'The Boulevardier and the Metaphysical'

In the Autumn 1962 issue of The Hudson Review, John Simon filled fourteen pages reviewing twenty-six new poetry collections, including X.J. Kennedy’s first volume, Nude Descending a Staircase. Simon’s verse chronicle carries the Horatian title “More Brass than Enduring.” Among those under review are the soon dead (Frost, Williams, Plath), the fraudulent (Norman Mailer, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch) and the masterful (Wilbur, Thom Gunn, Kennedy). The only names surviving in 2018 are Simon, ninety-three and still writing, and Kennedy, born on this date, Aug. 21, in 1929. Just last year, Kennedy published his most recent work, That Swing: Poems, 2008–2016, and he remains brassy and enduring.

Simon’s assessment of Kennedy’s work is mixed. It’s “lively” and “rousing”: “Mr. Kennedy is a curious cross between the boulevardier and the Metaphysical: he believes in the well-made, witty but significant, poem, donning its top hat and its Donne.” And then Simon says: “But when the wit fizzles or the elegance gets creased, things look sorry indeed.” He quotes the final stanza of “On a Child Who Lived One Minute” and describes it as “Kennedy at his best.” Here is the entire poem:

“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 mountain loads of logic,

So much could stay a moment in so little.”

Kennedy writes something memorable about the unendurable, while commenting on poetry’s dubious capacity to do so. The poem always reminds me of Donald Justice’s “On the Death of Friends in Childhood” and Peter De Vries’ novel The Blood of the Lamb (1961). Happy 89th birthday, Mr. Kennedy.