[In the following excerpt, Wagner argues that Ignatow creates a personal bond with his readers that gives his works greater resonance.]

Taking our cue from Ignatow's poems themselves, I would like to stress that—much as we love the poet—our attention falls on the words, the lines, the open and yet always coercive form of Ignatow's poems. Those poems give us insight, direction; they express the anger and the joy of living; and they also provide a map for our own voyage of discovery. From “Stages,” “I am somewhere left behind in a dream / that did not end with my awakening / to what I do not own. With music and drums / I awoke. …” And “A man confronted by masks / begins to maneuver / out of their reach.” Such a triad describes so well the impetus for poetry (to find the self, the assorted selves, and to move them out of reach of all confinement), and as Ignatow says in “Say Pardon”:

Say pardon
and follow your own will
in the open spaces ahead.

For running through these decades of Ignatow poems is the sense, the spirit, of openness. It seems no matter of chance that David's forthcoming collection is to be called Leaving the Door Open. Part of the openness is the urge of the speaker, the poet, to make contact (and one thinks of Williams' Contact), as Ignatow says in “With the Door Open”:

Something I want to communicate to you,
I keep my door open between us,
I am unable to say it,
I am happy only
with the door open between us.

What Ignatow does at the end of that short poem, it seems to me, is to slide out of the rhetoric he has been developing; and by sliding out of that verbal pose, he moves—easily, unthreateningly—into our space. There is room for us in an Ignatow poem. Though he is among the most confessional of our living poets—we know so well the sadnesses of his life as businessman, city dweller, father, husband, son, and we also have savored the joys of those identities—Ignatow manages to stop short before he comes to the restrictive, the closing-out detail. Ignatow writes, somehow—and with a consistency that must impress—participatory poems.

I never had a toy soldier, but when Ignatow creates the staccato tensions of the child and the adult in “The Sky Is Blue,” his experience becomes mine.

Put things in their place,
my mother shouts. I am looking
out the window, my plastic soldier
at my feet. The sky is blue
and empty. In it floats
the roof across the street.
What place, I ask her.

I hear the mother's voice. My eyes turn away, and create their own piece of world, complete with physical principles that are unique to my view. Denying the rational, the cause-and-effect that the adult world so often demands, the child's voice (my voice) tries to echo, in its seemingly simple question, the semi-mocking pose my body has already initiated. But the whole near-comic interlude carries a poignance that sets off memories for any reader, a poignance certainly not anticipated by the factual, didactic title—in fact, a poignance that acts against the very factual tone to create still further reaches of conflict between fact (“reality”) and the child's (poet's) imagination. The title works with the poem proper in the way the adult's order works with the child's unresponsive attitude, and wry question. This poem, like so many of Ignatow's, conveys a kind of wisdom Robert Bly described in his 1970 Tennessee Poetry Journal essay on Ignatow's Rescue the Dead, “we have to learn to reach in and uncover ideas, which actually are so much fresher than the ideas in prose precisely because they have been lying curled.”

Some of Ignatow's most participatory poems are the most subjective (yet we think of him as the painter of the external too, the outer appearance of bums, employers, women working at various jobs). A remarkable love poet (though he seldom reads love poems publicly), Ignatow does the same kind of precise-detail-burrowed-into-wide-context format in love poems that he does in the short, descriptive pieces. In an early stanza of “For Nobody Else,” he describes the lovers lying quietly, “my heart beats on your heart / as we hold each other's breathing / in our arms.” Every phrase carries an authenticity here—the quiet sense that all the person can know is the other's breathing, the woman's hands “upon my back / in the shadows”—but the poem quickly moves past the descriptive into a general that could lose the reader (where is that line between cliché and apt?). Lines like “I am not made happy with dreams.” “I want a maternal world.” “How do I know that tomorrow you will live?” And even—and have we heard this before and often?—“Do you know how much you mean to me?”

Those lines, however, direct and urgent as they are, come embedded in a context that makes them fresh, tense, as much a part of the Ignatow voice as the more convoluted passages like “Sadly is how I must say it” or “My body grows pale with effort / into the milky dawn.” The alternation between difficult rhythms caught to convey the taut passion of the lover's voice and the “meaningful” but never expressive enough lover's phrases shapes the force of the poem as a whole. And because of the commonality—of the language perhaps as well as the love experience—Ignatow conveys a reality we do not question. The poem closes with three lines that leave the reader as drained as the poet is,

At the thought of your death
all thought stops in me,
I catch my breath.

