BOOKS
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as she says in a long preface, be written for all the right reasons, or for
more right reasons than anybody else's poetry, and her reasons may be
mine as well as hers, and that these reasons are all the reasons of poetry,
but I suspect just the same and with good reason that the reason of all
these reasons is the reason (buz buz) she does not say once and for all
Unreason, and then add, for all the best unreasons that unreason is not not–
unreason. Perhaps she really does not not say so. Certainly she does not not
say every now and then unreproach unharshed unloving unsmooth unlove
undeath unlife undazzle unmade unthought unlive unrebeiJion unbeautifuls
unzoological unstrange unwild unprecious unbull unhurriedness unenthusi–
asm. Miss Riding is the not star of un no not never nowhere. After page
eighty pretty well right through 477 pages she tells us what she it they we
you are not, and when she does not tell us directly
she
tells us
even
more
not clearly by not not indirection. Many pages are not without fifteen forms
of the verbal negative; no page is without words which produce negation.
We
have either
There is much that we are not.
There is much that is not.
There is much that we have not to be
or we have such phrases as "native strangeness ...
Science,
the white heart
of strangers . . . the lionish landscape of advent." Here meanings beat
against each other like nothing but words; we have verbalism in extremis;
an end-product of abstraction without any trace of what it was abstracted
from.
Automatic writing as featured by Gertrude Stein plus an obsession
with the
problem
(not the experience) of identity plus an extraordinary
instinct of how best to let words obfuscate themselves here combine in the
most irresponsible body of poetry in our time. Miss Riding is not derelict;
she is jetsam: washed up; and just to the level that
we
are washed up she
makes excellent reading.
Mr. Kenneth Fearing's
Dead Reckoning
is not nearly as good reading;
for one thing a good deal of it is in capital letters which are very hard to
hear they are so loud and not at all foxey and feminine like italics and for
another thing much of it is in very long lines-some of the lines are several
lines long-with no
pegs
to hold them up, so it is hard not to hurry to the
end before they fall down or worse fall apart as indeed they often do both
-down and apart, like the genealogies in the Bible and the catalogues in
Whitman, and like what Mr. Fearing is writing about: the defeated people
who live in cities and the present world generally and who want what is
not to be had either in cities or the present world and want it very much
almost exactly because they do not know what it is.
We
all of us have
caught ourselves talking and sounding
like
Mr. Fearing's people showing
what we are and what we want and hastily covering up the gap between.
Mr.
Fearing just says what it is like; his work is an example of Henry
James'
phrase: the platitude of mere statement: disturbing, apt, accurate;
but
in the end, no soap. Meanwhile, though one would rather read any
poem
by Fearing than any poem by Riding because he not only
~ays
v.:hat
be
is
writing about but sticks to it, Jet us insist that there are certam
obl~ga
tions
in
the profession of poetry which if
~ulfil!ed
leave the reader! not JUSt
in
the same boat with the poet, but deeply m h1s debt.
If
Mt. Feanng wants
