Dear Katha,
What a curious state of limbo–I guess you’d call it “Florida”–to be in. I can’t say I feel very poetic this morning, or even prosaic, just suspended like an unstopped line awaiting its enjambments, or the dangling rhyme-word of an uncompleted couplet. Or like a sleepless swingless citizen. But anyway …
One benefit to that iffy, Soviet-style surrogate court business: Everybody gets the thrill of voting for a winner, and since nobody pays attention to what these people actually do once they’re in office, we’re all spared the feelings of guilt, betrayal, and remorse that so often follow hard on the heels of that thrill. (I anticipate, in “The Fray,” a passionate defense of the New York Surrogate Court, castigating us for our cavalier mocking of this august and vital body. Will we hear a similar paean to the Academy of American Poets? Hello? Anybody there?)
I also like Carlyn Kizer in her social-satirist mode; I’d love to read her ode on our new junior senator, or on Missouri’s. (A good night for widows and long-suffering wives, wasn’t it? Maybe marriage has its benefits after all–but that’s a subject for another Book Club, one we already did.) I was less taken with “Pro Femina” than you–its conspiratorial view of literary history, which no doubt seemed urgent at the time (the late ‘60s), felt dated, and Kizer’s victimological condescension toward women writers of the past seemed unwarranted, as did her slap at my personal critical paragon, Mary McCarthy (one of the “Quarterly priestesses/ Who flog men for fun, and kick women to maim competition,” and so impede the progress of the sisterhood). For some perverse reason, I often find myself irritated by writers whose lefty-liberal political viewpoints I share. My neck gets sore from all the nodding. Kizer’s feminism sometimes incites a similar impatience. Reading “The Erotic Philosophers,” I glazed over at her long, convincing exposition of the chauvinism and sexual cruelty of Kierkegaard and Augustine, even though it was clear she had a point. It was just a point that I’d heard drummed home in too many seminars and conference papers. I crave freshness more than confirmation.
What I like best about Kizer, though, is her Audenesque worldliness, the way she devotes poems to all kinds of occasions, for instance (in “Mud Soup”) the frustration of following, at great fuss and inconvenience, a recipe from the New York Times and producing an inedible result. The last stanza goes:
Tastes like mud, the finished product.
Looks like mud, the finished product.
Consistency of mud the dinner.
(Was it lentils, Claiborne. Me?)
Flush the dinner down disposal.
Say to hell with ham bone, lentils,
New York Times recipe.
Purchase Campbells. Just add water.
Concentrate on poetry:
By the shores of Gitche Gumee
You can bet the banks were muddy,
Not like Isle of Innisfree.
What easy, breezy, music. It’s a throwaway, yes, but I sometimes worry that too many ambitious poets, aspiring to seats on the Surrogate Court, go for glum portentous statements, or exquisitely right descriptions, at the expense of this kind of fun. (Kizer’s sense of fun doesn’t always pay off: There is an embarrassing attempt to translate Canto XVII of Dante’s Inferno into modern slang–“In Hell with Virg and Dan”–that begins “You Dan” and ends “And, man, when it unloads, it’s outta there, like gone.” Groovy, baby.)
Kizer does have a good election poem, not satirical precisely–troubling, in fact, and elusive, like Lowell’s poem about Eisenhower’s inauguration (“and the Republic summons Ike/ the mausoluem in her heart”). It’s called, “Election Day, 1984,” and when I saw the title I prepared myself for a hymn to the nuclear freeze and to Gerry Ferraro, a reprise of the righteous but futile Reagan-bashing that characterized the distraught and enfeebled left back in the ‘80s–again, nothing I necessarily disagreed with then or now, but nothing I particularly felt like listening to, then or now. What I found was this, a short, strange little lyric that does what poems, political or otherwise, should–it got under my skin and got me thinking, about the long night behind us and the unsettled days ahead:
“Did you ever see someone coldcock a blind nun?
Well, I did. Two helpful idiots
Steered her across the tarmac to her plane
And led her smack into the wing.
She deplaned with two black eyes & a crooked wimple.
Bruised proof that the distinction is not simple
Between ineptitude and evil.
Today with the President’s red button playing
Such a prominent role,
Though I can’t vote for it, I wonder
If evil could be safer, on the whole.”
Something for the Nader voters to ponder, perhaps.
Once again, this has been fun. I look forward to the next one. (Look, a rhyme!)
Yours,
Tony
