In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955–2007 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955–2007 Stephen Kampa (bio) X. J. Kennedy, In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955–2007 (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 205 pp. Perhaps the greatest danger for In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus arises from the ductility of the poet’s talent: X.J. Kennedy has managed to thread himself through so much of the tapestry of twentieth-century literature with his achievements in verse, children’s verse, children’s fiction, and translation while also working as an anthologist (for both children and adults), an editor, and a textbook author. The concurrent publication of a selection of comic verse entitled Peeping Tom’s Cabin (BOA Editions) points to Kennedy’s own sense of the diversity of his work. If anything, his selection of “less contemptible verse from previous collections” along with the “rasher of items not collected before” (from the first paragraph [End Page 645] in his Notes) runs the risk of being overlooked in light of everything else Kennedy has accomplished. “Less contemptible” is certainly a modest way of describing these witty, musical, poignant poems, which range from mordant satires of contemporary culture to elegies for childhood friends, former students, and vaudeville performers. I had thought of Kennedy primarily as an epigrammatist and a humorist, so I was surprised to discover his thematic and tonal range: many of the poems use Kennedy’s characteristic wit to probe matters of faith, as in this example with its clever syntactic transmutation of an ostensible verb into an adjective—“I thought my hangdog soul abhorred / In the fierce eyeball of the Lord” (“Flitting Flies”)—and other poems present moments of startlingly sudden violence, as in the following lines from “Loose Woman”: Someone who well knew how she’d toss her chin Passing the firehouse oglers, at their taunt, Let it be flung up higher than she’d want, Just held fast by a little hinge of skin. Two boys come from the river kicked a thatch Of underbrush and stopped. One wrecked a pair Of sneakers blundering into her hair . . . For a poet often associated with children’s verse and light verse, these outbreaks of violence seem particularly stark, but they also remind one of the Bunyan lines, “Some things are of that nature as to make / One’s fancy chuckle while his heart doth ache . . .” Kennedy has written a number of elegies—some serious, some sly, and some a bit of both. In the process of writing them, he sometimes grows impatient with artistic pretensions: Oh, let us do away with elegiac Drivel. Who can restore a thing so brittle, So new in any jingle? Still, I marvel That, making light of mountainloads of logic, So much could stay a moment in so little. The number of trochaic words, especially those ending in the liquid consonant l (drivel, brittle, jingle, marvel, little), lends an almost overwhelming music to the final stanza of “On a Child Who Lived One Minute,” and the slant rhyme of “elegiac” and “logic” testifies to the poet’s enviable linguistic resources and expert ear; if he wishes to “do away” with art, it is in a superbly artistic stanza that he has said so. A similar suspicion about art animates “Poets,” with its daydreaming Mallarmean swans frozen in ice and requiring rescue, and “Artificer,” a delightful response to Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”: [End Page 646] Blessing his handiwork, his drawbridge closed, He sabbathed on a hill of hand-tooled wax. On stainless steel chrysanthemums there posed Little gold bees with twist-keys in their backs. Kennedy concludes his depiction of this artificial world with the sentence, “All night the world he’d locked outside / Kept thrusting newborn rats under his door.” Try as he might, the artist cannot keep the real world from invading the one he has constructed; reality’s vivid reminders come squirming in through the cracks to contrast brutally with the artist’s impeccable but inanimate family: Increase perfection! So he shaped a wife, Pleated the fabric of her chartered thigh, Begot sons by exact strokes of a knife In camphorwood. He told them not...