'I Find a Demanding Medium Liberating'

One can argue that the essential purpose of art, despite what the humorless say, is to give pleasure to its consumers. If so, I rather uncharacteristically denied myself a lot of it by not discovering the poems of Turner Cassity until the final year of his life. He is a poet allergic to cliché and verbal flab, as every good writer ought to be but seldom is. He is reliably funny, often with a campy flavor. In general, I dislike campiness. It panders while the best humor is unexpected and harsh, but most times Cassity carries it off. He also writes a poet’s prose – not “poetic” but balanced, with every word doing its part to energize sentences that carry the thought. This becomes important when your nature, like Cassity’s, is indelibly contrary. Like any honest writer he is often politically incorrect. At the time of his death, Cassity left two unpublished books of poems: Hitler’s Weather and Poems for Isobel. Cassity’s literary executor, the poet R.L. Barth, sent me copies of the manuscripts. “Clausewitz of the Drawing Board” is from Hitler’s Weather:

“Is it significant that War and Peace

Are housed in buildings equally inept?

The Pentagon, the League of Nations morgue,

The UN in its Babel of the T-square?

Geometry, Geneva, Hope's "one world"

High Mannerism, all of them too trite

To serve as logos. Chateau Frontenac

Is where Defense Department ought to be,

A pseudo-citadel with lots of thralls.

Contemporary with the League Palais

At least three buildings on the Shanghai Bund,

That is, the "International" Settlement,

Could more appropriately have housed the corpse

Than who defeated Le Corbusier

In the design contest. Predestination?

Not for nothing Calvin's capital.

Having designed an opera house (the Met),

Is Wallace Harrison to be forgiven

Building earlier our East Side house

For diplomatic comic opera?

His Follies stage? Developed World or Third,

We really should do better. Working by

Whatever measure--cubits, inches, feet,

Pyramid inches--raise a folly that

Of many styles and none can say it all:

By other means continued, Peace is War.”

 

I urge you to look for Cassity’s collections. They are technically adept, funny and are actually about something other than Turner Cassity. They have identifiable subjects. A former student of Yvor Winters at Stanford, Cassity revels in knowing things and sharing them with readers. In this he reminds me of another Southerner, Guy Davenport, who wrote: “I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.” In 1988, Cassity wrote a 106-page autobiographical essay for the Dictionary of Literary Biography. He writes:

 

“In forty years I have seen no evidence that they [‘aspiring poets’] have the willingness or the ability to create characters to have relationships. It is not altogether their fault. They have no models. The English lyric is too relentlessly first person and too relentlessly centered on the internal. . . . The possibility that poetry might deal with settings and characters as well as drama or fiction is alien. . . . I find a demanding medium liberating rather than otherwise. The more secure the technique the wider range of subjects I am prepared to deal with. Few poems I read, however, have a subject.”

 

Cassity was born in Jackson, Miss., on this date, January 12, in 1929 and died on July 27, 2009 in Atlanta at age eighty.