I

David Ignatow has broken free of a naïveté so typical of American poets. Whitman is his master, along with William Carlos Williams, but he sees that Whitman's insistence that we are all brothers, and friends, or should be, will lead directly to murder and insanity.

Let us be friends, said Walt …
and cemeteries were laid out
miles in all directions
to fill the plots with the old
and young, dead of murder, disease,
rape, hatred, heartbreak and insanity …

To feel powerful and alive, we may want to hurt someone, or have evidence that our society is hurting someone in our behalf.

How come nobody is being bombed today?
I want to know, being a citizen
of this country and a family man.
You can't take my fate in your hands,
without informing me.
I can blow up a bomb or crush a skull—
whoever started this peace
without advising me
through a news leak
at which I could have voiced a protest,
running my whole family off a cliff.

We are in the hands of a dangerous person when we read Ignatow—dangerous to that hopefulness and guilelessness hidden in us. He pulls out a knife, and we soon feel that the part of us that loves false comfort being wounded.

Lovely death of the horse
lying on its side, legs bent
as in gallop, and firm policeman
pointing his gun at the horse's head:
dull sound of the shot, twitch
along the body, the head
leaping up from the ground
and dropping—
to hold me by its death
among children
home from school, the sky calm.
Playfully, I note my grey head.

Do you trust doctors? Do you secretly believe the doctor is a wise father and you a child?

The patient cries, Give me back feeling.
And the doctor studies the books:
what injection is suitable for hysterics,
syndrome for insecurity, hallucination?
The patient cries, I have been disinherited.
The doctor studies the latest bulletins
of the Psychiatric Institute and advises
one warm bath given at the moment of panic.
Afterwards inject a barbituate. At this
the patient rises up from bed and slugs
the doctor and puts him unconscious to bed;
and himself reads the book through the night
avidly without pause.

Do you feel that we have made considerable progress—despite all the wars—in becoming civilized? Do you believe that we really do have a better grasp of certain ethical problems than the ancients had, that we have corrected certain excesses characteristic of primitive cultures or the Dark Ages?

At two a.m. a thing, jumping out of a manhole,
the cover flying, raced down the street,
emitting wild shrieks of merriment and lust.
Women on their way from work, chorus girls
or actresses, were accosted with huge leers
and made to run; all either brought down
from behind by its flying weight, whereat
it attacked blindly, or leaping ahead,
made them stop and lie down.

Inside human beings, then, there is a continual conversation between the primitive man, or primitive woman, and the civilized ego. How the primitive one behaves depends a great deal on the attitude the ego takes when they talk. Ignatow notes that if the civilized person insists on friendliness, the instinctive man or woman will be cold or hostile; if the civilized person is rational, the primitive man will be obstructive, chaotic, and barbaric. The primitive man may change the direction of his pressures and thrusts, even within the lifetime of the man, but he always clings as close as a shadow, the smell clinging “tenaciously through perfume and a bath.” David Ignatow then is not writing trivial poems to fill up a book; you see in his poems a man in a fierce dialogue with Rousseau.

II

David Ignatow was born in 1914 in New York. He worked at his father's bindery shop on Lafayette Street in Manhattan for years, and ran the shop after his father died. He knows overwork, dealings, business, hiring and firing, paychecks, exploitation of others, disgust.

I see a truck mowing down a parade,
people getting up after to follow,
dragging a leg. …
A bell rings and a paymaster drives through,
his wagon filled with pay envelopes
he hands out, even to those lying dead
or fornicating on the ground.
It is a holiday called
“Working for a Living.”

A person suffers if he or she is constantly being forced into the statistical mentality and away from the road of feeling. Ignatow notices that the zoo is a good symbol for the statistical mentality, because the animal still has his instinctive Eros, but the Eros consciousness has nothing to hold to. A man is compared to a zoo lion:

He gets up from the couch under the closed window
and walks over to the rear wall
where he lies down again upon a sofa
as a change, as a protest.
He has nothing to say, looks out at you,
but then he might turn on his wife
and tear her to pieces. It would
extend the borders of his life
and sex means nothing.
For days he lies alongside the wall.

