POETRY CHRONICLE
comedian: "The Glory of God shines over Greenpoint.
I
The oxen of
the sun
I
Tread out the darkness....
I
The delicatessens open. It is
day," " ... the land
I
Where, in the fullness of time, Mae West was
born,'' and "The heart,
I
Said Rena,
I
Must learn to compose, like
Palestrina"-Gershwin would have done. Literary anachronisms curiously
resemble biological atavisms (supporting Brunetiere's genetic theory) ;
compare such specimens as Henry Miller, and Thomas McGrath still
carrying his little banner touchingly at the end of the May Day parade.
He can be fierce, as an
echt
Union Square poet: "When they saw the
moon would never fill
I
Its inside straight they knew the game was
up.
I
The trumpets turned up a jack of Mills bombs.
I
Obviously it
was time for
dep~rtures";
he can be tender, despite an ode for .Mike
Gold: "The hills sharp as a girl's breasts"; and he can write such boyishly
pornographic claptrap as: "Maine is a map of Freud with feminine fine
lakes
I
And phallic forests wherever the blind eye looks."
A Heraclitean nightmare of texture without structure, Miss Rukey–
ser's flux may be a result of the Fallacy of Expressive Form, the form
yielding to the raw material of the poem; hers is, with MacLeish, a
tragedy of the thirties, the wrack of a genuine sensibility in a zealous
topicality (e.g., the immortal "Not Sappho, Sacco"). She is left with the
ultimate topic; and, inevitably, the book, which concerns itself with sex
and reproduction ("Strangler and bitch, they said,
I
but they mistook
the meaning of my name:
I
I am the root who embraces the source.
I
I sing. I sing," she sings), reaches its climax in "Nine Poems," a sonnet–
cycle of pregnancy, month-by-month.
Chaos has many faces: it leers through a Shakespearean sonnet of
Miss Millay, and it smiles in the unimpeachable pseudo-order of Theo–
dore Spencer; here, in the almost textureless, careful cadences of Hous–
man-out-of-Emerson-out-of-Donne, is the emptiness of the academic
vacuum. "We look around and the Usual
I
Is all that we can find,"
he writes in "Song." Simple, with an ingenue's simplicity, wise to
the time-styles and the author's limitations, it is poetry-for-verse's–
sake, a willed verse, and rarely comes alive; it pays lip service to the
idea of paradox, but ignores its essence, the worked-out dramatic im–
pact; it is pleasant, skillful, innocuous, and dull.
Struggling towards order are the war-poets (preposterous term): the
American, William Meredith, and the Englishman, Bernard Spencer.
The first suffers from youth and a fine excess-that is, in his passionate
poems; in his witty poems, he is sometimes a clumsy Karl Shapiro,
if
such a thing is possible; see
(in
"Battlewagon") "Old Billy-be-damned
bang bang flashy-in-battle," "Oh by jesus noise," "exquisite with pur-
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