POETRY

Of these five poets in small books from small presses, I liked Alan
Stephens best. His work demonstrates clearly the real value of tightly
woven formal verse in the hands of a talented poet pressed urgently to
speak, and at the same time shows that the tight weaving, the formality,
and the logicality of the "argument", rightly employed, are only means
toward setting forth a distinctly individual way of experiencing and
knowing, without which they are useless. One has the feeling that his
relationship, as it actually exists, to the landscape of the western United
States, is the important factor to Stephens, rather than his mode of writ-
ing about it. Thus his technical accomplishment, which is considerable, is
given a real chance to discover new and vital conjunctions between lan-
guage, nature, and personality, because the poet comes to nature on na-
ture's terms and his own, without an approved set of philosophical pre-
conceptions with which to strait-jacket what he sees and undergoes,
and because he allows his personality to enter into account. In addition,
Stephens has what might be called an instinct for the total concept: the
ability to separate from a number of other possibilities the one set of cir-
cumstances which will be most likely, within his individual limitations,
to produce successful poetry. His poems are good not only in their de-
tails (which is usually enough to satisfy us in a new writer); they are good
as whole poems, and this is rare indeed. I quote *The Baby Cockatrice* as
evidence.

I'd read of the vast reptiles, maybe seen
Some musty drawings of them, years ago.
The rumor that such creatures have once been
Will make a child fear, idly, *They are, now*.

Preoccupied and happy, I had fished
Well through a June day on Commotion Creek
And had my limit; now the water rushed
In shadow, mostly. Almost at the lake

I climbed the bank, tired, quiet. There he was.
He happened; total; there. He barely lay
A finger long—bone mouth and ruff and claws,
The plated body, and, shock on shock, the eye.

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JAMES DICKEY

And once I turned, all I had been stayed there
Whole in a gaze where no more could occur.

Ellen Kay, in a companion volume issued by Swallow, has nothing
like Stephens' promise. She is a much more tractable student of the
Wintersian virtues, and seems to take as axiomatic that learning to con-
coct acceptable little quasi-philosophical proposition-making verses that
scan constitutes all that one can hope to achieve in the way of human ex-
pression. One sees immediately that nature is never itself in Miss Kay's
poems; nor does it belong to Miss Kay in any intimate and revealing con-
nection. It belongs to the Proposition which it may be made to yield, if
the poet rigs a satisfactory set of syllogisms. For this kind of writing, the
myths do as well as (or perhaps better than) things seen and known; con-
sequently there are poems on Pluto and Ceres, Eve, the unicorn, Tiresias,
*The Living Narcissus*, and, no less wonderful in the pantheon of West-
coast neo-classicism, *One Intent upon the Doctorate*. Perhaps this is all just
as well, for Miss Kay's powers of observation are decidedly slight. But
when one sees, also, that her ability to make decisive generalizations is
not much above that of the average graduate student, one becomes res-
tive. She says that a stone found in the sea is "licked small and smooth by
rough / Tongues of wave, in beauty / Its own cosmography...." Isn't
this a kind of predictable dressing-up of a poetic commonplace? What
more haggard cliché could the poet have come upon than *waves* seen as
tongues, albeit rough? I find this going-a-platitude-one-better occurring
so frequently throughout Miss Kay's book that it has all the appearance
of being systematized, and I can't, despite my best efforts, escape the con-
clusion that Miss Kay is an almost frightening example of all the worst
faults, quickly acquired, and middling virtues, come by somewhat more
slowly (but I should think not much) of the average Winters-trained
poet, primly preaching a set of academic homilies ("the mind is . . ."
"lust is . . ." "love is not . . ." etc.), wherein painfully-contrived argu-
ments in rhyme substitute for genuine insight, and the whole is delivered
in diction like nothing ever spoken in truth or understandable error:
"Comfort cannot insure / Life is no sinecure . . ." or (my personal favor-
ite), "April holds their last breath; / Catabolic law, guiled / By the
mind's strategy, / Moves to finality / Without return." In the end one
reads this kind of writing only as another more serious-minded and semi-

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codified form of jargon verse; in any meaningful sense it is subjectless, all "strategy" and no passion, all will-power and no luck.

Margaret Tongue is something else again. She has evidently read Cummings and Marianne Moore to advantage, but the deepest impression on her writing has been made by the Oriental poets, particularly the Japanese. Her method also has something in common with that of Francis Ponge, the poet of *Le Parti Pris des Choses*, wherein the poem tries to discover the essence of a given object or animal not so much as it exists in the mind of the beholder (though of course this is what it comes to), but as it seems to want to exist in itself. In most of these poems, Miss Tongue is able to enter the life of the thing she is writing about (in her world, frost and rivers live as individually as camels and unicorns do), and so comprehend it by an entirely original act of understanding. Her approach is oblique, touching at several sides of an object (a shell, a rose), hinting at characteristics, and then retiring when the reader has been given all the information needed to make an imaginative summation of the qualities, which then, almost magically, assemble in the mind into the thing described. This method has its dangers: it demands the most extreme delicacy, and the poem cannot afford anything resembling a false note. The poet can never say exactly, but must always *hint* exactly. Miss Tongue does not invariably find ways to avoid the hermeticism and arbitrariness that she risks; one would be hard pressed to say just what is going on in some of these little poems, did not the titles furnish the necessary identification. Yet look at "Fawn":

On is it up
Yes upon
It is and now
Endure.

