National Poetry Research Articles

The Myth of the Fixed-Form Villanelle

Julie Kane is assistant professor of English at Northwestern State University of Louisiana. Her most recent book is Rhythm & Booze(2003), selected by Maxine Kumin as a winner in the National Poetry Series. She is associate editor for twentieth-century poetry of the forthcoming Longman anthology of southern literature, Voices of the American South.

Rafael Campo

Rafael Campo teaches and practises general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, MA, USA, He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Poetry Series award, and a Lambda Literary Award for his poetry. His third book, Diva (Duke University Press, 2000), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has also been selected for inclusion in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and has appeared in many periodicals, including The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times Magazine, and The Washington Post Book World. His latest collection of poetry is Landscape with Human Figure (Duke University Press, 2002). This month The Healing Art: A Doctor's Black Bag of Poetry, essays on poetry and medicine, is published by W W Norton.

The poetry of nationalism*

Abstract.The poetry of nationalism has roots in ancient literature, particularly the Hebrew Bible, but is mostly a product of nationalism since the French Revolution. Many national poets are politically active and serve in government. Asserting artistic individuality, they express national individuality, though nationalism can also suppress creativity. Calling for moral regeneration, poets inspire their people with memories of heroism, real or imagined, and with myths unique to the nation. Their poetry often springs from defeat but anticipates national liberation and independence. Yet there is also a dark side to some national poets, particularly in their glorification of violence and lust for revenge against oppressors. National poetry changed after the failed revolutions of 1848–9. National poets were less inclined to believe in liberal ideals and progress toward universal goals and there was greater disillusionment and ambiguity toward the national role. World War I severely limited the militarist tendency in national poetry.

Millî Şiirin Canlanması Yolunda Malûmatta Yayımlanan Şiir Örnekleri Üzerine Bir Araştırma

OZET Malumat dergisi, Servet-i FUnun sanat anlayisinin gecerli oldugu yillarda, milli siirimizin canlanmasi yolunda Turkce ve hece olcusuyle yazilmis halk edebiyati tarzi siir ornekleri yayimlamistir. Bu calisma, soz konusu ornekler uzerinde gerceklestirilmis bir calismadir. ABSTRACT: Maliimat was pulished when Turkish Literature was donating by Servet-i Funun tirend. In Malumat, Turkhs Faik Literature examples which were wretten in syllabic meter were published in order to revive national poetry. This work is a study about these examples mentioned above .

Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature. Edited by Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. xiii, 333 pp. $60.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Contributors Historical periods Introduction: issues in Canon formation Haruo Shirane Part I. Nation Building and National Lterature: 1. Man'yoshu: the invention of a national poetry anthology Shinada Yoshikazu 2. Constructing imperial mythology: Kojiki and Nihon Shoki Konoshi Takamitsu Part II. Gender, Genre, and Cultural Identity: 3. Gender and genre: modern literary histories and women's diary literature Tomi Suzuki 4. Modern constructions of tales of ise: Gender and courtliness Joshua S. Mostow 5. Zuihitsu and gender: Tsurezuregusa and the pillow book Linda H. Chance Part III. History to Literature, Performance to Text: 6. Nation and epic: the tale of the heiki as modern classic David T. Bialock 7. Chikamatsu and dramatic literature in the meiji period William Lee Part IV. Language, Authority, and the Curriculum: 8. Kangaku: writing and institutional authority Kurozumi Makoto 9. Curriculum and competing canons Haruo Shirane Notes Index.

Ramble

Kevin Young is Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of To Repel Ghosts (2001) and Most Way Home (1995), selected by Lucille Clifton as part of the National Poetry Series and winner of the John C. Zacharis First Book Prize from Ploughshares.

Roadhouse

Kevin Young is Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of To Repel Ghosts (2001) and Most Way Home (1995), selected by Lucille Clifton as part of the National Poetry Series and winner of the John C. Zacharis First Book Prize from Ploughshares.

“Love Scattered, Not Concentrated Love”: Bernadette Mayer'sSonnets

juliana spahr is an assistant professor at the University of Hawai'i, Manoa. Her fi rst book of poems, Response, appeared in 1996 as a winner of the National Poetry Series. Her scholarly book, Everybody's Autonomy, was published by University of Alabama Press earlier this year. She is coeditor, with Jena Osman, of the annual journal Chain, now on its eighth issue.

