Dear Katha,

What an auspicious week to be discussing poetry--not only because the four books in front of us provide no occasion to indulge in off-the-cuff punditry, but also because one of the functions of poetry itself is to inoculate language against the banality, dishonesty, and lazy overgeneralization that infects both politics and journalism. Poets are by vocation lovers of words, and even the most prolix are careful with them to the point of stinginess. "I keep trying to improve my controls over language," Stanley Kunitz, our current Poet Laureate, writes in the introductory prose "Reflections" on his new Collected Poems (a beguilingly slim volume when one considers that he began publishing poems during the administration of Calvin Coolidge), "so that I won't have to tell lies." This strikes me as a concise statement of the relationship between poetry's procedural discipline and its ethical obligations. "Sometimes I feel ashamed," he continues, "that I've written so few poems on political themes, on the causes that agitate me. But then I remind myself that to choose to live as a poet in the modern superstate is in itself a political action." We may want to discuss what he means by this since to choose to live as a poet most often entails opting for a comfortable obscurity, a state of cultural marginality cushioned, if you're lucky, by academic job security, fellowships, and prizes. The more generous interpretation is that to be a poet means to take a stand against the dulling of the senses and the dilution of language, to preserve the innate capacity for creation that is our birthright as human beings in the face of the dehumanizing conveniences that are a feature of every political and economic dispensation.

This is, in most circumstances and almost by definition, a doomed enterprise. "Our poems can never satisfy us," Kunitz muses, "since they are at best a diminished echo of a song that maybe one or twice in a lifetime we've heard and keep trying to recall." Maybe so, but I wonder if this explains why so few of the poems in Kunitz's collection, or in Yussuf Komunyakaa's new volume of four-stanza lyrics and Carolyn Kizer's career-surveying Cool, Calm, and Collected, satisfied me. All three of these writers, I hasten to note, are capable craftspeople and on the evidence of their work, intelligent, thoughtful, and decent human beings. They have busily, but not greedily, harvested their share of Pulitzers, Bollingens, and so forth. Together they uphold the honor of the letter K. But their admirable carefulness and control--the sense, above all, of poetry as a form of responsiveness and responsibility--seems all too often to squeeze their lyrics dry of inspiration. What I missed in these books--with exceptions in each one, but mostly in Kizer's--was a feeling of surprise, that frisson of sharpened attention that occurs when a poem vaults into some strange, unexpected, but nonetheless right perspective on things and seems momentarily to change your way of thinking.

One name for this resource, largely untapped by the three K-surnamed bards before us (except, sometimes, Kizer), is wit. Wit is not just a matter of being funny--though funny poems are scandalously undervalued by the editors of quarterlies and the givers of prizes. Samuel Johnson defined it, with reference to the English metaphysical poets of the 17^th century (whose influence is visible in Kunitz's earliest and best verses), as heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together. Alexander Pope praised the "Great Wits" who could "snatch a grace beyond the reach of art." Kay Ryan, a new voice to me (though not, I take it, to you since you provided a blurb for the back of her new collection, Say Uncle), has an idiosyncratic, quicksilver intelligence--and an impish sense of humor--that Pope and Johnson might have admired. She reminds me a little of Emily Dickinson, a more wickedly funny poet than she's generally given credit for being. Ryan's short poems, with their syncopated rhymes and jump-cut meters, are like tightly wound springs jumping open at the slightest pressure. They even look like springs, with their short, tight lines. One of my favorites is called "Blandeur," and it goes:

If it please God,
let less happen.
Even our Earth's
rondure, flatten
Eiger, blanden
the Grand Canyon.
Make valleys
slightly higher,
widen fissures
to arable land,
remand your
terrible glaciers
and silence
their calving,
halving or doubling
all geographical features
toward the mean.
Unlean against our hearts.
Withdraw your grandeur
From these parts.

I'm not sure I endorse the sentiment of this poem,  or if I even understand it, but I love the wordplay in coinages like "blanden" and "unlean" and that stuttering volley of rhymes resolving in that calm, ironical couplet. (If I'm not mistaken, Ryan is lampooning, in her own sprung rhythm, the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that begins "The World is charged with the Grandeur of God"--she's asking God not to press the charge.)

I don't wish to be unkind to a man who has lived long and worked hard, but it seems to me that Stanley Kunitz has devoted his career to upholding the principle of Blandeur. His style and preoccupations have changed over the years-from the rhymes, echoing Blake and the metaphysicals of the formal, Auden-dominated '30s, to the myth-tinged war poems, to the post-confessional, Lowell-inflected free verse of "The Testing Tree" (1971)--but an air of modest, melancholy thoughtfulness pervades his Collected Poems. His careful rationing of literary allusions and chaste descriptive passages and his persistent attempts to be lyrical without being too musical give nearly every poem a quiet, almost muffled feeling. (There are exceptions, as in "The Portrait," which jolts you with the unassuaged pain that is its subject). He duly picks up the usual mid-century themes--family turmoil, historical catastrophe--and in his hands they become manageable, safe, and a little dull. His poem on the German Pastor Dietrich Bonhoffer, murdered by the Nazis in 1945, seems dutifully bien-pensant if one compares it to, say, anything by Paul Celan, or even to W.D. Snodgrass' agonized, sometimes embarrassing poems about the Nazis. And speaking of Snodgrass, Kunitz's "Journal for my Daughter" pales, as a recording of parental sorrow and failure, next to Snodgrass' ravishingly self-pitying "Hearts Needle." Kunitz's poem about Abraham Lincoln, written to accompany an exhibition of presidential relics, seems almost designed to bore schoolchildren. It sits, comfortable in its blandness, in the shadow of Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in Dooryards Bloom'd," the exemplary democratic elegy.

I'm not blaming Kunitz for failing to be Whitman. Every American poet of the 20^th century has failed to be Whitman, but most, at least, have tried. Kunitz's poems have an oddly comforting typicality to them. If you had to show someone what, in the postwar USA, a poem generically looked like, you could open this book. Nobody would ever claim that Kunitz was a great American poet of the 20^th century. After reading his Collected, I'm tempted to call him the average American poet of the 20^th century.

What do you think? I've given short shrift to the other two K's--Komunyakaa and Kizer. Are there particular poems of theirs you found especially exciting or vexing?

Yours in blandeur,
Tony