Most of Richard Wilbur’s poetry I read retrospectively, in books, long after it was written and first published in magazines. One exception I remember is “All That Is,” which appeared in the May 13, 1985 issue of The New Yorker. I had mostly stopped reading the magazine by that time. Someone observed that every reader of The New Yorker believes its glory days have passed, and that the time he discovered it was the Golden Age. That realization probably hit me in the late seventies, though I occasionally relented to see what John Cheever and Whitney Balliett had published.
My late
father-in-law was a dedicated worker of crossword puzzles, those in the Times and the Post. He sat at the counter in his kitchen in Virginia, working
them till complete, every square filled with ink. He politely rebuffed kibitzing
but occasionally asked about a specific
clue. Wilbur’s poem reminds me of the odds and ends of language found in
crossword puzzles, the unfamiliar abbreviations and acronyms, the small esoteric words used
like tiles in a mosaic. Wilbur’s first example: “The confluence of the Oka and
the Aare,” rivers in Russia and Switzerland, respectively. And this homage to
Charles Lamb: “Does she end / By reading to him from the works of Elia?”
Crossword
puzzles, the tough ones, are playgrounds for polymaths who revel in precious trivia.
Wilbur cites Lautréamont, and does the reader of Les Chants de Maldoror know his Hindu deities (Markandeya) and that
an oast is a kiln for drying hops?
Nabokov (whose tile-like ADA is a likely clue) would
have loved Wilbur’s poem:
“It is a
puzzle which, as puzzles do,
Dreams that
there is no puzzle. It is a rite
Of finitude,
a picture in whose frame
Roc, oast,
and Inca decompose at once
Into the
ABCs of every day.”
3 comments:
Slightly off topic, but yesterday I came across the word "ruth" while reading Daniel Deronda. "Among the things we may gamble away in a lazy selfish life is the capacity for ruth, compunction, or any unselfish regret..." Turns out it is an old word, according to the OED, dating back to 1200. Ruthless first shows up a century later. Always interesting when the secondary word outlasts the original.
I never saw the New Yorker as being much more than John Updike's private prose parking lot, though every few months I would go through a pile of them at the library just to read Pauline Kael's movie reviews.
In the 1980s, I worked in a building on 43rd Street, a few doors down from where the New Yorker had its offices. One day, I was coming back from lunch when I recognized John Updike himself (much taller than I'd pictured him)standing on the sidewalk, talking to another man. "I'll tell my grandchildren about this," I thought when I got back to my desk. Now that actually have grandchildren, I wouldn't dare bore them with a story like that.
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