The most obvious and salient fact about the natural separation of poetry from criticism is that in the greatest ages of poetry there has been little or no criticism. Criticism comes, if at all, after the art.
Karl Shapiro
THINGS HAVE CHANGED since Karl Shapiro’s time—and this is Karl Shapiro’s time. But during his long career of writing both poetry and criticism, the gap between the two has simultaneously widened and narrowed. Theorists have discovered what writers always knew (“The meaning of poetry, as far as language is concerned, is the meaning of hey-nonny-nonny. To the poet, hey-nonny-nonny means what the other words in the poem failed to say.”—Karl Shapiro, In Defense of Ignorance, 1960), but they’ve added a complex new vocabulary to the old insights. In fact, sometimes “old” vocabulary isn’t what it seemed. A previously unpublished essay by Randall Jarrell (which appeared in the Winter 1996 issue of The Georgia Review) reveals that prominent “modernist” critic to have had quite a few insights we have always termed “postmodernist.” The point is that critical ideas, including a poet’s ideas about his own work, evolve across time with overlapping strands rather than clear or sudden breaks.
We think of theory as not being the same as criticism. But for the poet, especially today, theory, criticism, and practice are often one. Poets who last have inevitably evolved not only their own aesthetic principles, but an ongoing critique of these principles. In effect, their work is a kind of “practical theory” (in place of I. A. Richards’ “practical criticism”). Some poets elaborate on their conceptual underpinnings within their poems; some have a kind of invisible structure that governs their choices. In either case, the reader is often made conscious of the process of writing as much as of the subject matter. Together, these add up to what we might, for want of a better term, call content.
I am convinced one of the things that makes a poet have “sticking power” is the sense the reader has that the poet knows what he or she is about. The poems themselves may be full of questions, but the poet is sure of what to ask. (This is different from the “sticking power” of an individual poem, which may or may not be written by a poet who persists.)
And how do we assess persistence in an age when publishing houses are “downsizing” their poetry lists in favor of blockbuster political or TV personalities and the latest legal wrangle? Excellent poets often have a hard time finding a publisher for second, third, even fourth books. Others have found a publisher with loyalty but often also with an insistence that they produce more to keep them in the spotlight. And meanwhile, it takes a spot on NPR or an invitation by Bill Moyers to pull a book of poetry out of the ho-hum category of negligible sales.
The bottom line is a bitter lesson. The place of poetry in our society has been debated for decades with no apparent answers and no lessening of the urgency of the question. But it’s useful to remind ourselves that the question remains urgent to all too few of us. And what about the Internet, with its allure? Will young readers want—and need—the physical presence of the poem on the page? Will they see enough by any one writer to understand the poetry as well as the poem? Or will all our thoughts be scattershot, forays into the unknown?
A writer’s poetry is always more than the sum of his or her poems. One can talk about this only when there is a large enough body of work to reveal an ongoing aesthetic. In a poet who persists, a critical overview simultaneously arises from the poems and governs their inceptions. It links those that will be written to those that have been, however different these may sometimes appear. In this essay, I will look at six poets whose work has persisted over time. A key part of their persistence has been their work’s ability to judge and, if necessary, correct itself. In other words, this is writing that teaches us how it is to be read.
Three years ago, in the afternoons,
I used to sit back here and try
To answer the simple arithmetic of my life,
But never could figure it—
This object and that object
nor all of its implications,
This tree and that shrub
Never completely satisfied the sum or quotient
I took from or carried to,
nor do they so now,
Though I’m back here again, looking to calculate
Look to see what adds up.
I’m instantly in the presence of, inside the voice of, Charles Wright. How do I know this? Even without the black-and-white cover of Chickamauga, even without the potent associations of the title, I know this is a “Southern” voice, a voice that will take the time it needs to think the things it wants to think. Speculative, contemplative, the poems of Charles Wright move across the page with the unhurried pace of a porch swing.
Wright is a poet for whom subject matter is subsumed by process. He can, it appears, begin anywhere, with anything, and a poem will emerge if he gives himself enough time and space to ponder the imponderables and to follow his own train of thought through its curious patterns, trusting it to find its way. At the same time, the poems probe and posit and penetrate even as they seem willing to follow a course of natural logic. (I can’t help but think of “Snow,” one of my early favorites, which begins with the structure of logic—“If we, as we are, are dust, as it will, rises”—and moves through the “then” clause with a sweep of religious and scientific history to end, six lines later, on a surprising note: “white ants, white ants, and the little ribs.”) Logic, in a poem, is not always synonymous with “rational.” Wright takes us on associative journeys which open the rational world to new and different interpretations.
Chickamauga was awarded the 1996 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, only the latest of Wright’s many recognitions. Divided into six unequal sections, each of which embodies the fluidity of time, the book is a kind of stock-taking, a middle-aged reflection. The first section, “Aftermath,” is a series of responses to the ideas of other writers—T. S. Eliot, Lao Tzu, Celan, Li Po (and even Yeats, if a poem called “Easter, 1989” could be said to be referential). Yet each response is filtered through the here and now of landscape, a view through orchard to the Blue Ridge mountains beyond, which colors the response by narrowing it to the specifics of season and circumstance. The second section is a deliberate foray into the “known land” of memory, the exactitude of 1959 and then 1963 in Italy, and the inexactitude of a number of fleeting memories finding a place together in my favorite of the poems, “Sprung Narratives.” Memory—including the impossibility of “fixing” memory, of finding its proper place in the order of things—becomes a motif. But it is the concept that engages the mind, not the event. And memory is not the moment held, but a movement of its own:
This text is a shadow text.
Under its images, under its darkened prerogatives,
Lie the lines of youth,
golden, and lipped in a white light.
They sleep as their shadows move
As though in a dream,
disconnected, unwished-upon.
And slightly distorted. And slightly out of control.
The other four sections twist these strands to form a thread comprised of memory, response, careful observation, and surprising images—until, in a religious sense, it connects “everything with everything else” and, in a more literary vein, “constructs us and deconstructs us.”
“An Ordinary Afternoon in Charlottesville” is exemplary. The somewhat generic title, paying homage to Wallace Stevens, could serve for many of the poems in the book. The ordinary, the title implies, is sufficient; everything is important. The scene is a close-up of an orchard, with birds “combustible / In the thin leaves incendiary—,” and the tone is meditative, a bit melancholy:
Or so they say. We like to think so
Ourselves, feeling the cold
glacier into the blood stream
A bit more each year,
Tasting the iron disk on our tongues,
Watching the birds oblivious,
hearing their wise chant, hold still, hold still . . .
