644
PARTISAN REVIEW
be maintained persuasively only by criteria enacted in poems. Given the
variety of formal possibilities, including the complex tradition of
vers libre,
definitions of poetry must be inclusive and flexible, constantly violated and
recreated by poets themselves. At the very least, poetry implies a special–
ized ordering of language that releases unusual verbal pressure by playing
against unusual constraints, often focussed on the line; it would seem a fur–
ther condition of poetry, as distinct from mere mechanical verse, that all its
elements be susceptible to symbolic transformation. All poems, even of the
marginless amoeba variety, live by a formal intelligence; strong poems live
by challenging and extending that intelligence. The recent books of Hollan–
der, Howard, and Merrill arrive at an opportune moment. Each probes self–
erected boundaries and presses verse into the domains of prose and the
colloquial so that we witness poetry defining itself in the only way it can:
caught red-handed,
in
the act.
It is a merely exoskeletal remark to say that Merrill excels in conven–
tional forms. More intimate access opens through an examination of the play
of mind that generates those forms. A supremely witty poet, Merrill cher–
ishes the lowly pun which unlocks treasure chambers for him and collapses
sacred and profane realms into one. Concentrating the epic energies of
The
Changing Light at Sandover
into personal lyric,
The Inner Room
continues the
epic's explorations of spiritual and material reality, desire and loss, art and
death, and still relies happily on the pun as a key to transfiguration. The puns
pop up in the midst of elegies, as wise, outrageous, and incongruous as
Shakespearean clowns. In "Farewell Performance," David Kalstone's ashes
released in water appear as ".. . that gruel of selfhood / taking manlike shape
for one last jete on / ghostly - wait, ah! - point into darkness ... "; the ety–
mologies of "jete" and "point" conflate balletic artifice and control with total
artlessness and loss ofcontrol, life "thrown away," the "point" of death. Simi–
larly in the long mixed-media tour de force, "Prose of Departure," which
grieves in interlocking prose and rhymed haiku for a friend, Paul, dying ap–
parently ofAIDS, revelations of mortality come accompanied by sick puns,
dying Paul as "the Dying Gaul."
The sickness of the puns is precisely Merrill's point. The veil oflan–
guage must be rent if revelation is to occur. And Merrill is, above all, a poet
of revelation, whose work has always been the charting of "mental sleights
and tints and taints untold" (from "Menu"), nudging the numinous out of the
promiscuous phonetics of the profane. At the conclusion of "Prose of Depar–
ture," the travelling lovers have made up their quarrel, haiku plays in har–
mony with the prose sentence, and "dying" has been aligned with "dyeing":
Dyeing. A homophone deepens the trope. Surrendering
to
Earth's
colors, shall we not
be
Earth before we know it? Venerated therefore is
