“A.E.
Stallings is a classicist, and would be if she never used a Greek or Roman
reference. Intelligence, balance, an unerring sense of which form will further
the material: these are classicism's characteristics, and hers. She makes you
realize how much poetry is simply a mess. In some cases a striking and
imaginative mess; still . . .”
The
ellipsis, characteristically, is Cassity’s. There’s no need to make the rest explicit.
Most poetry, past and present, is a
mess. Anyone reading Stallings or Cassity would know that. The enumerated qualities
of a classicist, beginning with intelligence, are, of course, his own. Without
exception, his poems are about something,
dense with historical, musical, geographical, pop-cultural allusions, but they
mean something and often help tell a story, unlike the flotsam that clutters The Cantos. Cassity's prose and verse are tight
and flabless. One could acquire a respectable education following up on every
reference in every Cassity poem. He is, as he says of Stallings, “absolutely
contemporary and recognizably classicist at the same time.”
Cassity was
a student of Yvor Winters at Stanford in the nineteen-fifties. He remained
loyal to his one-time teacher and his strict metrics, while becoming the most
wayward of the Wintersians. Cassity’s contribution to Poems in Memory of Yvor Winters on the Centenary of His Birth, a
chapbook edited by R.L. Barth in 2000, is “Exclusions Not of Rhyme”:
“Much I
omitted. What is left
Let
recompense the loss.
Detail . . .
denial, flanking theft,
Add
nothing to the Cross.
“The myriad
appeal of wit
May
tempt to overlong.
It is not
easy to omit.
The
press of fact is strong:
“Variety has
wealth to burn.
Tight
focus one must earn.
Confront the
many and be done.
Face
into death: the one.”
The title no
doubt alludes to The Exclusions of a
Rhyme (1960), a collection of poems by another independent-minded former
student of Winters’, J.V. Cunningham. Nearly every line is an aphorism and an
apologia: “Much I omitted.” “Sitting behind Ben-Hur” is one of the new poems in
The Destructive Element: New and Selected
Poems (Ohio University Press, 1998):
“The
drumbeat sets the oar-stroke, cruelly;
But then we
do not choose our heartbeat.
“Manacles
confine us. Who, however,
Can be
really said to venture?
“If in the
battle it is row or drown,
We row. The
lash is often on us.
“It is an
incentive, in its way.
The rowing
builds up shoulder muscles.
“I’ve a tan.
I look at backs a lot.
I deeply
understand teamwork.
“I live in
filth. Was I fastidious
When I was
free? Here sharks will have us;
“It’s not as
though elsewhere there are not jackals.
Bear up.
Hand and heart grow calloused.”
Cassity is
no nihilist, though his poems revel in human vanities and our bottomless capacity
for self-deception. The oarsman-slave starts out as a well-tanned, well-muscled
Pollyanna, but judging by the final line, he seems to have learned something. According to my count, three of Cassity’s
books come with epigraphs borrowed from novels by Ivy Compton-Burnett, which makes
perfect sense. Like her books, Cassity’s poems mingle lightness of touch with
solidity. At the end of his Stallings review he writes:
“[She] reminds us that poems are structures. The best, like hers, are rational
structures. Too many are like those of the notorious Winchester House in San Jose, where the only principles were vanity, intention, and addition.
Curiosities may survive, but only as curiosities.”
Cassity was
born on this date, Jan. 12, in 1929, in Jackson, Miss., and died on July 26, 2009 in Atlanta at age eighty. His work reminds me of an entry in Abram Tertz’s
prison memoir A Voice from the Chorus
(trans. Kyril Fitzlyon and Max Hayward, 1976): “Art is insolent because it is
so clear. Or rather, it is insolent in order to make itself clear. First it
sticks a knife into the table and then it says: there you are – that’s what I’m
like. (While listening to Haydn.)”
Look for Cassity’s
poems and read them. He is one of our best and will never insult your
intelligence.
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