Hollywood Africans 1983

Kevin Young is Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of To Repel Ghosts (2001) and Most Way Home (1995), selected by Lucille Clifton as part of the National Poetry Series and winner of the John C. Zacharis First Book Prize from Ploughshares.

Cassius Clay By Basquiat 1982, acrylic & oil paintstick on canvas

Kevin Young is Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of To Repel Ghosts (2001) and Most Way Home (1995), selected by Lucille Clifton as part of the National Poetry Series and winner of the John C. Zacharis First Book Prize from Ploughshares.

Sacred Forgery and the Grounds of Poetic Archaeology: Armand Schwerner's "The Tablets"

The final edition of Armand Schwerner's The Tablets arrives as valuable, important book, extending and challenging our conceptions of poetry, reading, certainty, completeness, and instructing us in the value of humor and the centrality of various modes of not-doing. The National Poetry Foundation has done beautiful job of producing this book, giving it properly large page-size format, pricing the book reasonably, and including an excellent, helpful CD recording of Schwerner's superb reading of great many of The Tablets. The Tablets exists at timely and seemingly timeless intersection of the written/visual and oral/performative. It profoundly moving and flawed project, at once greatly humorous, learned, and outrageous. When I call Schwerner's great work flawed, I do so with the awareness that all writing inevitably flawed. But, as part of my taking this work seriously, I do wish to consider what I see to be some of the limitations of Schwerner's work as well as the great accomplishment of it. The Tablets is, among other things, key book in the work of particular generation-a group of writers/thinkers that includes David Antin, Jackson Mac Low, Jerome Rothenberg, and Dennis Tedlock. These writers extend the encyclopedic impulse of modernism-the beginning globalism of Pound and Eliot and Olson-to make (in Robert Duncan's words) a symposium of the whole, and an ethnopoetics pursued with rigor, intelligence, curiosity, and passion that has changed forever the scope of poetry, particularly in the United States. Set beside the anthologies, translations, and books of poems by these writers, much contemporary poetry, particularly the poetry of official verse culture, readily seen to be minor, narrowly conceived, and claustrophobic in its scope and ambition. Schwerner began work on The Tablets in 1968, and, as Arthur Sabatini notes, Schwerner's career is paradigm of the way, during the past three decades, poets and poetry have become enmeshed in the many forms of discourse and performance that characterize contemporary art (DLB, 243). In an interview with Ed Foster, Schwerner describes the incident that triggered the conception of The Tablets: ... the thing that spawned the beginning stages of that work occurred when I was graduate student working in the Columbia Library. At the end of one of the long stacks I stuck out my arm to rest it on one of the shelves for moment, looked at what I was covering and there was large format edition of Samuel Noah Kramer's translation and transliteration from the Sumerian. I interpreted my experience as an omen. I have never forgotten the power of that initial charge. Charge in both senses, both electricity and the responsibility for task I hadn't yet formulated. (T, 43) For me, The Tablets opens up tremendously and extends its scope of consciousness in crucial ways with Tablet XXVII (the final Tablet) and with the concluding section, Tablets Journals /Divagations. Finished in the last year of Schwerner's life, Divagations constitutes one-fifth of the final book. Perhaps it fitting that book such as The Tablets, with its key figure of the Scholar/Translator, would conclude with such superb commentary on commentary, an extended meditation less ruled by the governing conceptions of the rest of the work itself. For me, this Apocrypha becomes the heart of the text itself, where we learn most passionately and exactly what at stake in The Tablets. Schwerner was quite aware of the significant departure and violation involved in adding the Divagations (which first appeared in the Atlas Press 1989 edition of The Tablets, and now appears in much more extended version in the new National Poetry Foundation edition): For so many years, I'd been deeply convinced that everything should go into the poem, that there should be no need for external divagations. And then, years after that profoundly held belief, I added Divagations, long section of citations and commentary as an appendix to Tablets I-XXVII. …

Mina Loy: Woman and Poet (review)