To make an authentic poem—an entire drama of awakening and weakness and trying to stand on new legs in a difficult, strange, and unsteady world—all this in eleven words: surely this is a remarkable achievement, deserving to rank with the best of Cummings’ short pieces. Like Cummings, Miss Moore, and Bashō, Miss Tongue has the gift of being able to reveal the things of her poems in their own fastidious and irrevocable immediacy, and of involving the beholder, beyond judgment,

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JAMES DICKEY

with each subject, his fate bound intimately to the unfolding of the words. I hope that people buy *A Book of Kinds* not to read once, or to give to friends because of its attractive illustrations and typography, but to live with. The poems here will repay everything of himself that the reader can bring to them.

I have heard that William Pillin came to the United States from the Ukraine at an early age, and that he began to write poetry almost as soon as he learned English. He is the only poet I have ever read to whom poetry would seem to be the *natural* mode of expression in English. This unusual combination of circumstances has produced some outstandingly beautiful poems, and some others, too. Most of the latter are written in simple formal patterns; at best they are charming, and at worst sentimental and routine. His really good poems are none of these things. Instead, they give the almost perfect illusion that they are taking the natural shape of profound and innocent thought exactly as it occurs. In these poems, Pillin perfectly succeeds in avoiding the sense of needless constriction and artificiality found in much formal poetry (particularly in some of his own); the writing has a marvelous *open* quality, and yet also arrives at the necessary conjunction of the rhythmic, the imaginative, and the humanly important that we recognize immediately as real poetry. Some years ago (November, 1946), Pillin published in *Poetry* an extraordinary poem in which all such good things happened. It is called *The Wanderer*, and I hope that readers will order Pillin’s largest collection, *Dance Without Shoes*, which contains it, from the Golden Quill Press (Francestown, New Hampshire), or seek out the poem in libraries. *The Wanderer* is a dream of *déracinement* in which that obsessive trauma of our time is given an imaginative resonance that all the citations of European and Middle-eastern place-names in *Passage After Midnight* could not hope to achieve. Here is the beginning of the present book:

City after city, all of my cities
are delicate dissonances
fading in my mind, are landscapes
sculptured out of mist. Alexandrowsk, Batum ...
My kinsmen paid their usual tithe of blood,
scattered a few candlelights and citron branches
and moved on. Alushta, Simferopol ...

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POETRY

One feels at once that the subject commands a great deal more emotional depth and impact than it has been given in this rather sketchy, panoramic treatment. When Pillin says, a little later, "There is never time to get the feel of the country," you see what the poem has lacked up until that line. As in the quotation above, the situations in the rest of these ambitious poems have the power to move one, not as poetry must, but as fact does. Their failure results principally from the poet's willingness to concede too much to mere fact (than which nothing can be more moving, handled selectively and with insight, and nothing less interesting if our attitude toward it is predictable, and that relied upon). There is nothing here to match the beautiful drifting cadences of *The Wanderer*, or of several other pieces almost as good in *Dance Without Shoes* and *Theory of Silence* ("If you say Thou to anything / it answers with a dazzling flash"). However, after noting that much of *Passage After Midnight*, if not simply commonplace, is wildly (and therefore tamely) arbitrary, I feel that it is still more important to say that Pillin's work nearly always has upon it, even in unsuccessful poems, the priceless touch of the human creature: characteristic, unique, and irreplaceable. The feeling of an individual life being lived is never really lost from it, and one encounters this quality with redoubled gratitude in an age when great reams of the verse we read, review, and toss aside seems to have come to us, if not from university-constructed machines, then from committees, seminars, and literary "plans boards", which perhaps amount to the same thing. Surely it is good to know that a man in the twentieth century can sit down and write

In the instant of waking
the real world
with its blue lineaments and suntipped tapers
bursts through my window
like a glimpse of incredible Eden.

Harold Witt says that "close observation of what is most familiar—the regional and known—is the way to universals". This is probably true or at least it ought to be, but it is hard for me to believe that things like "the in absentia bees" constitute much of value in the way of "close observation". *The Death of Venus* displays a good deal of verbal busyness,

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JAMES DICKEY

an air of brilliant slap-dash improvisation, and very little real feeling or consequence. The poems only infrequently *engage* their subjects: instead, they take off from them, circle them, skirt them, and, in essence, play with them. Despite Witt's avowal of "close observation", his clever figures are maddeningly vague; to say of a "strayed opossum" that it is "disturbing as stars" (italics mine) is to say little more or less than that it is disturbing as diamonds, raspberries, head-colds, birds, airplanes, atomic bombs, or almost anything else you might want to pick, for all things, seen in some perspectives, are "disturbing" in some sense; in point of fact, stars are usually counted (unless you are Pascal) as relatively reassuring.

