Massachusetts mortgage quote

Light and Dark

Light and Dark

AT THE MOST RECENT CEREMONIAI, of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, one of the finest poets of his generation, a poet who has been praised for his dark and sardonic view of the world, as well as for his elegies-was awarded the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse. The recipient was R. S. Gwynn. The presenter, himself a very distinguished American poet, remarked that he hoped Mr. Gwynn did not mind being cited for light verse, that a great many serious poets have employed humor. I thought immediately of somber Robert Frost and his puns, such as "Before I built a wall, I'd ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offence." And Yeats's line about the distraught lover who cuts off his ear and sends it to his beloved. Yeats then goes on, "And Mrs. French, gifted with so fine an ear . . ." Recently Billy Collins has become a bestseller for his books combining humor and accessibility. His last book has a (light) poem about obituaries.

And what is light verse? The term was coined in 1867 by Fredrick Locker-Lampson, for comic or funny poetry (as opposed to poetry, which the Victorians reserved for serious verse). It nearly always rhymes and usually is written in meter.

Among the books sent me to consider for this chronicle were examples of both light and dark poetry, and some that combined both. The finest of the light verse was Fred Chappell's Backsass,1 which abounds with a sense of humor. (The jacket blurb writer helpfully informs us that the title derives from a Southern term meaning "irreverent retort," as in an ironic remark or "scoffing observation.") Until this frolicking volume, I'd mostly associated Chappell with his tetralogy Midquest (1981), which reprinted four previously published books (River, Bloodfire, Wind Mountain, and Earthsleep). His work is rooted in his childhood and youth in the Appalachian Mountains and his vast reading of seminal books that forged Western culture. But now we have Backsass, and it is something else again.

The targets of many of the satires, and they are satires, because the reader feels Chappell would like to correct the follies of our age, are many. The first and last poems are soliloquies of "Fred's Answering Machine," porn sites on the web, Presidents who buy elections, men who mortgage their homes for a Lamborghini while secretly dining on hotdogs, the CIA, the FBI, and NASA, and the lack of anything left to explore. President George W. Bush is often alluded to:

I'm enlisting my brother Jeb

Gonna get him secret credentials, too

I have saved an extra box top

As if finding America today analogous to Imperial Rome, Chappell includes imitations and updated versions of Juvenal, including that Roman poet's seventh and eleventh satires.

Throughout Chappell displays a mastery of rhyme (Croesus/thesis, viands/friends, farces/horses' arses), and a propensity for the bitchy remark ('Your wine needs more paint thinner"). When a man is being tried for spousal abuse, he is told he can't contact his personal lawyer, but can be provided with a court appointed firm, "Steinern Friedan & de Beauvoir." Altogether the book is a delight. I just wish Chappell would punctuate his poems. Very few are. The effect is rather like reading a student who is infatuated with e. e. cummings, and with his dozen previous books of verse and the Bollingen Prize, Mr. Chappell doesn't have to resort to that.

Glyn Maxwell also writes, sometimes, about twenty-first-century America.2 Born in Hertfordshire, England, he now lives in New York City and is the poetry editor of The Nau Republic.

Among Maxwell's subjects are a man who holds his own funeral in a rented coffin and invites all his friends, refugees in Massachusetts, Tom the Weather Guy on TV, Genie, the thirteen-year-old California wild child, electrocution, women writing love letters to men on death row, and FBI agents (this seems to be the season for the FBI poems; I confess to having written one on that fat figure of fun, J. Edgar Hoover).

These are strange subjects, but Maxwell does not satirize or make fun of them. Compared to Chappell, he is a kinder, gentler poet, and I wouldn't call his poems light verse. He has a totally different tone. What he does demonstrate is that he can write a poem on any subject. W. H. Auden has been cited as an influence. Here's a short poem in its entirety:

Colorado Morning

Looping around the more or less dead straight

lines where skiers were,

some shy, nocturnal creature's one and only

shot at its signature.

Another poet who seemingly can tackle any subject is Rodney Jones.3 The problem is he may do it too often. His seventh single collection runs to 104 pages, and it somehow seems too long. Yet he remains a fine poet; in "Smoke," he shows his humor in a poem about being the token smoker on a committee for a smoke-free campus. In "Song of Affirmation," the poem which concludes the volume, he celebrates the ugly, the weak, the stupid, and the small of the world. In an age of Miss Americas, it is a refreshing subject:

For the duck-footed and pigeon-toed

May there be phone numbers to call.

For everyone cross-eyed, harelipped,

Gap-toothed, and lurching along on braces

May there arise a position and delectation . . .

This is a book worth investigating.

Mary Oliver has published thirteen books of poetry, which is an awful lot. She wrote forty-seven new poems within two years. The new collection is like her others, long on praise for the physical world, short on humanity.4 If you like to read almost exclusively about the sun, flowers, beans, arrowheads, lilies, crickets, goldenrod, blacksnakes, hawks, geese, bears, Luna, deer, wrens, and pinewoods, then this is the book for you. This reader misses a few of the human kind. A poet like Robert Frost or Robert Francis managed to treat both worlds. But who am I too carp (carp-another creature)? Oliver has been given both the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the National Book Award.

Louse Gl??ck (pronounced Glick) has produced a chapbook to commemorate her being named twelfth Poet Laureate of the United States.5 I am happy to say there are no talking flowers as there were in The Wild Iris, a device she hardly invented. Karl Shapiro's magnificent "A Cut Flower" was published in the 1940s:

I stand on a slenderness all fresh and fair,

I feel root-firmness in the earth far down . . .

Shapiro went on for 27 lines.

October consists of a single long poem in six parts, in which the poet identifies with both the dark and beauty of the season of autumn. As always her diction is sparse, almost unpoetic:

My friend the moon rises:

She is beautiful tonight, but when is she not beautiful?

Hardly an original notion-has any poet called the moon ugly? And if she is beautiful, beautiful as what? A metaphor or simile would be welcomed. Like Neruda's Book of Questions the poem's chief device is the rhetorical question:

didn't the night end, wasn't the earth

safe when it was planted

didn't we plant the seeds,

weren't we necessary to the earth,

the vines, were they harvested?

And isn't that voice boring as hell?

Carl Phillips (no relation to the current reviewer) has proven to be one of the rising stars in American poetry. Indeed, since this is his seventh book, he has risen.6 I say "rising star." He's forty if he's a day. But his first book wasn't published until a decade ago. He spent eight years teaching high school Latin, which perhaps explains the purity of his syntax and word choices. His poetry has been called erotic, yet somehow reserved, reminiscent of the gentlemanliness of older Auden and younger Merrill.

His allusions include the writers Chekov, Turgenev, Donne, Sophocles, and Mai-Mai Sze; hymns; and frescoes. One poem is a lovely aubade. The book's title is apt, since Phillips deals with love's numerous aspects. I hope his publishers bring out a selected poems from his earlier titles. I would quote, but his best stanzas invariably are run-on, long or complicated, so I'll pass. Just buy the book.

1 BACKSASS, by Fred CkappelL Louisiana State University Press. $16.95p.

2 THE NERVE, by Glyn Maxwell. Houghton Mifflin. $13.00p.

3 KINGDOM OF THE INSTANT, by Rodney Jones. Houghton Mifflin. $14.00p.

4 WHY I WAKE EARLY, by Mary Oliver. Beacon Press. $22.00.

5 OCTOBER, by Louise Gl??ck. Sarabande Books. $8.95p.

6 THE REST OF LOVE, by Carl Phillips. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $20.00.