The poet mediates between the “now and not-now” of the earlier poems; the afternoon is tinged with the familiarity of Dante’s Purgatorio and the premonition of a final holding still. Meanwhile, the afternoon “fidgets about its business” as the sunlit feathers of the birds flare in the branches, everything a part of everything else, reminiscent of the Eastern poets Wright has been reading throughout the book.
If Wright’s concerns are religious and philosophical—and they are—they are also painterly. He suggests that his poems, like Elizabeth Bishop’s, are “descriptive.” Light is doubly important, serving as insight, intelligence, intuition, and also as illumination. In “Still Life with Stick and Word,” the poet examines a broken stick along with whatever word is the word of the moment:
Inside now. The word is white.
It covers my tongue like paint—
I say it and light forms,
Bottles arise, emptiness opens its corridors
Into the entrances and endless things that form bears.
White, great eviscerator.
These lines are characteristic. The reader is invited to participate, to say the word and to watch the thought unfold. To see what form can, and will, bear.
In Wright’s case, form allows a freedom of thought. His distinctive lines help him to move from the particular to the abstract—and back again. Even as they break, they continue. Sometimes thoughts falter, then resume; more often they veer away from themselves, catching up the lint of other thoughts, moving outward in associative circles until they embrace idea. Wright’s abstraction is built on so many specificities that the reader settles comfortably into its center. But Wright is never satisfied: by noting the repetition of the seasons from the fixed centers of his successive backyards, he can take his own measure from a number of perspectives. (Titles like “Looking West from Laguna Beach at Night” and “Looking Across Laguna Canyon at Dusk, West-by-Northwest” show his obsession with getting it right, even in memory.) His answers are answers only for the temporal duration of the poem. What pertains today may not pertain tomorrow. What Wright sees on a winter afternoon may be contradicted by a summer morning’s song. “Structures are wrong,” he declares emphatically on page 6; relenting, he admits on page 63, “Everything flows toward structure, / last ache in the ache for God.” The poems may say one thing at any given time, but the poetry is all about not-knowing, about impermanence and flux.
This brings us to “theory” as Wright practices it. His method becomes his message. He does not show us how to (if we were to do it, it would not be like this) but that it can be done. Wright’s images, like Sylvia Plath’s, are arresting in their uncanny accuracy; the reader discovers a way of experiencing the world that, even in its strangeness, seems incongruously right. Afterwards, we see things differently. While Plath’s images are intense, even desperate, each linked to an emotion, Wright’s are intent on an internal perception and restrained passion: “The sea with its one eye stared.”
Since Wright’s poems are about movement, they let the reader in on the movement even as they self-consciously annotate their own progress, even subvert it to see if the opposite will reveal yet another possibility. Wright’s images occupy a juncture; they are the vehicle, moving thought from concrete to abstract and back again. Accompanied by patterns of sound, these images feel as fluid as music, as in “Cicada”:
Noon in the early September rain.
A cicada whines,
his voice
Starting to drown through the rainy world,
No ripple of wind,
no sound but his song of black wings,
No song but the song of his black wings.
Such emptiness at the heart,
such emptiness at the heart of being,
Fills us in ways we can’t lay claim to,
Ways immense and without names,
husk burning like amber
On tree bark, cicada wind-bodied,
Leaves beginning to rustle now
in the dark tree of self.
The whole point of all this thinking seems to be to “answer to / my life.” Not to answer, or to find an answer for, but to speak to its conditions, both physical and spiritual. The poems approach the age-old question of the nature of the universe and the place of the individual life within it, each time opening wide vistas, and often coming back to the inevitable: “There’s only this single body, this tiny garment / Gathering the past against itself, / making it otherwise” and, in another poem, “One life is all we’re entitled to, but it’s enough,” and in yet another, “When we die, we die. The wind blows away our footprints.”
Like Wright’s ten other books of poetry, Chickamauga is not so much a collection of discrete poems as a long meditation. And Charles Wright’s body of work really could more accurately be termed a body of thought. From poem to poem, book to book, his work has taken on the thickness of thought. That is, the poems accrete; they weave in and out of one another. Wright effaces himself before the immensity of his questions, his mind asserting its presence through the clarity of his images. The result is not a “shape,” nor is it formless—it’s an approximation of human consciousness. Wright teaches us how to listen to him: attentively, with an inward ear and eye. I cherish this work as a whole more than for its specific poems. I count on its being there.
Another poet with whom the term “meditative” is associated is Robert Hass, who has just completed his tenure as poet laureate of the United States. His well-known “Meditation at Lagunitas” was one of the first poems to acknowledge contemporary theory and, at the same time, to rail against it. Its final three words—“blackberry, blackberry, blackberry”—not only demonstrate the gap between the thing and the word for the thing, but almost defiantly—and joyfully—partially bridge that gap by inducing memory through invocation.
Sun Under Wood, Hass’s fourth collection of poems (he has also distinguished himself as the writer of essays and as a translator of Czeław Miłosz and others) takes its title from the “sonne under wode” of an anonymous twelfth-century lyric—a stark mixture of religious feeling with the natural occurrence of the setting sun. Hass blends intense feeling with a precise knowledge of the natural world as though the two were mutually dependent on each other—and in Hass’s case, they are. These poems might best be described in his own phrase, “navigable sorrow.” But if it’s a sorrow, it is mitigated by the impulse to sing, the felt necessity for poetry in spite of its inability to change anything. Private pain (from which the book does not shrink) gives way to a generalized knowledge: “I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain / it must sometimes make a kind of singing.”
Sun Under Wood begins with a poem called “Happiness,” so the pain is given a context: it is retrospective, reflected upon, realized not in its intensity but in comparative tranquility—something to be examined with the same curiosity with which the poet looks at dragonflies mating or the same precision with which he names the mariposa lilies. From within the happiness of a new marriage, Hass uncovers the sorrow at the heart of his first marriage, but not without first revealing the sorrow of the heart streaming from his mother’s alcoholism.
It’s interesting to note the progression of this personal narrative within the collection. In “Dragonflies Mating” a memory surfaces concerning his mother’s coming into his school gym and his humiliation over her “bright, confident eyes” and slurred words. Then the poem pulls back from memory, tries to “fix” not the moment but the stance:
When we say “mother” in poems,
we usually mean some woman in her late twenties
or early thirties trying to raise a child.