As we know, both capitalism and communism are shot through with disastrous conflicts, apparently built into each system, between Eros consciousness and the statistical mentality. Both cultures stumble into situations like Vietnam and Afghanistan and get stuck there by thinking in numbers. A shoemaker in the Middle Ages could be in business for years and remain in Eros consciousness, because he knew everyone who bought shoes from him, and he worked on a shoe long enough so that love-energy could flow into it, even for a short while. But it's clear that most business in the postindustrial era requires that Eros consciousness be given up and the love-energy pulled back inside.

The business man is a traitor to himself first
of all and then no one else matters.

By the time a businessman of that sort dies, he has passed far beyond the realm of Eros and is a partner of the grave, an entrepreneur of death itself.

I was last to talk to him
or rather he talked to me
and said, I've got a big deal on
and want you in on it.

In his hope and discipline Ignatow belongs to the group around Steichen and Georgia O'Keeffe—the artists who wanted to catch the frantic energy of New York, the sharp angles, steel and its brutal shadow, the negative cathedrals of business. Ignatow is one of our greatest city poets.

I'm in New York covered by a layer of soap foam. …
The air is dense from the top of the skyscrapers
to the sidewalk in every street, avenue
and alley, as far as Babylon on the East,
Dobbs Ferry on the North, Coney Island
on the South and stretching far over
the Atlantic Ocean. I wade
through, breathing by pushing
foam aside. The going is slow,
with just a clearing ahead
by swinging my arms. Others are groping
from all sides, too. We keep moving.
Everything else has happened here
and we've survived: snow storms,
traffic tieups, train breakdowns, bursting
water mains; and now I am writing
with a lump of charcoal stuck between my toes,
switching it from one foot to the other—
this money trick learning visiting
with my children at the zoo of a Sunday. …
                                                            And now what?
We'll have to start climbing for air,
a crowd forming around the Empire State building
says the portable. God help the many
who will die of soap foam.

Rollo May in his Love and Will maintains that more and more contemporary people are being possessed by the impersonal demonic, palpable now in great cities. “The most severe punishment Yahweh could inflict on his people was to blot out their names.” David Ignatow's emotional range of feeling includes that terrible wiped-out-of-the-Book-of-Life feeling, the emptiness that invites demonic possession; he knows very well that he is capable of the violence that most poets attribute to “others.” Doing violence is a way of proving that you can still affect others, and thereby do exist. Watching a man wash his car, Ignatow asks,

                                        Is it
the chamois cloth that stops him
from killing the man and leaping
upon the woman?

You know the president of your corporation, but the president does not know you. The only conclusion the unconscious can draw then is that you don't exist. Very few people are in touch with a private source of wildness inside them, let alone so close to it that they can confidently give the source of a name, as Socrates did, and as some Sufis, to mention a more recent group of “wild men,” have done. What is meant by “mass man” in fact seems to be a state in which for large groups of people the private source of wildness is inaccessible. They have to look sideways then, to those around them, for assurance as to who they are.

Television news leads us to take in images of suffering, and then get used to seeing the images die the moment they hit the heart. Our feeling impulse wants us to stop the TV program, and relieve the suffering, and because it cannot, the impulse fades and dies. We all become objective and businesslike. If love-energy cannot coexist with the statistical mentality, death-energy can.

I have a big deal on
And I want you in on it.

David Ignatow is a genius in the subtle way he ties the death-energy to the most ordinary details of ordinary life. One thinks nothing is happening, but the implications are enormous. He makes a stark contrast with poets such as James Merrill or James Dickey, who talk of life-energy, but in some grandiose way that makes one ill.

III

Somewhere in all poetry that is alive, there are images of the knots of energy in the psyche that cannot be crushed. Some wild impulse urges the baboon, sent out as scout to protect the tribe, to leap on the jaguar, even knowing it will be killed. Some knot of energy encourages the ship captain to bring his ship in close to shore so that the “Secret Sharer” inside him can escape to land. That same impulse encourages the painter to leave his wife and children and go to some Pacific island, and tells the saint not yet a saint it will be all right for him to spend the rest of his life in a cave, and urges the worm to enclose itself so it can later become a butterfly. The dreamer falling is about to hit the earth, and the energy slips him sideways and flows away with him over the sea, and turns the sword into a transparent substance that can hurt no one, and allows a single hair to stir the sea.

