puzzlements and the self in relation to them, and so contribute more irrelevancies by working in what Ignatow terms "the school of irrelevance," which cares not to define the self because that school believes that "the self doesn't exist any longer as we used to know it." Ignatow also said in "A Dialogue at Compas": "... there is a French school of poetry, not exactly surrealistic but deriving from surreal ism, with no intention of dealing with life as life, but 363 dealing instead with the imagination' as an autonomous experience. . . . that leads poetry into all sorts of strange byways, one of them being Ashbery's concentration on the mind and its values, observations, comments, and associations as merely stuff for processing, to what end we don't know" (64). But Ignatow does not object to humor, such as Strand's, which is used to an end of self-realization; nor does he object to surrealism in poetry that is used to illustrate how modern life can be justifiably perceived. Both humor and surrealism can relate to the condition of the contem porary self, but they should not be employed as poetic elements to disregard the self. The poetry of the "school of irrelevance" is contrary to Ignatow1s purpose, and the intentions of his self-effacing speaker. He says (in "A Dialogue") of Kenneth Koch, of the "New York school," that his poetry is one "of irrelevance, intentionally so, to distinguish it from Ashbery's, which does not appear to be intentionally irrelevant. With Koch, I feel it's a con scious contrivance as a metaphor for disengagement from social commitment" (65). A poet, in order to write of the community, as did Whitman, Ignatow continued, must concern his work with the material of daily life and "the life which you carry around within you every day": I'm not saying that poetry has to be written as social commitment— hardly. But poets are living the way all of us live, eating and drinking and 364 making love, and having families and working, so that for most poets the daily life must become the material. Not only the daily life but the life which you carry around within you every day. So it's both the internal and the external that must find themselves on the page. And this is the Whitman tradition. But that isn't the tradi tion which has gained prominence in the last ten years and been put forward as representative of American poetry at its best. (65) That Ignatow's concern is related to the universe becomes the subject of the short poem "The Song" from Figures of the Human (1964); in this poem, the speaker writes of his daily life as it infuses the "internal" perception of the universe: The song is to emptiness. One may come and go without a ripple. You see it among fish in the sea, in the woods among the silent running animals, in a plane overhead, gone; man bowling or collecting coins, writing about it. The celebration, or song of oneself, is to emptiness because the individual "may come and go /without a ripple,' even, indicating his presence in the universe.- The emptiness is of self, emptiness "among fish in the sea," or in any aspect of the physical world, including the emptiness in man's inclination to write poems about it. In this, the speaker of "The Song" is like Strand's, who is most alive when "emptied" ("I empty myself of my life and my life remains.") Yet, as Ralph Mills posits in his article "Earth Hard," this poem "emphasizes more directly and 365 definitely the absence of transcendental meanings for existence. The 'emptiness' to which the song is surrendered in the opening line Ignatow refers to elsewhere as 'the emptiness of consolation' . . . As the poem implies, in the appearance and disappearance of creatures and things in the universe, in the activities of men, whether recreations, hobbies, or the writing of poetry, there is no further significance" (377). Whitman's idea of self-celebration is not enough; "How do we console ourselves in a world that can no longer be motivated by the ideals of the nineteenth century?" Ignatow wonders. "We haven't any ideals to speak of now and the spirituality is the sense of defeat. For us it's a defeat that forces us into a kind of humbleness," the humbleness of knowing that the puzzlement of contem porary society will not be solved by a better understanding of one's self, for the center of life in our time is not the self, but the community. The need for self-effacement, then, becomes more apparent: to allow a shift in focus from the self to the community. Ignatow admits in his Notebooks that he writes not to celebrate, but to escape himself: It is when I feel dread coming over me, dread of my existence, dread of myself in particular, when I become too much for myself, when a hole begins to form in me that is inviting me to fall in or a thickness gathers in me in which I fear I will suffocate as it spreads through me. I write to escape myself in this condition. I write to be distracted from myself that I begin to see is a 366 nothing of huge proportions. (qtd. in New Naked Poetry 112-13) That his impetus to write poems derives from his self-view as "a nothing of huge proportions" informs his poetic voice, which, most appropriately, is of the self-effacing mode. Ignatow, or his poems' speaker, will continue suffering the dread of personal existence, it is my contention, until relieved by the act of writing a poem that is concerned with the community; in this way, Ignatow has escaped (or effaced) from the suffocating condition of the times when, as he says, "I become too much for myself," and he trans forms from "a nothing of huge proportions" (that is, he effaces that state, or conception of that state, of self hood) into a self of more worth. For Ignatow, that worth is earned not by poetry of irrelevance as practiced by the New York school ("It is an anomoly," he says, "since most of the poets who came to be representative of that 'school' were from out of town: Wisconsin, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Ohio . . ."), but by one of and for the community, and one's relationship to it. Remarking on his poem "The Two Selves," (which we discussed in terms of the one self confronting the other, dark, self— only to learn that there is nothing to be feared, that the darkness illuminates the conscious self) Ignatow, in an interview with Richard Jackson, speaks of the poet's relationship to the community: 367 We have to serve society through ourselves. This is what the poet should do, however limited that service is in our present society. We define ourselves through others. So I don't personally have a sense of loss of identity. If I do ques tion my identity, it is to question myself as a human being in relation to a tree, or the sea— it's to know myself as a human being, as a being in life, and to communicate that to others. In "The Two Selves," I meant the question in a physical sense— what was I before and after I was born? Did I ever know myself at the time of my birth? The poem . . . brings these things to the surface, to communicate them to others, to share our identity with others, to have a sense of community. (176) One obvious way that Ignatow has "shared his identity with others"--beside through his poetry— was the publication of his journals (Notebooks), about which thoughts expressed in them, he said in an interview with Alan Ziegler: "They're not so private. People tell me these are thoughts that they live with every day of their lives" (52). So in bringing "these things to the surface," and insofar that many in the community share these thoughts, perhaps Ignatow has succeeded in developing a sense of community; important to any individual's conception of self-worth is the knowl edge that he is not "a nothing of huge proportions," but equal to anyone else, and the sense that he belongs to the community, if only one limited to other poets or students of literature. In "The Dream," from Say Pardon (1961), Ignatow's speaker— his personal self effaced from the poem— relates a horror of the city; in so doing, the speaker articulates 368 a general fear of the community: Someone approaches to say his life is ruined and to fall down at your feet and pound his head upon the sidewalk. Blood spreads in a puddle. And you, in a weak voice, plead with those nearby for help; your life takes on his desperation. He keeps pounding his head. It is then you are awakened, the body gone, the blood washed from the ground, the stores lit up with their goods. The speaker removes himself from the story of his own dream by addressing it in the second person "you," as if to sug gest that his dream is common to anyone: "you" are in it, the speaker implies, not "I." That "someone," who in des peration pounds his head on the sidewalk, modulates with the "you" further suggests the intention of commonality, which is more particularly emphasized by the shared experi ence of helplessness: no one nearby stops to help, and the "you" does not know how to render any aid. It is this shared despair— that the "you" understands the "someone's" desperation and that the "you" is the only passer-by with enough sensitivity to want to help, but cannot— which war rants his life actually taking on the "someone's" despera tion. The you of the poem bonds with the man pounding his head in the dream, and any person of a city can relate to the insecurity in the belief that no one would be willing to offer help— even to a man insanely bent on self- destruction in the grotesque manner depicted in "The Dream"— as well as relate to the dread of knowing that the 369 morning after such an incident (as if it were a dream), the stores will light up once more, and the blood will have been washed from the ground. This evocation of horror of city life, ironically, makes "The Dream" a poem of the community. The use of the second person "you" invites the reader to relate to the dreamer in the poem (whereas an "I" can be regarded as a personal depiction of the poet, or the poem's speaker, the "you" opens the poem outward); "you," then, is a way of including the community in a poem about the way in which a community can (and often does) exclude one another by ignoring someone in desperate need of help. It has been Ignatow's stated intention to efface him self, his personal voice, from his work in order to better serve the community with a poetry of everyone, for every one; the result of such poetry, if successful, can be just as self-illuminating as Strand's or Simic's, however, in that the self would in effect be celebrated in the sense of its having realized its position in the community and its relationship to it. But, like Simic, Ignatow is not certain his theory is a viable one; in one of his most recently published poems (#6 3 from Leaving the Door Open [1984]— an inviting title, and one, possibly, suggestive of his skepticism), his speaker states: I've wanted to write my way into paradise, leaving the door open for others too to walk in. Instead, I am scribbling beneath its walls, with the door shut. 370 What is the magic word? Is there a magic word? Am I standing beneath the walls of paradise? Does paradise have walls? Friends, strangers and relatives look to me patiently or with sneers and amused tolerance, crowding around, waiting for the door to open at my words, but all I can offer are these questions, and they see me uneasy, seated with my back against the wall, my eyes closed to rest, to sleep, to dream of paradise we were to enter at my words. Characteristic of the self-effacing poet, Ignatow leaves us "with the door open," with his speaker’s ambivalence towards Ignatow’s own poetic theories, an ambivalence more doubtful than hopeful: "to dream paradise / we were to enter at my words." Just as Strand, who attained the ultimate self-effacement by composing poems "by somebody else," and Simic, who modified the seriousness of his rationale behind the theory of the mythic-unconscious self and the historic-conscious one {by comparing his speaker to "that unfortunate Mr. Poe: / Compulsive ratiocination on the subject of the self"), Ignatow seems to imply that any pretense of self-effacement for the advancement of the community (everyone "crowding around, waiting for the door to open / at my words") is absurd, that any voice must, finally, be personal ("my eyes closed to rest, to sleep, / to dream of paradise"), and that any subject must be, ultimately, the subject of self: "I am scribbling / beneath its walls, with the door shut." For Ignatow, even 371 though most definitely not intending any declaration of the unlikelihood of self-knowledge through the use of the self- effacing voice, this absurdity (that of leading us to believe he has been writing for us, "leaving the door open" for us to follow, when in fact, he has been "scribbling with the door shut") assures, if for none of the other reasons posited in the previous discussion of his theories and his work, that his poetry concerning the creation of a "paradise"— through which the community is served and con sequently the self is defined by its place and relationship to it— be read as personal poetry of the self-effacing mode. IV. In his earliest poetry, before he adopted the persona mode of voice, John Berryman relied on the self-effacing mode to express his rather insecure notions regarding his love life (about which the journal entries— we read in Chapter II— reveal his despair over a "crumbling sex life"). Berryman's self-effacing speaker takes this form of voice because of his self-perception, one that could be the per spective of Ignatow's readers— if, of course, Ignatow's poetry is indeed celebratory of the community. That is to say, Berryman's speaker in "The Dispossessed" (the title poem from his The Dispossessed [1948]) has no self conception other than that defined by whom he regards his counterpart in an Italian opera he is watching; the poem's 372 first four stanzas, quoted below, are all that is required to illustrate Berryman's self-effacing voice in this regard: 'and something that . . that is theirs— no longer ours' stammered to me the Italian page. A wood seeded & towered suddenly. I understood.