Review
James Wright Above the River: The Complete Poems
JAMES WRIGHT
Above the River: the Complete Poems
Bloodaxe £9.95
STEPHEN BERG
New and Selected Poems
Bloodaxe, £8.95
James Wright's writing career did not follow the accepted myths of development or, tragic as his sense of alienation may have become, that other myth of tragedy. His first two books, The Green Wall (1957) and Saint Judas (1959), are formal rhyming, extremely accomplished. They set up a thematic repertoire which remains in Wright's poetry to the end, central to which are destitution, the down-and-out often criminal male Judas-figure; this is connected to the scene of the poet's youth, Ohio, which forms both a backdrop for the destitution (which becomes a moral state often more than an economic one) and his own form of hell. Physically Wright escaped this U.S. industrial wasteland as a young man, but the poetry never did.
My name is James A. Wright, and I was born
Twenty-five miles from this infected grave,
In Martin's Ferry, Ohio, where one slave
To Hazel-Atlas Glass became my father.
('At the Executed Murderer's Grave')
So begins a poem about the murderer George Doty which refuses to pity the killer, but instead acknowledges a frank, uncomfortable identity with him:
And my bodies -father and child and
unskilled criminal -
Ridiculously kneel to bare my scars,
My sneaking crime, to God’s unpitying stars.
Staring politely, they will not mark my face
From any murderer's, buried in this place.
Why should they? We are nothing but a man.
The next poem is in the voice of Judas.
Wright's third book, The Branch Will Not Break (1963), broke with formal metre and apparently met with critical incomprehension and disparagement. In fact this version of North-American pseudo-Zen is an achievement in itself because it somehow manages to combine naivete with a sense of parody:
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life. (p122)
The parody is serious, and what it parodies is the wisdom and poise of the Japanese original, now brought to serve a poetic voice which is neither wise nor poised, but haunted, confused, always at twos and threes with itself.
The middle books of his career, Shall We Gather at the River (1968), Collected Poems (1971) and Two Citizens (1973) are less successful as poetry, slipping often into a kind of rambling storytelling. Donald Hall, in his introduction to Above the River, comments of these poems: "Sometimes when he fails, he insists not on beauty (which is conflicted) but on prettiness (which isn't) against his own ugly experience." This is a little too pat. What seems to me to happen is a kind of acceptance of artistic failure, allied to a sense of failure in life (Wright was himself prey to nervous breakdowns and bouts of heavy drinking). In 'Ars Poetica: Some Recent Criticism' he even comments, “could tell you, / If you have read this far...”, as if he knows, painfully, that many will not have; and he ends the poem as the utter dead-beat:
Hell, I ain't got nothing.
Ah, you bastards,How I hate you.
Nothing in the poem seems to justify the title: except this. Many of the poems are almost embarrassing, pathetic in all their negative connotations. There are elements of the male psyche here that have possibly never been expressed so well; he picks off all the scabs self-pity can find. If it were better poetry the self-pity would turn into something noble, not itself, into a lie. So I guess this is important bad poetry.
And of course he came, late in his fairly short life (some fifty-three years) to write well again, losing the obsessiveness, widening the focus out into the landscape, still real and unprettified. Take this from 'To the Cicada', which seems to comment on Carlos Williams' wheelbarrow, or Stevens' jar:
But there it is,
On the other side of the field,
The water barrel, the only real thing
Left in the shadow.
I can see the rust-stained bung dribbling
Its cold slaver down the curved slats,
Squiggling into black muck beneath
The barbed-wire fence.
Stephen Berg's poetry also makes honest approaches towards some of the less seemly sides of the male psyche. Not the self-pity of Wright's verse, but a trying to come to terms with the contradictions within the self:
I shave and stare into the mirror
as if I don't recognize myself, my eyes caged and vacant
like a girl's I was afraid of twenty years ago, like
my father's.
The sink's ice against my groin...
('With Akhmatova at the Black Gates')
But I have problems with his technique. Take this, from 'A Day':
But I tell you this voice is almost not here
to speak
because nothing
explains or helps or knows what
we are.
The problem is that the voice is there, and very clearly there, and speaks with a great deal of self-confidence. Its assured tone does not break down, like Wright's, and its style seems to avoid the sense of slippage, of occluded identity which the poems them-selves almost always are concerned with. It seems, what Wright despite himself almost never seems, to be straightforward autobiography. It's as if Ashbery happened to forget that: it all happens the process of the language and started talking his poems like Ashbery, about John Ashbery. Or as if O'Hara lost that sense of a Now that makes the poems construct themselves, be more than the jottings of a man walking round a city.
These comparisons may be terribly unfair to Berg, and even irrelevant to his project, but they help me to approach the slackness that seems to increase in his poems as he gets older. Until you get to what the blurb calls his "masterly long work" Homage to the Afterlife, which is on one level a pseudo-Ginsbergian (irregular line-stanzas beginning "Without me...") poem on life and the universe and everything, and on another a kind of self-analysis unearthing the consequences of the subject's relationship with his dying mother. A lot of it is incisive, or intellectually challenging, or at times charged with psychological significance, But stylistically it's a mess because it shanghais the Whitman-Ginsberg style of extrovert, celebratory, communal poetry, for what couldn't, in the end, be a more introspective piece of writing. In many ways Berg is a brilliant poet, and there are individual poems like 'In Blue Light' and 'The Voice' which prove it, but if he could face up to this, from Homage to the Afterlife: "Without me, one's own death linguistically misconceived like calling yourself you like using your own name", then perhaps his "this voice is almost not here" would read less like those posters which read "No Bill Posters".
Page(s) 63-65
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