Songs of my Divided Self by L. W. Michaelson, and: Running Lucky by R. P. Dickey

Abstract

Reviews 79 Songs of my Divided Self. By L. W. Michaelson. (Fort Smith, Arkansas: South and West, 1969. 43 pages, $2.75.) Running Lucky. By R. P. Dickey. (Chicago: The Swallow Press Inc., 1969. 80 pages, $5.00.) Reading L. W. Michaelson poems in the journals, I have found myself thoroughly delighted with the fact that here is a poet who has read other writers and can make them part of his own world. But when these poems are put together in one cover, one gets a slight sinking feeling—it’s all so damned literary. But then one comes back: So it’s literary? And, no, it isn’t literary— the man is not a pedant. There is something more. For it is only when one sees the poems together that he realizes how much Michaelson is “using” these quotations, allusions, literary echoes: Michaelson is a committed man, not a “political, true, and thank God, but a man who loves the natural world and human beings and it seeking the most exact way of both affirming the love and attacking those who would deny other human being and/or the natural; the allusions are often witty, often savage, but always for a purpose. Consider these lines from the “Letter to J. Swift, Reformer”: “We still don’t eat babies;/We put fall-out in their milk instead.” Or the nicely satirical transmogrification of Emily Dickinson’s “debauchee of dew” into “debauchee/of dew-drop diamond brooches” in “How to Write a Love Poem for a Magazine that Runs an Ad for a $68,000 Necklace.” And Frost’s love for nature informs Michaelson’s “Whose picnic grounds these are/I think I know;/But, then, I’d rather watch them/Fill with snow/Than with ‘turistas’ that I know.” But there are other things not “satirical” in the common sense, such as the remarkable “Postscript to Letter No. 9” of Hector St. John Crevecoeur: “I fired once and the dark birds were gone:/So were the Darkie’s eyes.” Crevecoeur supplied the original story; Michaelson has made it into an even more profound protest against racism. In short, these are often deeply felt, well wrought, and more than often very funny poems. R. P. Dickey, younger, less given to the “literary,” more given to the confessional, is, so, more contemporary and more expert, but oddly more orthodox than Michaelson. In the review copy of Dickey’s book that I received, someone had left a piece of paper on which he’d begun to note the subject matters of the sections: I, sexual; II, natural; III, social-historical . . . . These “classifications” have their point: the poems are very conscious of themselves. Nevertheless, I like a crafted poem and these are—the work of a man with a poet’s ear, a poet’s eye, a man who wants to talk of the artist’s irreducible subject, the single human being in his own life. Still, the very precision of the poems makes it had to describe them, makes it hard to quote from them; they 80 Western American Literature need to be seen whole. In “Photograph for Gail,” the “I” speaks of the girl standing “behind the capitol in Jefferson City,” and says he’ll not give up his dream, her, for “look what I got./I’U commemorate, . . ./order to be cast statues of you, empress . . . .” But such a quote does not give the taste of the poem. Or to cite the last line from the title poem, “I’m running lucky,” is to risk suggesting that the poems are flat, but, no, the poem builds to that state­ ment and it has weight, but only after one has read the whole poem. Still, there are beginnings, middles, striking lines in themselves here, quoteable lines: “In this lovely scuffle for sex/and care/how do guys in wheelchairs/score?” And there is the more than good “For Delmore Schwartz,” this lovely praise of a man and a poet which I wish I had room to quote entire: “as things in celebrations/his sword chiseled out from/fifty-two turns toward release/and one about a bear’s/become a masterpiece...