— The Leading Man's especially, and the Juvenile Lead's, and the Leading Lady's thigh that switches & warms, and their grimaces, and their flying arms: our arms, our story. Every seat was sold. A crone met in a clearing sprouts a beard and has a tirade. Not a word we heard. Movement of stone within a woman's heart, abrupt & dominant. They gesture how things really are. Rarely a child sings now. "The Leading Man's" self as portrayed for the audience, a self which has been prescribed by the composer (appar ently unregarded by the self-effacing speaker) is demonstra tive of the speaker's self, for the speaker actually has none of his own— he is dispossessed from knowledge of him self, in one sense of the title's meaning--and consequently adopts "The Leading Man's" as his own. In this way, he is Ignatow's ideal audience, or member of the community for which Ignatow intends his poems, in that Berryman's speaker has relied on art--has been waiting for it, apparently— to define not only himself, but his role in his relationship with the lady, just as Ignatow's "friends, strangers, relatives," he says, "look to me / patiently or with sneers / crowding around, waiting for the door to open / at my words." But they, like the voice which speaks for them, in having no other direction, no concept of their individual 373 selves, are as self-effaced as the dispossessed speaker (who is dispossessed of self-conception) of Berryman's poem. Robert Lowell, too, used the self-effacing voice to express a concern of his love life; he felt, apparently, that the confessional (or persona) modes would too nakedly reveal himself, his private self, in such an intimate experience as follows in his poems about sleeping with his wife; he first uses the confessional voice in "Man and Wife" and then uses the self-effacing in "'To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage'" which were placed together in Life Studies. In the first, the confessional voice begins in the present, thinks back to an early date with his wife, then ends the poem again in the present: Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed . . . At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street, blossoms on our magnolia . . . All night I've held your hand, as if you had a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad . . . you were in your twenties, and I . . . outdrank the Rahvs in the heat Of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet-- too boiled and shy and poker-faced to make a pass . . . Now twelve years later, you turn your back. Sleepless, you hold your pillow to your hollows like a child; your old-fashioned tirade— loving, rapid, merciless — breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head. Lowell's biography can document some of the poem's details, and the narrative structure and sentence syntax ("All night I've held your hand")— common in the confessional "Memories 374 of West Street and Lepke," for example— make a case for this poem being in the confessional mode. "Miltown" was the brand name of the tranquilizer prescribed to Lowell after one of his breakdowns through which his wife (then, Jean Stafford) patiently "nursed" him; she "faced the king dom of the mad" only to turn her back on him in bed. The confessional voice relates how the speaker once, "heart in mouth," desired the woman whom he addresses in the poem but was too shy to make a pass, and now, "twelve years later," his desire for her again goes unsatisfied. Here is Lowell on the same subject— the "old-fashioned tirade"— recast in the third person in "'To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage'": "The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open. [t/o] Our magnolia blossoms. Life begins to happen. My hopped up husband drops his home disputes, and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes . . . [t/o] Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust . . . It's the injustice . . . he is so unjust— whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five. My only thought is how to keep alive. What makes him tick? Each night now I tie ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . . Gored by the climacteric of his want, he stalls above me like an elephant." The speaker of this poem is the wife, who is offended because her husband "stalls" and cannot satisfy her. He is "gored by the climacteric of his want"; he is unable to perform sexually with his wife. (The physiological use of the term "climacteric" is the period in one's life which 375 marks a decrease in reproductive activity.) Therefore, the roles of the husband and wife in this poem have been reversed from their roles in "Man and Wife"; the wife is now the one who wants some intimacy, even if only an acci dental caress of her thigh as her husband takes the money and car key from her so that he can "hit the streets to cruise for prostitutes." The entire poem is set in quotation marks as the mono logue of the sole speaker, the wife. In this way, in "'To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage'" Lowell has used the same subject and theme as he did in "Man and Wife" but he has effaced his own voice from it. The wife now observes the magnolia tree; the confessional voice of "Man and Wife" observed the blossoming of his tree on Marlborough Street. She sees her husband as a "screwball" that "might kill his wife, then take the pledge," but in "Man and Wife" the con fessional voice thought she lovingly "faced the kingdom of the mad" husband. The confessional voice of "Man and Wife" has transformed into a self-effacing one because, in "'To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,'" it expresses the con fessional voice's thoughts, but not from its own point of view; the personal voice is removed from "Woe," and the wife-character, who is the narrator and voice of the poem, alone speaks. She is not a persona for the first person speaker of "Man and Wife" because the husband (the "Lowell" of the poem, since we have already accepted him as the 376 confessional voice of "Man and Wife") is her counterpart; they are two characters. Yet, having read "Man and Wife," the speaker of "Woe" states the same theme as the confes sional voice did in the former poem but in the absence of that voice— the personal voice has been effaced from "Woe." And it is this mode, this use of the self-effacing voice, that is most common in current practice, perhaps because— like Lowell who used it in "'To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage1" to cover the intimacy of the poem's subject— many poets in 1986 prefer not to reveal their most private experiences in the more personal confessional and persona modes, as will be discussed in the final chapter. 377 CHAPTER V PERSONAL POETRY IN 1986 In Chapter I, when reviewing the many plausible factory and influences relating to the appearance of personal poetry from 1959 to 1969, I indicated the apparent parallel between open form and the concern for self as the predominant sub ject of verse; it seemed poets increasingly wrote of the SGlf as they relied less on traditional forms. Robert Bly has suggested that the political consciousness of the 1960s resulted in poets— in most people— becoming more self involved, and so many thought they must enact some heroism in order to change society; some poets accomplished this either by focusing the dramatic situation of the poem on the confessional speaker— so that, in this regard, poetry became more Romantic again— or by using that speaker as a voice of direction, one urging specific courses of action. Bly's own poetry of the time reflected both; he remarked. "It is as if in the sixties we kept looking at the dark side of the U.S. which pulled people into heroism and narcissism but in the seventies I looked at my own dark side" (qtd. in Baker 68). We can read this, perhaps, as a fair assessment of reasons for the "narcissistic' poetry of the 1960s and the resulting preponderance of the 378 confessional voice; an "I" speaker in a poem which defines the poet's self would represent best that self as hero. As Bly turned from his 1960s heroic— shamanistic— role in "looking at the dark side of the U.S." to the more intro spective examination of his "own dark side," his poetry contained more personal subjects such as his family, his biography, so that this self, as depicted in these poems of the confessional mode, became the (personal) hero of his verse. Even though Bly has used the confessional voice more in his recent work, most of the poets of "the generation of 2000"— that is, those who will be between the ages of forty- five and sixty at this century's end, who, mostly therefore, would have had to establish themselves as poets in the 1970s and 1980s-^-have used it less, even sparingly, because they write primarily of subjects other than seemingly autobio graphical experiences, although, of course, their subject matter may still derive in part from those experiences. The poets of this generation have not merely abandoned their public "heroism"— as did Bly--in order to explore their individual "dark side," a more private heroism possibly. Many, rather, have shunned personal poetry altogether, as though a narcissistic preoccupation and the heroic percep tion of the self can no longer provide a relevant basis for their present work. Whereas Bly regarded the investigation of his dark side as less narcissistic, perhaps the 379 generation of 2000 feels that any subject devoted to the self— whether or not concerned with "heroism and narcissism"— must be now supplanted with topics more germane to the needs of their time, for the self as poetic subject is hardly the principal one it was a decade or so earlier. The poets, whom I distinguished in Chapter I from those working with personal poetry, such as W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery and James Merrill, whose work is more imagistic, less informed by apparent autobiography or quotidian experience--although their poems sometimes use people, incidents, etc. from their personal history— are often intent on creating a lyrical expression, one more concerned, perhaps, with sound than with self. One result of such poetry is usually an indeterminant voice in the sense that it cannot be identified as that of a single person, or speaker, engaged in matters of self-identity or definition, but rather as a separate entity (not as a means of personal inquiry in the way the self-effacing poets can use a "separate" voice), more similar to the "omniscient" voice of prose fiction, a medium necessary for the act of convey ing the images, the thematic messages— the poem— to the reader; yet voice here is not regarded as a means of creating another self in verse. In such poetry, sound, rhythm, cadence, prevails over narrative accounts, for example, or most other characteristics we have seen common to personal poetry (in whichever mode). These poets are 380 popular— especially among the critics, as I noted in the first chapter--and influential of younger poets, who, in university workshops, are sometimes taught by those critics; it is an influence due in part, possibly, to these poets' books being widely distributed and easily available. All of Ashbery's books are in print, for instance, but works of Kees and James Wright even are hard to find. It is difficult to assess the extent of these influ ences on those still writing personal poetry currently, yet ever more, within the last seven years or so, many younger poets have become occupied once again with sound, internal rhymes, assonance, although not in allegiance to any partic ular traditional form or school of poetry— rarely, still, can we find many end-rhymed couplets— and any "literary" magazine today usually includes several poems of regular stanzaic pattern, say, three, four-line stanzas to a poem (not much more since these magazines are hesitant to publish a poem longer than a single page). Just-as the movement away from the New Critical objectivity, and form, towards the subjective self, however, did not wholly exclude some use of the elements of traditional form (rhymes, allusions, etc. that we saw, for example, in Lowell's and Wright's personal poetry), the penchant now for more formal elements of sound and rhyme does not imply necessarily the complete abandonment of self as matters of subject, although it seems the trend is more towards the impersonal. 