Once asked about politics in a symposium portentously titled “The Writer’s Situation,” J.V. Cunningham replied:
“You can
write on politics or not. I do not. But is politics meant here? Or is it,
rather, ideology? The latter is religious, not political, though religion has
awesome political consequences. Politics is negotiation, accommodation,
controlled power. It is achieving consensus without agreement, defeating a
zoning change, voting for Harry Truman. It is being chairman. It is irrigation
and not a flood. It is effective and corrupt in a settled society, the Old
Adam. It gets another generation through to the grave with tolerable illusions
and half-beliefs. I have finally written on politics.”
If you’re
unfamiliar with Cunningham’s poems and essays, you might think, “What a sensible fellow. How
level-headed and mature his understanding is.” You might even mistake him for Michael
Oakeshott. Old Cunningham hands will smile, nod their heads and say, “Cunningham
believed in poetry as a form of public utterance. It makes sense he would consider
politics a form of public service, not self-indulgence.”
Cunningham
is one of poetry’s mavericks, a critic impervious to literary fashion, an
anatomist of desire, a Swiftian satirist and an epigrammist in an age of free
verse mush:
“Deep
summer, and time pauses. Sorrow wastes
To a new
sorrow. While time heals time hastes.”
Few modern
poems are as dense without waste as Cunningham’s. They are philosophically rich and each syllable counts. Consider one of his
most beautiful poems, “For a Woman with Child”:
“We are
ourselves but carriers. Life
Incipient
grows to separateness
And is its
own meaning. Life is,
And not;
there is no nothingness.”
This recalls
nothing so much as a passage in Guy Davenport’s essay on a very different sort
of poet, Ronald Johnson, in The Geography
of the Imagination (1981):
“Nature has
no nothing. To feel that it has is what we call the devil, the enemy. In Blakean
words, our predicament is that we can exist and still not be, for being
requires an awakeness from the dream of custom and of ourselves. The self is by
nature turned outward to connect with the harmony of things. The eyes cannot
see themselves, but something other. The strange and paradoxical rule of nature
is that we are fullest in our being by forgetting our being. To love nothing is
to be nothing, to give is to have.”
Cunningham
was born on August 22, 1911 and died in 1985 at age seventy-three.
[Cunningham’s
responses to the questionnaire quoted above can be found in the August 1970 issue
of New American Review. The books to
own are The Poems of J. V. Cunningham (ed. Timothy Steele, 1997) and The Collected
Essays of J.V. Cunningham (1976). Wiseblood Books has announced it will publish
The Complete Essays of J.V. Cunningham
in November.]
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