PARTISAN REVIEW
155
Williams even resists distinctions between poetry and prose, admitting
"in the midst of writing this poem, which is to be very pedantic an.d
mildly arcane and written very quickly to get rid of worrying just for
once whether it is prose or its blessed contrary" to a "blessed" ignorance
of the differences.
In other words, the quality of Williams's accomplishment is uneven
but often high; its variety is absolutely extraordinary.
An Ear In Bar–
tram's Tree
will inspire in some the discomfort felt by a Flaubert scholar
at a reading of Mark Twain. But in its exuberance and generosity of
spirit, it is "a procession no one can follow after / But be like a little dog
following a brass band."
For years David Wagoner has been writing not only a large body of
poetry but a large number of first-rate poems as well; and although
Riverbed,
his latest book, doesn't significantly improve on his best work,
it unquestionably increases it. This is the shortest poem from that book:
Doing Time
Do your own time,
say pnsoners
To those who spill their lives to others.
I serve my indeterminate years
Through these concurrent sentences
Out of a hope to get time off
For good behavior, doing life
For willful failure to report
On what goes on and on in the heart.
In its economy and sureness of movement, "Doing Time" is typical of
Wagoner at his best. It's also typical by virtue of the way the wit, un–
folding as the central metaphor expands, strengthens the argument.
Wagoner is one of the wittiest and most toughly reasonable poets writing
today; the symbiotic relation between wit and seriousness in his poetry is
inevitable in a writer who places a high value on "balance" and who, in
his neoclassical way, is bent on reminding himself as well as his reader
that man is "No straddler of winged horses, no budding centaur."
"Doing Time" is typical in subject too since it describes a speaker
trapped by time, the circumstance which in Wagoner's view most hedges
and prohibits our freedoms since it refuses to replace the illusions it robs.
In "Old Man, Old Man," an aged speaker, nearly out of time arid illusion,
tells his young questioners: "I have become the best and worst I
dreamed." It's clear he has realized the worst last. And so time traps; but
it receives "willful" cooperation from our reduced selves, moving as we
do in "a dark of our own making." There are no clear directions for the
befogged self. No matter where we are, that "is the place where we must
be ready to take / The truths or consequences / Of which there are none
to be filched or mastered or depended on ." By the time we reach the