381 Referring to many poets who were active in 1969, Mark Strand told us in Chapter I that they "have made . . . a lifetime's work of the self, a self defined usually by cir cumstances that would tend to set it apart." In an inter view with Cristina Bacchilega in 1981, Strand indicated that he continued to believe those remarks still applicable to the poets of today: I don't know where American poetry is going. I think it's impossible for anyone to say with any assurance where it's going. The things that I pointed out in 1969 probably still apply. That is, much American poetry is still self-involved, so to speak. Also, translation is a factor in many poets' work; they are influenced as much by foreign poets as they are by those who write in English. I think that there is, perhaps, a greater con cern for forms and measures— at least, I notice this with my students. Perhaps we will have a period with a lot of rhymed and measured verse: the fifties revisited, that is the academic side of the fifties' poetry. This is not to say that in our age we'll see an Alexander Pope or a John Dryden; but, we have James Merrill. We may have little James Merrills. I don't know. (51) The self can continue to be represented in personal poetry even if written in imitation of Merrill's forms, I suggest; and, as Strand said, although we cannot be certain of this poetry's future, personal poets remain active at the present, regardless of their use of more formal sound elements and their continuing arguments over the extensive use of self as subject. In Chapter I, we learned that a few years after per sonal poetry's wide acceptance over the— what Strand 382 called— "terrific resurgence of formalist poetry in the fifties," poets began disagreeing over what best constituted subjects of self, or whether the self should be the primary focus of poetry at all. In 1973, Louis Simpson remarked of personal poetry that: . . . a lot of it is confessional. A lot of it is just referential. Confession implies some emo tional outpouring, but in many poems today there is only conversation. The man sits down and writes a poem that says, "You know, there's a war, I feel terrible, other people feel terrible, I'm calling up my friend and we're going to meet and have a little conversation." That's not a con fessional poem; it's just a poem about daily, ordinary life, what he does every day. To me, this is kind of a pointless poetry. There's been a lot of it and it's not getting anywhere. (36) Because the "ordinary life" of so many poets today is teaching, writing poems and travelling the country reading them, the subject of their personal .poems reflect just that. "Out on the Circuit," one poem of many about the poet's life in academia in The Collected Poems of George Garrett (1984), provides us a typical example: Waking alone with a hangover in the Howard Johnson Motel I could as well be in Denver or Miami or Emporia and could as well be (I like to think) a travelling salesman at least or maybe a conventioneer, a straggler from some conference on, let’s say, new procedures and guidelines in modern corporate accounting. But I am not, I cannot be; I was here, wherever I am, to read poems and to talk about poetry with students and my head is a booming buzzing ache of words, words, words, my own and other people's, said and unsaid. We wear the order of the laminated cliche like a convention badge. . . . ______Wi 1 ling._to_.fiash__the__lates.t_c 1iches like expensive____ ~ 38 3 cufflinks. [t/o] Rich now in my coat of many colors, the reassuring check fitting [t/o] comfortable and heavy like a gun in a holster, [t/o] I raise my glass to share a toast with the stranger in the mirror, [t/o] to rejoice together in the inexhaustible resources of self-deception, [t/o] beyond the deepest dreams of decent salesmen and cost accountants. [t/o] See how my hands are steady. Now I know how it is to live forever. In spite of all that the speaker of Garrett's poem dislikes, however, he remains a part of the "circuit, and collects his check— at the expense of hypocrisy, "self-deception," as the poem's last lines tell us. If the poet does not stay on the circuit, maybe he would lose the principal basis of his subject matter, as Simpson might argue. The disagreements over the nature and extent of self as subject, which were reflected in part by Simpson s 197 3 remarks, have continued to the present, including the following polemical stance taken by Bruce Weigl in his 1984 review of Jonathan Holden's Leverage, a book of personal poetry: For a poet, relying too heavily upon autobiographi cal detail, structure, content, or strategy can be a dangerous thing. Such dependence can lull the writer into focusing too much attention on being true to actuality and not enough attention on the poem itself: on the language and on the possibilities of surprise that should always accompany the act of writing_poems. Of course, this is especially deadly when the life^ being literally rendered doesn't happen to be particu larly interesting. (113) Weigl here reiterates Lowell's philosophy of (confessional) poetic composition— i.e., Lowell often emphasized that his 384 personal experiences had to be worked into art, but that there remained an essential nexus between the elements of his craft and his autobiography, as he told A. Alvarez in 1963: . . the thing was the joy of composition, to get some music and imagination and form into [my personal 'out pourings'] and to know just when to stop and what sort of language to put in . . (190)— and betrays, presumptively, his own. Weigl's personal poetry is based primarily on his seemingly autobiographical, experiences of his boyhood and in the Vietnam war, neither of which are uninteresting, as examples from his latest book, The Monkey Wars (1985), will show. ■ ' . Ultimately— as we have seen that poems of the confes sional mode must do— the tone of Weigl1s speaker combined with the veracity of the experience depicted in these poems will determine their confessionalism. I will cite some poems at length in order to preserve the integrity of these factors. The confessional speaker of the following poem, "Girl at the Chu Lai Laundry," records a moment in the war when "the world stops / turning": All this time I had forgotten. My miserable platoon was moving out One day in the war and I had my clothes in the laundry. [t/o] I ran the two dirt miles, Convoy already forming behind me. I hit The block of small hooches and saw her Twist out the black rope of her hair in the sun. She did not look up at me, Not even when I called to her for my clothes. She said I couldn't have them, _________JThey„wer.e. we.t_.___._---------------------------------- 385 Who would've thought the world stops Turning in the war, the tropical heat like hate And your platoon moves out without you, Your wet clothes piled At the feet of the girl at the laundry, Beautiful with her facts. The speaker evokes the Eliotic allusion (from "The Waste Land") of the woman holding out her black hair as if a rope, yet unlike Eliot— who saw the woman's hair stretched into a violin— Weigl's speaker, just as the girl at the laundry, relates simply the facts, and uses a strong narrative line and confessional voice to do so. Weigl continues his use of this mode of voice through out the book, sometimes in poems that are prose-like remi niscences of the speaker's boyhood, such as "1955," the first stanza of which follows as illustration: After mass father rinsed the chalice with wine Again and again. Drunk before noon He'd sleep it off in the sacristy While the other alter boys and I Rummaged through the sacred things, feeling up The blessed linen and silk vestments, Swinging the censer above us so it whistled. We put our hands on everything we could reach Then woke the father for mass. The poem then ends with the speaker, as an adult, recalling a spiritual experience: "I don't know why my hands should shake, / I'm only remembering something." And the poem "Song of Napalm," bearing the inscription "for my wife," blends the confessional speaker's remembering a napalm attack in Vietnam with a domestic scene, set in the present of the speaker at home with his wife: 386 After the storm, after the rain stopped pounding, We stood in the doorway watching horses Walk off lazily across the pasture's hill. We stared through the black screen . . . The grass was never more blue in that light, more Scarlet; beyond the pasture Trees scraped their voices into the wind, branches Criss-crossed the sky like barbed wire But you said they were only branches. . . . But still the branches are wire And thunder is the pounding mortar, Still I close my eyes and see the girl Running from her village, napalm Stuck to her dress like jelly . . . the girl runs only as far As the napalm allows Until her burning tendons and crackling Muscles draw her up Into that final position Burning bodies so perfectly assume. Nothing Can change that; she is burned behind my eyes And not your good love and not the rain-swept air And not the jungle green Pasture unfolding before us can deny it. Weigl's The Monkey Wars should suggest to us that many of the elements of the confessional mode of voice as prac ticed by his older contemporaries (Lowell and the later work of James Wright and Bly)--preceding him by a generation— are continuing through the mid-1980s; these elements include: simple, rather than decorative, diction (what Wright referred to as "the pure, clear word"), a reliance on narrative and complete sentences— although a poem may break its lines at points not comprising a com plete sentence— and, of course, the semblance of autobiog raphy, all of which Weigl combines (as Lowell remarked of his Life Studies poems) to "get some music and imagination and form" into his personal "outpourings." __ 387 Other younger poets who continue to employ the confes sional mode of voice, however, do not necessarily write such prose-like lines as does Weigl; these poets are, as sug gested earlier, more concerned with sound and rhythms. Garrett Hongo, in his Yellow Light (1982), for example, used the confessional voice in many poems that are less narrative and more reliant on images than are Weigl's poems; perhaps, too, they are more given to sound. The principal concerns of Yellow Light, a book of carefully ordered poems, are: the discovery of the history of the Issei (the first genera tion of Japanese immigrants to America), the forging of myths regarding the Issei and succeeding families, and the ethnicity peculiar to the poet's ancestral beginning. Structured in five movements, without distinctions indica ting these divisions, the poems' central speaker travels through his home neighborhoods, Japan, and America's West. Engaged in searches that lead to the creation of myths and the recreation of ancient ones, these poems ultimately re cord the process of the speaker learning to understand the importance of the immediate. "Yellow Light," the opening poem, takes us to inner city Los Angeles, the setting for the book's first movement, where a woman with groceries passes "gangs of schoolboys playing war" on her way home to cook dinner. This is what she sees: From the Miracle Mile, whole freeways away, ____________a-brilliant_fluorescence breaks out________________ 388 and makes war with the dim squares