PARTISAN REVIEW
Distance
&
Nearness
Landscape
&
Houses
Many (people)
&
One (person)
One (nation)
&
Many (individuals)
Spirit
&
Flesh
America
&
Me
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The trouble with the poem is that it wants to settle for such a paradigm
as this. What Kelly knows comes to us as theories and notes for a poem,
not as poetry. But the deficiencies, if such they are, result in part from
Kelly's scrupulousness: as
if
he must accept the fact that from one view
of America any contrary now seems impossible. One cannot easily speak
for what is Near
and
what is Distant, for Me
and
America, Flesh
and
Spirit. So we most often hear of what the poem
might
do, but won't.
Kelly will allow no central and personal "I" to hold the contraries to–
gether. The language lacks what Whitman, always giving himself away,
called "amativeness," what Warren calls loving the world. Although
Kelly insists much more than does Diane Wakoski that there
are
pos–
sible relations and connections, his poems seem even more an expression
of loneliness.
In
The Vessels
("vessels" both the art and the women by which we
come to the discovery of America) he comes nearest to convincing us that
his words are
about
something. But even one of the best of these,
"(Mem–
orial Day )
," almost rejects its subject, women in the park, by snobbishly
"forgiving them / for what they are /
&
will never be." Their physical
reality seems to trouble him, this "unwilling / participation / in our–
selves." He seems to regret that they have "no memorial but the distance/
implicit in my / eye." Poor mortals. Most of the poem easily avoids
them, escaping into poetic distances: obscure allusions, nostalgia f.or the
medieval, truncated syntax, precious metaphors, solemn puns, bookish
vocabulary. Strangely enough Kelly knows this (see, for example, the
poems "Stood before the dark building" and ''The Surveyor"), but he
appears to be unwilling to take the trouble and risk of putting his words
in relation to the world. This big poem goes everywhere and takes us
nearer to nothing. Keep your distance, America.
Edward Dom's
Gunslinger I
and
II
begins a great comic poem
about the many ways in which all of us,
po~ts
or not, ask and expound
the "meaning" of America. Like
Don Juan
it is a comedy of the failures
of love, but it locates those failures in our love for the distances of
inner and outer landscape. Appropriately,
Gunslinger
is
a travel nar–
rative. It tells us of The Gunslinger who comes knocking at the nar–
rator's door with a map of our domain:
"If
it is where you are, / ...
he will unroll the map of love." The narrator needs it, and follows the
