BOO' KS
Have driven in carriages, by violets traveled
In a field stolen over. In clear land what mist!
Of its long-bodied field blues hung in a heap–
Or the blur is of jewels or blush of cheeks, lips–
Seen from a distance where the air presses round,
Coloring the long-bodied heads in a group.
Nearby a sea wall. Clear panes of sea lifted,
Till the flash of the soft foam smokts.
Vinous roofs of the berry. A gardener strolling
High up in a heaven of straw for the oranges.
W hat presence contains us! You bearded!
Like that statue we saw embraced
By
the rose grown over its brow.
Like azures to drink. The plane trees deep!
As, vagrant of pebbles, a pauper of leaves,
The snail delicately pulls in its horns,
Stopped by our carriage, our riding on fields,
Gone in to all that he
is.
471
One has a feeling, in fact, often that Miss Garrigue is going to be
excessively lush, loosely associative, but this real risk is usually sur–
mounted, as here (all the danger of the exclamatory, invocational style)
by .a sudden surprising delicacy and precision. The snail, I think, saves
this poem from being just a succession of Monetesque color splashes,
just a rave-up for France. Edith Sitwell and the Comtesse de Noailles
could have done the statue with the rose grown over its brow, the drink–
able azures (-"The plane trees deep!" with the three strong stresses
is more after Hopkins-) but they could not have done the snail.
A lifetime's work, as ambitious as
Paterson
or the
Cantos,
Mr.
Zukofsky's long poem cannot be criticized here but merely hailed with
the respect it deserves. The constructive idea is a free, expansive form
which can bring
in
the most remote and intellectual ideas,
if
they are
creative ideas, and the most personal anecdotes of a lifetime: prose,
documents, antipoetic detail can also be fitted in somehow. Robert
Creeley, in his useful introduction, speaks of this mode as the poem
as autobiography (and it is clear also that this is what
Paterson
is and also
that to regard the
Cantos
as autobiography - rather than epic - is
the only way to absolve Pound of the charge of being, in his formal
intentions, like Mauberley, "wrong from the start.") One should merely
note that this new form is not free form:
in
Paterson,
in the
Cantos,
and here, there are three fairly rigorous technical rules of abruptness,
disjunction and elimination of prosy explanatory context (so that each
of these poems sends the reader out on a research job about the life
and reading of the poet). Such poems are also open-ended in two
senses; there is no formal reason for their not being added to indefinitely,
so long as the poet remains alive and interested. More subtly, they are