of yellow kitchen light winking on in all the side streets of the Barrio. . . . The moon then, crusing from behind a screen of eucalyptus across the street, covers everything, everything in sight, in a heavy light like yellow onions. The combination of lyrical description with the narrative is representative of Hongo1s technique. The plain language and unsheathed images contain, within the control of the voice, the emotions this scene evokes for the speaker remem bering his mother's daily routine. Given the book's purpose of scheme, it is appropriate that the poems of this first movement address the speaker's early life and condition of home. The subject of the nine-section poem "Cruising 99," marking the second movement of the book, is a pilgrimage toward the uncovering of the possibility for myth making. The voice, now detached from the personal memories of home and family, is relaxed, sometimes playful (as in "A Samba for Inada") and is, finally, a voice seemingly of wonder, one caught in discovery. The poem begins with a "porphyry of elements," an "aggregate of experiences" of the_ speaker and two friends joy riding down the two-lane Highway 99. This porphyry (literally, a rock containing the minerals of two generations) comes to signify the primary theme of a collection of poems that, in subject and;craft, embodies differing elements of the old and present day Orient. _____ ___________________ 389 In the section "On the Road to Paradise," the fourth part of "Crusing 99," the speaker suggests that he will be wishing continually for "paradise" because his conception of it must somehow include "landscapes / in brocades, mist, wine, and moonlight," like a poem by Tu Fu, all conjuring mystery and all missing from Highway 99 en route through the desert: I wish this road would turn or bend, intersect with a spy movie, some Spanish galleon, or maybe a Chinese poem with landscapes in brocade, mist, wine, and moonlight. The California moon is yellow most of the time, like it was stained with nicotine, or sealed in amber like an insect. Why is it always better somewhere else? Why do I always wish I were Tu Fu? Like the soft moonlight, paradise is elusive. By chance, the travellers meet an old hermit who tells them that his "desire to escape" is overwhelming. Dressed as the scare crow in a kimono whom the speaker and his companions encoun ter earlier, the hermit longs to: shout in unison with thunder roar with the assurance of Santana wind, leap out of these bonds of copper and steel, slough off this skin of cement, and walk south or north or even west into the weather and the sea. His desire to transcend the restrictions of place and past can be read metaphorically as the speaker's yearning to create poetic landscapes, mystery and myth from the barren ness of the desert. Although the actual journey leads nowhere, a commit- - men t_to_t he_c re a t ion_ of _my_th _ is. born. The book's third____ 390 movement, then, takes the speaker to Japan, the origin of his personal history, to begin his search to recover, expi ate, create, mythify and learn why the past acts as a "skin of cement." As the conclusion of "Postcards for Bert Meyers," a prayer is proposed for the restoration of a her itage, as it was at an earlier time, uncorrupted by history and migration: Tomorrow to Ise, to the shrines where my family has not made pilgrimage for more than a hundred years. I'll toss a copper yen-piece, clap twice and bow, call on the land's most terrible god to give us back our name. Yet in the next poem, another part of the speaker's culture is treated less seriously. A Japanese dinner is described with savor and it holds a peculiar importance for him that cannot be shared: Can your foreigner's nose smell mullets roasting in a glaze of brown bean paste and sprinkled with novas- of sea salt? . . . Who among you knows the essence of garlic and black lotus root, of red and green peppers sizzling among squads of oysters in the skillet, of crushed ginger, fresh green onions, and pale-blue rice wine simmering in the stomach of a big red fish? Coming in a sequence of poems about the significance of his experience in Japan, these lines suddenly change the tone of the book's middle movement. At a point where Hongo easily can begin to sentimentalize (as Lowell's confessional _ver.se_is„often. acc.used__o.f_j3.oing)__the older world's culture, 391 or to state a bitterness towards an America for failing to embrace this culture in order to enrich its own, or to la ment the loss of the past, he evaluates the beauty of a sen sual pleasure with grace and with an aggressive, yet tonally light, voice. Japan has given the speaker, now back in America, a base from which he can confront the meaning of his life in relation to his cultural origin, one of the subjects of the fourth movement of the book. In the poem "Roots," the res olution of self and past is equated to a spiritual enlight enment : One day soon, the old man and I will go off together toward the Sierra, squat on the brow of a sculptured hill, tip the cup of sky to our lips, drink a sake of cactus juice, and wait for the moon to rise over the salt flats near Manzanar. . . . When I pace the seven steps of the shrine in my soul, [t/o] the old man of my dreams will be me, leaning into the wind blowing off the Mojave, over Sierra passes and stands of sequoia, circling around L.A. to spin out past Catalina across the Pacific all the way to Asia, and heritage will be an ancient flute throbbing from its place in my heart where his heart has found its roots. Far from the discolored moon "stained with nicotine" that repulses the speaker of "Crusing 99," the desert moon, rising "over the salt flats near Manzanar," is now seen with a beauty befitting a Chinese landscape in a Tu Fu poem. The porphyry, the blending of the old man with the speaker, -emerges-,- and—the_poem-ends ..in-a comforting peace, somewhat 392 closer to "paradise." Myths for the present, arising from the past, must be written, as called for in the long poem "Stepchild." Inter spersed with passages by Carlos Bulosan and others regarding the history of Japanese immigrants, the speaker asks: Where are the myths, the tales? . . . They are with the poets, the scholar transcribing talks with survivors, the masters of the stage, the novelists collecting cosmologies . . . The task defined, the speaker meets his responsibility in the last movement by creating stories about his child hood, the memories being summoned by looking at a photograph ("The Hongo Store 29 Miles Volcano Hilo, Hawaii"), about a failed labor strike attempt, written in haiku ("C&H Sugar Strike Kahuku, 1923"), about old men and friends ("Kubota" and "And Your Soul Shall Dance") and, finally, about coming to peace with the history of personal experience and circum stance ("Something Whispered in the Shakuhachi"), a poem in which the speaker, a gardener of the past, states that he can, "when it's bad now,": sustain the one thicket of memory that calls for me to come and sit among the tall canes and shape full-throated songs out of wind, out of bamboo, out of a voice that only whispers. Hongo uses the confessional voice as a means of per- _sonal_disco.ver.y.,__much_as_ Lowe11 did in__Life Studies ; the 393 blending of the old man and the younger speaker is part of such discovery, yet this "porphyry" does not constitute a use of the persona mode of voice, which has been used only occasionally in the 1980s. The appearance through 1986 of the confessional voice is evident, but neither the persona nor the self-effacing mode is commonly used at present; some poets may prefer to think that their personal "I" is persona enough. That is, they often disclaim any direct relationship between their "I" and themself, and few would remark, as Lowell did, that the "I" stands for the poet, or the poet’s self defined by the poem. George Garrett would insist, I think, that the: first person speaker of "Out on the Circuit"— despite that poem's being in the confessional mode— is a persona, not to be associated necessarily with himself. But this is not the persona voice, in any of its uses, as practiced by Berryman, Kees and Kinnell that we discussed in Chapter III. Although the self-effacing voice has not been used ex tensively by younger poets, Strand, Simic and Ignatow, be cause they are still writing sometimes in this mode, ensure that it continues today. One recent book, In Memory of Michael Morgan (1986) by Frank Graziano, does not concern itself so much with the alien self's relationship to con temporary society as does the work of this mode we examined in the previous chapter, but it does take from Strand some elements, such as employing other writers' works as his own, 394 relying on these selections--not so much for content— as its basis. In this regard, In Memory of Michael Morgan is of the self-effacing mode, in the manner that Strand's "Leopardi" is, because the quasi-narrative is that of an actual crime committed in South Carolina, and the allusions and images accompanying that narrative are taken from other works. (Strand took Leopardi's narrative, but set it in his contemporary circumstance, and interjected his wife's name into the poem, etc.) Graziano's is an interesting book to use as a representation of the current form of the self- effacing mode because it combines several of the sound tech niques common of younger poets (which should be apparent in some of the selections I will quote) with the personal— but only peripherally— subject matter. The structure of this book-length poem is informed by the Modernist pastiche. Yet whereas Eliot, Pound, Joyce (and the many others) had serious intentions for their in corporating what Eliot called, in "Tradition and the Indi vidual Talent," the "whole of the literature of Europe from Homer" into their own verse and prose fiction, making some of that literature a part of their own, and desiring such pastiche to result in, as Eliot said, a "traditional" work (that is, one created by an author who is "aware that the mind of Europe— the mind of his own country— a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind— is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer ..."), Graziano, rather, here gives us a pastiche closer to that of its more comic, or tragi-comic, uses as practiced by a French school of painters who were consciously imitating— usually in order to mock— the paintings of other, older, artists? to such imitative work the term "pastiche" was applied. That In Memory of Michael Morgan alludes to, para phrases passages and employs lines— syntactically altered or verbatim--!rom a few acknowledged Modern "classics"— thus comprising an extension of Eliot's diffuse list: European literature "and within it the whole of the literature of [an author's] own country . . ."--including Eliot's own "Ash Wednesday," the poetry of Robert Penn Warren (as the dust cover informs us) and others, such as lines from Yeats, images and themes from "The Waste Land" (although Graziano does not openly admit that these are also part of his poem, he furtively interlaces them with the other elements of his pastiche, losing these allusions, almost, in the horror evoked by the narrative, which includes an arbitrary act of murder), the poem is a Modernist pastiche, one using works of literature— mostly Modern, but the Old Testament is used as well— to help explain the frightening, perhaps patho logical, behavior of Michael Morgan, a murderer and sub sequent suicide. 