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PARTISAN REVIEW
and I'll tell you who you are.
Show me the poets you respect,
and I'll tell you where you're coming from.
Our grandfathers' gaunt figures I sec
in unbearable times when our parks withered and we only had our
books
to tide us over the winter,
Show me the poets you rally around,
and I'll tell you what will become of you.
Reading this poem, an American reader may feel a bit caught out. Who
would have thought reading poetry could be such serious business. In
the face of such zeal one feels as though one had fallen into another cen–
tury-one in which ideas, verbally expressed, can create furor, incite
revolutions, or get you beheaded. Not that these poems smack of any–
thing but the late twentieth century in their variety of form and expres–
sion. But the gravity with which they regard a poem can only emerge
under terrible social and historical pressures. In a culture enervated by
ceaseless, pointless reflexive irony as its primary mode of expression, to
experience the barbs of those whose words actually have life-and-death
import is both shaming and deeply stirring.
A notable number of poems in this volume take on the subject of
poetry itself-not in the navel-gazing manner of American poems–
about-poetry, but in open interrogation of the craft's cultural role and
efficacy under pressure. Domokos Szilagyi asks, for example, "What
Can the Poet Do?" and answers by enumerating the ways in which
poets can pinch-hit in times when others-scientists, celestial bodies–
fall down on the job:
What indeed can the poet do?
He can fill the sky
by scribbling stars all over it
while the astronomers are asleep.
He can fill the garden by scribbling roses in it
while May is asleep.
He can fill the beach by scribbling sunshine on it
while the sun is asleep .
Oh, he can find one hundred and one
ways to get around the procrastinators!
He can scribble hope to fill