In the street two children sharpen
knives against the curb.
Parents leaning out the window
above gaze and think and smoke
and duck back into the house
to sit on the toilet seat
with locked door to read
of the happiness of two tortoises
on an island in the Pacific—
always alone and always
the sun shining.

Ignatow describes his foot as it rises and falls in a half circle while he lies in bed:

its shape delicate, light,
swift-seeming, tense and tireless
as I lie on a bed, my foot
secretly a bird.

He is open to the still larger community, larger than any nation. When Winston Churchill died, Ignatow remarked:

Now should great men die
in turn one by one
to keep the mind solemn
and ordained,
the living attend in dark clothes
and with tender weariness
and crowds at television sets and newsstands wait
as each man's death sustains a peace.
The great gone, the people
one by one
offer to die.

It is astonishing that we should have produced in the United States a poet who can speak of community in this deep and convincing way.

He writes poems drawn up from the secret well of energy inside us, and yet he does not write narcissistic poetry. The recent emphasis on psychology has opened poets to the personal unconscious, which they assume to be private to them, as in the phrase “my dream.” David Ignatow sees his dark side that way but also as reflected in the angers and frustrations of the community. For example, he sees it embodied in a stabber moving through a subway car. He is a poet of people who work for a living but he is also a poet of the greater community. Reading him, we experience in a deep way our union with the collective. His beautiful bagel poem suggests that he experiences his joyful side particularly as a member of the Jewish community.

I stopped to pick up the bagel
rolling away in the wind,
annoyed with myself
for having dropped it
as if it were a portent.
Faster and faster it rolled,
with me running after it
bent low, gritting my teeth,
and I found myself doubled over
and rolling down the street
head over heels, one complete somersault
after another like a bagel
and strangely happy with myself.

IV

I'll close this essay with a brief look at a new theme that has appeared. Its mood is of swift, highly sustained desire. In Lorca the Eros impulse is felt by the reader to be absolutely indestructible—when Amnon looks at his sister naked on the roof, it's clear the desire he feels will have its way and break through all brush dams set in its path, whether by private conscience or collective rules. In Ignatow's poem “A Dialogue,” a man wants to leap from a building to express his sorrow. He knows that people will try to block him. But he insists on his feeling, and he will have that, as Amnon had his desire.

I now will throw myself down
from a great height
to express sorrow.
Step aside, please.
I said please step aside
and permit me access
to the building's edge.
How is this, restrained,
encircled by arms,
in front of me a crowd?
I cannot be detained in this manner.
Hear me, I speak with normal emotion.
Release me
I would express sorrow in its pure form.
I am insane, you say
and will send me away—
and I will go
and die there
in sorrow.

Desire gets its way through the “third.” Joseph Campbell writes often about the Western deadlock around opposites—communism versus capitalism, spirit versus matter, evil versus good, up versus down. Often a third thing the rational mind missed entirely enters and finds a new way.

No man has seen the third hand
that stems from the center,
near the heart. Let either
the right or the left prepare
a dish for mouth,
or a thing to give,
and the third hand deftly
and unseen will change the object
of our hunger or of our giving.

A great joy in reading his poetry is in experiencing again and again “the third.”

David Ignatow has chewed over issues of right and wrong for years, relating unknown material coming in from below to questions of ethics. In a fine poem called “Rescue the Dead” he suggests that “loving” may be preventing us from breaking through to desire. The yearning for love is described as a forest with a secret grave in it.

To love is to be led away
into a forest where the secret grave
is dug, singing, praising darkness
under the trees …
Finally, to forgo love is to kiss a leaf,
is to let rain fall nakedly upon your hand,
is to respect fire,
is to study man's eyes and his gestures
as he talks.
Is to set bread upon the table,
and a knife discreetly by.

We are each of us, he says, a part of the collective unconsciousness, and therefore we are unable to rescue the dead, who now live helpless in some vast consciousness, longing to be rescued. One of David Ignatow's loveliest qualities is that he does not claim to be free.

You who are free,
rescue the dead. …