396 Graziano, however— and in this he differs from the Modernists, the followers of Eliot's "mythic method"— implies that these contemporary classics are only minimally relevant to Morgan's life, his confused consciousness, and that any "method" suggesting parallels between the myths contained in this literature and Morgan (who is a contem porary man) results in the comically absurd, which is, Graziano seems to suggest, an appropriate response to our time, to our culture (including literature, religion) and society that can do nothing to prevent or explain Morgan's crimes. Literature reflects Morgan's behavior; he actually can do little that has not been written about already, so literature is prescient in this regard. That is, the pri mary work Graziano uses in his pastiche is I, Pierre Riviere, a memoir written by Riviere, who in nineteenth century France murdered his mother— who was then six months pregnant--his sister and brother in order to relieve his father of what Riviere saw as the burdening pressures, the financial hardship, of raising a family. At one point in Graziano's poem, Morgan, barely conscious, due to his choking from the blanket used as a rope in a failed sui cide attempt, thinks of Pierre Riviere, but quickly adds: "that was odd; who was Pierre?" (9) This is our first in dication of "authorial intrusion" in the sense that Morgan is capable of such an allusion to Riviere— to Eliot et alii in the ensuing pages— only insofar as Graziano, or more 397 appropriately, the voice of the poem allows; this voice, not Morgan, makes the parallels between history and myth, be tween fantasy and fact, between the incidents described in In Memory of Michael Morgan and selected works of the "whole of the literature." Because I, Pierre Riviere, written in jail at the judge's request, clarifies the narrative of In Memory of Michael Morgan, it will be useful to analyze that work as it relates to Graziano's poem. Riviere had read widely in religion and philosophy, and told an interrogating officer that his reading of Deuteronomy and Numbers provided him the necessary justifi cation for committing parricide: to serve his father, he felt so directed, because his mother, sister and brother were, he said, "in league to persecute my father." He wrote in his memoir: I wholly forgot the principle which should have made me respect my mother and my sister and my brother, I regarded my father as being in the power of mad dogs or barbarians against whom I must take up arms, religion forbade such things, but I disregarded its rules, it even seemed to me that God had destined me for this and that I would be executing his justice. I knew the rules of ordered society, but I deemed myself wiser than they, I regarded them as ignoble and shame ful. I had read in Roman history, and I had found that the Romans' laws gave the husband the right of life and death over his wife and his children. Riviere, then, is well chosen in reflecting Morgan: Riviere's reading failed to instill in him any intended moral teachings; instead he selected certain passages and -Cons.tr.ued_them._to_match his sense of justice and duty.______ 398 Morgan, following the Christian principle of losing oneself (the old self dies; a new, spiritual, self is born), under stands the "death" of one's self to be literal: "When he pushed I have to die down into the black water of old hope it bobbed up He has to die . . ." (20) and he murders an old man, a complete stranger, believing this man to be, somehow, that other self which must die. Both Riviere and Morgan distort what they read, yet both regard the Bible as it was intended: a code of conduct one should obey. The two men extrapolate highly individualistic and bizarre codes from it however, of which Morgan's will become more evident in the following analysis of In Memory of Michael Morgan. The poem begins on Good Friday (the title for the book's first section), the day in Christian history when. Jesus was crucified— in service to his father— and on which day is the poem's setting for Morgan's suicide attempt be cause "he did not turn / to hope, because he did not hope," lines in derision of Eliot's poem declaring his faith his hope--manifest by his conversion to Catholicism. ("Ash Wednesday" marks the beginning of lent, forty days of penance in spiritual preparation for Easter.) We are told that Morgan no longer turns to hope, and so turns to sui cide, because of his past, which includes: having crushed a sparrow between broken stones . . . because he enceepharatinged seven toads . . . (4) This, within the first ten lines of the poem, gives us more 399 proof that In Memory of Michael Morgan is intended as a type of pastiche (besides the more obvious use of Eliot), for "enceepharating" is the word used by Riviere in his memoir to describe a peculiar kind of crucifixion: "I crucified frogs and birds," he wrote of his childhood, "I had also invented another torture to put them -to death. It was to attach them to a tree with three sharp hails through the belly. I called that enceepharating them ..." This word is not in use in English; it was Riviere's— and now Morgan's, who, on this Good Friday, recalls his having crucified, "enceepharated," seven toads. Graziano calls our attention to this word by his— what I am certain is intentional— misuse of the past participle form; if it were a word found in our dictionaries, its past participle would be "enceepharated." Morgan, who in his suicide attempt spins from his blanket-rope, hopes to stop spinning, stop "turning": And because he did not hope to turn again he grabbed the blanket which he used for a rope and— fist above fist, dizzy with his mouse-face blue like a vein— moled nose-against-wood toward the dirty bulb, choked up for a breath . . . (8) Eliot's line is used more directly here; whereas earlier, the syntax was inverted— changing its meaning from Eliot's "because I do not hope to turn" (turn, that is, to another religion, if any, or philosophy after committing himself 400 to Catholicism) to Morgan's abandonment of hope, his loss of faith: "Because he did not turn / to hope, because he did not hope"— Graziano now inverts his own line, making it closer to Eliot's phrase: Morgan, "because he did not hope / to turn again," grabs the blanket to stop its spin ning. This, of course, is an instance of the pastiche's comic effect, but it is also a tragi-comic one in that Morgan, unlike Eliot who does not "hope to turn again" in order to preserve his newly-acquired spiritual life, does not hope to turn, literally, again so that he might breathe, so to preserve his physical life, which he does. Thus alive, yet in an altered state of consciousness, Morgan thinks of Riviere, as I previously noted, and of Jonah: "And the Lord spake unto the fish, and. it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land" (10). Jonah, you will recall, because he was disobedient to the Lord's command, was thrown overboard by his own sailors into the sea where he was swallowed by a large fish— (whale in the New Testament account.) After three days, the Lord, satisfied that Jonah had been punished long enough, ordered the fish to expel him; thereupon, Jonah was a "new man," one, presumptively, never to disobey the Lord again. This reference to Jonah suggests that Morgan, believing to have disobeyed the Lord by "enceepharating" toads, among other sinful acts, thinks he, too, can become a "new man" after being properly punished. From Morgan's perverted perspective, this 40lj punishment must take the form of killing the old self, the self that committed those acts. To Morgan, this is reason able: "What is actual is actual only one time," (12) he suggests, which is Eliot's line verbatim, but used here to illustrate, and define, Morgan's state of mind. That is, Morgan, now wavering between life and death, attempting to transcend himself, considers that anything is possible be cause his state of consciousness would suggest to him that which is most likely for the moment, that which is "actual is actual only one time." And the poem moves easily from verse to prose, from what is seemingly Morgan's reality to his dreams, remembrances, and to his consciousness which evokes Riviere, Jonah and the rest; the verse to prose re flects this consciousness, one which comprises the book's second section, "Philautia Street: The Nature of Reflec tion . " It is during the course of Morgan's "reflection" on self-love that we learn of his rationale for killing ("I_ have to die . . . He has to die") that I mentioned earlier: in order to beget a new self, one spiritually cleansed. Morgan is religious, although his prayers' motives are twisted: "I bless the earth that opens for the lowering of coffins. I bless the rose that bleeds in the crime without motive, and the hollow of sheets, and bed-cold," (24) lines which foreshadow Morgan's own (as seen by those not under standing his intention) motiveless crime. Morgan believes 402 that "to love yourself is a way to love God," (28)— a line, incidentally, of Robert Penn Warren— and he shows his love by destroying what he believes to be his other self, a "self" that is actually another person, an old man— a stran ger to Morgan— and owner of the house Morgan has absent- mindedly entered. Morgan looks about, sees a picture of the man's wife (long dead), Camilla, hanging above the mantel, then uses the toilet. When Morgan flushes, the old man, "being in the grog and ozone of a dream," awakens and thinks it is Camilla coming to bed: The man with the mole, Michael Morgan, left the bathroom dragging his baggy-socked feet, pulling up his zipper, and put his foot down on the first step upward, which creaked. And the sleeper, hearing the flush and creak, even a hint of the slipper-slosh, being in the grog and ozone of a dream the sleeper rasped, "Camilla, Camilla, is that you, dear?" and this in the tone of St. Thomas, the doubter— as though addressing the dead--and this seemed peculiar to the man with the mole, his name wasn't Camilla. (31) Morgan, having already "pushed I have to die down into the black water of old hope" and it having "bobbed up He has to die," is now presented with the opportunity to make his ra tionalization manifest, and so murders the old man in his bed by smothering him with a pillow. Morgan disregards the man's muffled screaming and thinks back to someone from his past calling his name, to his enceepharating the toads: Miiiichael Miiiichael he hears her 403 and giggles tee hee hee while with the left hand a nail is held to the skin, the hammer, choked, swings past the squint and nose and the nail, first with a squish-bounce then thump against tree bark, goes ini. And then another, to the left . . . (34) [t/o] (Given the nature of Morgan’s mind, it is possible that he murders the man by enceepharating him, but more likely, thinking now only of his boyhood acts, he is unaware of committing murder; either way, his remembering enceephara ting the toads serves as a partial catalyst for his crime.) Afterward, as this middle section of the book closes, we return to Morgan trying to hang himself with the blanket, thinking, because he is tired of hanging, about undressing for sleep, which again diverts his■attention back to the murder of the old man: So, nude, lies down beside the dead man where once a wife lay and, finding the sheet-chill not to warm quickly, cuddles. But this won't do. He must get up with his little fig-like penis and roll the dead man to the wife-side of the bed, roll all of him over, then tuck himself into the body-warmth. (38) In murdering the man, Morgan has freed himself from his old self, and consequently feels as rejuvenated as did Jonah upon his release from the fish. Like Jonah, Morgan be lieves he has served his penance, has successfully met the trial of having to relinquish his old self ("He has to die"); yet it is a penance that must be re-enacted again and again until his (this time) achieved suicide by hanging 404 while in prison for his crime, as the book's final section, "Ash Wednesday: The Epilogue," reveals. Morgan has a skewed sense of prioritizing those sins in most need of expiation; after he kills the old man, for ex ample, (perhaps because he associates the act with his boy hood guilt) he thinks of his sin of masturbating, confessing to Father Mulligan, and the ensuing guilt: "the sin he had lugged like a black stone lodged between lungs ..." Yet none of his sins matters any longer, for his penance ends, ironically, on "Ash Wednesday," the first day of lent, or period of personal sacrifice, a day which includes— as the poem closes— Morgan hanging in his cellblock, presumably to death because, aside from the poem being in his "memory," that is precisely how Pierre Riviere died, one of the many people Morgan thinks of during his penance. Five years after Riviere was sentenced to life imprisonment— commuted from the original death penalty because his crime "bore every sign of insanity"— he hung himself in his cell. Morgan's seeming knowledge of Riviere is "in memory" as well— his literal memory, which includes the memory, and accompanying burden, of history; Morgan in this regard is representative of contemporary man, bearing the collective guilt of all transgressions that have preceded him in lit erature and history, and his destiny— his need for the ex piation of his sins, for destroying his old self, etc.