`Verse is Not Easy'

David Yezzi is a good poet (see The Hidden Model) and executive editor of The New Criterion, which consistently publishes better arts writing and poetry than any magazine in the country. In this weekend’s edition of The Wall Street Journal, Yezzi uses the approach of April and National Poetry Month as an occasion to reconnoiter the terrain of contemporary poetry and, to no one’s surprise, finds the enemy has not only breeched our defenses but severed our supply lines, while the reservoirs of lousy poetry remain bottomless.

Yezzi points out the usual sources of mediocrity – so-called “experimental poetry,” the fetishism of politics and what he calls “folksy, first-person ruminations of the poet who feels that every mundane observation will be of interest to others.” Not all is grim, however. Yezzi applauds Poetry magazine in its recently born-again incarnation under the editorship of Christian Wiman, and cites as evidence a sharp, funny poem by Kay Ryan from a 2005 issue.

What’s most invigorating about Yezzi’s essay, however, is the way he musters J.V. Cunningham to the cause. Cunningham was a poet, epigramist and scholar whose work, in the context of contemporary poetry, is a cold mountain stream blithely flowing past a landfill. He is one of my favorite poets, and it’s invigorating to see Yezzi revive this poet of wit and sanity. Here’s a pertinent sample titled “For My Contemporaries”:

“How time reverses
The proud in heart!
I now make verses
Who aimed at art.

“But I sleep well.
Ambitious boys
Whose big lines swell
With spiritual noise,

“Depise me not,
And be not queasy
To praise somewhat:
Verse is not easy.

But rage who will.
Time that procured me
Good sense and skill
Of madness cured me.”

Horace and Ben Jonson, not Tony Hoagland or Jackson Mac Low, live in such lines. Ten years ago, the poet Timothy Steele edited a sumptuous edition of The Poems of J.V. Cunningham, complete with notes and a useful introduction. Here’s another tart little poem from Cunningham:

“And what is love? Misunderstanding, pain,
Delusion, or retreat? It is in truth
Like an old brandy after a long rain,
Distinguished, and familiar, and aloof.”

Lines like that, and there are hundreds more, bolster the tempered optimism with which Yezzi concludes his piece:

“Holding poetry at a certain remove helps readers to resist the sentimental and meretricious. It is precisely this skeptical weather eye that most reliably discovers a place for the genuine. The finest poetry overcomes our wariness and our repeated disappointments. To shed light on experience, to discover language for our most complex emotions, to reveal such emotions to us fully for the first time: I suspect that J.V. Cunningham would have agreed that these are pretensions that the best poems can hope to satisfy.”