'There Is No Nothingness'

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.]