— is subsequently thus determined. His memory can end only with 405 his death, which I argue is the most satisfying interpreta tion of the book's final lines since his suicide, which atones for his crimes (in that it stops both his re—living them, especially the murder, and his repeated, unsuccessful, suicide attempts), provides the truest closure to a poem which exists solely "in memory" of Morgan; the poem con cludes when Morgan's memory ceases— at his death. Because the poem does not suggest that Morgan's life (as represented in verse)— simply because it mirrors in part RiviSre's, or undertakes a perverted type of Eliotic religious conversion— is a manifestation of Eliot's mythic method" or Joyce's adaptation of Vico's cyclical theory of - history, Graziano moves beyond the limited intentions of the Modernist pastiche in that Morgan's crime remains essentially motiveless to us: neither historical precedent, such as that provided by Riviere's memoir, nor religious precedent (Jonah, and in a sense, Eliot) can account for it. The poem does not present any reasons or clear motives; such answers, as were proffered in Modernist literature, are no longer viable, as In Memory of Michael Morgan suggests to us by its using a literature— historical and religious--which can complement and illustrate a horrific case of murder in our day, but cannot explain it. This contributes to the (darkly) comedic aspect of the poem's pastiche quality. Just as the French pastiche painters usually mimicked works not otherwise worthy of notice, Graziano includes in his 406 account of Michael Morgan passages and ideas from works of literature which can not explain satisfactorily Morgan's complex personality and resulting behavior. And in temper ing the morbidity of the poem's subject by using that lit erature humorously at times, Graziano has found a suitable role for it in "post-Modern1 1 poetry, a poetry, that is, of the self-effacing mode, couched in the older guise of the pastiche, here manifest by Graziano's complete submersion in allusion, in adapting— and using literally— selections of others' works in making his own poem. He has borrowed this technique from Strand; In Memory of Michael Morgan is as personal to Graziano--in that the other authors' works speak for him— as "Leopardi" is to Strand. (Leopardi's poem addressed Strand's emotional condition exactly as it was at that moment, the setting of "Strand's" poem, so Strand sub stituted his wife's name for Leopardi's "Oh, my woman," for example.) Graziano sees Morgan as emblematic of himself, not as a persona, but as reflective of his personal view of the value of literature: just as Morgan does not understand the allusions to literature (because the poem's speaker puts: them there), or why he thinks of such, Graziano cannot understand how literature helps to explain the reason for a senseless murder, or how it is that Morgan's situation so accurately parallels Riviere's of the previous century. Given, then, that personal poetry remains in contempo rary practice by younger poets— particularly in the 407 confessional mode— let us now review the current work of the (still living) poets whose poems discussed in Chapters II through IV were used as archetypal of the three modes of voice. As mentioned earlier, Bly's poetry in the 1980s has become more personal; he has used the confessional voice in creasingly as he moves further from his exploration of the unconscious— a poetry, heroic in nature, intended to teach us something about our behavior— which, as shown in Chapter II, resulted in poems concentrated on the projection of the emotive image (rather than the objective one— the object itself, that is.— as was William's and Pound's concern). Of Bly's recent work, Deborah Baker has suggested: Bly has recently begun to work with the power of narrative or "character." With narrative he is able to discover the people, relationships and human events in his life, as in his prose poems. He has just finished a series of poems on his father. Bly's redefinition of the powers of poetry, emphasizing two powers, sound and rhythm, which he had ignored or dismissed earlier in his career, reveal not only Bly's creative growth, but also a new awareness of the importance of personal relationships and communication. (73) The following poem, narrative in its structure, "For My Son Noah, Ten Years Old" from his The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981), attests to his "new awareness" of his family: Night and day arrive, and day after day goes by, and what is old remains old, and what is young remains young, and grows old. The lumber pile does not grow younger, nor the two-by-fours lose their darkness, but the old tree goes on, the barn stands without help so many years; the advocate of darkness and night is not lost. 408 The horse steps up, swings one leg, turns its body, the chicken flapping claws onto the roost, its wings whelping and walloping, but what is primitive is not to be shot out into the night and the dark. And slowly the kind man comes closer, loses his rage, sits down at table. So I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided tenderness, when you sit drawing, or making books, stapled, with messages to the world, or coloring a man with fire coming out of his hair. Or we sit at a table, with small tea carefully poured. So we pass our time together, clam and delighted. "The kind man" who "loses his rage" can be Bly who has come to an understanding of his relationship with his son. Since the poem is "for" his son, the first two stanzas relay some truths which Bly has learned in life and wishes to pass on. The last stanza addresses his son more directly— although he is still speaking to us— and expresses his love for Noah. The poem begins with general assertions, but continually focuses on specific details until arriving at a personal narrative scene which includes Bly and his son. Whereas a poem from Silence in the Snowy Fields starts with personal reflection and then moves outward, "For My Son Noah, Ten Years Old" begins with reflections on the world, and ends with personal circumstance. The confessional voice here is used to "discover the people . . . in his life," spe cifically, the nature and importance of being close to his son. Some of the poems in the second section of The Man in the Black Coat Turns reveal more blatantly Bly's use of the 409’ seemingly quotidian, and autobiographical, for his subjects, as the opening of "Eleven O'clock at Night" would suggest: I lie alone in my bed; cooking and stories are over at last, and some peace comes. And what did I do today? I wrote down some thoughts on sacri fice that other people had, but couldn't relate them to my own life. I brought my daughter to the bus— on the way to Minneapolis for a haircut--and I waited twenty minutes with her in the somnolent hotel lobby. I wanted the mail to bring some praise for my ego to eat, and was disappointed. I added up my bank balance, and found only $65, when I need over a thousand to pay the bills for this month alone. So this is how my life is pass ing before the grave? As Baker has noted, "Bly's willingness to talk about, his life, to be more candid in his presentation of himself as a poet, a writer with no foreign poet to promote or politi cal cause to champion, has also had a corresponding influ ence on his latest poetry" (73). Bly devoted his latest book, Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1985) , exclusively to exploring his love for an unnamed woman as that love has extended from the early passion he felt as a young man to the now mature love, sustained, yet changed, over several decades. He continues in the confessional mode, using the poem to speak directly to the woman, and as the following stanzas taken from "In Rainy September" will show, in this, by addressing the poem to the woman, he is much like the James Wright of the poems lamenting the loss of "Jenny" (in "The Idea of the Good," for example, discussed in Chapter II): In rainy September, when leaves grow down to the dark, I put my forehead down to the damp, seaweed smelling sand. The time has come. I have put off choosing for years, perhaps whole lives. The fern has no choice but to live; for its stubbornness it receives earth, water, and night. We close the door. "I have no claim on you." Dusk comes. "The love I have had with you is enough." We know we could live apart from one another. The sheldrake floats apart from the flock. The oaktree puts out leaves alone on the lonely hillside. Men and women before us have accomplished this. I would see you, and you me, once a year. We would be two kernels, and not be planted. We stay in the room, door closed, lights out. I weep with you without shame and without honor. The tone of this poem, until the final line, is one of rationalization: the confessional speaker at first con siders his separation from the woman as something natural ("The sheldrake floats apart from the flock,") but ultimately concludes that he cannot live without her, seeing her but once a year, and therefore he openly displays his grief over the imminent separation from her, just as Wright (but from the outset of his poem) shows his emotional responses— labels them in the poem— after losing Jenny. Some biographical information will help elucidate both "For My Son Noah, Ten Years Old" and "In Rainy September," and further show how Bly transformed certain experiences from his life— and the emotions accompanying them--into personal poetry using a confessional speaker: 411 In June 1979 Carol and Robert Bly agreed to a separation and divorce and went into equal parent ing. In August they both moved to Moose Lake in the North Woods of Minnesota. Though maintaining separate households the Blys live within the same school district so the children are able to spend time with both parents. In November 1980 Bly_ married Ruth Ray who had lived with the Blys in Madison from 1973 to 1977 with her two children, Wesley and Sam. It is possible_that the personal upheaval and divorce from his first wife made him face the responsibilities of a parent and accept the sorrows and. grief that such a decision in volved for both of them. (Baker 67) Although Bly's work is now mostly concerned with his personal relationships, the "human events in his life, his personal poetry of the confessional mode which has the most affect on younger poets is the early meditative pieces from Silence in the Snowy Fields. William Heyen, for example, seemingly patterned his Evening Dawning (1979) after Bly's first book. (Since Evening Dawning was written before either The Man in the Black Coat Turns or Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, Heyen could not have been influenced in this regard by Bly's poems of personal relationships, yet it is of note that Silence in the Snowy Fields, a volume pub lished in 1962, could be, nearly two decades .-later, influ ential of the current poems of the confessional mode.) Heyen writes in the preface to his book that: The poems took place on the acre of ground behind our house in Brockport, New York. The insects and plants, the myriad summer ground gave me those poems. In August, 1978, my father and my brother . . . built a small writing cabin for me at the back of this property. Early the following January, planning to work on a long poem, I sat down at an 412 oak table in front of the picture window in that cabin, looked out at the snow, and wrote down, instead, more tiny poems, this time set in winter. They begin as I, the I I am in these poems, walk over Lord Dragonfly's frozen field toward my cabin. Heyen implies that the "I" of these poems ("the I I am in these poems") is different from the "I" he is outside his poetry, that is, something other than the "I" when not the voice of his personal poems of the confessional mode; Heyen thereby corroborates Hugo's theory, as stated in Chapter I, that voice arises from the urge "to reject the self and to create another self in its place," a self, as Heyen sug gests, which acts as the confessional speaker in a group of poems based on his autobiographical experiences of one winter. Here are two short poems from Evening Dawning: xv Rabbit tracks, rabbit pellets, my own footsteps drifting with snow. xxiii I am thirty-eight. Evening is dawning. Like many of Bly's poems in Silence in the Snowy Fields, Heyen1s poems, as these represent, are similar to the Romantic ode which begins with the confessional speaker (the hero of the poem, as Edmund Wilson informed us in Chapter I) meditating upon a personal subject— such as Heyen does with his age— then turning that outward, using 413 the personal as an agent to comment on the universal; that "evening is dawning" is meant for anyone of that age, not just the thirty-eight year old Heyen. This kind of gesture, the offering to everyone a personal conclusion about life, is extended to near prophecy in Galway Kinnell's poetry