'A Poem Calls For a Formal Reading'

I swore off poetry readings a long time ago for reasons of health. The atmosphere of pressurized solipsism makes it difficult for me to breathe. Sugary adulation induces diabetic comas. Free verse is emetic and I’m allergic to hipsters but Thursday evening I broke my vow and went to hear A.M. Juster read as part of the Summer Literary Programs at the University of Saint Thomas here in Houston. And I feel fine. 

Mike read for almost two hours, original poems and translations. His voice is soft, sometimes whispery, but not out of feigned, Chet Baker-like “sensitivity.” To listen to him read is to hear a grownup. He maintains a strong mid-tempo pace. His words are neither rushed nor labored. The enunciation is usually flawless. No cheap effects, over-emoting, goofy sounds or pandering to listeners, though he’s reliably funny. Mike sounds like a husband, father and thinker, worthy of trust. He is the messenger, not the message. The poet James Matthew Wilson, founding director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Saint Thomas, introduced Juster as “a civil servant in a number of ways.” For six years, Mike served as commissioner of the Social Security Administration during the Bush II and Obama terms. The diversity of his life experience recalls Wallace Stevens'.

 

Mike read certified oldies like “Moscow Zoo” but also a poem from his translation of Petrarch's Canzoniere, to be published next year by W.W. Norton:

 

“No stars adrift in peaceful skies,

no ships that drift through tranquil seas,

no fields of clanging cavalries,

no woods where wildlife runs and flies,

 

“no promise of a long-sought prize,

no love expressed in rhapsodies,

no glades or streams where melodies

of chaste and graceful ladies rise,

 

“nor other things can lift my heart

for she who was my only light

and mirror shrouded it from me.

 

“Life brings such grinding pain I start

to cry for death and clearer sight

of someone better not to see.”

 

Between poems, Mike talked shop, including the virtues of meter and rhyme. As a one-time acolyte of John Berryman, I’ve always admired his sonnet “No”:

 

“No, not this time.  I cannot celebrate

a man’s discarded life, and will not try;

these knee-jerk elegies perpetuate

the nightshade lies of Plath.  Why glorify

descent into a solipsistic hell?

Stop.  Softly curse the waste.  Don’t elevate

his suffering to genius.  Never tell 

me he will live on.  Never call it fate.

Attend the service.  Mourn.  Pray.  Comfort those

he lacerated.  Keep him in your heart,

but use that grief to teach.  When you compose

a line, it is a message, not just art.

Be furious with me, but I refuse

to praise him.  No, we have too much to lose.”

 

And for my fellow Godfather fans, please read “Epistle to a Friend Confused about the Ivy League,” accompanied by Joseph Bottum’s gloss. Mike closed with “Proposed Clichés,” including “Ask not what your country can do, / for fear of the answer.” Without being stuffy or dogmatic about it, Mike lived up to the standards Yvor Winters set out in his essay “The Audible Reading of Poetry” (The Function of Criticism, 1957):

 

“A poem calls for a formal reading, partly because the poem is of its own nature a formal statement, and partly because only such a reading will render the rhythm with precision. Furthermore, it is only with a formal tone as a basis that variations of tone within the poem can be rendered with precision: without such a formal tone to unify the poem, the poem becomes merely a loose assortment of details.”