'Poetry Is Communication'

In 1988 I read a poetry reviewer in Ohio who called Clark Coolidge “arguably the worst poet currently writing in English.” I felt the way I did as a kid longing to see the sideshow freaks at the county fair. I had to meet this guy. I was working for a newspaper in Albany, N.Y. and Coolidge lived an hour away, across the Massachusetts line in the Berkshires, so I interviewed him at his home and wasn’t disappointed.

 

His shtick was the usual avant-garde hauteur. He dismissed readers who expected beauty and coherence in their poetry. He said: “It’s not TV. It’s not the Carson show. A poem never stands in any one place. The delight is in the way the poem changes. It’s not going to sit still and answer your questions.” He went on: “In the popular mind, they still think of Robert Frost, Joyce Kilmer, Rod McKuen, greeting card verse.” Clearly, readers disappointed him. If you feel the sideshow tug I felt thirty-five years ago, seek out Coolidge’s poems on your own. I won’t inflict them on you.

 

I thought of Coolidge again as I retrieved my copy of the poetry anthology Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English (1969), selected by Yvor Winters and one of his students, the poet Kenneth Fields. Winters approved the contents shortly before his death in January 1968. In his introduction Fields writes:

 

“For each of us language is the essential intermediary between the isolated self and the world of others; rather than trammeling the mind and affections, it sets them free, giving them proper objects. And whatever else poetry may be, its medium is language—poetry is communication. Those poets who fail in their responsibilities to the public aspects of language, concentrating instead on the private or eccentric aspects, impair their ability to reveal, to themselves as well as to their readers, the reality of their experience.”

 

The Winters/Field anthology is unusual. For one thing, not one of the collected poems is lousy. Each is worth reading at least once and many are worthy of memorization. You’ll find none of the canonical Romantic poets, not even Keats, and only one from the 18th century – Charles Churchill. After Churchill (1731-1764) the next selection is an American, Jones Very (1813-1880). You’ll find Stevens and Williams but no Tennyson, Whitman, Hopkins, Pound, Eliot, Frost, Moore, Crane, Bunting, Auden or Larkin. The book includes 185 poems by 48 poets from the last 450 years. Fields calls them “the most remarkable poems in English,” including some by members of the “Stanford School,” the finest of that generation of American poets – J.V. Cunningham, Edgar Bowers, Janet Lewis, Thom Gunn and Helen Pinkerton.

 

As originally assembled, Winters selected none of his own poems. Fields added twelve of them. Among them is one of the finest, “Time and the Garden,” which includes these lines:

 

“To seize the greatness not yet fairly earned,

One which the tougher poets have discerned—

Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne,

Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,

And spaced by many years, each line an act

Through which few labor, which no men retract.”