132
KENNETH KOCH
eat, sup, end, Antinous, lake of comprehension, unless passion
down aimlessly sonorous plusses, denies our doubtful paroles.
To speak historically, I think
Second Avenue
is evidence that
the avant-garde style of French poetry from Baudelaire to Reverdy
has now infiltrated the American consciousness to such an extent
that it is possible for an American poet to write lyrically in it with
perfect ease. Since there is so much a:bout us that has never been
described and which this language can bring to life, I hope that
Mr. O'Hara will go on writing in it, and that other poets will do
the same.
The language of the other poets considered in this chronicle is
not as alive as Mr. O'Hara's. Their words often don't get through
directly to things, they don't communicate like "kisses on the breast,
like water from a pitcher."
Mr. Yvor Winters considers his collected poems "a kind 9f
definition by example of the style I have been trying to achieve for
a matter of thirty years." The style that Mr. Winters has been after
is
very different from Mr. O'Hara's, which is both accurate
and expansive. The range of experience Mr. Winters writes about
is deliberately limited. Style means to him not only exactitude but
also tightness, narrowness, and a kind of "purity."
In
some early
poems influenced by Pound and William Carlos Williams Mr. Win–
ters' search for this purity has interesting results-as in the last
stanza of "Quod Tegit Omnia" or in "April," with its lovely play
on "spring":
The little goat
crops
new grass lying down
leaps up eight inches
into air and
lands on four feet.
Not a tremor–
solid in the
spring and serious
he walks awcry.
But when Mr. Winters gets away from physical things his language
seems to falter: "Can one endure the/acrid steeping darkness of/the
brain} which glitters and is/dissipated?" Unless one is writing abollt
