David Slavitt

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David Slavitt has written in a range of poetic styles, from tightly crafted poems treating mythical or historical subjects to poems in looser forms better suited to more contemporary concerns such as his family, the nightly news, and visits to F. A. O. Schwarz. Slavitt’s wide vision of humankind is enhanced by his formal study in history and classical literature, his translations of Vergil, his work as the “witty, offbeat, irreverent movie critic” for Newsweek, and his writing of popular novels under the pseudonyms Henry Sutton, David Benjamin, Lynn Meyer (his first wife’s name), and Henry Lazarus. He has been praised for his ability to find poetry not only in the domestic occasion but also in his understanding of current affairs and historical events. As a result, there is a dark side to Slavitt’s poetry, a side that seems almost fearful of death, no doubt concerned about the world as it must appear when viewed and analyzed by the historian-classicist. For a poet such as Slavitt, with an impressive intellectual range that renders him uniquely aware of the continuous reenactment of grave mistakes because human beings rarely learn from history, the only certitude ultimately is form, and the only objective validation for behavior is not one’s performance itself, but how one’s behavior is reported later, most often by others.

Suits for the Dead

Examining Slavitt’s first collection of poetry, Suits for the Dead, John Hall Wheelock, editor of the Scribner Poets of Today series, notes among other qualities the poet’s command of form and point of view, two characteristics that continued to distinguish Slavitt’s poems. Wheelock stresses “the brilliance and clarity of [Slavitt’s] work, its brisk pace and taut resonance of line, its sardonic counterpoint, and, above all, its dramatic tensions.” Suits for the Dead is remarkable, as are the first books of many first-rate poets, for the territory it marks off as Slavitt’s own, the juxtaposition of the historical and mythological to images of the contemporary world. Such juxtapositions are subtle reminders of the cyclical nature of history, the arbitrariness of what is regarded as significant about events from the past, the contrariness concerning which of these events to celebrate and which to ignore, and, finally, the necessity of questioning authorities to determine why certain events and not others have been judged historically significant and whether they have been accurately portrayed.

The Carnivore

While these concerns are brought to light in Suits for the Dead, they receive a greater depth of treatment and clarity of articulation in Slavitt’s second volume, The Carnivore. Here again Slavitt deftly juxtaposes scenes from contemporary life to images of lasting historical import. “Item from Norwich” expresses the predicament a poet who has been strongly influenced by his classical background must confront. The poem depends for its success on a series of images. For example, “the bit before the baseball scores: the man/ seventy-two, found in a tarpaper shack” sets up in Slavitt’s mind a comparison with the Syrian, Simeon Stylites, [who] raised near “Antioch/ a column three feet around and sixty high,” upon which he perched for thirty years, until his death. Slavitt then moves in this same poem to “the regimen of the Egyptian monasteries” and then back to “the man by the dump” in Norwich. The images Slavitt rolls before the reader suggest an ongoing motion picture of history and significant events, and he questions whether they are, in fact, the same.

The poem concludes by noting how natural, how futilely human it is to record such senses: “The impulse [to make such records] is always with us.”...

(This entire section contains 4150 words.)

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What is history? Slavitt seems to ask. What is news? Which events merit reenactment, even celebration? Do the historical events that are remembered rise above the “traditional mortifications” of events found newsworthy today?

There are, however, more than these epistemological concerns in The Carnivore, because history is full of reminders of aging and death and the inevitable hardship of endings. Slavitt writes in this volume about aging film heroes in old Westerns, Leonardo da Vinci’s last years, wreckers smashing gables, the practice of fishing with grenades, and Eskimos floating away on ice floes. An excellent example of his concerns comes in “The Lemmings,” where Slavitt writes that “they begin to swim/ westward in the nobility of despair.” Then, however, he adds an overlooked complication: “who can say the conclusion/ is the obvious drowning . . . ?” Slavitt reinforces here and elsewhere in the volume the notion that the writer-recorder and not the actor is the maker of history. In “On Realpolitik and the Death of Galba,” he writes, “There are some that say/ the death of Galba was noble, some say not.” After all, in reviewing historical occurrences, historians must either record accurately and without the filter of subjectivity, so that later generations can interpret and evaluate such events themselves (which means that they must record all events), or sit among poets in a Platonic celebration of the event, re-creating it with the republic and its hero in mind, with the lone goal of making the event memorable. No doubt history, like the news it immortalizes, depends on who tells the story.

The question of authority permeates The Carnivore since it spells some kind of death, not only of the historical figure but also potentially of self-determinacy in interpreting events. In “Planting Crocus,” the speaker’s son “is certain the flowers will come, because I have said/ they would.” Readers are required as they read such poems to ask not only who has authored their past and the history of their species but also who has authored their future, their expectations. For many children, Benjamin Franklin is portrayed in school as a historical figure who provided a model for earnest endeavor; the truth of his past is only whispered behind their backs. Slavitt writes with typical wit in “Financial Statement”: “Benjamin Franklin, egomaniac, lecher,/ a penny saved is a penury earned.”

