Review of Against the Evidence: Selected Poems 1934-1994
Since David Ignatow began publishing in the early 1930's, his career has spanned ten presidential administrations, and four wars. He has witnessed the waxing and waning of literary modernism, and has come to enjoy the status of Grand Old Man. With the exception of Stanley Kunitz, no prominent American poet of today has been gifted with such a long career; but Ignatow's longevity seems not to have tempted him to play the role of wearisome cultural custodian in the manner of many other Grand Old Men. He possesses none of the later Frost's hectoring Cold-Warrior conservatism, and none of the aged Sandburg's treacly populism; Ignatow plays the Grand Old Man only so far as to congratulate himself for his sturdiness, his plain-spoken dependability. His odometer has turned over several times, but he still runs surprisingly well. And what other American poet has explored the possibilities of the plain style with Ignatow's tenacity?
Against the Evidence gathers work from seven decades, work notable less for its development than for its tough-minded consistency, for the relentlessness in which Ignatow reiterates his pet themes. His manner has always been deadpan and self-effacing, but this is less a form of modesty than a wryly Darwinian way of insisting that the fittest have indeed survived. As he puts it in his preface, “for Against the Evidence I have gathered from the most resonant of my work. The poems speak of sixty years of a contribution to American poetry, the significance of which awaits judgment.” Hardy, in his introduction to his final volume, Winter Words, is similarly coy, “though, alas, it would be idle to pretend that the publication of these poems can have much interest to me, the track having been adventured so many times before today, the pieces themselves have been prepared with reasonable care. …” Like Hardy, Ignatow is less a poet of old age than a poet who seems to have prepared for old age even in his twenties; he can now play his role with supreme self-confidence. There are, to be sure, aspects of Ignatow's method which limit his expressive range, not the least of which is an utter lack of music. But when he is writing at his best, Ignatow is a true American original, with a voice gravely urgent, realistic, and prophetic by turns.
Ignatow keeps himself for the most part to three subjects: money, family, and mortality. His most interesting poems are those in which these three concerns merge, a fusion which can be explained partly by Ignatow's upbringing. A child of Russian Jewish immigrants, Ignatow spent much of his adult life working as his father's assistant and later his successor in the family business, a small printshop. For the bookish Ignatow, this fate, complicated by guilt, resentment, and financial necessity, might as well have been a lengthy sentence to Sing Sing; and yet it has given him a sense of the working life which is equalled by no other contemporary poet save for Philip Levine, and he shares with Levine a sense of how work and family can grow tragically entangled.
Some of the best such poems are ones in which Ignatow addresses his father and his own mentally ill son, and their pattern is often one of recrimination giving way to grudging affection. In a recent poem, “A Requiem,” Ignatow expresses his ambivalence toward opera; but we find him studiously listening to Rossini, if only because doing so reminds him of his father:
I am alone in my apartment, alone as you were
without me in your last days at about my age.
I am listening to Rossini and thinking of you
affectionately, longing for your presence once more,
of course to wrestle with your character,
the game once again of independence,
but now, now in good humor
because we already know the outcome,
for I am sixty-six, going on sixty-seven,
and you are forever seventy-two.
We are both old men and soon enough
I'll join you. So why quarrel again,
as if two old men could possibly settle
between them what was so impossible
to settle in their early days?
The bald and plaintive directness of these lines are classic Ignatow. The warts-and-all presentation derives, of course, from his original mentor, William Carlos Williams; and though in recent decades Ignatow has moved towards a more allegorical and fabular mode which recalls Beckett and the surrealists, Williams's influence has remained predominant. Ignatow is considerably more saturnine than Williams; and while the poems of Williams's old age often raise their voice to a zestful sort of singing, Ignatow's timbre remains that of a gruff mutter. Yet this muttering bespeaks a fierce and tenacious integrity. There are certainly many grander and more various poets than David Ignatow; but few of them can claim, as he can, to be a national resource. The American Way is to neglect our natural resources, and it's time Ignatow receives the recognition he is due. …
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