Most of his work shows Witt to be a decorative poet: the decorative being defined as the writer who, because he cannot say exactly the right thing, hopes to say the interesting thing. If, as Malcolm de Chazal maintains, poetry is the art of transmitting life, or the sense of life, at its most meaningful, then the presence of a living human being must somehow make itself felt behind the language. This does not happen in *The Death of Venus* any more than it does in the sardonic and contrived poems of Weldon Kees, which Witt's somewhat resemble. As must be apparent, I don't much like Witt's kind of writing. Nevertheless, he has an enviable store of energy, and obviously he loves the language. He may yet go through a thousand changes, and one of them may be the right one.

If it is inferred that, of these five poets, I should like most to bet on the futures of Miss Tongue, Mr. Stephens, and, at his best, Mr. Pillin, the reader is to be congratulated on his sure grasp of the perfectly obvious. And yet, after all, I would bet on Mr. Witt, too, and on Miss Kay: Mr. Witt because he says in one place, "All men can be enchanted by a touch," and Miss Kay because of her reference to the "jagged flash" of Elvis Presley's (or someone's) guitar. Perhaps these are small beginnings, but all works of art (and the futures of those who aspire to produce them) take shape where the world and the imagination conjoin to shed new light, as I would say they do here.

JAMES DICKEY

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LONDON CHRONICLE I

*The Skylark and Other Poems*, by Ralph Hodgson. Colin Fenton & Rupert Hart-Davis. £4.4.

*Collected Poems*, by John Betjeman. John Murray. 15s. Houghton Mifflin. $4.00.

Two events have shaken the London poetry world this winter. The first is the publication of a volume of new poems by Ralph Hodgson (born 1871), a Georgian long presumed dead, though still figuring in *Who's Who* as resident in the USA. His survival is one surprise, the price of the volume is another. At four guineas, review copies are desperately scarce and the front pages of *The Times Literary Supplement*, where an extremely long and dutiful critical examination appeared in February, provide as much of Hodgson's recent poetic material as any of us are likely to see.

The second event is of much greater interest. The *Collected Poems* of John Betjeman have been a best-seller. This, in England, is something quite extraordinary. The last poet to have a remotely comparable success was Rupert Brooke (posthumously), and before him, Tennyson with *Enoch Arden* and before that, Byron with *Childe Harold*. In four months, Betjeman's book has run through five printings and sold 40,000 copies. *Childe Harold* (same publishers) ran through three printings and sold 11,000 copies in five months. Betjeman's book had 1,232¼ column inches of review space devoted to it in the national press up to March 1, and since then has had a great deal more, Betjeman having been awarded a second poetry prize at Foyle's on March 5.

What is the source of Betjeman's popularity? Certainly there are not 40,000 prosody enthusiasts in Great Britain. As his subject matter embraces a whole complex of social attitudes, it is perhaps best to consider his technique first.

Betjeman frequently bases his meters on those of *Hymns Ancient and Modern*, the sentimental ballads of the last century, and old favourites in *Palgrave's Golden Treasury*. These old rhythms defy the inroads of "experimental" writing. Betjeman is elegantly, eloquently, euphoniously syntactical:

> On the floor of her bedroom lie blazer and shorts
> And the cream-coloured walls are be-trophied with sports,

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ALAN NEAME

And westering, questioning settles the sun
On your low-leaded window, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

This is a Byron without cohorts and chariots. Betjeman's use of nineteenth century rhythms as a vehicle for the twentieth century charade is his secret satirical weapon. The rough highland landscape of *Annie Laurie* is transmuted into a hyper-sanitary North Oxford of suburban flowering shrubs:

> Belbroughton Road is bonny, and pinkly bursts the spray
> Of prunus and forsythia across the public way.

And more caustically, the Anglican "Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire" becomes an imprecation on a hideous railway junction:

> Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough.

The bathos of the present is exposed against the heroic rhythmical contours of the past.

But in lyric measures of his own, where there is no hint of parody or satire, he commands a simple musicality that perhaps one verse of the exquisite *Youth and Age on Beaulieu River, Hants* can hardly illustrate:

> Schoolboy-sure she is this morning;
> Soon her sharpie's rigg'd and free.
> Cool beneath a garden awning
> Mrs. Fairclough, sipping tea
> And raising large long-distance glasses
> As the little sharpie passes,
> Sighs our sailor girl to see.

Betjeman's poetic diction, deliberately and perfectly, is at times that of a very well-bred woman who has survived with the speech mannerisms of the Victorians into the age of Woolworth's and electric trains. "Schools boy-sure," "sharpie," and "sailor girl" carry us instantly back to *The Rosebud Annual*. Or at other times, the diction of a 1940 she-Conservative at prayer:

> Keep our Empire undismembered
> Guide our Forces by Thy Hand,

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Gallant blacks from far Jamaica,
Honduras and Togoland;
Protect them Lord in all their fights,
And, even more, protect the whites.

Or again, of an underbred but aspiring woman of 1954:

It's ever so close in the lounge dear,
But the vestibule's comfy for tea
And Howard is out riding on horseback
So do come and take some with me.

This quatrain contains *eight* major breaches of polite usage; can you spot them, you in Chicago?

The recurring subjects of Betjeman's poems are Church and churches, childhood, suburban proliferation, and the opposite sex; in two words, architecture and women; or in his most celebrated poems, the architecture of women. The architecture is the structural concomitant of pianola and gasolier, an architecture past middle-age. The women, whether nymphets, splendidly articulated games-girls, lonely typists, obsessive businesswomen, or securer creatures like Mrs. Fairclough, are seen through a middle-aged perspective and often with a middle-aged woman's feline sharpness.

"Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another—
Let us hold hands and look."
She, such a very ordinary little woman;
He, such a thumping crook;
But both, for a moment, little lower than the angels
In the teashop's ingle-nook.

No man observes like that; the intuitions have grown acute on the whetstone of *Woman's Own*. And hence, Betjeman's popularity with a vast female readership and with numberless students of female behavior.

To weekend architects, ecclesiologists, amateurs of the Church of England in its odd and amiable decay, conservers of the threatened countryside, and those for whom the provincial and suburban inter-war years are now bathed in amber light, Betjeman also speaks with nostalgia and wry sympathy. While those caught up in the second round of the

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ALAN NEAME • HUGH KENNER

class war, triggered off by Nancy Mitford and the U-controversy, i.e., the counter-revolution from the right, plot in the work of this idiosyncratically English poet the true geography of

That topic all-absorbing, as it was,
Is now and ever shall be, to us—CLASS.

The *Collected Poems* are to be published by Houghton Mifflin in April.* What will America make of them?

ALAN NEAME

## TO MEASURE IS ALL WE KNOW

*Paterson, Book Five*, by William Carlos Williams. New Directions. $3.00.
*I Wanted to Write a Poem*, by William Carlos Williams, reported and edited by Edith Heal. Beacon Press. $3.95.

What survives the death of the body at the end of *Paterson IV* is the imagination

(I have told you, this
is a fiction, pay attention);

hence this coda. Book V is a poem of vigorous survivals: a play of Lorca's, a Breughel *Nativity*, a great French or Flemish tapestry displaying the hunt of the Unicorn, this latter "the living fiction" in which you can identify

wild rose
pink as a lady's ear-lobe when it shows
beneath the hair,

* The American edition was published April 13, 1959. ED.

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created by

the old women or the young
or men or boys wielding their needles
to put in her green thread correctly
besides the purple, myrtle beside
holly and the brown threads besides:
together as the cartoon has plotted it.

These things endure. It is a great achievement to have so presented them that they endure in the verse actively, emanating passion, not simply resisting decay with the aid of some museum's air-conditioning. Here is part of the account of the Breughel:

Armed men
savagely armed men
armed with pikes
halberds and swords
whispering men with averted faces
got to the heart
of the matter
as they talked to the pot bellied
greybeard (center)
the butt of their comments
looking askance, showing their
amazement at the scene
features like the more stupid
German soldiers of the late
war

—but the Baby (as from an
illustrated catalogue
in colors) lies naked on his Mother's
knees

Neither frozen nor arrested nor fabricated, this life simply goes on for ever. So, by implication, does the poet's imagination:

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HUGH KENNER

So through art alone, male and female, a field of
flowers, a tapestry, spring flowers unequaled
in loveliness.
through this hole
at the bottom of the cavern
of death, the imagination
escapes intact.

"The cavern of death" is a typical image, the merest denotative convenience, preserved from slackness only by pace. In Book V pace and drive propel a disquieting transparency of statement unknotted by Williams' characteristic musculature of diction. The angular, half-unassimilable word no longer juts; nothing impedes the rapidity of declaration.

Though functional, this facility is not unrelated to a certain unexpected susceptibility to paraphrase that seems inherent in the conception of the poem. In the summer of 1957 Dr. Williams told an interviewer, "Pater son IV ends with the protagonist breaking through the bushes, identify ing himself with the land, with America. He finally will die but it can't be categorically stated that death ends anything. When you're through with sex, with ambition, what can an old man create? Art, of course, a piece of art that will go beyond him into the lives of young people, the people who haven't had time to create. The old man meets the young people and lives on."

This explication, as banal and engaging as a twelfth grade valedictory, is to be found in I Wanted to Write a Poem, Edith Heal's transcription of a summer's interviews, a wonderfully interesting little book though yawning with missed opportunities. A running bibliography, printed in red, states the topics of the poet's reminiscences, which appear without quotation marks. Miss Heal is pleased with this device, and notes that her subject was pleased with it too. She also points out that "paragraphing is accomplished by spacing between paragraphs to give the effect of a burst of speech because that is exactly the way the words came to me", and Dr. Williams for his part says concerning his early collection, Al Que Quiere, that "the titles of the poems tell you how I looked around me and saw something that suggested a poem: Man with a Bad Heart, Child, The Old Man, Dedication for a Plot of Ground."

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HUGH KENNER

They don't set up as a knowing pair, these two. "I asked Dr. Williams if his poem *Portrait of a Lady* had been suggested by either Henry James or T. S. Eliot. Then I read the poem and we laughed and agreed that it could not have been suggested by the work of either gentleman. I include it so the reader will see why." There is ample excuse for the reviewer who concluded from this volume that Dr. Williams was an agreeable man without talent, fiercely determined to experience the sensations of being a writer. Such a man would express himself no differently. "This was automatic writing," he says of one book. "I sat and faced the paper and wrote." Or again, of some short stories, "I wrote it down, without technical tricks. I kept the literary thing to myself." He sounds wonderfully naïve, and we nearly conclude that Miss Heal simply wasn't talking to the man who wrote *The Descent* or "The pure products of America / go crazy...." She was encouraging a retired New Jersey doctor to leaf through his albums: "*Blizzard* tells about me, the doctor. I had to go out in the snow to make a night call. I can remember the moment the last lines speak of...."

