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There are some American poets who have about them an
enviable feeling of freedom, spaciousness, of plenty of truly democratic air
to breathe in, elbow room in which to be wisely outspoken, poets in the
tradition of Whitman and Frost. Reading them is like inhaling a lungful of
the Big Outdoors: there's something companionable and healthy to it. In the
poem 'Quibbling the Colossal' Ammons
talks of 'room to / breathe and stretch and not give a shit.' Reading poets
like him and Stern makes one aware how stuffy and insular some British poetry
can be. That is unless you're sceptical of poets who give you the feeling
that, despite its ups and downs, life is still worth - even wryly -
celebrating or you are averse to poetry that's unashamedly solipsistic.
Ammon and Stern are two distinguished American oldies. Ammons (author of more
than twenty books) died six years ago aged seventy-five; Stern, born in 1925,
now in his eighties, has published fourteen books. Both are highly regarded
in America as major poets of celebration and have been honoured with
prestigious awards: Stern is cherished for a uniquely bitter-sweet blending of
the Whitmanesque and the Judaic, Ammons for his down-to-earth irreverence and
overriding insistence on 'joy's surviving radiance.' It is their vigour and -
to adopt a phrase of Lawrence - the man-aliveness that one relishes.
Bosh and Flapdoodle is a posthumous
work, containing seventy-eight poems, all written in the course of six weeks.
Ammons looks on the world with a knowingly 'innocent' eye, with a certain
maverick knowingness, sometimes with a lovable kind of crankiness and
garrulity, but always with a metaphysical cast of mind. What seems at first
sight to go off at tangents always arrives back to its first thoughts
enriched. He sets his mind questing and doesn't mind taking meanders. He
tells us 'my poems come in/dislocated increments.' It's been said of him that
he puts observation 'to service abstract investigation and themes' in search
of 'a unifying principle among minute and divergent particulars' - which is
to say that he is a poet of nature and everyday experience who brings a
scientific questing mind to his writing. Inevitably many of the poems here
are about the pros and cons of old age and many of them are wryly and slyly
comic: poems about erections, peeing, dieting and counting calories, the
generation gap, weathers, marital love, illness - all in couplets and all
using an Ammons' trademark, the colon, which it has been observed means that
'closure is constantly postponed.' We are drawn into a kind of honest
companionship, one that wants to share 'a lifetime's/worth of getting on with
life', of being human, vulnerable, fallible with us rejoicing in this in an
attempt to 'wipe out some of the darkness, put the/jiggle back in.' So a poet
who retains an optimism, who affirms, wants to help us 'move more/smoothly in
and out of the circuits of grace'; but by the same token tough-minded,
unsentimental, a no-nonsense poet who tells us in Hooliganism, a poem in which he looks back over the many loves
in his life:
one learns to love, it is
not easy, yet
not to love, even astray, leaves
something
left for the grave: burnt out
completely is
ease at last, the trunk honeyed
full as a
fall hive: when the light dies out
at last on
the darkening coal, the life
turns to
jewels, so expensive, and
they never
give the sparkle up: this was
a fancy, and
not half fancy enough and somewhat
lacking in
detail but ever true.
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Stern's Everything Is Burning is the work of a man in his eighties, unflagging
in its energies. Charles Simic quoted on the back cover talks of Stern's
'freedom to go wherever his imagination happens to take him'; this 'gives his
poems a feel of adventure that is hard to resist.' So we have similar
qualities to the ones found in Ammons. But Stern is more of a storyteller
with twist of the surreal and the tough-mindedness is harder, spikier than
Ammons'. Here for example is a poem called Loyal Carp:
I myself a
bottom feeder I knew what
a chanson a
la carp was I a lover
of carp music
for I heard carp singing
behind glass
on the Delaware river,
keeping the
shad themselves company
and always it
was basso, in that range there
was space for
a song compleat, it was profundo
enough and
just to stop and drink in that
melody and
just to hum behind those
whiskers,
that was muck enough for my life.
This is a cunning mixture of the real and the surreal (carp are usually
perceived of as being silent in the water; hauled out on a fishing line they
can however grunt like a pig) - and written about in a strange challenging
mixture of styles and odd punctuation, arriving at what I take to be a
last-line affirmation ('muck' being ironically positive word).
Like Ammons, Stern explores the paradoxical nature of life, celebrating both
the foolishness and beauty to be observed in the way humans beings try to
live it.
© Matt
Simpson 2007
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