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PARTISAN REVI EW
forms to trace the genealogy of his stanza. More than a lesson in
literary history, his tracing culminates in this glossing of the form:
An emblem of love's best and worst:
Marriage
(where hand to warm hand clings,
Inner lines , linked by rhyming rings);
Distance
between the last and first) ...
As he himself has argued, any self-glossing by a poet is a poem
in itself, and Hollander has made himself a master of the self–
glossing poem: "Why must I always play / The stanza called
abba
/
In
books of
ars poetica?"
To those misled by the false distinction between
\
"art" and "experience," those who distrust what they dismiss as
poems about poetry, Hollander's poetic pacing of the shined, reflect-
ing floors, which give back images of himself and his poems, will not
be satisfying. But what the misled miss, and what is so profoundly
satisfying about
In Time and Place,
is that it thoroughly mythologizes
poetic technique; prosody becomes trope. The minute operations of
poetic form come to signify the operations of awareness in all its
phases, from the cognitive awareness which measures and marks the
world to the erotic awareness which knows what it knows in a wholly
different way.
What is more, the physicality of poetic form - its auditory,
\
visual, kinesthetic phenomenology- stands in Hollander's world for
other kinds of physical experience, especially the possession of what
is desired but never had or of what has been had and now is lost.
Stevens warns us that "The greatest poverty is not to live / In a
physical world, to feel that one's desire / Is too difficult to tell from
despair" ("Esthetique du Mal"). (An earlier master of the
ars poetica,
Stevens enters
In Time and Place
in one of its final prose pieces ,
"Asylum Avenue," although Hollander never names Stevens , refer-
ring to him only by means of a note which tells us that "A poet
walked to his office along this street in Hartford.") But Hollander
does live in a physical world, the intensely physical world of verse
schemes and structures in which his reader experiences acutely the
material realities of written language. Admittedly, his persistent at–
tention to the phenomenology of verse implicitly acknowledges the
great poverty of which Stevens warns. After all, who would live in a
world of written language if, in our everyday world, desire were not
too difficult to tell from despair? But such persistent attention also
insists that the physical richness of formally organized language