On the other hand, she wasn't talking to a litterateur. "I wrote it down, without technical tricks:" exactly so: his art was the art of seeing what to write. The casual social gusto of *I Wanted to Write a Poem* is infinite with his creative depths. Reviewing Robert McAlmon in 1924, Williams wrote, "Villon could not exist now if there were the faintest feeling about his writing that he had sought to be effective.... 'Le mot juste' is the ready word, it has no other significance. This is fundamental. There cannot be in literature a seeking for words.... It is dangerous ground, but good writing is rare." So for fifty years he has used the ready word, with results often remarkable. The ready cadence also: "I was looking for a metric figure—a new measure. I couldn't find it and I couldn't wait for it. I was too impatient: I had to write."

The energy, the activity, lie near the top of his mind, where the words are also. Hence they unite, words and energy, without involving that urge to be effective which has its springs a little deeper in the psyche, down in the regions where the Self becomes aware that it can cut a dramatic figure. The poems seem just dashed off, as indeed they were: "By the road to the contagious hospital ..." was written in fifteen minutes or so. To write anything at all of the smallest interest by this means requires the rarest balance of literacy and impulse, a balance only possible

130

to naïveté of a certain order. The naïveté makes the poems possible without itself (at best) getting shredded into them. Cellophane-thin, it protects from corrosion an exceedingly delicate mechanism of apprehension, ticking away in full view. The very air is polluted with knowingness: let a trace enter, and the poet would be ruined for ever, the poet who is determined to rely, in twentieth century America, neither on books nor on a literary tradition. Pound had virtually to invent the books he relies on, Eliot the tradition. Miss Moore, whose late works show her moving quite as innocently close to the occasions of her poems as Williams, chose to invent symmetrical little jewelled watch movements, to serve for forms. Williams, who has written memorably of invention, invents nothing we can categorize, not forms, not traditions, merely the poem in hand, an improvisation and at the same time "a machine made out of words". "It is dangerous ground, but good writing is rare."

So much we can learn from the very transparence of *I Wanted to Write a Poem*, a transparence the habit of which made possible the strong verse of *Paterson V*, which like Villon "could not exist if there were the faintest feeling about his writing that he wanted to be effective". It is menaced by a dozen clichés of feeling: sentimentalities about old age and harlots, birds and flowers ("Flowers have always been his friends"—a laxative cadence that miraculously does not spoil one of the finest pages in the poem). It evades cliché by paying it no heed. It opens with a conventional eagle and conventional sentiments:

In old age
the mind
casts off
rebelliously
an eagle
from its crag
—the angle of a forehead
or far less
makes him remember when he thought
he had forgot

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POETRY

—yet the words seem to have written themselves, and guard, not having been put there by somebody for effect, what was in the sentiment before convention overtook it. This mysterious process suggests in turn to Williams, as it has suggested to other poets, the analogy of the dance, that ordered energy which posits without insisting; yet not bothering his head about the need to refurbish this worn image, he can end as strongly as he began:

The measure intervenes, to measure is all we know,
a choice among the measures . .
the measured dance
"unless the scent of a rose
startle us anew"

Yo ho! ta ho!
We know nothing and can know nothing .
but
the dance, to dance to a measure
contrapuntally,
Satyrically, the tragic foot.

HUGH KENNER

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NEWS NOTES

NEWS NOTES

Most of the Winter issue of *The Literary Review*, published at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Teaneck, New Jersey, is devoted to the work of Gil Orlovitz: *Lyric, The Morning of a Clown*, selections from the *Diary of Matthew Parson*, from *M'sieu Mishiga*, from *The Letters of Great Ape*, and the *Art of the Sonnet*, a statement by Mr. Orlovitz under the heading *Some Autobiographical Words*, and a play in thirty-nine scenes entitled *Gray*, "based in part on some of the events in the life of Abraham Lincoln". There is also a drawing of the poet by his wife, Lynn Marquize. ✠ The first number of *Extantis*, for Winter 1958-59, has poems by Daniel Langton, Stephen Leiper, Robert Stock, Edith Hoffman, Norman C. Moser, Carmoreau Hatié, and Eve Langton. There is also prose fiction. It is edited by Jason Smith and published semi-annually, at thirty-five cents a copy. The address is P.O. Box 796, San Francisco. ✠ Agenda is "a revival of the publication known originally as *Four Pages*", and is edited by William Cookson, at 5 Cranbourne Court, Albert Bridge Road, London, S.W.11. It still consists of four pages. The first number quotes Ford Madox Ford on the lack of "any sort of union for an esthetic or for an intellectual purpose" in England and America, contains a poem by Osip Mandelstam adapted by Peter Russell from the Russian, and offers among other political and economic opinions the statement, "When the intelligent (?) thinking, or soisdisant thinking public, begins to realize that revolution is not the monopoly of the left, they may seriously consider the possibilities of the ideas of Belloc, C. H. Douglas, Gesell, and other economists who put the individual's rights before the power of the State, and who saw the possibilities of widespread private property, prosperity, and freedom as real." Subscriptions for twelve issues, including postage, are twelve shillings. ✠ The first number of *Big Table*, a new quarterly, offers poetry by Gregory Corso and Edward Dahlberg and prose by William S. Burroughs, Mr. Dahlberg, and Jack Kerouac. There is also an editorial by Irving Rosenthal accusing the administration of the University of Chicago of having suppressed the Winter issue of the *Chicago Review*, which was to present the material now published in *Big Table* (except for Mr. Corso's three poems, a "supplement" to this issue). With the publication of this material, Mr. Rosenthal, who had been the editor of the *Chicago Review*, now regards his "last editorial responsibility" as fulfilled; the editor of *Big Table*, beginning with the second number, will be Paul Carroll. Subscriptions are $4 a year, and

