PARTISAN REVIEW
605
the public and historical realms, and retreated into the freedom of "inward–
ness." This relinquishment "became a political act, issuing eventually into
the political poetry of the late 1960s.
"As with any language which settles into a code and a set of conventions,
the conversational style of the 1960s has gradually discovered its limits. All too
often " honesty" has become a formula, slack rhythms a vehicle for unfocused
energy, smallness of perception a form of avoidance. The enormous release
which many poets experienced in the early 1960s has been replaced by man–
nerisms of release.
This weakening of the language is apparent in William Stafford's new
book,
Sometime Maybe.
1
Stafford is one of the finest poets of the conversational
style. His poems are limpid and controlled, with a sort of narrative plainness
that recalls Robert Frost. Like Frost too, he writes out of an experience of
America, in particular of the American Northwest, though rarely with the
insistent localism which characterized other poets of the 1960s, who loaded
their poems with folk history and picturesque place-names. For Stafford the
American landscape is the embodiment of a way of seeing.
It
supplies a solitary
vastness crossed by languages which reach from one blind place to another; not
only human languages, confined to the long loops of telephone wire which
appear so often in Stafford's poems, but natural languages spoken by
snowflakes, by echoes, by tumbleweed. Stafford's "language of hearts" speaks
across the distance which separates man from his own created objects, and
from nature, as in this poem from
The Rescued Year:
Some catastrophes are better than others.
Wheat under the snow lived by blizzards
that massacred stock on Uncle George's farm.
Only telephone poles remember the place, and the wire
thrills a mile at a time into that intent blast
where the wind going by fascinated whole
millions of flakes and thousands of acres of tumbleweeds.
These connections come easiiy to Stafford. He perceives them with a child's
immediacy, but a child who has grown older and learned to understand the
irremediable quality of distance. When he is at his best, Stafford's plain style
has some of the feeling of folk stories and myth: it does not need complexities
of language in order to create its vision, because the vision belongs to the
world the poet sees, and not to the poet himself.
These marvelous qualities are only sparsely present in
Sometime Maybe.
Instead, the simple language has become a mannerism. The transparent sense
of myth or folktale has become a delibcrrate na·ivete. There are too many lines
in the book like these:
1.
Sometime Maybe.
By
William Stafford. Harper
&
Row.
$5.95.
