484
MARK MIRSKY
ican labor, their gradual withdrawal from shoulder to shoulder contact
with the working class. Finally, what is most interesting to me and
what qualifies
Standing Fast
to stand within the Jewish canon, is the
deep suspicion of that salt of the earth, the poor white trash of
America. It is no accident that Albie Small, who comes down from
the hills to join the radical labor movement, ends up with the American
Nazi Party. Anti-Semitism keeps surfacing as the wisdom of the prole–
tariat, its secret knowledge, for poor Irishmen and hillbillies. In exposing
this vein Swados uncovers a real paranoia of the American Jewish labor
organizers, but he hardly digs in it. Strip mining!
Perhaps the world of
Standing Fast
lay too close to Harvey Swados's
imagination to be searched painfully. What we get are cartoons of
people, Black labor leaders and civil rights organizers, Italian painters
and sexpots, Macedonian parents, Charles Van Doren, Trotskyite mil–
lionaires, all of whom would be better served if Harvey Swados had
addressed them in the first person. For there is no interest in
Standing
Fast
in the irrational, the dream life of human beings, the anxiety
which is finally inexplicable. All the experience of the book is under–
stood, psychologized, plotted. "I write what I don't know," Robert
Creeley declared, paraphrasing Franz Kline. But Harvey Swados knew
most of
Standing Fast
before he began
it
(alas, so did we). There was,
is, no mystery in the telling.
Mark Mirsky
CHANGES
THE WILL TO CHANGE: POEMS 1968-1970. By Adrienne Rich. Norton.
$6.00; paper $1.95.
THE BOOK OF NIGHTMARES. By Galway Kinnell. Houghton Mifflin.
$4.50; paper $2.95.
BRIEFINGS: POEMS SMALL
&
EASY. By A. R. Ammons. Norton. $6.00;
paper $1.95.
Like other cultivated poets of her generation - like
Merwin,
Snodgrass and James Wright -
Adrienne
Rich is haunted into
signifi–
cance as much by what she has changed
from
as by changing at all or
by
what she is changing to. Recurrence, memory, any presentiment of
the old order, of the poem as contraption, is what this poet obsessively,
