'Chronology Alone Made Strange Bedfellows'

A reader here in Texas found a “third- or fourth-hand paperback copy" of Twentieth Century American Poetry, an anthology/textbook published by McGraw Hill in 2004, and mailed it to me this week. The editors are Dana Gioia, David Mason and Meg Schoerke. My reader writes: 

“Per my compulsive mode, I looked up all the ‘pre-contemporary’ (born prior to 1940) poets to see who might still be among the living. They are: Ferlinghetti, Snyder, Kennedy, Field, Bly, Charles Wright, Simic, Espaillat, Pastan, Momaday, Chappell, Zamora, Reed, Jared Carter, Dunn, and Kooser.”

 

As if to underline the passing nature of reputations and poetic generations, Lawrence Ferlinghetti died at age 101 last Monday, before the book reached me. Never a writer I cared much about, Ferlinghetti I met when a friend and I cut classes and attended an observance of the first “Earth Day,” in 1970. He preached from the pulpit of a church in downtown Cleveland, and all I remember is the rock-concert frenzy of the audience. (One more memory: My brother once named a cat Lawrence Ferlingkitty, “Larry” for short.) About the other still-living poets who are at least eighty years old, my reader writes: “Most aren’t still all that notable, but a precious few would be worthy of a good retrospective in the days, months and years ahead.” That’s a fair assessment of the survivors.

 

About Pastan and Zamora I know nothing. Snyder, Field, Bly, Wright, Simic, Momaday, Reed, Dunn and Kooser I’ve read but mostly forgotten. I’ve read some of Carter but not enough to say anything worthwhile about his work. The poets on the list I admire and enjoy are X.J. Kennedy, Rhina Espaillat and Fred Chappell. Kennedy is well represented by four poems, including “Little Elegy,” which shows off his rare gift for seeing the comic in the grim. The editors include three poems by the Dominican-born Espaillat, of which “Bilingual/Bilingüe” is probably the best known. About her father, who moved his family to the U.S. when his daughter was seven years old, Espaillat writes:

 

“’English outside this door, Spanish inside,’

he said, ‘y basta.’ But who can divide

 

“the world, the word (mundo y palabra) from

any child?”

 

Chappell, as poet and novelist, is the writer I know best among the pre-1940 survivors. See Midquest (1981), originally published as four separate volumes of poems -- River, Bloodfire, Wind Mountain, and Earthsleep -- between 1975 and 1980. From the four of his poems anthologized in Twentieth Century American Poetry, here is “The Epigrammist”:

 

“Mankind perishes. The world goes dark.

He racks his brains for a tart remark.”

 

Meaningful generalities about the sixteen octogenarians are impossible. Poets, after all,  are individuals, not members of generations or other demographic groups. Some are good, most are mediocre, very few are great. In their preface, the editors write: “Chronology alone made strange bedfellows of some poets . . .”