Reviewed by: Mina Loy: Woman and Poet Joshua Weiner Mina Loy: Woman and Poet. Edited by Maeera Shreiber and Keith Tuma. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1998. Pp. 639. $24.95 (paper). When Virginia Kouidis published her monograph, Mina Loy: American Modernist Poet (1980), it stood as the only extensive study devoted to this beguiling poet’s neglected career. Two years later Jargon Press published Roger Conover’s collection, The Last Lunar Baedeker, which included, in addition to Loy’s poems, selections from her autobiographical and critical prose, interviews, photographs of her artwork, and a valuable biographical essay by the editor. These two volumes from the early 1980s returned Loy to poets and scholars at a time when they were well under way revising a predominantly male and Anglo slant to the literary history of modernism and theorizing a feminist aesthetics; and this revision eventually led to a simmering of critical activity on Loy that included such dissimilar sensibilities as Thom Gunn and Susan Stanford Friedman. Following upon Carolyn Burke’s breakthrough biography of Loy, Becoming Modern (1996), this recent collection of essays, Mina Loy: Woman and Poet, firmly indicates that the simmer has reached full boil. Many members of the loose association that “loyalist” Marisa Januzzi dubs the “Loy Polloi” are represented here, and the collection is of import first and foremost for laying down the various lines of inquiry scholars are currently following in their pursuit of a once marginal figure viewed increasingly as a central player in the drama of modernism. Thus we get Rachel Blau DuPlessis linking the representation of female sexuality to the rise of the New Woman and the disruptive narrative structure in Loy’s sequence “Songs to Joannes”; Marjorie Perloff’s contrarian view of Loy’s “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” as a critique of, rather than complement to, Marinetti’s parole-in-libertà, uniquely combining mannerisms from the Yellow ‘90s and a rupturing (and contemporary-sounding) polyglossia; Elisabeth Frost’s consideration of how Loy’s “mongrelized” poetics play into, and off of, the eugenics of both the political Right and Left; Susan Gilmore’s decoding of Loy’s anagrammatic poetics of imposture; Tyrus Miller’s reading of the autobiographical novel Insel in relation to the genre of the Künstlerroman; Susan Dunn’s reminder that we need to keep in view Loy’s labor in the world of popular fashion as “an activity that was not supplementary to, but rather integrated with, her participation in avant-garde movements” (444); and Richard Cook’s wary assessment of Loy’s foray into Christian Science. There are other worthy items here as well, including Januzzi’s passionate and witty essay on Loy’s diction (in which she is surely right to emphasize that “Loy could not have had the conservative motives—the ‘learned’ purposes—of Symons or Pater at heart from the beginning” [418]); a previously unpublished 1965 interview with Loy conducted by Paul Blackburn and Robert Vas Dias; and an earlier version of Conover’s introductory essay to The Lost Lunar Baedeker (1996) that dramatizes Loy’s impact on her moment by capturing in vigorous, pungent prose the variety and intensity of reponse [End Page 155] to Loy’s work (from Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, to Amy Lowell, Harriet Monroe, Conrad Aiken, and John Collier). Certainly the most valuable contribution is Januzzi’s heroic and painstakingly annotated bibliography. It will save new Loy scholars months of legwork and send those seasoned in the archives back to the stacks in dismay—How did I miss the 1996 reprinting of “Collision” and “Cittàbapini,” the two plays Loy published in Rogue (1915); how could I have known of Pound’s note on Loy appearing in the Italian publication Il Mare (1933); or that one of Loy’s aphorisms adorned the cover of Jerome Rothenberg’s anthology, Revolution of the Word (1974), particularly since the Exact Change reprint (1998) tucks it after the introduction? These items are by no means trivial to scholars concerned with the nature of Loy’s appearance, not just in the early century’s little magazines such as Camera Work, Others, Trend, and The Blind Man...

The reception of Solomos: national poetry and the question of lyricism

AbstractThrough the reception of Solomos, this paper explores the tension between the lyric and the narrative, and the extent to which the roles of national and lyric poet are compatible. The critical reception of Solomos demonstrates that his recognition as a lyric poet was not on an equal footing with his presentation as a national one. It shows that his joint treatment as the national poet of Greece and its greatest lyric poet is problematic and not convincingly argued. It also argues that Solomos’s reception can be summarized as the conflict between the historical and the aesthetic approaches.

