| Find Literary Events |
|
Chronicle Book Club |
|
Chronicle Book Review |
| Best-Sellers |
| Bay TV's Bookmark |
| Book Review Archive |
 |
| Gate Sections |
|
Home |
|
Today's News |
|
Sports |
|
Entertainment |
|
Technology |
|
Live Views |
|
Traffic |
|
Weather |
|
Health |
|
Business |
|
Bay Area Travel |
|
Columnists |
|
Classifieds |
|
Conferences |
|
Search |
|
Index |
 |
| Food Movies Music & Nightlife Performance Art Events Books TV Radio |
|
| ||
|
Why Can't Poetry Be Fun? REVIEWED BY Cynthia L. Haven |
Sunday, February 6, 2000
|
|
|
| ||
THE POETRY OF LIFEAnd the Life of Poetry By David Mason Story Line; 203 pages; $15.95 paperback
Many have decried the lack of serious poetry criticism, recalling the glory days of the mid-century when Randall Jarrell, Edmund Wilson, Delmore Schwartz, R.P. Blackmur, Louise Bogan, Weldon Kees and others plied the popular press with a regular routine of praise and blame. A few have stepped bravely into the void, but poetry and its criticism have nevertheless remained very much a niche market. One of the most recent attempts to assay a broader public is David Mason's ``The Poetry of Life: And the Life of Poetry.'' Mason, author of two award-winning volumes of poetry, identifies his West Coast allegiances from the outset and distances himself from the ivory tower: He grew up in the Puget Sound and worked at a wide range of (often manual) jobs before he became a professor. In the course of the 20 essays included in this book, he mentions that he drove a pea combine in Washington's Skagit Valley and unloaded crab boats for six months in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, credentials he offers as proudly as his academic status at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. His point: The West is populist, unbound by the critical prejudices of the East Coast literary establishment and academia, so it can offer a refreshing, shrewd alternative take on current literary fads and fashions. As Mason notes, ``The best poets eventually come to believe in an audience of intelligent listeners, not just in decoding critics.'' Mason energetically points out when the emperor is in the altogether, one of the many strengths of his provocative, insightful book. Certainly, it's cheering to see an academic echo what so many of us have felt when reading critically praised but irritatingly opaque works: ``When critics like Edna Longley praise (Irish poet Medbh McGuckian) for her `teasing subversions, her dismantling of hierarchy and authority,' my answer is stubbornly simple: why can't she make it all more fun to read? If `she writes a symbolic meta-language with its own emblematic grammar,' well, pardon me for choosing to read someone else.'' It's a point worth making. A huge potential audience has been disenfranchised from poetry since mid- century. This alienated ``we'' is the audience Mason is trying to reach: ``I have in mind that audience of grown-ups arguing about books even while they discuss their divorces, the latest political tremors or a new movie coming to town.'' Will he get such an audience? Not terribly likely. Story Line Press in Ashland, Ore., has an impressive record (publishing Donald Justice, Maxine Kumin and Rita Dove, among others), but it's not mainstream. Moreover, Mason tends to refer repeatedly, perhaps excessively, to a few key figures within the New Formalist movement, a label that means little outside poetry cliques, and whose cause needs more spelling out for the general reader than it gets in this volume. The result: His book may be pitched to a narrower audience than necessary. It's too bad if it is. With the much-ballyhooed ``poetry renaissance,'' with haiku in grocery stores, poems on the backs of buses and all the silliness of National Poetry Month, the public could use a practical, fresh approach to the modern poetry scene, one that neither condescends with self-indulgent, feel-good pap nor mystifies with inbred, pretentious jargon. ``Why is most contemporary poetry so dull?'' Mason asks. He points out that his uneducated Scots father-in-law could recite hundreds and hundreds of lines of Robert Burns -- without the support of a national advertising campaign. Mason defines poetry as ``memorable speech.'' He frequently points out instances where poets wrote better poems with metrical forms: Anne Sexton, he says, desperately needed (and initially had) the discipline of form to protect her from her worst self-indulgences. Anyone who's tried to memorize poetry can confirm his common-sense point: ``I can't help noticing how good free verse often settles into metered lines at key points,'' he writes, and often at the best points, too. He also dusts off iconic but neglected figures: Longfellow, whose metrical ingeniousness he praises; or Whittier, sometimes ``full of charm, a quality we should not underrate''; or Tennyson, in whom he now takes ``an unguilty pleasure.'' One welcomes his scansion of Tennyson's ``Break, Break, Break,'' a useful step in guiding the uninitiated through some of the arcana of less obvious meters and stanzas. One also applauds his attempts to fold less recognized poets into the modern canon -- such mavericks as J.V. Cunningham, or ``political'' poet Thomas McGrath, ``the most famous neglected poet of recent decades'' -- as well as his dunkings. Heedless of received wisdom, he writes, ``Ginsberg's `Howl' now seems to me a crashing bore, whatever its historical interest.'' ``The Poetry of Life'' is crusty, generous, lyrical and iconoclastic, a bold, alternative menu to ubiquitous pablum of poetry ``appreciations.'' Mason has his faults: He's sometimes brusque and superficial in passing judgment, digressive, occasionally weak or glancing in a description or phrase. But many of his arguments are convincing, in some cases inarguable, and one may find oneself unconsciously adopting them even as one pencils rebuttals in the margins. ``Truth matters even when we doubt our ability to know it,'' says Mason, who is bound to arouse controversy over just those truths he doubts least. Palo Alto critic Cynthia L. Haven has written for the Washington Post and San Francisco Magazine. |
|
· Printer-friendly version
|
