BOOKS
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even if David Jones is demonstrating the craft of memorial sacred
writing, rather than poetry as such. Reality is often not so much
horrible as boring and few of us feel guilty in escaping from it with a
film like
Chinatown,
or even, say, an ode by Keats.
Rich, Jones, and Dugan could be said not
to
escape reality but to
transcend it, offering us more impersonality, more elevation, or in
Dugan's case more uncomfortably direct talk than we feel comfortable
with. Will not "an extension of (Miss Wakoski's) life" depend for its
interest partly on the interest of that life, partly in how Miss Wakoski's
experiences overlap illuminatingly with ours? People are not interest–
ing just because they exist, and from a performer we ask a show, the
display of some skills.
In fact Miss Wakoski's way of writing poetry seems to me one of
the several dozen legitimate ways, if you allow that her indifference to
the "craft" of the whole poem (there is the craft she needs, plenty of it,
in the details of the poem) makes it hard
to
pick out specially
memorable individual poems; and if one allows also that fondness for
goof jokes and vividly pleasurable sensuous impressions makes her
poems unfashionably unjudgmental. The three volumes included here
are very much, in fact, extensions of the pleasure of being Miss
Wakoski, but enjoyable extensions. Martha Washington is speaking
about crossing the Delaware (a tiresome obsession of George's):
the boat
built out of razor blades
moves best on
a burning lake
the grass
twisting itself
into carnation stems; the carnations, thousands of
them
burning and making the air smell of hOl cracked
cinnamon ...
lhe sane like powdered sugar under your feet. ..
Or, for a simple but giggly joke:
George Washington
never had a mouslache,
lhough he was
a busi ness man ...
In spite of the Puritan tradition, in spite of civilization and its