Messages as Translation

Messages as Translation Michael S. Harper (bio) “Justice Shallow, I owe you a thousand pounds.” —Shakespeare With all of Sterling’s poems in Spanish the committee waits for defense; you cannot go before them with your hands empty so go before them full of the saga of St. Elizabeths when a chaplain went into his room and introduced herself as a student of Housman asking him to sign her book she had studied as a freshwoman at Brown University; was he that Brown? The Asiento, the church’s covenant with the mercenaries to imprison the tribes of the New World, all that the Alhambra failed to do: 1492: to raise up the barbarians into the aesthetics of design, the garden of the self in the glaze and patina of black men and women who could build the Taj Mahal with their own version of bricks: Douglass Hall, Sterling Nelson Brown Hall, Arthur Paul Davis Hall, Daisy Turnbull Brown Hall: the planet marble; the planet Styx. [End Page 911] Falstaff, your pass protection is the arc of St. Michael’s “straight, no chaser” sword; crooked is the speech of the inquisitors, for they must have their music. The Slim Greer of the elements, all the forces of humor and travail on the open road, is now in Douglass Hall, and in the Founder’s Library, as in the study of the glass books; there is no postal box on Fort Totten; Kearny Street is still the poet laureate’s house: even in Spanish Cervantes holds the Inquisition at bay (the Spanish Armada, 1588), defeats in terza rima, so that each child would understand it, women applaud it, men remember it: so present Southern Road as your hymnal on the long walk to the presidents of Howard; “there’s no hiding place down here.” Michael S. Harper Michael S. Harper is University Professor and Professor of English at Brown University, where he has taught since 1970. He is the first Poet Laureate of the State of Rhode Island, a post he held from 1988 to 1993. This prize-winning poet is author of ten books of poems, including History Is Your Own Heartbeat, Song: I Want a Witness, Debridement, Nightmare Begins Responsibility, Healing Song for the Inner Ear, and Honorable Amendments. In 1970 and 1977, his poetry collections, Dear John, Dear Coltrane and Images of Kin were nominated, respectively, for the National Book Award. In 1979 selected and edited The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown for the National Poetry Series. Copyright © 1998 Charles H. Rowell

Ronsard’s guitar: A sixteenth-century heir to the Horatian lyre

The string instruments lauded in Pierre de Ronsard’s odes to the lyre, lute, and guitar serve to exemplify the range of his poetic powers and scope of his professional aspirations. In “A sa lire”, the subject poses as a restorer of ancient instruments, asserting his precedence as an inventor of French odes after classical models and revealing his ambition to conquer the court with a renovated national poetry. In “A son luc,” he invests the contemporary string with the epic-making potential of the Pindaric lyre, the rby announcing his intention to compose a French national epic. In “A sa guiterre”, he associates the instrument with the Horatian lyre. The guitar thus represents the amotory voice that surfaces occasionally in the odes collection, intruding on the nobler endeavors to which the young poet sought to draw attention. The ode to the guitar heralds the canzoniere that would be Ronsard’s next major project and anticipates that his love poetry, rather than the odes or the projected epic, would prove a source of lasting fame.

