The Hunter's Trail: Poems by Wendell Berry

Abstract

Pound and Williams continue to be useful paradigms in our poetry: one, an erudite antique collector who, after many expansions of shop, found himself with more curious merchandise than even he could inventory; other, a provincial dealer in small pieces of Americana, a few of them perfect, but rest easily duplicated. Pound shows legacy of Symbolist movement, for, like so many of its other inheritors, he writes poems which are intended not to be read but to be explicated. Language, one feels while reading him, is arcane and, save for flashes of suggested meaning, opaque to all but most devoted researchers. Williams, on other hand, believed that the particles of language must be clear as sand, and his poems are illustrations of theory. The best of them are written in plain, conventional language, and though they are not ultimately for man on street, it's plain that he would be able to get through them, often with pleasure. It's important to keep these two types in mind while reading modern poets, and to be aware that there are two. Reading a poem by someone like Robinson for first time, I would almost certainly not understand it com pletely, but I would recognize it as understandable. Whereas after reading some one like Crane for first time, I might say, Not only do I fail to understand this poem completely, I don't understand it at all. But (and this perhaps only because I am an academic) I might declare it to be figurable. Figurable and Understandable poets are still with us, some of them as friendly to each other as were Pound and Williams: Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, and Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, though far declined from their masters, are obvious examples. Wendell Berry (b. 1934) is an Understandable poet, and a good one. I can give no better example of his distance from much of what is fashionable than an ex change I overheard between Berry and a friend who wrote surrealist poems. The subject was teaching writing of poetry. The friend said that his students did their writing in class, automatically, without reflection and without trying to make sense. He added that they often needed inspiration and, as an example, he told how he had once brought into classroom a dressmaker's dummy and, placing a beercan on its head, had merely told his students, Write! It is typical that Berry did not comment directly, but instead gave his own example.