154
PARTISAN REVIEW
WHEN TO PIERCE THE GREEN
AND TANGLED TENEBRAE
COMES APOLLO'S RAY
SEE WHAT SHEEN THE LOPPED BOUGHS
NOW LIFT HIGH
... FRONDE, FLORE, GERMINE
o
CRUX AVE
AVE VEXILLUM
There can be no doubt about Jones's authenticity of spirit. One
can feel the chisel putting sacred words on stone. His theme about the
imperium and the local rites is, on quite another level than his own,
very relevant. But how many readers have the patience (one needs that,
rather than any great learning) to decipher him? What is positive and
splendid in female and male, what Ms. Rich calls "power", comes
oddly together in her and in Jones.
Alan Dugan is a consistently excellent poet (I am proud that I had
the luck to hail his first book, the one with the unforgettable poem
about sharks). His special technical device is a clausal clearness that
leaves his poems transparent as arguments and eliminates every
emotive adjective. Then the baldness-as in the use of "float around"
and the specialized use of "culture" here-becomes rich with grim
implications:
Speciously individual
like a solid piece of spit
floating in a cuspidor
I dream of free bravery
but am a social being.
I should do something
to
get out of here
but float around in the culture
wondering what it will grow.
Typical of Mr. Dugan 's gifts, these lines are concise, unemphatic,
alarming, and very funny.
Diane Wakoski was quoted in
Partisan Review
as a spokesman for
a number of writers: "We no longer believe that there is something
called 'the craft of poetry' which is apart from the life style of the
poet. .. I'd like to .. . make a case for the excitement in literature being
an extension of the writer's life, rather than a transcendence of or an
escape from reality." That there is such a craft, though not of course
divorced from the poet's life, I hope my quotations so far have shown ,