Editorial: W.S. Merwin's Hawaiian Epic and National Poetry Month

Editorial: W.S. Merwin's Hawaiian Epic and National Poetry Month

An Interview with Ronald Johnson

Like his poem ARK, Ronald Johnson's life can be seen in three parts. first part begins and ends in Kansas, most of it spent in Ashland, a small town in the western prairies where he was born in 1935, with a brief stint in Lawrence, at the University of Kansas. second part he spent on the East Coast, traveling a great deal. He moved to New York City in the mid-1950s to attend Columbia University, where he earned his B.A. He spent the early 1960s walking through Britain and Appalachia, and served in the army during this time. His poems soon began to appear, first in an issue of Poetry devoted to the long poem and then in books: A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees came out on Jonathan Williams's Jargon Press in 1964, and Book of the Green Man, his long seasonal poem composed out of his experiences walking through England, was published by Norton in 1967, which also published Valley of the Many-Colored Grasses in 1969. By this time, Johnson had settled in San Francisco and had already begun working on ARK, thus entering the third part of his life. As his life shifted to the West Coast, so did his publishers: Sand Dollar (Berkeley) published RADI OS in 1977, and North Point Press (San Francisco) published the first part of ARK as ARK: Foundations in 1980, one of that now-defunct publisher's first titles. ARK 50 (Spires 34-50) appeared in 1984 as a National Poetry Series winner, and since then, ARK has appeared mainly in scattered literary journals. Johnson lived in San Francisco for twenty-five years, making his living, in part, writing cookbooks, before returning recently to Kansas, where this interview was conducted. three parts of ARK are The Foundations, The and The Ramparts, each divided into thirty-three sections. The Foundations, beginning at dawn and ending at noon, lays out the forms, ideas, and themes of the poem in great variety. Concrete poetry, lyric poetry, prose-poems, and poetic quotations use quantum physics, physiology and optics, and astronomy to reveal myths of Orpheus and Eurydice, Hermes, and the Wizard of Oz. The Spires, going from noon to sundown, are the vertical counterpoint to the horizontal of The Foundations. They rush up to the sky, their words rising rapidly, composed into high-flying windmills, pillars, and fireworks that the poet dedicates to other poets, friends, places, and mythic figures, such as Ariel and Prospero. The bring the horizontal and the vertical together into a grand arcade of arches. Each Rampart is composed of a cluster of three arches, and each arch of eighteen tercets. There are eleven encircling the structure, covering a range of material from Thoreau's Journals to Van Gogh's letters to Protestant Hymnals, culminating at crack of dawn with the rift-off of the spaceship that is ARK. Peter O'Leary: Let me start by asking how ARK changed over the course of the twenty to twenty-five years or so of its composition. Since it was published in increments, you always included incidental notes describing the next step or two... Ronald Johnson: I worked on it all the time. I knew it would be three parts. I didn't have The Ramparts quite named--I've forgotten I called them. But I was lucky to envision a form that left me three different periods. So that when I got to doing The I could just do Spires and think what is a Spire? And then when I got to The Ramparts, which was really influenced by the mosaic arches outside of the Watts Towers, each one of three lines is meant to be an arch. So I was just lucky. PO'L: ARK seems comparable to epic Modernist poems like Cantos, Paterson, Maximus, as opposed to modernist long poems like The Waste Land or Briggflatts. Did you conceive of ARK along the lines of the big modernist poem? RJ: Well I wanted it to be equivalent. Olson said that an epic is a poem with history. Zukofsky put a lot of contemporary history and Marxist politics into his poem. …

More Than "A Nice Idyllic Thing To Do": Jarrell's Work for Children

More Than "A Nice Idyllic Thing To Do":Jarrell's Work for Children Richard Flynn (bio) Griswold, Jerome . The Children's Books of Randall Jarrell. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1988. In 1962, Randall Jarrell, age 47, was at the height of his fame as a writer for adults. He had served as the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress from 1956-58, received the National Book Award for Poetry for The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960), and had gained a certain notoriety as a curmudgeonly social critic by publishing his collection of essays, A Sad Heart at the Supermarket (1962). Jarrell's star as a critic of poetry had risen so high that in 1962 he was invited to deliver the major lecture at the National Poetry Festival, entitled "Fifty Years of American Poetry." Despite these outward indications of success, Jarrell was experiencing great difficulty with his writing, particularly with writing poetry. As a way out of this impasse, encouraged by Michael di Capua, Jarrell began writing for children, which had a salutary effect on his writing for adults, and resulted in at least two excellent children's books. Jarrell's work as a whole has received scant critical attention compared with that of his exact contemporaries, particularly Robert Lowell and John Berryman. Despite the publication last year of William Pritchard's Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life, this remains true. In the past ten years, Ian Hamilton's excellent biography of Lowell has appeared as well as several full-length academic studies, and Berryman has been the subject of two major biographies, and several critical books and essays. By contrast, Jarrell has received slighter and less satisfactory attention. The relative marginalization of Jarrell's work among academics may well be due, in part, to Jarrell's writing for children. Lowell, for one, characterized Jarrell's children's stories as "a nice, idyllic thing to do" (Pritchard 314). In his preface to The Children's Books of Randall Jarrell, Jerome Griswold raises the question of Jarrell's literary status and laments that "the standard entry for Jarrell in literary reference books...makes no mention at all of his books for children." Griswold's study serves as a corrective to this oversight by giving sustained attention to each of the four original children's books—The Gingerbread Rabbit (1964), illustrated by Garth Williams, and The Bat-Poet (1964), The Animal Family_(1965), and Fly By Night (1976), all illustrated by Maurice Sendak. But Griswold's assertion that "Jarrell's children's books can be seen as the final fruition of his life and of his career as a notable twentieth-century American writer" is more problematic. Because Lowell, like critic Jeffrey Meyers, sees Jarrell's children's writing as a failure rather than a fruition, it is important to show that Jarrell's writing for children was an essential rather than a peripheral activity. Though he promises to do otherwise, Griswold relates the children's books to Jarrell's larger enterprise only sporadically. This strategy threatens, at times, to backfire. By isolating the children's books from the work for adults, Griswold runs the danger of unintentionally lending credibility to those who wrongly argue that Jarrell's children's books contribute to his lesser status among die poets of the so-called "middle generation." However, Griswold is the first Jarrell critic to give the children's books the attention they deserve. Combining biographical criticism with excellent close-readings of the texts and illustrations, Griswold's study is an "appreciation" written in a familiar style, which is relatively free of academic jargon. Exquisitely designed, with profuse reproductions of the original illustrations by Garth Williams and Maurice Sendak, the book is strongest when Griswold analyzes what he calls the "conversation" between text and pictures. Griswold is quite convincing when discussing the problems of illustration that Jarrell's texts presented to the artists. For instance, while admitting that The Gingerbread Rabbit is easily the least successful of Jarrell's children's books, he demonstrates the expertise of Williams's illustrations, noting how, in the cover illustration, Williams captures the Jarrellian theme, apparent in poems like "A Quilt...

