'Poems Can Be True in Different Ways'

Something seems to be stirring out there. I’m too cautious and cynical to proclaim a renaissance in formalist poetry but the prognosis is promising. Clarence Caddell, an Australian, has published the second issue of The Borough: A Journal of Poetry. I wrote about the first issue in September. Just last week I wrote about the third issue of New Verse Review.

 

Especially gratifying is seeing five poems by R.L. Barth in The Borough. Bob is a Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam who served as a patrol leader in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion. He is the finest American poet to have served in that war – not that there’s a lot of competition for the title. His work is composed in the plain style, practiced by writers from Ben Jonson to Yvor Winters and J.V. Cunningham. Here is Bob’s anti-sentimental “Letters from Home”:

 

“I never understood

Why others couldn’t wait

For letters when what good

Came from news three-weeks late?

 

“Came from an alien world

Of proms and family meals?

Took mind from war, unfurled

No memory that heals

 

“But carelessness that kills?

The truth is that you’re here

On mountains or foothills

Where life, not home, is dear.”

 

And here is “Flying Home,” subtitled March 1969, also from The Borough:

 

“Weapons surrendered to the armory,

My separation papers well in hand,

I look at the dark porthole, where I see

Myself in civvies, ill-prepared to land.”

 

Another good poet collected in The Borough is Vivian Smith, a retired teacher in Australia who turns eighty-two this year. As with Barth, note the emotional realism, the pared-down though conversational style, and the anti-sentimental tone. Here is Smith’s “Birthday”:

 

“Born in the year that Hitler came to power,

I don’t do face book, blog or tweet,

I’ve never owned a mobile phone,

kind of old-school, dressed to disappear,

 

“and yet surprise, surprise, I’m still alive

with poems waiting to be written down

like sign writing scribbled on the sky,

half-erased, already vanishing.

 

“I like my life, the humdrum tasks.

I never hungered for the hippie trail.

Indifferent to fashion, I survive.

Poems can be true in different ways.

 

“I write them down, I do not hold my breath.

I don’t just sit around, waiting for my death.”

 

On Friday, Bob sent me a new poem not published in The Borough. Of it he writes: “Here's a poem about a subject I've been thinking about for fifty-five years. Like [J.V. Cunningham], I am a renegade Catholic; but, as JVC certainly knew, being a renegade doesn't mean you leave the training behind.” Here is “A Soldier-Poet Courts Controversy”:

 

“‘Your unchecked rages and so forth are clearly

Manifestations of PTSD.’

An all-encompassing excuse, for sure,

To which I give a blunt response: bull shit.

Agnostically, call them . . . character flaws;

But Catholics know the Seven Deadly Sins

Down in the depths of their iniquity,

And strictly hold themselves accountable.”