'Shaggy, Cosmic, Learned or Foul'

“Typically indifferent to current trends, the fire-dry poems of Turner Cassity, through nine collections, seldom vary from their pet concern and target: human nature.” 

Poems that amuse get dismissed as frivolous unless the reader is looking for  confirmation of his hobbyhorse du jour and the satire is sufficiently strident. Poetry is heavy, after all, not light. The rest is doggerel. So say the earnest-minded. Yet, Cassity is as serious a poet as I know and at the same time one of the funniest. The sentence quoted above is how Moore Moran (1931-2011) begins his review of Cassity’s No Second Eden (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2002) in Prairie Schooner.

 

Both Moran and Cassity were students of Yvor Winters at Stanford in the nineteen-fifties. Moran’s assessment of Cassity’s work is one of the most insightful I know:

 

“[H]e does not deal with transgression for its own sake. Nor out of the reporter’s compulsion to ‘tell it like it is.’ This is one of our finest poets endeavoring to gain a foothold on sense in a nonsensical world. And he goes about it by employing an adaptation of familiar Socratic theory: namely, that truth is approached most fruitfully by first identifying and eliminating the things that truth is not.”

 

Cassity’s poems invariably deal with human nature and its infinite capacity for rationalization, but the poet is no scolding schoolmarm. His goal is not to teach lessons. Take “Crime and Punishment,” devoted to the 1924 Loeb and Leopold murder case, including these couplets:

 

“The crime poor Bobby was the victim of

Is in a sense upon Raskolnikov,

 

“In that the inexperienced who read

Believe the less well-read do not quite bleed.”

 

Moran writes in his review of No Second Eden: “The poems teem with the satirical prickle that has become a Cassity trademark. In the Garden, after all, didn't human nature (presumably with a choice) blow it big time? Since then, occasions of man’s behavioral triumphs have been rare bright spots in a dispiriting trend. Human nature appears to thrive on bad habits, and this is where Mr. Cassity makes his living.”

 

Moore concludes his poem “Just Joking” (The Room Within, 2010) with these lines: “And in these moments, a joke, / Shaggy, cosmic, learned or foul, / Needs no defense.”