POETRY CHRONICLE
Curse my right hand. That both were lefts
or honest claws-
We see that Selden Rodman is unrewarding and sometimes intol–
erable as a poet because he has no
tone.
His new book, designed as a
marvel of virtuosity (50 Beautiful Forms 50), is vaguely and unhappily
characterless; only fashionable and busy. What he can do is a serious-gag
poem like "Pearl Harbor"; the rest is manufactured chaos, and the
better the subject (like Esmond Romilly) the more inadequate the treat–
ment, the grimmer the Flat, the more helpful the Climate. This is a
union member in good standing.
We see that Ciardi, who is as sharply superior to these writers as
Miss Garrigue is superior to him, ought not to
be
content with the
Climate which can sing him a mild and simple poem like "Sea Burial,"
but can do nothing for him when he is up against it at the end of "First
Summer After a War," with a twelve-clause sentence in three quatrains,
only one clause being independent; again at the end of "I Meet the
Motion" he has an eleven-clause sentence in four quatrains, only one
clause being independent; and the rhetorical skill necessary to deal with
this is hardly to
be
found since the Renaissance. I don't say that endless
falsification of the substance is not involved in
trying
to do it this way;
but what can the chop-chop-chop syntax of the Climate do with it?
For the simplest periodicity one must cast about.
Jean Garrigue has cast about and about.
If
the record of her
inquiries is too full, it is also more active and honorable than any
woman's for years except Miss Bishop's. She is interesting on all the
ranges from "Banquet of the Utilitarian" up through "Iowa City Zoo"
and "Oration against the Orator's Oration" to the elaborate poems she
has placed first and last in her
book.
But her air of freshness and
seriousness, probably, is more important so far than her finished poems.
Does she finger them enough?
They kick him in the head, jammed there.
They are kicking a man in the head to death.
I see no loss, some gain,
in
an order altered to "kicking in the head a
man"; and another passage, "that old man / Sourly drags the broom
through vestibules," might gain from the obvious change. Or it might
not, or it would change the style. But looking again at the high-keyed
poems, "Poem" and "The Circle," I again feel inclined to be quiet
and see what she does or her poems do. She is not quite in the Climate.
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