“Into
a world where children shriek like suns
Sundered
from other suns on their arrival,
She
stared, and saw the waiting shape of evil,
But
couldn't take its meaning in at once,
So
fresh her understanding, and so fragile.
“Her
first breath drew a fragrance from the air
And
put it back. However hard her agile
Heart
danced, however full the surgeon’s satchel
Of
healing stuff, a blackness tiptoed in her
And
snuffed the only candle of her castle.
“Oh,
let us do away with elegiac
Drivel!
Who can restore a thing so brittle,
So
new in any jingle? Still I marvel
That,
making light of mountainloads of logic,
So
much could stay a moment in so little."
It’s
voguish to say poems are about the making of poems, but the good ones normally
engage something out there in the big bad world beyond the classroom. They have
substance. Kennedy, I would suggest, is writing about a dead newborn, the poem
we are reading and the promise of poetry itself in proper hands, and does so without
compromising them. How refreshing his injunction to “do away with elegiac /
Drivel!” “Jingle” is suitably patronizing and the final line is perfect. In a
similar multum in parvo spirit, Yvor
Winters wrote “Much in Little.”
I
muster these responses to Kennedy’s poem to remind us of what Auden wrote in
1937 in “Letter to Lord Byron”: “Light verse, poor girl, is under a sad
weather. / She’s treated as démodé altogether.” Light verse is left to the hobbyists
and misfit autodidacts, the terminally clever and earnestly comic, and this is a
shame. In a 1986 tribute, Kennedy writes of the recently dead Philip Larkin that
he “achieved a poetry from which even people who distrust poetry, most people
can take comfort and delight.” Of how many living poets can we say the same? Of
how many Pulitzer Prize winners, especially in recent years? Philip Levine?
Sharon Olds? You’re kidding. Kennedy plays with the permeable membrane
separating light verse and the rest of poetry. His blurring of boundaries adds to
the fun and to the reader’s engagement with the poems: Is this funny? Am I
supposed to laugh? Or is this serious? Is funny the same as trivial? Is serious the same as important? In 1978, when reviewing Kingsley Amis’ The New Oxford Book of English Light Verse, Kennedy said poetry
“generally speaks with the deep voice of feeling” while light verse “tends to
twitter and chirp.” He adds:
“As
in the elderly man’s damnation of the entire human race, a piece of light verse
may profess strong feelings. Yet all the while it is affirming them, its jingly
form and its verbal playfulness set up an ironic betrayal of that affirmation.”
Into
which camp does “Terse Elegy for J.V. Cunningham” (Dark Horses, 1992) stray?:
“Now
Cunningham, who rhymed by fits and starts,
So
loath to gush, most sensitive of hearts—
Else
why so hard-forged a protective crust?—
Is
brought down to the unresponding dust.
Though
with a slash a Pomp’s gut he could slit,
On
his own flesh he worked his weaponed wit
And
penned with patient skill and lore immense,
Prodigious
mind, keen ear, rare common sense,
Only
those words he could crush down no more
Like
matter pressured to a dwarf star’s core.
May
one day eyes unborn wake to esteem
His
steady, baleful, solitary gleam.
Poets
may come whose work more quickly strikes
Love,
and yet—ah, who'll live to see his likes?”
X.J.
Kennedy was born on this date, Aug. 21, in 1929, in Dover, N.J. Happy
eighty-fifth birthday, Mr. Kennedy.
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