`A Skeptic in Dialogue with Hope'

My personal acquaintance with the late poet Howard Nemerov is attenuated but quite real. When I worked for the newspaper in Schenectady, N.Y., I ate lunch almost daily in a diner on the other side of the Mohawk River, in Scotia. Another regular was co-owner of a nearby steel-fabrication business. He wore a tie but fancied himself a working stiff and littérateur. His son had graduated in English from Washington University, in St. Louis, and among his teachers had been William H. Gass, Stanley Elkin and Nemerov. My fellow-diner said he had met all of them while visiting his son, and had not been impressed by the first two: “But Nemerov, he was a mensh, a real mensh.”

In The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten gives three definitions for mensh, the first being “A human being,” and thus a synonym of its German cognate, Mensch. Next: “An upright, honorable, decent person.” Finally, and this is the meaning I think my friend intended: “Someone of consequence; someone to admire and emulate; someone of noble character.” Rosten adds:

“The key to being `a real mensh’ is nothing less than – character: rectitude, dignity, a sense of what is right, responsible, decorous. Many a poor man, many an ignorant man, is a mensh.”

Based only on years of reading Nemerov’s work, I’m certain my diner friend was right. Most of Nemerov’s poems are formal, with rhyme and meter, and devoted to what we unsophisticates know as “the real world.” Even when writing light verse, Nemerov is almost never frivolous. He’s serious but not humorless or earnest. In his foreword to The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov, Wyatt Prunty writes:

“Nemerov was a skeptic in dialogue with hope. He cast a longing eye toward neoplatonism, window-shopped the Aristotelian aspects of Aquinas, but ended up viewing America’s mid-century suburbs through the lens of process philosophy, where formulas were more reliable than forms and the logos was more verb than noun.”

Nemerov was productive though not long-lived. He died at 71 in 1991. His Collected Poems, all 516 pages, sits on my shelf, but like Wordsworth and Tennyson, he’s a poet improved by careful selection. Out of curiosity I picked up the Selected Poems, prudently edited by Daniel Anderson and published in 2003 by Swallow Press, and re-discovered a poet who writes for grownups. In the final stanza of “The Blue Swallows,” Nemerov says:

“O swallows, swallows, poems are not
The point. Finding again the world,
That is the point, where loveliness
Adorns intelligible things
Because the mind’s eye lit the sun.”

No theories. No preening or self-dramatizing. Just lyrical, down-to-earth intelligence, an engagement with reality tempered by coolness, a little like late Yeats. Nemerov had a taste for elegies and sonnets. His is a homely, competent voice, technically deft but without pyrotechnics, one I find congenial. Here’s a passage from “September, the First Day of School”:

“A school is where they grind the grain of thought,
And grind the children who must mind the thought.
It may be those two grindings are but one,
As from the alphabet come Shakespeare’s Plays.
As from the integers comes Euler’s Law,
As from the whole, inseparably, the lives,

“The shrunken lives that have not been set free
By law or by poetic phantasy.”

Nemerov often navigates Cheever/Yates country, but more meditatively, without their desperation. He has poems about lawn sprinklers, telephone books, model airplanes, burning leaves, the town dump, and many about trees. Here’s one, “Blue Suburban,” that might be set in Bullet Park or on Revolutionary Road:

“Out in the elegy country, summer evenings,
It used to be always six o’clock, or seven,
Where the fountain of the willow always wept
Over the lawn, where the shadows crept longer
But came no closer, where the talk was brilliant,
The laughter friendly, where they all were young
And taken by the darkness in surprise
That night should come and the small lights go on
In the lonely house down in the elegy country,
Where the bitter things were said and the drunken friends
Steadied themselves away in their courses
For industrious ruin or casual disaster
Under a handful of pale, permanent stars.”

Finally, another favorite, one that might usefully be taught in poetry “workshops,” titled “Because You Asked About the Line Between Prose and Poetry”:

“Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

“And there came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.”