BOOKS
I, Rainey Betha,
22,
from the top-branch of race-hatred look at you
with two lines of filling-
The robins of my eyes hover where
sixteen leaves fall that tuere a prayer.
111
The dignity and justness of the first metaphor are only reduced by the
metaphorical (not the verbal) distortion of the personification. Perhaps it
is the rhyme or it may be the sentiment that wreaks the injury; certainly
there is corruption at work in the language, not the corruption from which
we spring, but that in which we end, a corruption from which the archness
of flavor is no redemption. The Jines are simply offside, representing ma–
terial out of control. When the robin eyes begin to hover the attention is
distracted; it is the distraction, the specious haven, of irrelevance so often
resorted to by the wavering intelligence, the selfish spirit, the vain crafts–
man before the invoked face of reality. That the resort is made as we say
unconsciously-merely because in this nexus the poet thought of something
or something suggested itself to put in-does not diminish the dereliction.
The principle involved is practical and has a direct effect upon the degree
of appreciation the poet can expect from his reader, namely: you cannot
successfully write a short poem in either different modes of language or
different modes of feeling unless you make sure that the different modes
work together to a common advantage. Put the other way round, unity of
tone is the best assurance of the effect of composition. Put generally: only
within an order can you give disorder room. All of our poets so far have
rather attempted to get along on vestiges of order in composition as in life,
and are aiJ examples of what Yvor Winters calls the fallacy of expressive
form. The practical result is that as the poet does not keep to his subject
and make it objectively complete neither does the reader keep to the poem.
Mr. Roskolenko, in his
Sequence on Violence,
has not yet, I think,
begun to write poetry; he is rather a vast fascinating register of the mind as
sensorium in which at any moment
a~ything
may occur. He has aiJ the
irresponsible vitality of the immediate in sensation and of the frantic in
perception; aiJ governed, as is usually the case, only by vitiated convention,
which is to say not governed at all. That is, the rich material of sensation
is
not used to enliven convention; rather we have sensation and convention
with very little connection between them. On one level-that of the poems
dealing with the politico-economical predicament-we see fresh sensation
resolved into the convention of blanket anti-fascist terminology; on another
level-that of the poems of personal revolt-we see it in the conventional
negation of such final binding lines as those that end the last poem in the
book:
Love is only gall
thus love offends us all.
But
the lapse into vitiated convention shows most clearly, perhaps, on an–
other
level altogether- on the pervasive level where the detail of sensation
or perception is supposed to acquire meaning or movement by jointure with
lhe
conventional word.
You have seen
waves
and rockets-gerrymander
the sightleu shafts of air.
...
Tht
italics are Mr. Roskolenko's ; the word here in question is gerrymander.