We use this particular noun
to secure pathos of the child’s point of view
and to hold her responsible.
Who is this “we”? How many people write poems? How many people reduce a word with such powerful associations to a “noun”? Here Hass displays the self-conscious attitude of the writer, always aware of the activity even as he engages the emotional source. In his case, he has built that self-awareness into the poems, breaking into them with an editorial eye (“It is summer as I write” or “This morning I am pretending . . . “)
So it’s an easy step in the following poem, “My Mother’s Nipples,” to begin with improvisation. The provocative title is undermined immediately with a precise description of bulldozers in “the upper meadow at Squaw Valley,” which leads to farmers and roofers and the eventual green sign reading “Squaw Valley Meadows.” Only in the second segment (an enigmatic couplet in quotes which seems to come out of nowhere) does Hass intrude on his own reverie:
“He wanted to get out of his head,” she said,
“so I told him to write about his mother’s nipples.”
From there, it’s another easy step to a playful riff on how various poets might write about their mothers’ nipples—the cosmopolitan’s song, the romantic’s, the utopian’s, the philosopher’s, the misanthrope’s, the saint’s, and so on—and then to the distanced study of a photograph before he finally faces his curiosity about and aversion to his own mother. At this point, the poem breaks into (blossoms into?) prose, a mix of past- and present-tense memories of his mother in an institution and, in another section, her oddly solipsistic response to her husband’s (the poet’s father’s) death.
But the poem continues to undercut itself—and it knows this. No sooner has Hass found a lyric moment in which he can come, quite naturally, to the conclusion (spoken in direct address, to himself), “I said: you are her singing,” than he begins the final segment of the poem, “You are not her singing, though she is what’s / broken in a song. / She is its silences.” Then, after a stanza break, the qualification: “She may be its silences.” Words, lo and behold, do not suffice; they always need to be shaded to nuance, and then the nuance itself needs further shading.
At some point, Hass’s acute sense of the impossibility of his task becomes a part of the way his poems are fashioned. They intrude on themselves, reminding the reader that these are, after all, only poems. They examine the power of poetry, and find it wanting. At first, this is somewhat disconcerting because the interruptions are just that—they disrupt what is otherwise a more traditionally coherent lyric. But Hass is teaching us, through interruption, to expect his “other” voice, the one that questions, dismantles, pricks its own bubbles. This happens early in the book when he writes not only the poem (“Layover” and “Iowa City: Early April”) but the alternative poem (“Notes on ‘Layover’” and “A Note on ‘Iowa City: Early April’”), giving us yet another view of the same place, person, event. “Layover” may be just a bit too politically correct in California terms for me (I remain unconvinced that the native Alaskans think of their snowmobiles, CBs, and prefab sheds as being imposed by a “colonizer”), but “Notes on ‘Layover,’” with its sequences of I could have saids and And thats, is stimulating in the way it fills in the spaces, poses alternatives, moves through a series of associations in the manner of all minds in all airports, then catches itself short with its final insight that the speaker doesn’t even recognize his own life, with its unfamiliar vases full of mauve hydrangeas.
This technique has hardened into pattern by the last half of the book, so the reader is prepared for two of the most significant poems, “English: An Ode” and “Interrupted Meditation.” The former is imaginative and far-reaching. It begins in Spanish and moves through a number of English words with their derivations, connotations, and unnatural origins to end with an English translation of its opening. Along the way, we learn what Hardy meant by a madding crowd, the reason we say we are at loggerheads, how Hodgkin’s lymphoma got its name, and even that the suffix -math (as in aftermath) comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for mowing. And all this is buried in an imaginative “story” generated by finding a secondhand book with two names (one English, on Spanish) written on the flyleaf. If this poem is also a bit politically correct, it points the finger at my resistance:
There are those who think it’s in fairly bad taste
to make habitual reference to social and political problems
in poems. To these people it seems a form of melodrama
or self-aggrandizement, which it no doubt partly is.
But I remain steadfastly guiltless since it is never politics per se I object to, but any specific agenda that assumes universal agreement with “accepted” stances.
Luckily, Hass is willing to undercut himself as well as his poems. The final work in Sun Under Wood is titled “Interrupted Meditation,” and it is here that Hass’s method finds a true home. The poem begins with short interruptions:
Little green involute fronds of fern at creekside.
And the sinewy clear water rushing over creekstone
of the palest amber, veined with a darker gold,
thinnest lines of gold rivering through the amber
like—ah, now we come to it. We were not put on earth,
the old man said, he was hacking into the crust
of a sourdough half loaf in his vehement, impatient way
with an old horn-handled knife, to express ourselves.
In one fell swoop the old man has put us all in our places. The poem goes on to reveal a narrative in which the old man and his friends, in wartime Poland, had left scraps of bread where they thought a family of Jews might be hiding. Thought. Might be. The young friends didn’t raise their voices, didn’t know if people or dogs took the food, whispered about “art” and “truth” even though each meant its own kind of death. The remembered conversation is juxtaposed with the poet’s observation of the mountainside until soon the “dialogue” is dense, intense with the necessities of the man’s acquired knowledge: “To Czeslaw I say this: silence precedes us. We are catching up.” Hass goes on to let the man critique his (Hass’s) poetry:
. . . you can express what you like,
enumerate the vegetation. And you! you have to, I’m afraid,
since you don’t excel at metaphor. A shrewd, quick glance
to see how I have taken this thrust. You write well, clearly.
You are an intelligent man. But—finger in the air—
silence is waiting. Milosz believes there is a Word
at the end that explains. There is silence at the end,
and it doesn’t explain, it doesn’t even ask.
The poem might end there, but doesn’t. Hass goers on to recollect the failure of his marriage and to think of how we “live our half lives / in fantasy, and words.” So why not resort to words? The speaker says, “I am a little ashamed that I want to end this poem / singing, but I want to end this poem singing . . . “
Still, this is talk about singing. Hass’s real “singing” is a singing of the mind aware of itself and a singing of the natural world, which he describes with affection and accuracy and, often, a kind of remorse. Hass’s nature isn’t just nature observed, nor is it nature idealized. It’s another act of the mind where we learn as much about ourselves as we do about the nonhuman. What persists in Hass is his awareness of the obstacles to song and his desire to sing. “The Woods in New Jersey” is a song in every sense of the word—musical, personal, and shaped, but more. Addressed to Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr., the poem defines the law as something so ephemeral, so intricately ordered, that it mirrors the natural order of the forest. But there’s something else as well—the life that makes any order, including a poem, matter. Here, for once, Hass has mastered metaphor:
And what of those deer threading through the woods
In a late snowfall and silent as the snow?
