Whose
best lines run across the page like scars
Carved
in the tree of us healing crookedly
Over
the dead foliage of who we are.”
In
real life, “foxed S-O-B’s” are not my type but I’m a sucker for them in print.
Our author plays with “foxed.” In books it means the brownish-yellow stains
left by time on the page. And beer turned sour is said to be foxed, and a drunk
is foxed. Wyatt Prunty’s trio can’t be read without leaving a reasonably
indelible mark. How many writers stick in memory, if not whole verbatim lines
then phrases or vivid impressions? “Extravagant Love” showed up among the new
poems in Wyatt Prunty’s Unarmed and Dangerous:
New and Selected Poems (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). His three
were newly dead – J.V. Cunningham and Philip Larkin in 1985, Howard Nemerov in
1991. Each, especially Cunningham and Larkin, was intolerant of cant, the
lubrication of our lives, and of the lazily sentimental. Each played the role
of lie-detector and truth-teller. Prunty refers to Larkin’s “The Old Fools,”
with its indictment of the old with their “air of baffled absence.”
In
an interview Prunty gave William Baer, published in The Formalist in 2001, he says of the poets named in “Extravagant
Love”: “Those writers used an acid bath to distill their subjects and get down
to what’s essential and truthful. They wanted each of their poems to hold up in
the way that Howard [Nemerov] describes in `Lion & Honeycomb’ when he says:
“Just
for the sake of getting something right
Once
in a while, something that could stand
On
its own flat feet to keep out windy time . . .”
Nemerov’s
poet aspires to leave behind “words that would / Enter the silence and be there
as a light.” All three of Prunty’s poets did it more than once. He goes on in
the interview:
“Cunningham
did it with an economy of wit. Howard would shock you not only with wit, but
also with harsh statements, humor, and all kinds of other things, to shake up
sentiment and the reader’s expectations. As for Larkin, he often seems so
scathing and contemptuous, but in fact, I think he’s actually quite
compassionate about the people he’s discussing, but he’s absolutely determined not
to be sentimental in any way. So they’re all tough guys, and they all applied a
tough, intellectual rigor to their subjects that often seems a kind of
harshness towards others. But I think it was a conscious aesthetic method they
used to avoid sentimentality, not an indication of disdain for their subjects.”
J.V.
Cunningham’s fifteen-poem sequence To
What Strangers, What Welcome (1964) is subtitled A Sequence of Short Poems. It forms elliptical narrative which he elsewhere
distills like this: “A traveler drives west; he falls in love; he comes home.”
It’s probably the best verse he ever wrote, and begins like this:
“I
drive Westward. Tumble and loco weed
Persist.
And in the vacancies of need,
The
leisure of desire, whirlwinds a face
As
luminous as love, lost as this place.”
The
operative phrase is “vacancies of need.” Cunningham fashions a westbound film
noir travelogue, as in the sixth poem:
“It
was in Vegas. Celibate and able
I
left the silver dollars on the table
And
tried the show. The black-out, baggy pants,
Of
course, and then this answer to romance:
Her
ass twitching as if it had the fits,
Her
gold crotch grinding, her athletic tits,
One
clock, the other counter clockwise twirling.
It
was enough to stop a man from girling.”
The
speaker, back home in the East, concludes the sequence with this:
“Identity,
that spectator
Of
what he calls himself, that net
And
aggregate of energies
In
transient combination—some
So
marginal are they mine? Or is
There
mine? I sit in the last warmth
Of
a New England fall, and I?
A
premise of identity
Where
the lost hurries to be lost,
Both
in its own best interests
And
in the interests of life.”
The
sequence chronicles, for adults, the journey of a middle-aged man. This is what
Prunty means by “an economy of wit.”
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