of the 1980s. When Rosenthal judged the "Life Studies" sequence as confessional because it was concerned with Lowell's "literal self," he, of course, meant "literal" in the sense of being closely true to fact, of accurately relating autobiography. Yet in much of The Past (1985), Galway Kinnell presents us with a personal poetry of the confessional mode that is also engaged with the poet's "literal" self— that is, a seif that is defined and represented by the poem— and this is not necessarily true to fact , 'although we know from reading Lowell's biography that personal poems of the confessional mode can rely on fact, as indicated by many details from the "Life Studies" sequence; the subject matter of personal poems do not require substantiation by "fact," however, in order for them to be confessional, as we have seen (primar ily from our discussion of Wright's and Bly's work) in Chapter II. Kinnell, whose poetry of the late 1960s and 1970s was mainly concerned with the persona mode of voice ("The Porcupine" and "The Bear" from Body Rags) and ideation and the ensuing quest for knowledge (in The Book of Nightmares), 414 has recently written of his domestic affairs, seemingly, his personal relationships, the "human events in his life" (as was suggested of Robert Bly's current work, also largely confessional); in doing so Kinnell has abandoned the persona mode in favor of the confessional. The following selection taken from the poem "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps," from Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980) , is typical of his current personal poetry: let there be that heavy breathing or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house and [Fergus] will wrench himself awake and make for it on the run— as now, we lie together, after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies, [t/o] familiar touch of the long-married, and he appears— in his baseball pajamas, it happens, the neck so small . . . which one day may make him wonder about the mental capacity of baseball players— and says, "Are you loving and snuggling? May I join?" He flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep, [t/o] his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child. . . . [t/o] Poems comprising The Past include more domestic scenes as the one depicted in "After Making Love We Hear Foot steps." Kinnell begins and ends his newest book— the middle section contains few personal poems— with a confessional poetry that explores the memories the speaker has retained, so that these poems are essentially a record of the speaker's past life of which he is conscious. (His personal history, that is, is comprised of other experiences too: memories he has forgotten or that have been left out of the 415 poem for other reasons.) These memories define the self, then, to the extent that the self is represented by the poem. The opening poem of the book, "The Road Between Here and There," chronicles the many experiences— at various stops along the road— the speaker remembers. The speaker is travelling the "road between here and there," one with which he is long familiar, and, as he does so, he cites the places where he has read, loafed, listened to nature, etc.: Here I heard the terrible chaste snorting of hogs trying to re-enter the underearth. Here I came into the curve too fast, on ice, and being new to these winters, touched the brake and sailed into the pasture. Here I stopped the car and snoozed while two small children crawled all over me. Here I reread Moby Dick (skimming big chunks, even though to me it is the greatest of all novels) in a single day, while Fergus fished. . . . Here I arrive there. Here I must turn around and go back and on the way back look carefully to left and to right. For here, the moment all the spaces along the road between here and there— which the young know are infinite and all others know are not— get used up, that's it. The final lines have at least two meanings: the speaker, each time he travels the road, has another opportunity to remember more experiences of his past, and, in doing so, to retain a conception of himself, of that which has brought him to the present; also, the lines suggest that there are "spaces along the road" that the speaker has, as yet, no reason to remember. However, he has the rest of his life to garner new experiences from those new "spaces." Once they are "used up, that's it"— meaning either that the 416 speaker's physical life is actually over, or that the self which is defined by the speaker's memories of the past will "cease" when there are on longer spaces from which these memories are engendered, that is, when the aging speaker loses the capacity, or desire, to do so. The landscapes, or other types of "spaces," often serves as the catalyst for poems about the speaker's past; the following poem, "The Old Life," shows the speaker standing along the shoreline watching the waves, a scene which makes him remember a time when once there with his lover. But the poem transcends, somewhat, being entirely personal and introspective by attempting a prophecy— but using a personal experience as the basis for such. Here is "The Old Life" in its entirety: The waves collapsed into themselves with heavy rumbles in the darkness and the soprano shingle whistled gravely its way back into the sea. When the moon came from behind clouds its white full-moon's light lightly oiled the little beach stones back into silence. We stood among shatterings, glitterings, the brilliance. For some reason to love does not seem ever to hurt any less. Now it happens another lifetime is up for us, another life is upon us. What's left is what is left of the whole absolutely love-time. The confessional voice here remembers a time in life when the couple— then much younger— stood in the same place, watching, as the speaker does now, the ocean's waves. Yet —though—the—waves—seem-unchanged. since that time, the speaker ‘417 and the woman whom he addresses in the poem, he tells us, are nearing the end of a lifetime together: "another life time is up for us, / another life is upon us," which could bespeak several intentions. Even though the couple's "old life" is now in the past, it marks the beginning of "what is left / of the whole absolutely love-time," which can be said of the love of any couple: they have the future before them in which to share their love. "The Old Life" is pro phetic in this sense, then, but the first person speaker still does not quite attain the objectivity of a more repre sentative voice— a persona such as the Whitman "I" we dis cussed in relation to Berryman's work in Chapter III— for his "prophecy" is only incidental to his personal reflec tion. Or the final lines may be less suggestive of an opti mistic future and rather mournfully, instead, be indicative of the end of the couple's relationship, in which case the last two lines could mean either that "what's left" is merely the memory of their past love-life, or that the time left "of the whole absolutely love-time" is that which re mains in order to pursue another love relationship, presum ably with another person. The confessional mode of voice, though apparently prophetic, is too personal, to speak in behalf of anyone other than the first person "I" alone; therefore, the "prophecy" of (the one interpretation of) the final line suggests the future, the probable course of behavior, of only the speaker. 418 That Kinnell does not intend his speaker as a Whitmanesque "I" (one that is a representative voice, at once both the speaker and everyone) becomes more apparent in his poems written in commemoration of deceased friends; his confessional "j" reflects on personal memories of them. One illustration of this is "On the Oregon Coast," dedicated as "In memoriam Richard Hugo," of which a selection follows: The last time I was on this coast Richard Hugo and I had dinner together just north of here, in a restaurant overlooking the sea. The conversation came around to personification. . • • Our talk turned to James Wright, how his kinship with salamanders, spiders and mosquitoes allowed him to drift back down through the evolutionary stages. When a group of people gets up from a table, the table doesn't know which way any of them will go. James Wright went back to the end. So did Richard Hugo. . tt/o] The waves coming in burst up through their crests and fly very brilliant back out to sea. . . . Much of which the Kinnell (as' represented by the "I" of the poem, the first person confessional speaker) remembers about Hugo in this instance is the conversation about James Wright, who had then just passed away. The memory, evoked by the speaker's standing on the coast looking at the ocean (and in this, the speaker is like the one of "The Old Life" who recalled a time earlier in his life when watching "the waves collapse into themselves"; his being at a certain place on the coast evoked the memory of when he was there before with his lover) is, then, of a memory of still an other friend. In this way, Kinnell interlaces one of his 419 notions of "the past"— which is the book's principal the matic concern— namely, that one's personal history is only that which can be retained in memory. The Kinnell "I" makes his tribute to Wright exclusively in the next poem, "Last Holy Fragrance" (subtitled "In memoriam James Wright"), in which this speaker's reading of a Wright poem, one he watched Wright compose one morning when they were in France at the same time, evokes for the speaker the following memory: When by first light I went out from the last house on the chemin de Riou to start up the cistern pump, there he sat, mumbling into his notebook at an upstairs window while the valley awakened . . . The next winter in Mt. Sinai, voiceless, tufted with the shavelessness that draggles from chins on skid row in St. Paul, Minnesota, he handed me the poem of that Vence morning. Many times since, I have read it and each time I have heard his voice saying it under my voice . . . "Last Holy Fragrance" is a poem about the memories another poem (by another poet) brings to the Kinnell "I" speaker, and in this the author Kinnell has extended the conception of "the past" as presented in "On the Oregon Coast." In that poem, the speaker's returning to a certain place con jured another time spent there with Richard Hugo, but "Last Holy Fragrance" describes how the Wright poem— the one that the speaker recalls seeing Wright working on— affects the speaker's memory in two ways: by reading his friend's work, the speaker "hears" Wright's voice, and that same poem 420 evokes the image of one morning "on chemin de Riou" where the speaker saw him writing it. The Kinnell "I" speaker in the poem "The Past" carries "a chair under one arm, / a desktop under the other, / the same Smith-Corona / on my back," he says, "I even now batter / words into visibility with" to a certain place on the beach so that he might remember "the details" of the experiences he had there over the last thirty years, details including: the dingy, sprouted potatoes, the Portuguese bread, the Bokar coffee, the dyed oranges far from home, the water tasting of decayed aluminum, the kerosene stench. The front steps where I sat and heard the excitement that comes into sand, the elation into poverty grass, when the wind rises. In a letter which cast itself down in General Delivery, Provincetown, my friend and mentor warned, "Don't lose all touch with humankind." The speaker remembers these details through the imagination of his memory, not necessarily the landscape, for it has changed— the Quonset hut he once "broke into without break ing it" is there no longer. But the speaker's desire to recall what he had done there in the past is enough to "reach the past." The anticipation of writing a poem about the desire to remember the past is what, ultimately, precip itates his memory of the place before actually arriving there and setting up his writing table. The poet Kinnell, who is the speaker of the poem, who— as he narrates the 42lj poem— "batters words into visibility," in this way acts to define himself by this very depiction of the confessional speaker, the Kinnel "I," of the poem. These poems, which are typical of the first and final sections of The Past, openly relate a subject matter that— at the least— has the semblance of autobiography; they utilize the confessional mode of voice to do so, one perhaps "intended without question," as Rosenthal said of the voice of the "Life Studies" sequence, "to point to the author him self." They do, we can be certain, use a speaker