The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones by Thomas Dilworth

critic’s opinion that Spenser was not “lily-livered.” Coggins argues and doc­ uments in Spenser an obsession with sexuality that suggests a Lawrentian sex-in-the-head. This work is useful in alerting the reader to the possi­ ble presence of a sexual allusiveness that is bluntly and energetically preVictorian . It will provide, for instance, source-material to assess alongside analyses of Renaissance sexuality such as Jos. Pequigney’s recent provoca­ tive reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Certainly, it is hard to imagine any one suspecting a bawdy or salacious or serious sexual allusion in Spenser’s work that has not been mercilessly rounded up by Professor Coggins’s priapic computer. d e r e k n .c . w o o d / St. Francis X a vier U niversity Thomas Dilworth, The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones (Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 1988). xii, 434. $47.50 More than fifty years after the artist David Jones’s first appearance in the medium of print (In Parenthesis, 1937), it remains the case that most writ­ ing on his work is both introductory and advocatory. David Jones is, if I may be permitted the crudity, a “hard sell” ; and despite the prolifera­ tion of essays and reviews in literary journals, of doctoral theses, conference proceedings, and scholarly books published by academic presses, Jones is not yet a familiar name in the household of scholarship. Professor Thomas Dilworth notes, for example, that Jones is not included in Philip Larkin’s Oxford Anthology of English Verse; he is seen to have been omitted as part of a “widespread reaction against modernism” (367) despite the critical accolades his work has received from such celebrated poets as T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, W.B. Yeats, Basil Bunting, and Hugh MacDiarmid, whose approbatory words Dilworth invokes in the early pages of his study. Jones has, of course, been anthologized elsewhere over recent years, though his work does not lend itself easily to that mode of propagation nor fit happily within it. For instance, Jones appears in the second edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1988), wherein he is represented by selections from In Parenthesis and The Anathemata (1952); from the latter, 115 lines from Part III, “Angle-Land,” are outnumbered if not overwhelmed by some 300 lines of editorial annotation and notes (some of them Jones’s). Therein lies part of the problem for the critical advocate: Jones’s work as example extraordinaire of the modernist-mythic enterprise largely associated with Eliot, Pound, and James Joyce. Nonetheless, the scholarly attention to Jones continues unabated, and 1989 saw another collection of scholarly es­ 241 says and a massive addition to the National Poetry Foundation’s “Man and Poet” series showcasing David Jones. Dilworth himself is preparing a com­ missioned biography for publication some four or five years hence. (Canada, surprisingly some might say, has long been the most hospitable ground for Jones studies; the University of Toronto has been its centre, but books on Jones have issued from the Maritimes to Victoria and many points between.) To hand we have Dilworth’s exhaustively researched, impressively formu­ lated, and densely detailed The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones, whose declared purpose is “interpretation . . . a prologue to critical assessment of the poetry [(ix)].” There has, of course, been interpretation before, also attempts at critical assessment, some premature, inept, and ill-informed, some thoughtful and instructive. Much has issued from rather uncritical channels, written by those whose shared backgrounds in things Welsh and/or Roman Catholic might be said to predispose the authors to a certain kind of advocacy. Jones has been well-served, too, by those who were his life-long friends and who have undertaken to present and elucidate his work from that connection and vantage-point. It is a criticism broached by Elizabeth Ward in David Jones Mythmaker, in which she complains that too much writing on Jones has been produced by those who “see things through David Jones’s eyes.” Ward comes in for a fair share of criticism in Dilworth’s book (as he states in his Preface, “interpretation always implies evaluation, and I shall...

