'Begin to Memorize Again'

“A simple test of any collection’s merit is this: supposing you were editing an anthology of the year’s best poems, how many of these would you be tempted by? For me, three-quarters of those in Between the Chains would have a claim to be included. Or here's another test. Joseph Epstein has recently lamented the dearth of poems with single, memorable lines as once there were in the days of Yeats and Eliot. Let him read Turner Cassity, and begin to memorize again.” 

Thirty years ago, in “The Occasion of the Poem,” Tom Disch reviews six new volumes, including Cassity’s. I might have discovered Cassity’s work sooner had I read Disch’s review in Poetry. The two poets had much in common. Both mastered poetic technique, both were gay, both mocked with laughter. The poet whose work most often reminds me of Cassity’s and Disch’s is Jonathan Swift. All are formalists to one degree or another, are attracted to the topical and usually write with a satirical edge. All are given to mordant comedy. Take Cassity’s “Acid Rain in Sherwood Forest” from Between the Chains (University of Chicago Press, 1991), including these lines:

    

"We have, as usual, let sentiment

Define the natural.  Our sympathies

Are not with progress but with Robin Hood,

Who is himself mere envy wearing tights.”

 

And this: “Child / Of nature, little boy of five or six, / Why have you pulled the rubber suction cup / From off your arrow and begun to sharpen it?” Has recent poetry ever been less naïve about human nature?

 

Disch refers to Epstein’s essay “Who Killed Poetry?” in the August 1988 issue of Commentary. Read today, Epstein’s post-mortem seems self-evident, and the subsequent thirty-four years have confirmed his judgments. The mediocre careerists have won, though some good work still gets published. In recent years we’ve seen R.L. Barth’s Learning War, Maryann Corbett’s In Code, Dick Davis’ Love in Another Language, Boris Dralyuk’s My Hollywood and Other Poems, A.M. Juster’s Wonder and Wrath, Aaron Poochigian’s American Divine and A.E. Stallings’ Like. I list only books I can see on my shelves as I write.

 

But in no way are these poets and poems central to the culture, or even central to most other poets and their readers. The fragmentation of the reading audience, the professionalization of writing, and the resulting diminishment of poetry’s importance have seen to that. We’ve lost some of our best poets in recent years – Richard Wilbur, Geoffrey Hill, Les Murray – and their deaths haven’t helped.

 

That one-time ideal, the “well-rounded” person – educated, with or without a degree; on-goingly self-educated; curious and respectful of tradition; a common reader without necessarily being bookish or academic – is, it’s time to admit, largely extinct. Epstein writes:

 

“It was Wallace Stevens who once described poetry as ‘a pheasant disappearing in the brush.’ One gets a darting glint of it every once in a while in the work of the better contemporary poets, but to pretend that that meaty and delectable bird freely walks the land isn’t going to get him out of hiding, not soon, and maybe not ever.”