110
PARTISAN REVIEW
to limit himself to the poetry of statements on the Whitmanesque line he
will have to use that line for all it is worth ;especially for phrasing and the
control of speed such as are usually obtained by metre and rhyme; and
further, and much more difficult, he will have to charge his lines so per–
suasively with his subject that every line will "tell" just in itself as well as
in its major relations. In metrical poetry the filling may well be the binding
agent between the parts and inseparable from them; in non-metrical poetry
the only bond is gravity and balance, what is only filling drops out.
Miss Boyle in
A Glad Day
gets round that difficulty more or less in
passing, partly because she resorts largely to prose phrasing to keep her
work moving, partly because her filling is indistinguishable at a given in–
stant from her building material, and partly because she is apparently in–
terested in using only the least amount of the vast possibilities her work
declares. All that she does is penetrating, discriminating, devastating and
decorative. She knows all about meanings without ever seeming to have
experienced what is meant. This is the end of "In Defense of Homosex·
uality":
Put under glaJS some of them could be wom as cameos
Their femininity plumbed to the depths of
A tedious
t~ocation
as engrossing as bee-raising
And as monotonous to the outsider.
Her value lies everywhere, as in these lines, in the display of specialised
and truncated perceptions: perceptions both so intelligent and so little tied
to their locus that they can be used like postage stamps on anybody's mail ;
a feature which is perhaps representative of that general dissociative frame
of intelligence called surrealism, or the addiction to superimposed units of
perception, superimposed but nowhere joined. Unlike Mr. Fearing she has
nothing to learn because there is nothing in the world supplied by learning
that she wants to do. Your sophisticate is pnly swamped by learning,
cramped by form.
The outside of Mr. Ford's
Garden of Disorder
belongs to much the
same school, the stretch of overt sonnets in the midreach of the garden
doing nothing to belie the borders. The title poem is dedicated to Pavel
Tchelitchew; hence one expects, and indeed is given, a flair for the common·
place seen as gusty because slightly twisted and distrait; one is both amused
and brought to the edge of discovery-where one is vaguely, and archly,
taken aback:-
When you were in the circus did the seals lie on their backs,
piJS straight up like hallelu;ah?
The archness makes it fun, and because it is fun it does not mean or need
to be actual, and because it is not actual it must be taken either as not
counting or as an escape from what does count. This is a splendid method,
this verbalised nexus of the arch look and the thing seen, of voiding poetic
responsibility at the moment that you feel it-splendid and fascinating, a
very vice. In the poem called "Plaint before a Mob of
10,000
at Owensboro,
Ky.", which is quite the best poem in the book, Mr. Ford writes six mag–
nificently direct lines which are all of his poem but its end; then he adds
seven lines of arch filling which obfuscate precisely as they dictate the dis–
tich of ending. Let us compare two direct lines,