Oregon or Bust by Max Westbrook, and: Moon by David Romtvedt, and: The Porcine Canticles by David Lee

86 Western American Literature Blue Period,” ending finally with “Hunt Without Style.” Collectively, what the various views of Hunt create is a portrait of the artist as middle-aged. For Hunt, the hunting years turn out to be the middle years. The point of departure for the novel’s action occurs boldly in the first paragraph when Hunt informs his wife, Leah, that he wants a divorce. The couple does not, in fact, divorce, but the novel is also a study of a marriage, a redefinition of a man and wife. What we discover in Hunt is a penchant for risks, even a penchant for destruction. The initial wish for the divorce ishis entrance to a mid-channel wherein he goes through a series of such decisions, literally attempting suicide at one point. He does not ponder the actions he is about to undertake; he is given to acting on impulse, as in the final chapter where he finds his truth in a confrontation with a bison. Earlier he tells a woman who, on a spur-of-a-moment decision, becomes his model, “I’m a klutz!” Then hejustifies himself: “But I’m a good painter.” The good painter, Kranes seems to say, shares much with the hunter. The novel comes to us mostly from Hunt’s perspective. The only other character in the novel in any sense rounded isLeah, and segments of the novel come to us through her. Leah, in fact, changes greatly in the novel. Essentially catatonic at the beginning when Hunt tells her he wants a divorce, she later embarks on a business career, becoming assured and successful. We never understand the dramatic change. Finally, it, too, is a by-product of Hunt, the artist. David Kranes gives us some vivid pictures at this exhibition of creativity, near-destruction, and recovery. JOSEPH M. FLORA The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Oregon or Bust. By Max Westbrook. (Austin, TX: Thorp Springs Press, 1984. 73 pages, price unlisted.) Moon. ByDavid Romtvedt. (St. Paul, MN: The Bieler Press, 1984. 76pages, $6.95.) The Porcine Canticles. ByDavid Lee. (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1984. 108 pages, $7.00.) Clear, honest voices seem to be important in the evolution ofour national poetry today. To them one may add an expert control of the line, the creation of well-defined dramatic situations, and the development of a distinctive, personal perspective within the nature of poetic action. The poetry of the West iskey in this evolution and the uniqueness of the western experience and idiom unarguably an intrinsic part of the American voice. All three poets here concern themselves specifically with a western outlook and idiom and their relationship to the larger issues of time and change. Max Westbrook’s Oregon or Bust is an experiment in personae, a presen­ tation of oral histories some ofwhich are successful, some not. Westbrook isat Reviews 87 his best when he draws the perimeters of his dramatic situation clearly. This lends an authenticity to the voice and gives over to a natural tautness of the line. This is most evident in poems such as “Rat Terrors” and “Home­ steaders.” In “Father’sDiary,” for instance, a daughterdiscoversher deceased parent’sdiary and is amazed at the human revelation of its pages where “love and grace . . . slip the guards / of death yet keep their secret.” Interestingly Westbrook isalso a debunker of myths, preferring the hard realities of struggle to Hollywood’s romantic glosses. In “A College Student,” he surprisingly gives these words of balance to a critical, yet pragmatic speaker: “Look, they went west / because what they could get / was better than what they had. / The rest is money-loving technicolor hogwash.” One wishes more from Westbrook, however. If he can give shape more consistently to what he so well imagines, he will be a western poet to watch. David Romtvedt’s Moon is a work of unusual sensitivity and texture. Divided into three sections, the book moves from a vision of sometimes wanton, sometimes careless destruction, as in “The Men” and “Solstice,” to an unsettling portrait of the undeveloped central African nation of Rwanda to a nostalgic and disturbing viewof the earth aswe move almost...