Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     Only a few of the poems in this fine book of Rakosi's correspond to what we might expect from that title: a poem offered with gaiety & wit as complete in itself, in the contained ordering of its language, & itself an analogy for the natural objects around it. This is not a descriptive art. The movement presented in each case has its own grace, the complicating factor of the nature of language. It is the finished poem that seeks the analogy, not its proceeding part to part. The end is a visual & tactile art, the proceeding is musical.

     A sentimental metaphoric ordering of experience & the physical phenomena that surround any man is what this kind of poem seeks to avoid. An account of this process appears in a lovely poem called 'Shore Line':

                                        This is the raw data.
                                        A mystery translates it
                                        into feeling and perception;
                                        then imagination;
                                        finally the hard
                                        inevitable quartz
                                        figure of will
                                                   and language.

The 'raw data' is set well behind any poem of this kind; it derives from a deliberate perceptual or meditative stance of the poet's, & the stance is itself a meditating one. There is no 'raw data' in 'Shore Line', which opens in the form of a soliloquy with a listener or reader implied, as in a transcript of a play:

                                       We speak of mankind.
                                       Why not wavekind?

It continues in the ready language of speech, the poet a presence within the poem, providing the shaping & inter-acting language. This is no mystery, we know how a man acts in the world, & re-acts on it. This poem is a noble instance. Nor is the result 'the hard/inevitable quartz/ figure of will/and language'. That would itself be a confusing sentiment giving no account of the excellencies of the Americana poems or the really fine synthetic movement of the mind (will) & language in Four Characters and a Place in The Merchant of Venice.

                                le mot juste? la branche juste

he exclaims in another poem, but the lyric tongue makes over both word & branch into its own movement, & it's not a pure or local matter, the harmonics set up are proper to the language of men. In The Declarations of Pierrot there is a turning away from the limitations of the idea of a poem to the true strengths of his tongue:

                                     I will put my purity away now
                                     and find my art in other men
                                     before I end up like a candle
                                     in the bedroom of an old maid.

This is the inclusive range & a fine strength of language: the speech of the Jew plus all the advantages of the artful tongue of 'the conventions of a tale of love'. Men are to be found in these poems, the sea is the salt presence it is, the earth is there & also the city (not as Reznikoff had it) and the heavens. The figure of the poet I like to take from them occurs in Early American Chronicle:

                        Here cometh not the King of France
                        nor the Secretary for the Latin Tongue
                        nor the Lord High Butler of England
                        with coronation jewels.
                        I spit on them al.
                        They have broken me for the last time.
                        I lie on the high poop al the night
                        with open eye, with wenches, singing
                        in radium like Chaucer and the smale fowles.

I find it apt that Chaucer should be named there, with that suggestion of grace. There is always grace in the short pieces of domestic sentiment, but that it should be there too, without sense of exile, in Four Characters, is something I admire very much & am grateful for. It is a language not hard or quartz-like, but eloquent, already by this man's use of it better fitted for the shaping desires of those who come after him.