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POETRY

single copies $1. The address is 1316 N. Dearborn Street, Chicago. Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso gave readings in Chicago to help launch the magazine, on January 29 at the Sherman Hotel, under the sponsorship of the Shaw Society, and on January 21 at the Gate of Horn.

Ezra Pound, on an invitation from the City of Munich, will read selections from his work in the Cuvilliés Theater on June 3. Other writers who have been invited to read in Munich are Arthur Miller, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, Rudolf Hagelstange, and Wilhelm Lehmann. ✠ The English Department of Seton Hall University is sponsoring a Francis Thompson Centenary celebration to be held on Saturday, October 31, 1959, on the campus in South Orange, New Jersey. There will be an exhibition of Francis Thompson papers and materials, and two sessions at which papers will be read. Any poets, critics, or scholars wishing to submit papers should send them to Professor Paul M. Ochojski, for the Thompson Centenary Committee, Seton Hall University, before September 15, 1959. ✠ Dudley Fitts succeeds W. H. Auden as the new editor of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. ✠ Djuna Barnes, Dorothy Parker, and Karl Shapiro are among five new members (the others are Janet Flanner and Will Durant) elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in its department of literature. Glenway Wescott is the new president. ✠ Carl Sandburg and Edward Steichen will go to Moscow at the invitation of U.S.I.A. for the American National Exhibition, which will include Mr. Steichen's exhibit of 503 photographs, *The Family of Man*. ✠ Our readers, who have both an interest in Kenneth Patchen's work and activities and a concern for his health and for his financial means for meeting the constant threats to it, will be pleased to know that he was on a reading tour in Canada during February. His tour included Victoria (B.C.) College, a two-night appearance with Al Neal's quartet at The Scene in Victoria, an appearance on C.B.S. television, the opening of a new night club with Al Neal in Vancouver, a reading without jazz at the University of British Columbia, another in Portland, and then an engagement with Johnny Witmer and the new Bed of Roses Chamber Jazz Group to open the Musicians' Union Auditorium in Seattle. He returned home for a medical check-up before going on to New York where he appeared with Charles Mingus in concerts on March 16 and 20 in the Living Theatre. Other plans are being held in abeyance, we are told, until the medical report makes clear whether some new surgery for Mr. Patchen is to be an immediate obstacle.

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CONTRIBUTORS

CONTRIBUTORS

H. D. was given the Gold Medal for Poetry last month in the Brandeis University Creative Arts Awards, and Poetry's Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize last November. She lives outside Zurich, but has recently repatriated herself as an American citizen. (By a ruling which has been amended since that time, she had automatically lost her citizenship at the time of her marriage.) Grove published her *Selected Poems* in an Evergreen paperback a few years ago. ✠ KENNETH KOCH is working on the libretto of an opera for which Virgil Thomson is writing the music. He is the author of *Poems* (DeNagy Gallery, 1953) and now has a larger collection of his work ready for publication. ✠ MARY SOLES appears in *Poetry* for the first time. She was born in New Jersey in 1915 and educated in France. She has two sons and is occupied both as a housewife and as a bookkeeper in a dairy in East Hampton, New York. ✠ New work by JOSEPHINE JACOBSEN can be seen in recent or forthcoming issues of *The Commonweal*, *Prairie Schooner*, the *Beloit Poetry Journal*, and *Imagi*. She is the author of *The Human Climate* (Contemporary Poetry, Baltimore). ✠ ROBERT S. SWARD's poems have been appearing frequently in some dozen little magazines during the past few years. Some of the poems were collected in his book *Advertisements* (Odyssey Chapbooks, Chicago). He has held fellowships at the Iowa Workshop and at Bread Loaf and is now teaching at Connecticut College. ✠ EDA LOU WALTON has been working on a book of *Selected Poems* to include her recent work besides selections from three earlier volumes. There were seven of her poems in our November 1957 issue. She has written much criticism and many articles in anthropology and has edited a number of anthologies. She was born in 1896. ✠ PHILIP BOOTH has been on a Guggenheim Fellowship this year. His book, *Letter from a Distant Land* (Viking) won the Lamont Prize in 1956; and the title-poem won Poetry's Bess Hokin Prize in 1955. ✠ PAUL CARROLL will be the editor of *Big Table* beginning with its second number (see *News Notes*). His poems have been published in many journals besides *Poetry*, and his translation of the *Satirical Letters of St. Jerome* was published by Henry Regnery in 1956. ✠ CONSTANCE URDANG is now living at Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. She has recent work in *Harper's*, *Sewanee, Texas Quarterly*, and the *Quarterly Review of Literature*, and an article on Wallace Stevens forthcoming in the *Western Review*. She worked with Satoru Sato in the editing of our Japanese issue. ✠ HAROLD NORSE is back in Europe, living in Naples. His translations of the *Sonnets of G. G. Belli* will be published by

