PARTISAN REVIEW
621
GROWl NG UP TOGETHER
SKY. By Michael Benedikt. We.leyan. $4.75; paper $2.25.
MOLE NOTES. By Michael Benedikt. Wesleyan. $10.00; paper $3.45.
DOUBLE DREAM OF SPRING. By John Ashbery. Dutton. $4.95; peper
$2.45.
THREE POEMS. By John Ashbery. Viking. $5.95; paper $1.95.
DARKER. By Mark Strand. Atheneum. $2.95.
Michael Benedikt, J ohn Ashbery and Mark Strand are three
poets who have already created a distinctive voice and a following for
themselves. They therefore enjoy the questionable good fortune of being
watched more carefully with their present work than they were before.
Ashbery and Strand bear up well under the scrutiny; Benedikt, sorry to
say, doesn't.
Benedikt's talents seldom come to focus in
Sky,
his recent book of
verse poems, and scarcely at all in
M ole Notes,
his latest book, a collec–
tion of prose poems. In his verse poems, Benedikt is too often merely
cute when he wants to be witty, too often self-conscious and even self–
promoting when he should remain silent. "And now when I write poetry
I don't know what I am saying anymore, only what I'm doing," Bene–
dikt says in "Let Me Out." It's a joke with metaphysical ambitions
of the sort we come to expect, with considerable resignation, in many
of these poems. We hear about "the portability of time," "little dia–
logues of matter and spirit," "the jar of eternity," " the day of eternity,"
"The Audience for Eternity." We are even told that "Late, late, the stu–
dent of wonder sits at the tables of thought, and in the chairs of mem–
ory, smoking the cigarettes of eternity."
Along with this coy straining toward "Serious Thought" is a con–
fessiona l mode prevented from self-revelation by being merely chic :
we learn that Benedikt likes Godard, LeRoi Jones and Charles Olson,
Dylan (to whom he dedicates a poem ), Allan Kaplan a
lot,
Jane Fonda
(especially her ass and especially as viewed in
Barbarella ),
Bill Haley
and the Comets, Fifth Avenue apartments, a particular racoon in the
Central Park Zoo, and further, that:
Bundle, hunch, flaunt, corpse, lapse, kiss, fiddle, pelt,
consume, erode, erotic, remake, tape, eyelash
Are
7
one-syllable words and
7
two-syllable words I like
I like all
3
and
4
syllable words for their more complex symmetry
Regarding the names of people, I would
like
to
refer
you to my
poem, Naming the Baby