Look: they move among the winter trees, so much
the color of the trees, they hardly seem to move.
Sun Under Wood was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1996 and, as poet laureate, Robert Hass worked tirelessly for poetry and for the cause of literacy in this country. Because of the honesty and seriousness of his own work, the standards he expects of poetry, and his dedication to the work of others, Hass’s legacy is—to date—a generous enhancement of the life of literature in America.
Maxine Kumin was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1973. She served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1981, and in 1995 she became a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Connecting the Dots is her eleventh collection of poetry. The book’s dust jacket suggests that she “expands on themes that have engaged her most strongly,” but I would suggest that, though this is certainly true, there’s more than expansion going on. There’s a kind of rejuvenation. These poems have the energy and urgency of youth; they are active more than reflective, leaving the reflection to take place after the fact, in the mind of the reader. Even memory seems to reside very close to the surface in this new collection.
Kumin’s poems have always been toughly clear-sighted; nature, for her, is wonderfully complicated and complicating, never romanticized. And humanity is seen as part of nature. Connecting the Dots opens with a crown of sonnets called “Letters,” placing the emphasis on the human. The letters are, if anything, silent missives written to a deceased mother who might or might not have understood them, a recitation of the poet’s thorny, shifting relationship with her mother until they eventually “pulled even,” and a retrospective appreciation that leads, full circle, to the final line where the mother sends a brief message to the daughter. Because of the circular motion of the repeated lines in a sonnet cycle, the first and last lines combine to acknowledge—at last—a reciprocated love. From this perspective, the speaker launches a series of poems in which she links her life not only to her parents but to her children and grandchildren, then enlarges the circle by finding connections with other poets, friends, neighbors, historical figures, animals—in short, everyone and everything. A good example of this panoramic view comes at the end of “Rehearsing for the Final Reckoning in Boston,” where the Berlioz Requiem is filling the Symphony Hall:
Like a Janus head looking backward and forward,
pockmarked by doubt I slip between cymbals
to the other side of the century where our children’s
children’s children ride out on ranting brasses.
Kumin’s poems assume continuity. That is the backdrop against which she can voice her religious doubts and her principled beliefs.
“After the Cleansing of Bosnia” sees those beliefs mirrored, even magnified, in her daughter’s chosen mission with the UN in war-torn countries (this time Bosnia), but the poem moves ever outward to its enigmatic ending in the dream of an owl with a mouse in its talons:
We saw there was no obstacle
he-who-looks-behind-without-looking,
he-who-looks-ahead-without-blinking
could not thread through, backward or forward,
and we were falsely comforted.
In some ways Kumin also appears to have set herself the task of unblinkingly looking both backward and forward in order to assess and repossess the world. In the book’s last section (but at the emotional center), two poems about her friendship with Anne Sexton are seminal, possibly even the source of Kumin’s newfound energy. The first, “New Year’s Eve 1959,” recalls Sexton dancing with Jack Geiger, the “Physician / for Social Responsibility.” Anne kicks off her shoes, and the dance (“setting all eight gores of her skirt / and twirling”) begins. But the scene is replayed in memory, and the poet gives the evening a context it didn’t have when the notes of “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” filled the room. “This was after Seoul and before Saigon,” she says, placing the moment in the flow of human history, placing herself in the role of observer and, even, in the role of survivor:
madcap Anne
long dead now and Jack snowily
balding who led the drive to halt the bomb
and I alone am saved to tell you
how they could jive.
“October, Yellowstone Park” follows directly—elegantly formal in its rhymed and slant-rhymed (abba) quatrains—as an elegy to Sexton on the seventeenth anniversary of her death, but also as an affirmation: “Of sane mind / and body aged but whole I stand by the sign / that says we are halfway between the equator // and the North Pole.” At the halfway point of the poem, in full sun, on the 45th parallel, Kumin (as woman, as friend, as poet—but not as “speaker,” which would distance her from her own lived life) declares:
Fair warning, Anne, there will be no more
elegies, no more direct-address songs
conferring the tang of loss, its bitter flavor
as palpable as alum on the tongue.
Despite her assertion, she lapses almost instantly into direct address:
I’ve come
this whole hard way alone to an upthrust slate
above a brace of eagles launched in flight
only to teeter, my equilibrium
undone by memory. I want to fling
your cigarette- and whiskey-hoarse chuckle
that hangs on inside me down the back wall
over Biscuit Basin. I want the painting
below to take me in. My world that threatened
to stop the day you stopped, faltered
and then resumed, unutterably altered.
Where wildfires crisped its hide and blackened
whole vistas, new life inched in. My map
blooms with low growth, sturdier than before.
Thus I abstain, I will not sing, except
of the elk and his harem who lie down in grandeur . . .
Even the rhyme scheme is altered; it shifts dizzily through a series of permutations, then resumes for the final stanza. Kumin moves from the tang of personal loss toward incantation. Her declaration of independence ends with a vision of Sexton hammered into memory. But the residual—and enduring—image is the sweep of Yellowstone and its resolute regeneration.
The present-tense immediacy of the poem brings it close to the reader, even as the formal aspects allow the writer a certain distance from the material. The result is a tension that energizes the work. It is experiential, not referential. The book’s two sestinas—one early on, one after the poems about Sexton—also benefit from the constraints of form. “In Praise of the New Transfer Station” may be the only poem to celebrate a dump since Wallace Stevens did it—and what a dump this is! Kumin remembers the “pre-ecological days” when it was actually called a dump, but now recycling makes for a social occasion. This poem is pure fun—and its repetitions are so subtle that at least this reader was brought up short at the final three lines, suddenly (and only then) made aware of the form.