Ignatow's language, and more importantly the effects he creates with it, reminds me of a description Robert Creeley once wrote in a letter to me of Williams' sense of language. Creeley was trying to make a distinction between colloquial and idiomatic, when he pointed out that Williams' used a phrasing “that is ‘idiomatic’ rather than ‘colloquial,’” managing by that to create “a ‘spoken’ sense of sequence, rather than a ‘literary’ one—but the individual words … are often in no sense colloquial.” How the poet conveys the rhythm of “spoken” language when the words and phrases are often not those of common spoken language depends in part on the syntactic control—length of ostensible sentence played against length of line, line break, position of word, and emphasized word in other patterns, as sound. Ignatow as poet of the city, the common reader, the common man and woman actually uses a very high level of abstraction in his speech, a generalized vocabulary (as compared to Roethke, for example), and a reliance on repetition as refrain that holds stanzas, and images, together.

“Oh Irene” is one of many poems that show Ignatow ostensibly worked through idiomatic language, but actually using repeated phrases and abstracted maxims to punctuate the flow of his “speech”—and, accordingly, of our ideas generated by the poem.

What has happened to Irene whose bald brother
wore a wig? She asked me not to see her
and I loved her, which saddened her.
So sorry for herself, poor child,
working at Woolworth's where I would come.

Seemingly direct, the poet opens with a question that is both literal and rhetorical, and then goes on to convey all the factual information we need. But midway through the third line, the apparent naturalness of the syntax breaks (into “which saddened her”) and the fourth line also conveys the stained language of the poet-as-adolescent and the Irene in question. The poem continues with more constraint: “The once she did let me walk her home after work / was to tell me of her brother's wig. / It was she felt ugly and unwanted. …” Ten lines move with this combination long sentence and hesitant introductory clause or phrase rhythm, until finally Ignatow brings himself back into the poem—imperatively:

Listen, I am through feeling unhappy.
I have been through for a long time!
I am grown up,
a man like your brother.

The brother of the first line, the bald brother whose shame and strangeness had dominated the poem as well as his sister's life, surfaces here in Ignatow's manhood; and after the litany of Irene's self-pity, her absorption of her bald brother's shame, the return to the focus on do-er (brother, poet) is both effective and reassuring. The implied lament in Ignatow's title (“Oh Irene”), printed without the expected comma so that we read it as, perhaps, her name, or a commonplace expression said so often it needs no pause, characterizes the girl as well as the long central section of the poem does. “Poor child,” “unhappily,” “difficult,” “unhappy for Irene,” “patiently”: the language of Ignatow's description of the girl embroiders the title tone until she appears monochromatic. Our interest remains with the bald brother, and, in conjunction at the ending, with Ignatow as poet.

In this poem, too, Ignatow almost moves into the fantasy he comes to work with so effectively in his poems of the later 1960s and continuing. The sense of mystery that his mixture of factual and abstract language helps to convey seems to have led him to subjects that are real beyond our given terms of reality—rolling bagels, books that snap at his fingers, the poet as bird—or as “a species / related to the tree / and the cold dark.” Where metaphor ends and fantasy begins only the careful reader can say, and Ignatow purposely suggests the child's question at the end of “The Sky Is Blue” in a number of these quasi-fantastic poems. Such poetry is an extension of his earlier work, a pushing through techniques that might have become limiting in their repetition, but not a departure from it. The openness, the willingness to let the reader share in the poem (a sharing that might be more possible because of the various levels of diction and syntactic arrangement included), and the concentration on important life matters as subjects—Ignatow has not deviated from those concerns throughout his life work.

Part of his secret may be, as he says in “A Loose Gown,”

I wear my life loosely around me,
feeling it at elbows and knees.

Far removed from narcissicism, Ignatow's stance is rather acceptance, openness to whatever comes—joy of chasing bagels, defining Americanism, making love; and the parallel sorrow of knowing those for whom such self-forgetting joy is impossible.