'Perhaps Even Pleasure in Difference'

“The voice of his poems, though sometimes marred by an affectation of toughness, is severe, sardonic, and bruising.” 

Who might be the subject of this evaluation? Hardly a recipe for poetry awards and grants today. Jonathan Swift would be a respectable guess. No political pieties, sensitive introspection or lines that read like flaccid prose. Irving Howe is speaking of his friend and fellow faculty member at Brandeis, J.V. Cunningham. In A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (1982), Howe devotes two out of his 382 pages to Cunningham but concludes by calling him “the one colleague whom I regarded as my teacher.” I have a copy of Cunningham’s Tradition and Poetic Structure (1960) inscribed “For Irving, Aug. 29, 1960, J.V.C.”

Attentively reading Cunningham’s poetry and prose could constitute a first-rate education, one largely absent from today’s universities. Howe writes:

 

“Prickly, contentious, rudely charming, he was a determined plebian. If I had a New York dress presser for a father, he had a Montana carpenter, and we both felt warmth for the unions to which our fathers had belonged, both despised the genteel pretensions of many academics. Cunningham was not an easy man to be near. Inner torments could make him savage (as they could make me sullen). The way to preserve a friendship with him was to keep a certain distance.”

 

This rings true to life. Nor will readers of Cunningham’s stringently witty poetry, written in the classical plain style reminiscent of Ben Jonson, be surprised by Howe’s characterization. Here’s an untitled poem from Trivial, Vulgar, and Exalted (1959):

 

“I had gone broke, and got set to come back,

And lost, on a hot day and a fast track,

On a long shot at long odds, a black mare

By Hatred out of Envy by Despair.”

 

Cunningham published no mediocre poems. I rank him among the finest American poets, with Dickinson, Robinson, Eliot, Frost and Wilbur. Howe describes him as “an intellectual opponent of romanticism [who] struggled in his poetry, as in his life, with an ineradicably romantic temperament.” This is shrewd criticism and character analysis, and Howe goes on to praise the example Cunningham set for him as a critic, teacher, scholar and human being:

 

“Between Cunningham and me there was an enormous gap in experience, temperament, ideas. Yet we worked easily together, amused and pleased that we could. Being professional himself, he honored me with the presumption that I too could become professional. I learned, by being with him, the value of scraping against a mind utterly unlike one’s own, so that finally there could emerge between our two minds a conditional peace, perhaps even pleasure in difference.” 

 

I find it difficult to choose a favorite poem by Cunningham but I’m partial to To What Strangers, What Welcome (1964), subtitled A Sequence of Short Poems. In his essay “Several Kinds of Short Poem” the poet, who grew up in Montana, writes:

 

“The poems would deal with the American West, that vast spiritual region from Great Falls, Montana, to El Paso, Texas; from Fort Riley, Kansas, to the sinks of Kansas; and with the California Coast, another and perhaps less spiritual region. And the poems would relate some sort of illicit and finally terminated love affair. And there would be a fusion of the feeling in the personal relationship and the feeling for the West and the Coast.”

 

The sequence consists of fifteen poems. It’s not a travelogue but an elliptical narrative which he sketches in the essay like this: “A traveler drives west; he falls in love; he comes home.” The fractured story is grim and occasionally squalid, more film noir than happy romance, as in the sixth poem:

 

“It was in Vegas. Celibate and able

I left the silver dollars on the table

And tried the show. The black-out, baggy pants,

Of course, and then this answer to romance:

Her ass twitching as if it had the fits,

Her gold crotch grinding, her athletic tits,

One clock, the other counter clockwise twirling.

It was enough to stop a man from girling.”

 

It’s Cunningham’s correlation of the vast, uninhabited landscape and the narrator’s fraught emotional life that makes To What Strangers, What Welcome so compelling. Here is the first poem in the sequence, summarized by Timothy Steele as an “intimation of an as-yet-unmet lover”:

 

“I drive Westward. Tumble and loco weed

Persist. And in the vacancies of need,

The leisure of desire, whirlwinds a face

As luminous as love, lost as this place.”

 

Cunningham was born on August 23, 1911, and died on this date, March 30, in 1985.

 

[The books to get are The Poems of J.V. Cunningham (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, ed. Timothy Steele, 1997) and The Complete Essays of J.V. Cunningham, Wiseblood Books, 2024). Also, see the class notes kept by the late D.G. Myers when he was a student of Cunningham.]