“The Riddle of Noah” is more noticeably a sestina from the beginning, so Kumin feels free to take liberties with the words, substituting rhymes, antonyms, and combinations to form an intricate network of sound and association which can sustain the content without trivializing it. Spoken directly to her grandson (“You want to change your name”), the poem moves from the child’s wish for another name to a memory of the poet’s brother (who did actually change his name) and then on to its central memory:
The names that we go by are nothing
compared to the names we are called. Christ killer! they mocked
and stoned me with quinces in my bland-looking
suburb. Why didn’t I tattle, resist? I guessed
I was guilty, the only kid on my manicured block
who didn’t know how to genuflect as we lock-
stepped to chapel at noontime.
Again, the present-tense framework of the poem, combined with past-tense recollection, revives memory. Present and past exist simultaneously. The logic of association governs the poem and allows for its surprising turns, as it moves well beyond personal memory into a shared history that implicates not only the present but the future:
Spared being burned at the stake, being starved or gassed,
like Xuan Loc, Noah is fated to make his mark,
suffer for grace through good works, aspire to something.
Half-Jewish, half-Christian, he will own his name, will unlock
the riddle of who he is: only child, in equal
measure blessed and damned to be inward-looking,
always slightly aslant the mark, like Xuan Loc.
Always playing for keeps, for all or nothing
in quest of his rightful self while the world looks on.
And so Connecting the Dots concludes by filling in the picture. From Kumin’s vantage, looking at the progress of time, the world requires balance. On the day Sarajevo falls, she appreciates the music of a student orchestra. There’s continuity in the changing seasons, the sense of the seed’s tenacity even as she tucks the garden in for the winter. And always there’s the word: reading Hopkins, she finds the “priest’s sprung metronome” keeping descriptive time with the emerging landscape; poised on horseback, she sees a fox with its brood, wishing she possessed the word the vixen uses to call her young out of the den:
Its sound o-shaped and unencumbered,
the see-through color of river,
airy as the topmost evergreen fingers
and soft as pine duff underfoot
where the doe lies down out of sight;
take me in, tell me the word.
Kumin’s own words feel unencumbered—lithe, shaped, charged with purpose.
Maxine Kumin has achieved by now a kind of wisdom based in honesty and grounded in her love of nature—her appreciation of its fruitfulness, its unruliness, its almost willed persistence. Her poems ask us to assess them in a complex manner, employing our intellect, our sense of form, even the biographical knowledge she has shared with us in other books over the years. For those interested in Kumin’s overall accomplishment, Selected Poems 1960-1990 (covering work from her first nine books) has just been published by W. W. Norton, and a collection of critical essays, Telling the Barn Swallow: Poets on the Poetry of Maxine Kumin, edited by Emily Grosholz, was recently issued by University Press of New England. But there’s nothing retrospective about Connecting the Dots; it has the feel of the transitional, building on and extending the themes of earlier work even as it seems to be embarking on a new venture characterized by an active voice and a genuine curiosity about the future. Kumin teaches us, by example, to survive.
When the poet’s “practical theory” has been flexible enough to allow for change and yet consistent enough to provide a framework, the resulting “selected” volume may achieve a unity that has been undetected (or only fleetingly glimpsed) in the separate volumes. The poet has had an opportunity to assess earlier work, make choices, put the poems together where they can—and most often do—speak to each other. The very act of giving the poems new life may, in fact, give them a different life. This is certainly true of Paul Zimmer’s Crossing to Sunlight: Selected Poems, in which he provides even a third life for some of the poems that had appeared in his first selected, Family Reunion (1983).
Over the years Zimmer has given us a number of memorable personae, including the delightful “Zimmer,” in whom we instantly recognize ourselves. In Zimmer’s second collection, The Republic of Many Voices (1969), “Zimmer” emerges as one of the “many voices,” plagued to some extent by his own inner voices: guilt, fear, regret. But the persona is somewhat enigmatic; it figures in the titles, then recedes in favor of the first-person singular of the poems. “Zimmer’s Head Thudding Against the Blackboard” begins “At the blackboard I had missed / Five number problems in a row.” “Zimmer” and “I” are clearly equated, yet somehow removed from each other. When the exasperated nun throws him back into his seat, the speaker of the poem discovers the source of power: “. . . I hid my head and swore / That very day I’d be a poet, / And curse her yellow teeth with this.” Moving from the past tense of the recollection to the present tense of “this,” the poem realizes its own secret ability to create a new reality, to give the nun those yellow teeth for all eternity. The speaker of the poem is not quite the Zimmer of the title, who functions to place the self in memory and who allows the poet to take a slightly distanced stance on his own life.
This technique is perfected in the third volume, The Zimmer Poems, where the persona dominates almost all the titles. We see Zimmer not only in the ongoing narrative of his life (who he was/is) but also inside his dreams (who he would be). It’s an age-old story: the awkward child in an insensitive world, the bullied boy dreaming of revenge and, always, the fearful sinner under the domination of the Church. “The Day Zimmer Lost Religion” begins with the small sin of missing Mass on purpose, waiting for Christ to “climb down / like a playground bully” to beat him senseless. The ending, though, shows the subtle shift in perspective, indicating that the speaker knows more than Zimmer does:
But of course He never came, knowing that
I was grown up and ready for Him now.
At the same time that Zimmer (the poet) creates Zimmer (the persona), he sets him against a long tradition of poetry. Sometimes playful, punning on the name itself (“Zimmer Is Icumen In”), sometimes with ribald seriousness (“Leaves of Zimmer”), Zimmer takes his own measure as well as that of “The Tradition.” That “Zimmer” has entered this tradition is evident in recent poems like John Engels’ “With Zimmer at the Zoo,” where Engels counts on our knowing the original in order to play off our expectations.
Someone picking up a single Zimmer volume would probably take pleasure in it—it would be hard not to—without gaining much sense of the ongoing project. It may be that Zimmer himself didn’t know where this playfulness would lead. But he persisted. Over the years, the distinctive world of Zimmer has evolved as a means of expressing and framing very human desires and ambitions, the kinds of things that many might consider too mundane (or profane) for poetic treatment. In that middle ground between first and third person, the Zimmer persona makes the unimportant significant precisely because it does not demand attention to the self. The titles deflect any implicit solipsism. We can watch the performances, each of which gives us a glimpse of a never-completed figure, almost antimythology: The Myth of Zimmer.
In subsequent volumes, Zimmer expands his repertoire. His “Wanda” poems explore sexual desire and fantasy with unashamed self-knowledge. After these, there is a gradual shift to the third person. Reversing the earlier method, now the title sets the scene (as in “The Duke Ellington Dream”) and Zimmer appears as a central “character”:
Of course Zimmer was late for the gig.
