136
KENNETH KOCH
sodden ditch." Of Dylan Thomas: "And lit the fox in the dripping
ground."
One hopes Mr. Hughes will
be
brave enough to part with his
stylistic influences. And also with the tramps, drunkards, hawks,
and Telemachuses, subjects which have proved almost automatic–
ally productive of mediocre poems since the death of W. B. Yeats.
One hopes this because sometimes his poetry comes alive and his
language seems genuinely
his:
The stars make pietas. The owl announces its sanity.
The crow sleeps glutted and the stoat begins.
There are eye-guarded eggs in the hedgerows,
Hot haynests under the roots in burrows.
Couples at their pursuits are laughing in the lanes.
No discussion of where poetry is at the end of 1960 would be
complete without some mention of John Ashbery's
Europe,
whose
111 (short) sections occupy thirty pages of
Big Table
#4.
Europe
is
a very exciting poem because it contains what amounts to a new
method of poetic notation-
17.
I moved up
glove
the field
18.
I must say I
suddenly
she left the room, oval tear tonelessly fell-
though such isolated passages can give one little idea of the poem's
amazing technical inventiveness.
Europe
is a very different poem
from
Second Avenue.
Mr. O'Hara suffuses details with emotion,
whereas Mr. Ashbery tends rather to arrange details in such a way
as to create emotion. What the poems have in common is the direct–
ness and originality of their language and a technical mastery so
complete that it gives pleasure with almost every word.
If
both
these poems are "difficult," they are none the less among the very
few poems of recent years in which one's difficulty is more than per–
functorily rewarded ;
Europe
and
Second Avenue
have more to
offer than "exercise"-what they have is the illumination of life
turned into language and language turned into life.
Kenneth Koch