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POETRY

Jonathan Williams in the fall. His first book of poems was *The Undersea Mountain* (Alan Swallow, 1953). ✧ JACK CRAWFORD, JR. has published poems in various literary journals and was introduced to our readers in December 1957. He lives in Kingston, New York, where he works as a newspaperman. ✧ Summer Knowledge, a volume of new and selected poems, 1938–1958, by DELMORE SCHWARTZ will be published early this coming August by Doubleday. Other recent poems from this volume were in our May issue last year. The Library of Congress has just published as a brochure the lecture on "The Present State of Poetry" that he gave in Washington in January 1958.

Five of JEAN GARRIGUE'S new poems were in our December 1958 issue. She has recently been on a *Hudson* Fellowship, working most of the year in Europe and later at the MacDowell Colony. ✧ DAVID LOUGÉE has shown his verse in many magazines here and abroad, and in various anthologies, the latest being *21 Poets and Painters*, published by the Morris Gallery (see *News Notes* for February 1959). He was one of the contributors to our special Dylan Thomas number in October 1955. ✧ JAMES DICKEY won our Union League Prize last year for his *Dover: Believing in Kings* in the August issue. He has a first book of poems ready for publication, *The Vegetable King, and Other Poems*. ✧ There were three new poems by ALAN NEAME in our March 1959 issue. He has been living in London since last summer. His piece in this issue is the first section of a London chronicle which he has written for us; there will be two other installments to follow. ✧ HUGH KENNER was this year's Faculty Research Lecturer at the University of California at Santa Barbara. William Carlos Williams is the subject of a book now in progress.

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BOOKS RECEIVED

BOOKS RECEIVED

VERSE

*Fighting Terms*, by Thom Gunn. Hawk's Well Press (New York). $0.75.

*Metaphysical Lyric* and *Poems of the Seventeenth Century*, edited by Herbert J. C. Grierson. Oxford University Press. $1.75.

*Japan: Theme and Variations: A Collection of Poems by Americans*, edited by Charles E. Tuttle. Charles E. Tuttle Company (Rutland, Vermont). $3.00.

*Poems Written in Berlin*, by Barbara Gibbs. Claude Fredericks (Pawlet, Vermont). $2.00.

*The Hotel Wentley Poems*, by John Wieners. Auerhahn Press (San Francisco). $1.00.

*Rivers to Senang*, by Margaret Leong. Eastern Universities Press (Singapore). No price listed.

*Ash Flowers, First Poems*, by Lyman Andres, Jr. Contemporary Poetry (Baltimore). $3.00.

*Faces of Love*, by Mary Elizabeth Bayer. Ryerson Press (Toronto). $1.00.

*A Time to Search*, by Ruth F. Brin. The Jonathan David Company (New York). $2.75.

*Poems: 1958*, by Paul Trachtman and Grandin Conover. Swarthmore College Print Club (Swarthmore, Pennsylvania). $0.50.

*Poems*, by Michael Collie. The Ryerson Press (Toronto). $1.00.

*In Her Mind Carrying*, by Verna Loveday Harden. Ryerson Press (Toronto). $1.00.

*The Heart Is Fire*, by Douglas Lochhead. Ryerson Press (Toronto). $1.00.

*The Lovely Quarry*, by Seymour Faust. Hawk's Well Press (New York). No price listed.

*Orbe*, by Pablo Ramella. Francisco A. Colombo (Buenos Aires). No price listed.

*His Thoughts Made Pockets & the Plane Buckt*, by John Berryman. Claude Fredericks (Pawlet, Vermont). $2.00.

*The Blackbird in the Lilac*, Verses for Children, by James Reeves. Illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. E. P. Dutton & Company, Inc. $2.50.

*A Book of Czech Verse*, edited and translated by A. French. Macmillan & Company Ltd. (London); St. Martin's Press (New York). $1.75.

*A Suit of Nettles*, by James Reaney. St. Martin's Press (New York). $3.00.

*The Night of the Hammer: Poems*, by Ned O'Gorman. Harcourt, Brace. $3.75.

*Bodily Responses: Preceded by Other Poems and Followed by Footnotes*, by George Buchanan. Gaberboccbus (London). 8s. 6d.

*Poesia Americana del Dopoguerra*, ed. by Alfredo Rizzardi. Schwarz (Milano). L. 3500.

*New Land New Language: An Anthology of Australian Verse*, compiled by Judith Wright. Oxford University Press. $1.65.

*8 Poems: 1958*, by Kenneth O. Hanson. Graphic Arts Workshop (Portland, O.). No price listed.

*Journey into Time*, by David Morton. The Pentelic Press (Norfolk, Va.). $3.50.

*A Singing of Shells*, by Richard Diers. The Waterbury Press (Villefranche-sur-Mer, France). No price listed.

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POETRY

Singing Threshold, by Francis Brabazon. Beacon Hill Press (New South Wales, Australia). 21s.