Duke was pissed and growling at the piano,
But Jeep, Brute, Rex, Cat, and Cootie
All moved down on the chairs
As Zimmer walked in with his tenor.
Everyone knew that the boss had arrived.
The introduction of this third-person Zimmer has the effect of establishing yet more distance—this time allowing for a stance on the subject matter as well as the self. There is also room for compassion. But even this enlarged Zimmer can sometimes be constraining. Certain circumstances do not lend themselves to parody or irony, and distance would trivialize their importance. So the deaths of the poet’s parents are treated with the first-person immediacy and the honest respect they deserve.
From this point on, Paul Zimmer is able to step out of his created persona and write a fully personal poem. That’s not to say he doesn’t resort to “Zimmer” again, but he has gone unmasked and discovered the freedom of wearing his own face. “But Bird,” another of the many tributes to jazz and blues, is an example of what happens when he leaves the persona behind. In the autumn of 1954, Zimmer heard Charlie Parker play and found something he could believe in. Five months later, the poet was stationed in Nevada where he witnessed tests of the atomic bomb:
The bones in our fingers were
Suddenly x-rayed by the flash.
We moaned together in light
That entered everything.
Tried to become the earth itself
As the shock rolled toward us.
The red-cheeked boy who heard that tenor had lost his innocence. Five months later, Bird was dead: “But Bird. Remember Bird.” If the poem were written in the Zimmer persona, it would lose the mythic power found in the juxtaposition of the two overwhelming realities.
Unlike many volumes of selected poems, Crossing to Sunlight does not begin with new work. Paul Zimmer has sensed that the new poems belong at the end of the book where they can make their own profound statement. By then “Zimmer” is gone, replaced by a “he,” a “you,” and an individualized “I” to look the world squarely in its eye. Nevertheless, the persona haunts these poems, makes them more poignant, possibly more heartfelt. Now the third-person hero of “Entrance to the Sky” contains the vestiges of an earlier self who might have used a less resigned tone. This character, too, occupies the middle ground between “he” and “I”—but the effect is not so much a distancing as it is a blending of perspectives:
He has faith in whatever the sky brings—
rain, heat, snow, ice, dark.
He believes in morning, noon, and night,
in sunrise, sunset, and midnight.
Even these small, unnerving lights
might bring down to his life
some sudden, lustrous conclusion.
Faith, rejected in the earlier poems (at least in the form the priest presented), now seems possible.
The speaker of these new poems admits he has had a cancer scare, a detached retina, and asthma, that he is overweight and wears hearing aids. In short, he admits to aging. And the poems vacillate between acceptance of and resistance to death. In “The End before the End,” he contemplates “the vast, chilled foothills of age.” In “And Then I Drove On,” the title itself tells the aftermath, while the poem details the near-accident that “makes my chest echo when I think of it.” A new awareness of mortality makes for renewed observation, and for Paul Zimmer the observation is heightened by his years of seeing life through a double lens of Zimmer & Co. All those years of practice have made way for a poem that is intensely personal yet not confessional, a poem that, even with a detached retina, retains its peripheral vision. Zimmer has emerged from “Zimmer.” (But wait: in a recent long sequence called “Poems from the Old Republic,” published in the autumn 1996 Gettysburg Review, the old gang is reconvened in death. The sequence ends with a “paunchy guy / slowly dragging off in the dust / a tremendous letter Z . . .” So we might expect to see him again.) Crossing into Sunlight assures us that Paul Zimmer, like the Orpheus of his opening poem, can cross the infinite boundaries between selves, between darkness and light.
Lisel Mueller’s Alive Together: New and Selected Poems was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in April 1997. The book opens with the new material, almost as though Mueller’s own sense of her career is a bit like peeling an onion, working down to the core. But it’s an onion that has grown over thirty-five years and six previous collections—each new volume adding density and weight to the previous ones, enlarging her themes and accumulating detail as though memory itself were taking on importance in inverse proportion to the distance between the event and the memory of the event. While the earlier books explored the power of “story,” the later books have become more and more aware that the poet’s own story is symbolic of its time.
If it’s true that all happy families are alike, then Mueller’s family shouldn’t be called happy. But it was—and happiness takes its own convoluted turns. “Ordinary life: the plenty and thick of it”—over many volumes the story unfolds: a gentle, happy family living in prewar Germany; their flight to America, leaving the grandparents behind; the immersion in a new language; grief at a mother’s death; marriage; motherhood; the loneliness and pain of the father, his impending death. As if aware that the reader of Mueller’s earlier poems is familiar with the details of her life, “Curriculum Vitae” opens the selected poems with a reiteration—twenty numbered one- or two-sentence statements that summarize the “story.” These are nearly all in the first person. Only the thirteenth (the unlucky one) slips into third person, the pain still necessitating distance: “the death of the mother hurt the daughter into poetry.” Echoing Auden’s poem in memory of Yeats (“Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry”), Mueller’s third-person story simultaneously removes her from the event and reveals it as the source for everything that is to follow.
The “new poems” portion of Alive Together is no longer than in most selecteds; it acts almost like a “book,” with three distinct sections: the first with its focus on place and time (memory), the second with its emphasis on things, and the third a long sequence about the plight of Patty Hearst. So memory persists, bringing with it quiet reflection on the meaning of memory. In “Place and Time,” Mueller begins with the moment when she hears a man on the radio telling that the business district of his hometown had been plowed under, then moves to the thought of what can—and cannot—be eradicated:
My mother is dead, and the piano
she could not take with her into exile
burned with our city in World War II.
That is the half-truth. The other half
is that it’s still her black Bechstein
each concert pianist plays for me
and that her self-taught fingers
are behind each virtuoso performance
on the stereo, giving me back
my prewar childhood city
intact and real.
If the man on the radio has his own version of “some music that brings back” his town, he can recall with equanimity what is now gone. “Pillar of Salt” expands this theme as the poet compares herself to Lot’s wife, looking back at destruction. She brings back her family in “brilliant moments” of memory—a show set up for herself “so I can change the ending, / stop it short of hell, / give them bearable old age, / a decent death.” But the ruse doesn’t work—history is unalterable:
Memory is the only
afterlife I can understand,
and when it’s gone, they’re gone.
Soon I will betray them.
Think of it as the solid pillar
dissolving, all that salt
seeping back into the sea.
