488
RICHARD HOWARD
and discretion are largely flouted in the ordering of this work. It
is
wonderfully ordered, composed, this dream book of Kinnell's, and Denise
Levertov is quite right, in her jacket comment, to remark how brilliantly
the poem holds its disparate apertures together, how it coheres; it is all
one text, but it is not written in verse, it is written, merely, in poetry,
and there are findings of loss in the performance which founder in a
waste of invention. As Wordsworth said about Goethe, it is not memo–
rable enough, for it does not come back enough to itself. One discovers
this when the poet himself, an astonishing performer indeed, recites this
work - he alters it in the recital; for him it is not a piece of language
with which nothing more can be done, but a text, a piece of language
with which anything may be done, provided it is done by himself. What
Kinnell calls "the body-Arabic of these nightmares" never allows us
to cool down, to enjoy that interval between burning and burning
which is implied, precisely, by the work of
lines;
instead, as the poet
himself accounts for it:
on the absolute whiteness of pages
a poem writes itself out: its title
-
the dream
of all poems and the text
of all loves
-
"Tenderness toward Existence."
Exulting, then, in the general conflagration which leaves no member
standing, Kinnell employs "this languished alphabet / of worms, these
last words / of himself" in order to discover what is not himself. And
he does discover it. The translator of Villon and Bonnefoy has a
justified confidence in his own compositional energies - "the carnal /
nightmare soars back to the beginning" - the power to make up a
poetry out of a hope, a wonder, a question:
Can it ever be true
-
all bodies, one body, one light
made of everyone's darkness together?
And he answers with the old stoic rapture, if the oxymoron will stand,
the one so flagrant in
Body Rags,
his latest book:
Never mind.
The self is the least of it.
Let our scars fall in love.
Addressing himself throughout to his totem animals, the bear and the
hen, and to his daughter and son, as well as to various shadowy loves
who are indeed unselved, Kinnell closes his fire sermon ("this corpse
will not stop burning!") with a magnificent apostrophe to his own
powers, the powers he has referred to in his lectures as "the standard