Certain Poems, by John Edward Hardy. Macmillan. $2.75.

The Idle Demon: A Collection of Verses, by R. P. Lister. Macmillan. $2.50.

With Love to Lesbia, by Maurice Kenny. Aardvark Press (New York). $0.35.

Tecumtha: Shawnee Chiefiain—Astral Avatar, by Wallace Havelock Robb. Abbey
Dawn Press (Kingston, Canada). $5.00.

The Rose and the Puritan, by Alden A. Nowlan. Fiddlehead Poetry Books (New Brunswick, Canada). $0.50.

Know All Men by These Presents, by Beverley Bowie. Bookman Associates (New York). $2.75.

Jargon 31: 14 Poets, 1 Artist: A New York Portfolio. Drawings by Fielding Dawson.
Jonathan Williams (Highlands, N.C.). $1.00.

Three Journeys, by A. E. Dodd. The Fortune Press (London). 7s. 6d.

Earth of Eyes, by A. Carl Linder. Privately printed (Berkeley, Cal.). No price listed.

The New Orlando Poetry Anthology, Vol. I, edited by Anca Vrbovska. New Orlando Publications (New York). No price listed.

Prismatic Voices, edited by C. A. Muses. Falcon's Wing Press (Colorado). $4.00.

Moment in Ostia, by Sister M. Therese. Doubleday & Co. $3.00.

Tidings: Christmas Poems, by Jonathan Hanaghan, Eithne Strong, and Rupert Strong. Runa Press (Dublin). No price listed.

The Terrible Stars, by Matthew Louviere. Litzenberger Press (New York). $1.00.

Selections from Paroles, by Jacques Prévert. Translated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
City Lights Books (San Francisco). $1.00.

Poesie, di Richard P. Blackmur. Versioni di Alfredo Rizzardi. Immagini di Sergio Romiti. Edizioni del Triangolo (Milano). No price listed.

Two Plays: The Seraphina & In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree, by George Barker.
Faber and Faber. 13s. 6d.

PROSE

Stewards of Excellence, by A. Alvarez. Charles Scribner's Sons. $3.50.

My First Seventy Years, by Sister M. Madeleva, C.S.C. Macmillan. $3.50.

Studies in the English Renaissance Drama, edited by Josephine W. Bennett, Oscar Cargill, and Vernon Hall, Jr. New York University Press, $6.00.

What Life Should Mean to You, by Alfred Adler, Edited by Alan Porter. Capricorn Books. G. P. Putnam's Sons. $1.25.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by M. D. Herter Norton. Capricorn Books. G. P. Putnam's Sons. $1.15.

Modes of Thought, by Alfred North Whitehead. Capricorn Books. G. P. Putnam's Sons. $1.15.

Art, by Clive Bell. Capricorn Books. G. P. Putnam's Sons. $1.15.

The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, by Henry Adams. Capricorn Books.
G. P. Putnam's Sons. $1.25.

Art as Experience, by John Dewey. Capricorn Books. G. P. Putnam's Sons. $1.35.

T. S. Eliot: A Symposium for His Seventieth Birthday, edited by Neville Braybrooke.
Farrar, Straus & Cudahy. $5.00.

138

BOOKS RECEIVED

An American's Guide to English Churches, by John Betjeman. McDowell, Obolensky.
$6.50.

In Pursuit of Moby Dick: Melville's Image of Man, by Gerhard Friedrich. Pendle Hill
(Wallingford, Pa.). $0.35.

The Iliad, or The Poem of Force, by Simone Weil. Pendle Hill (Wallingford, Pa.).
$0.35.

Here Where One Stands, by Peter Docili. Island Press (New York). $0.50.

The Human Way Out, by Lewis Mumford. Pendle Hill (Wallingford, Pa.). $0.35.

The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder, by Henry Miller. New Directions. $2.25.

The Golden Bowl, by Henry James. Grove Press. $6.50, cloth; $1.95, paper.

Blake's Fourfold Vision, by Harold C. Goddard. Pendle Hill (Wallingford, Pa.).
$0.35.

The Modern Psychological Novel, by Leon Edel. Grove Press. $3.50, cloth; $1.45, paper.

The Secular Journal of Thomas Merton. Farrar, Straus & Cudahy. $3.75.

PROSE AND VERSE COMBINED

Literature As a Fine Art, edited by Donald J. McGinn and George Howerton. Row,
Peterson and Co. (Evanston, Ill. and White Plains, N.Y.). $6.50.

Poets Walk In, by Anna Pettit Broomell. Pendle Hill (Wallingford, Pa.). $0.35.

Ch'u Tz'u, The Songs of the South, An Ancient Chinese Anthology, by David Hawkes.
Oxford University Press (London). 30s.

The Second Issue of
THE FIFTIES

The Work of Robert Creeley

New Poems by JAMES WRIGHT and THOMAS PARNELL

Reply to Cecil Hemley

Poems of JUAN RAMÓN JIMÉNEZ

translated by Carlos de Francisco Zea

The Possibilities of New Poetry

Poems of GOTTFRIED BENN

Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum

50¢ • $2.00 per year

Editors: William Duffy, Robert Bly
Briarwood Hill, Pine Island, Minn., or at Bookstores

139