Along with (and probably related to) the poems of memory are poems about failing eyesight—cast in first person. This theme has been implicit in earlier volumes (perhaps best known is “Monet Refuses the Operation”) but now it is made explicit. As the poet’s world goes dark, her ears compensate, opening new worlds: “Tonight the crickets spread static / across the air, a continuous rope / of sound extended to me, / the perfect listener.” Not only the perfect listener, but the perfect describer of auditory experience. The poems are filled with alert attentiveness to sound: soft-spoken daughters, a far cry, querulous murmurs, laughter of women, wind howling, clocks striking, and always the radio with its music. The sounds here are almost tactile.
So it is with empathy that Mueller begins “Captivity,” her poem about Patty Hearst, imagining the darkness (“Eight weeks in that closet: / a child’s worst nightmare, / being locked up in the dark”) and the intrusion on the darkness (“the radio always on / blaring just out of reach / of her useless hands”). And it is with empathy that Mueller imagines Hearst learning another language—the language of fear and dependency: “Green, she said to herself, / a beautiful word in another language, / devoid of meaning.” But there’s more going on here: Hearst’s story presents a contemporary version of the fairy tale—the maiden in distress, translated into modern terms. However, Patty Hearst has foiled our expectations because her story was more complicated, more human, than our sense of myth could bear: “We wanted kitsch, / the easy split into black and white, / a story in which the heroine, / bruised but pure, throws off / the Tania skin . . .” Mueller examines the subsequent lack of empathy on the part of the public—“She turned into Tania and we turned against her”—including herself in the all-encompassing “we”:
We could not cope with the huge
complexities of the heart,
that melting pot of selves.
More than most people, Lisel Mueller is aware of the selves that make up an individual. Her own entry into a new language has been a source for her understanding that everything is a kind of translation, and her method has often been what I would call “indirect metaphor”—an implied metaphor that works subtly through the choice of vocabulary. The Patty Hearst poem is about Hearst, not about fairy tales, but the frame of reference is such that the reader realizes something about the way anecdotal material, through human necessity, becomes myth. The new poems in this book serve to reinforce Mueller’s ongoing concerns and to provide an umbrella under which all her poems can be seen to be “alive together.” (It’s interesting to note that the title poem for this particular gathering is taken from her second book—sure testament to the fact that the various poems stem from the same source and build toward a cohesive statement of being.)
Finally, each volume represented here reveals a steady and steadfast love for her husband which takes the form of delicate love poems that honor both the difficulties and the sustenance found in an enduring relationship. “Together we make the equinox,” she says of her husband’s optimism coupled with her caution. “Midwinter Notes” quietly—and beautifully—extends love for someone else into love for the world: “As the world grows darker / before my eyes, the sun / sends me sharper, harder / glances off glass, off ice- . . .” Set against her failing eyesight, the poem offers something that will not fail:
Another chance to wake up together,
accepting the invitation
of one more morning.
And the world itself, as if by association with this fidelity, reveals yet more of its secrets:
At twilight, water in roadside ditches
pulls down the last light
to be transformed from lead
into softly gleaming silver.
It has taken me years to discover
this slant conjunction of sky and water
late in the day, when the dead
are allowed their brief shining.
In Lisel Mueller’s case, what has persisted is her life, but her life is recreated in poems that couple present and past in a continuing commemoration of what could have been viewed as historically broken. Because of her biographical circumstances, she has “translated” herself from one language and one culture to another, but her sensibility provides continuity. Over the years, she has held herself to a standard of clarity and truthfulness in language as well as in emotion. Her appreciation of the persistence of her life takes the form of celebratory lyrics—love poems to the world. And she couples the lyric with the concept of story, bringing old tales into the present and making them new. It is especially gratifying to see the Pulitzer committee recognize this achievement and give one of our highest honors to this poet whose experience is quintessentially American.
The Welsh poet and short-story writer Leslie Norris, born in the industrial and mining town of Merthyr Tydfil, has taught for many years in the United States, most recently at Brigham Young University. He, too, has undergone a kind of “self-translation”—this time not so much in language as in landscape. Norris’ early poems contain not only the pit ponies and slag heaps but also the fields and moors, the curlews and cattle, the bracken and barnyards of his native landscape. And these poems reflect, in their formal construction and lush sounds, the influences of early Welsh poets as well as both Dylan Thomas and Edward Thomas. Collected Poems incorporates seven previous volumes along with new work, moving from the “secure horizon” of his childhood to the great expanses of the American West, and from the security of a mastered form (“I believe that craft is more than anything, almost,” he said in a recent interview) to the challenges of a more Americanized “freed” verse.
Norris’ work is not as well known in this country as it should be. In 1994, Camden House (Columbia, SC) issued a critical assessment of his work, edited by Eugene England and Peter Makuck. That collection, An Open World: Essays on Leslie Norris, with contributions by Glyn Jones, William Matthews, Sue Ellen Thompson, Brendan Galvin, Richard Simpson, Fred Chappell, and Christopher Merrill among others, places Norris firmly in both landscapes and celebrates the range of his vision. Maybe Collected Poems will now introduce him to a wider audience.
“Autumn Elegy” (from The Loud Winter, 1967) demonstrates Norris’ early ease with form and rhythm. Looking at the September hillsides, the poet turns elegiac:
Young men of my own time died
In the Spring of their living and could not turn
To this. They died in their flames, hard
War destroyed them. Now as the trees burn
In the beginning glory of Autumn
I sing for all green deaths as I remember
In their broken Mays, and turn
The years back for them, every red September.
Such passages show Norris’ skill with enjambment, his subtle ear for rhyme, his sure ear for meter. They also sound rather old-fashioned. Another characteristic of his early work is that the poems tend to sum up their own contents, ending on a definitive note as though the speaker had, in the process of working through the poem, found an answer to whatever question spawned it.
Elegy is one of Norris’ repeated themes—not only for his dead companions, but for other Welsh poets (Dafydd ap Gwylim, Dylan Thomas) and for the land itself:
Whenever I think of Wales, I hear the voices
Of children calling and the world shrinks to the span
Of a dozen hills.
Then, six stanzas later:
Whenever I think of Wales,
I think of my leaving, the farewell valleys letting go . . .