that is the representation of Kinnell in his verse in order to record the images, the memories, which serve as the basis for his subject matter. Mark Strand, too, has used the confessional voice more in his poems of the 1980s; we discussed one, "Shooting Whales" from the "New Poems" section of his Selected Poems, a section which he dates as 1980, in comparison to the other poems of the confessional mode in Chapter I. However, he began turning from his subjects of the bifurcated self, the concern for the other presence within us (which subjects required the self-effacing voice) toward the confessional mode in The Late Hour (1978). In "Pot Roast" from that book, for example, the speaker uses the occasion of eating a meal to remember his mother; I gaze upon the roast, that is sliced and laid out on my plate ----------— -and-over— it ___________ __________________________ 422 I spoon the jucies of carrot and onion. And for once I do not regret the passage of time. I sit by a window that looks on the soot-stained brick of buildings and do hot care that I see no living thing— not a bird not a branch in bloom, not a soul moving in the rooms behind the dark panes. These days when there is little to love or to praise one could do worse than yield to the power of food. So I bend to inhale the steam that rises from my plate, and I think of the first time I tasted a roast like this. It was years ago in Seabright, Nova Scotia; my mother leaned over my dish and filled it and when I finished filled it again. I remember the gravy, its odor of garlic and celery, and sopping it up with pieces of bread. And now I taste it again. The meat of memory. The meat of no change. I raise my fork and I eat. At first, the speaker does not "regret / the passage of time" while eating because he enjoys pot roast; it is at least something of worth to him in "these days when there 423 is little / to love or to praise." But then his meal be comes more significant. Although the speaker does not see anything alive as he eats, "not a bird / not a branch in bloom, / not a soul moving," the vision of the first time he ate pot roast "lives" at this moment in his memory, so he raises his fork as if in praise of this "meat of memory" since there is little to love or praise, since there is no living thing except memory. "My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer," from Strand's "New Poems," is like "Pot Roast" in that the speaker remem bers his mother. In this poem, the speaker recalls from his childhood how his mother, at home in Nova Scotia, used to watch the ocean from the home's porch while relaxing with a cigarette after a long day's work; her son, now an adult (and speaker of the poem) remembering such an in stance, explains what his mother's thoughts must have been in those moments of reflection, as this selection from the poem indicates: . . . my mother will stare into the starlanes, the endless tunnels of nothing, and as she gazes, under the hour's spell, she will think how.we yield each night to the soundless storms of decay that tear at the folding flesh, and she will not know why she is here or what she is prisoner of if not the conditions of love that brought her to this. [t/o] Although Strand has not published a volume of poetry since 424 his Selected Poems, his gathering in the "New Poems," such as "Shooting Whales" and "My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer," would indicate that his verse subjects at the present— childhood experiences, his parents— are best repre sented by the use of the confessional mode of voice. Yet, some other poems that lately have been appearing in magazines show the sense of wit he displayed in his earlier work— which contrasts with.the more somber tone of his poems of the confessional mode— although these poems are only marginally concerned with self-effacement, and the self-effacing voice, as "The Poem," from the September 1984 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, will illustrate: 1. The Poet to the Reader Dear Reader, though I spend my days and nights in hiding, wanting your attention and fearing it will be no more than the sad interest success finds in failure, my faith in you has never been shaken, for only in your genius do my poems have life. I gather the fragments of night, and only in you do they shine. There is no limit to what you make possible. That is why, for as long as I can remember, I have wanted to speak in you. Accept the enclosed poem as an attempt to present the self I have so long hidden. 2. The Reader to the Poet Dear Poet, thank you for the poem. I like the part about the bird and the part about the tree. Even your letter was nice. I'm not sure I'm all you think I am, but my wife says that there's.more to most of us than meets the eye. I wouldn't know. Pleasing anyone is hard enough. These are difficult times and no one is safe. Lately, I have been plagued by uncertainty over our son. We live in an unfinished house. Every time I reach down there is a nail sticking up. As a poet, you will understand. The poet tells the reader that his poem, which we do not 425 see, is "an attempt to present the self I have so long hidden," yet he apparently has already done so: he reveals his fears to the reader ("wanting your attention and fearing it will be no more than the sad interest success finds in failure"), his personal, eccentric, habits--and here he re minds us of the paranoid insomniac of Strand's Sleeping with One Eye Open— ("I spend my days and nights in hiding"), and romantic, idealistic, regard of the usefulness of poetry: "only in your genius do my poems have life. I gather the fragments of night, and only in you do they shine." The poet wants "to speak in" the reader, making the reader part of the poem--probably the poet has something like Eliot's objective correlative theory in mind. Yet the reader little resembles the poet's notion of him, and he relates his concerns to the poet as the poet did to the reader: we live in troubled times, he does not understand his son, he lives in an unfinished house. He thinks that the poet will understand his troubles because poets, the reader assumes, are sensitive to contemporary issues that affect mankind. Each, however, misunderstands the other: the reader, it is evident, does not have the genius to bring to poems, as the poet thinks, and the poet, who spends his days and nights in hiding, could not know the nature of the reader's problems, as the reader thinks he does. But "The Poem" accomplishes, in revealing the self the poet has hidden, what "the enclosed poem"— the one we 426 do not see— was intended to do; the poet, then, has been effaced from "The Poem": we just see his prose, his letter to the reader. "The Poem," then, approaches a use of the self-effacing mode because it discusses the relationship the poet has to his work— that is, his creating another self to be represented in his poetry, and necessarily his hiding the personal self from the poem therefore, (the poet desires to speak in the reader, not himself)— in the absence of that work, without showing it to us, his actual readers; all this contributes to the absurdity of the piece. And Charles Simic's poems of the 1980s often incor porate elements of the absurd; they are more fable-like, disposed toward historical fantasy (strolling about in the nineteenth century, for example), rather than being so much concerned with the "I's" relationship to myth or history as a means of consciousness— poems which require the use of the self-effacing mode of voice— as was his earlier work we examined in the previous chapter. "Madonnas Touched up with a Goatee" from his 1982 Austerities illustrates a type of poem common to his current practice: Most ancient Metaphysics, (poor Metaphysics!) All decked up in imitation jewelry. We went for a stroll, arm in arm, smooching in public [t/o] Despite the difference in ages. It's still the 19th century, she whispered. We were in a-knife-fighting-neighborhood - Among-some rundown relics of the Industrial L------- Revolution-_________________ [t/o] 427 Just a little further, she assured me, In the back of a certain candy store only she she knew about, [t/o] The customers were engrossed in the Phenomenology of the Spirit. [t/o] It's long past midnight, my dove, my angelI We'd better be careful, I thought. There were young hoods on street corners With crosses and iron studs on their leather jackets. [t/o] They all looked like they'd read Darwin and that madman Pavlov, [t/o] And were about to ask us for a light. The witty references to the intellectual, and physical ("industrial revolution"), development of the last century, and the first person speaker's admittedly nostalgic emotion toward metaphysics (out of fashion in this century)-- which Simic personifies as a woman "decked up in imitation jewelry" and very much at ease, knowing her way around, the nineteenth century— are characteristic of Strand's type of self-effacing poem. But this poem is really little more than an amusement, one using history cleverly, yet not as a way to recover our mythic unconscious or to explore our historical consciousness. Consequently the voice is not of the self-effacing mode since it is not concerned with the personal self's role in either myth or history, even though the personal voice of Simic is (because of the fantasy situation) obviously effaced from the poem. Neither does David Ignatow employ the use of the self-effacing voice as often now as he did in his earlier poetry, although he never has been occupied with the absurd 428 as have Strand and Simic. As we saw at the end of Chapter IV, Ignatow's work from the 19 84 Leaving the Door Open would seem to indicate a new direction for his verse. Perhaps he feels he has exhausted the artistic and thematic possibili ties of the self-effacing voice intended to bind and strengthen the community, or maybe his concerns are more philosophical and so any particular mode of voice is secondary to the messages— other than the self's relation ship to society— he wishes to convey in his work. Regard less of his intentions, Ignatow seems to have for now abandoned the idea of self-effacement for the sake of the community; that idea, he revealed in poem #63 of Leaving the Door Open (discussed in the previous chapter), is no longer plausible, particularly because it does require some measure of self-divestment. The older Ignatow has now matured, as the following poem, #36 from Leaving the Door Open, would indicate, and he is at peace with himself, not desiring to be impersonal, to be effaced from the self speaking of community concerns in his poetry: Here he is, sitting quietly, enjoying his own presence, for it turns out from many quarrels and separations in himself has come an understanding that he is the one with whom to sit at peace silently in friendship, or to converse. Generally, the poets who once practiced the persona and the self-effacing modes of voice have turned in the 1980s to the more immediately personal— the confessional voice so 429 that which Louis Simpson, writing in 1978, informed us in Chapter I still seems viable: If one considers the impersonality of the modern bureaucratic state it is likely that, more and more, poetry will be written to express the life of an individual. Personal poetry, as apparent by the selected work of the young poets represented in this chapter and by many others— some mentioned in Chapter I, some writing at this moment, not yet known to us— probably will linger through this decade in whatever forms (lyric, epic, etc.) it may next choose to adopt as its medium. Yet personal poetry, it seems, surfaced in this century as a distinctive phase, one beginning in 1959 and very likely coming now to its end, so that the craft of the poets who practiced the con fessional, persona and self-effacing modes is more histori cal than archetypal of future poetry. Regardless of its course, however, American poetry of the past several decades will be distinguished by its individualistic, and personal, voices which flourished under the political currents and intellectual thought of its time. 430 Works Cited Baker, Deborah. "Making a Farm: A Literary Biography." Jones and Daniels 33-77. Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 142-48. Bellamy, Joe David, ed. American Poetry Observed: Poets on Their Work. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1984. Berg, Stephen, and Robert Mezey. Foreword. Naked Poetry: Recent American Poetry in Open Forms. Eds. Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey. 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