'Besides the Surface of Decorum'

Here’s a book I hadn’t seen in more than forty years: Preferences: 51 American Poets Choose Poems from their Own Work and from the Past (Viking, 1974). Edited by the late Richard Howard, the oversized anthology comes with photographs of each poet taken by Thomas Victor. Half a century ago, it seemed that half the author photos you saw on dust jackets were Victor’s work. In his introduction, Howard is typically long-winded: 

“The point was not to get the poets to speak for continuities, to avow interferences, even contaminations, but to find them for myself . . .”, and so on with that sentence for another sixty-nine words.

 

The book is a time capsule of literary fashion. Most of the sanctioned poets from the Seventies are assembled, including such good ones as Auden (whose death the previous year is not acknowledged), Bishop, Hecht, Justice, Merrill, Nemerov, Tate and Wilbur. Plenty of ephemeralities, too, long past their sell-by dates: Ashbery, Marvin Bell, Ginsberg, Rich and Wakoski, among others. Those still living, forty-nine years later, are Irving Feldman (94), Edward Field (98), Jerome Rothenberg (91), Gary Snyder (92) and Wakoski (85).

 

Two pleasing inclusions are J.V. Cunningham (1911-85) and L.E. Sissman (1927-76). For his poem, Cunningham chooses "Montana Fifty Years Ago," with its devastating penultimate line, “And then the child died and she disappeared.” A novel in seventeen lines. Chosen by Cunningham to accompany his poem is Alexander Pope’s “Ode on Solitude,” written when the poet was twelve years old: “Thus let me live, unseen, unknown . . .” Sissman’s poem is “Safety at Forty: or an Abecedarian Talks a Walk”:

 

“Alfa is nice. Her Roman eye

Is outlined in an O of dark

Experience. She's thirty-nine.

Would it not be kind of fine

To take her quite aback, affront

Her forward manner, take her up

On it? Echo: of course it would.

 

“Betta is nice. Her Aquiline

Nose prowly marches out between

Two raven wings of black sateen

Just touched, at thirty-five, with gray.

What if I riled her quiet mien

With an indecent, subterrene

Proposal? She might like me to.

 

“Gemma is nice. Her Modenese

Zagato body, sprung on knees

As supple as steel coils, shocks

Me into plotting to acquire

The keys to her. She's twenty-nine.

Might I aspire to such a fine

Consort in middle age? Could be.

 

“Delia is nice. Calabrian

Suns engineered the sultry tan

Over (I'm guessing) all of her long

And filly frame. She's twenty-one.

Should I consider that she might

Look kindly on my graying hairs

And my too-youthful suit? Why not?

 

“O Megan, all-American

Wife waiting by the hearth at home,

As handsome still at forty-five

As any temptress now alive,

Must I confess my weariness

At facing stringent mistresses

And head for haven? Here I come.”

 

Sissman pairs his poem with “Resolution in Four Sonnets, of a Poetical Question Put to Me by a Friend, Concerning Four Rural Sisters” by Charles Cotton (1630-87), Montaigne’s translator. It reads like a smuttier, more leering version of Sissman’s poem. Howard writes of Cotton’s verse: “Even to our ears, the Stuart puns . . . suggest what we must always know about light verse, as we have come to call it—that it is ‘light’ because of a darkness nearby, that it always suggests an alternative possibility, another level of experience besides the surface of decorum.”