(“Postcards from Wales”)
Reading Leslie Norris, for most of us, means entering an unfamiliar landscape but familiar territory. He is decidedly the poet of childhood (boyhood, to be more exact), almost as though it were yet another landscape. Maybe it is—a landscape of the mind, of a certain kind of freedom. The sweep of these poems is extensive, but they return, almost always, to the particularity of boyhood—one not frozen in amber, but fluid and lively in the imagination. So when, in “Dead Boys,” he imagines his friend returned to the town of their youth, he talks as if they were all singular (“he” / “the boy”), and the reader is made doubly aware that the poet’s own childhood is represented as being universal:
Days are long to a boy;
Nights buried his foundered sadness in their tides
Till the black hulks slept in softness, as he slept.
Once he was thoughtless to an easy friend. The roads
Of summer led them away and they broke in a rough moment,
Never to meet again. It was here that he said goodbye
To his angular childhood . . .
By the time Norris published the work that appeared in America in Sequences (Gibbs Smith, 1988), he had been living in Utah for quite some time. The initial sequence is “The Hawk’s Eye,” eight poems in which the land is seen from above, almost mapped in flight. The landscape is explored from a position of self-imposed exile. If writer and raptor are not fully equated, the hawk’s viewpoint is at least equivalent to the perspective of the poet, allowing Norris to collapse the distance between childhood and the present, between somber Welsh mountains and the high Sierras. “I could use that harsh gaze / above the crested summit . . .” says the speaker, and “I could see the men / I might have become. . . .” In “Hawk Music,” he obliterates all boundaries. From above, the land appears flattened, untouched by political demarcations, and the isolate eye of the soaring hawk “is concerned with what’s visible”:
Its happiness is to watch
the intricate valleys weathering
and the wearing down
of upturned faces of rock.
Let me lean into this wind,
so rare that its demands
are those of music. I would
give it a note on the thinnest
string of air, a sound
support it. But I
will hope to hear it.
With these poems, Norris seems to have found not only a new vista but a new kind of music—freed from the demands of form and, at the same time, firmly tethered to meter and sound. As they shed some of their didacticism, the poems gain authority; the final section of the book, “New Poems, 1996,” touches on earlier themes but with new, more subtle dimensions. “Bringing in the Selves” looks hard at the eight-year-old self (seen in third person—“He has in his mind / the names of waterbirds / mallard, swan, moorhen: / he discovers and murmurs / their incantatory syllables”) and, at the same time, looks with the eyes of the child (“Mild rain polishes / the skins of new leaves”). The final couplet adds an overlay of adult sensibility, completing the self: “Come in, child, come in. / The circle is made.” And for those of us who love soccer, “The Night Before the Game” captures the magic and anticipation found in practice—whether it be sport or poetry:
So he runs around
in the ring of light, a small thin boy,
until his running is automatic and the ball’s
response is to something other than his feet,
something different, a sudden unity,
a harmony, like happiness.
On the brink of sleep, he imagines the next day’s game when the “moving thread of playing” will link him to everyone (even “Arthur Ferguson, / who’s gone to Australia”) in a web of intricate connection.
The new work contains a major poem, “Borders,” written in memory of the poet’s friend John Ormond. It begins with the “bridge between the town and Breconshire” where the boy “lived a moment in adventurous limbo” and about which the man asks,
Did I stand on air then, invisibly
taken to some unknown world, some nowhere?
Where was I then? I was whole
but felt an unseen line
divide me, send my strong half forward,
keep my other timidly at home.
Then this memory is emotionally fused with other times, other places. Driving in America, Norris once stopped to buy a Navajo belt buckle and found himself at the meeting of four states, placing “a foot in Utah, / a foot in Arizona, my palms flat / in the dust of Colorado and New Mexico.” Having thus experienced the insubstantiality of border, the poet feels free to let the poem flow, like “the river’s neutral water.” He recalls his friend—“When he left, / it was to see his place from a distance / and peacefully go home”—and the way Ormond saw his mother through to her death. In a final breathtaking shift, the poem sheds narrative in favor of narrated meditation, reminding the reader of the poem’s source:
Border, boundary, threshold, door—
Orpheus moved either way, the living and the dead
were parted by a thin reflection
he simply walked through. But who can follow?
For all the boundaries I have crossed, flown over,
knowingly, unknowingly, I have no answers;
but sit in the afternoon sun, under mountains
where stale snow clings in shadowy patches,
remember my friend, how he had sung,
hope he is still singing.
So it is that last poem, “His Father, Singing,” is all the more poignant as it catches up multiple associations. The title—ritualistic, almost archetypal—creates an interval to be bridged. The first lines tighten the focus by claiming a more personal connection: “My father sang for himself, / out of sadness and poverty . . .” The single instance of his singing—“He sang for us once only”—stands out in memory: a moment when the poet saw his father holding his younger brother, and “what he sang / above his baby’s sleep / was never meant / for any infant’s comfort.” As the poet’s song merges with that of his father, the younger man accepts what he cannot understand; his father’s life remains a mystery and the poem resigns itself to the unanswerable:
For the first time raised
his voice, in pain and anger
sang. I did not know his song
nor why he sang it. But stood
in fright, knowing it important,
and someone should be listening.
The memory is so precise that it creates a landscape of its own—one which not only recovers but illuminates the lost.
Content—so important in Norris’ poems—is nonetheless secondary to form, which orders memory so that it’s not just an accumulation of detail but an aesthetic experience: the poems perform on the page. Yet over the years of sustained discipline, Norris’ form has somehow softened; he has moved from the constrictions of end rhyme into the subtler patterns of internal rhyme and a “sprung” meter, with the accompanying freedom of insight that comes when a poem’s form does not demand an expected epiphany. By refining his craft, by staying true to his true material—more, by redeeming the past—Leslie Norris has demonstrated why he continues (and will continue) to persist.
19 April 1912
Dear Madam
I am only one, only one, only one. Only one being, one at the same time. Not two, not three, only one. Only one life to live, only sixty minutes in one hour. Only one pair of eyes. Only one brain. Only one being. Being only one, having only one pair of eyes, having only one time, having only one life, I cannot read your MS three or four times. Not even one time. Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one.
Many thanks. I am returning the MS by registered post. Only one MS by one post.
Sincerely yours
A. C. Fifield
We do not know of or remember A. C. Fifield. But we know exactly to whom he was sending his rejection letter. There’s something in her style (and something in his imitation) that endures. Something in her style, some thing, not any one thing, but some thing that makes for something. Well, you get the idea. I am only one. One reader. Reading one by one. Only time will tell.