Day Sailing

Day Sailing is equally concerned with the theme of authority and self-determinacy. Though Slavitt rises to a more hopeful note in many of these poems, he is somewhat concerned that his craft may be, ultimately, no better than other kinds of crafts, including in the title poem, “a skill, a trade, a duplicity,/ a small boat.” He admits in this poem, “I am no sailor, but there is no virtue/ wholly irrelevant,” as if to suggest a continued search for the causes of this captivity he is beginning now to understand. He describes this captivity in “Another Letter to Lord Byron” as a lack of “something to do.” He writes, “It must be dull to be dead. You can’t write,/ or, if you do, you can’t send it off to the printer/ the way you used to.”

Slavitt is concerned still with the issue of authority as he perceives it, and the poems in this collection are often concerned with the act of creativity as a kind of breaking free of captivity, the deathlike state that prevents one from finding “something to do.” In “Cape Cod House,” he writes about “the builder of this room who had a sense/ of grace and gave more than a thought to grandeur.” In “Three Ideas of Disorder,” he models his behavior after that of his son, “who has learned the tough/ tyranny of blocks” by stooping himself “to make an architectural monster of some kind.” For Slavitt these are expressions that break free from the prison-house of self-consciousness and silence. As he says to George Garrett in “Upon Receiving a Book of Poems,” comparing Garrett’s gift of his book to another friend’s gift of a crystal bowl, “I have read your book, and flicked my nail/ against its rim, and having done so, thank you,/ for the air rings, sings with a clear tone.” Sometimes one can break free of captivity in that way. Sometimes one cannot.

The problem is a matter of articulation, as it is described for historians in The Carnivore and the tales they tell. In “Plymouth Rock,” the true story of what happened “is suppressed/ because we prefer to derive from the rock its gray/ certainties than to romp on the sand. Half-dressed/ little sailors and whores in the school’s Thanksgiving play/ wouldn’t be right.” Slavitt, though in a lighter tone, has not progressed substantially from his earlier position in The Carnivore: History is the record someone chooses to keep. Without truth, one is a victim, a captive of another’s fiction. There seems to be little protection in Day Sailing. When some sort of protection is built, the result is ironic, as in “Precautions,” where the poet recounts efforts to protect his boat against a promised hurricane. When the hurricane does not appear, he bemoans the fact that the unsecured boats of the “careless weekenders” have survived: “Battered to bits/ they should have been, all wrecked, and only mine/ secure in a just world.” In this unjust world, the poet likens the person who takes precautions to a Noah who might have awakened to find that the promised rain never developed, or to a Lot who might have left a city “to which nothing at all happens.”

Fortunately, Slavitt’s sense of irony permits him an acceptance of his place among other captives. All humans are somewhat like the seals, in a poem of that title, who, trapped inside a zoo, lose their “natural seal sense,/ and being captive,/ acquire dependence.” There is ample recompense for Slavitt, however, in “Pruning,” where the reader is reminded that he or she can “read/ with prickered fingers some of the rose’s poems.” Again, there is a hopeful moment in Slavitt’s “The Covenant,” which begins, “Let the world be wary of my son,/ be gentle with him, be reverent.”

Child’s Play and Vital Signs

The logical extension of such thinking, however, leads one back to form, to appearance, to the way the intensity of color changes depending on what is held beside it. These concerns seem to have occurred to Slavitt in his next two volumes of poetry, Child’s Play and Vital Signs. Between the publication of Day Sailing and Child’s Play, Slavitt published two books of translations, Vergil’s Eclogues (1971) and Georgics (1972), the product of seven years’ hard work. Slavitt approached these translations wholly as a matter of challenge, not simply of technique but of understanding as well. The poet’s understanding of the Eclogues was to influence his sense of his own time and the place of the writer among daily events as being inescapably exhilarating, almost unbelievable; his notion of the importance of form and juxtaposition was also influenced by Vergil. The central concern of the Eclogues, what Slavitt describes as “the lit biz,” enabled Slavitt to recognize Vergil’s anguish over his own reading public. Slavitt’s translations—which involve summary, critical interpretation, and commentary, often through direct address of the present-day audience—made him aware of form as a kind of salvation, a method for overcoming the subjectivities that surround him, as apparent in the heavy reliance on forms in Child’s Play.

Child’s Play articulates an unmistakably darker vision for Slavitt. The poet attempts to fall back upon old and trusted remedies—children and form—for his increasingly cynical view of the modern world, but those methods fail. For example, his three “children’s stories” and the title poem all look to the innocent and childlike vision as redemptive, but come up instead with the coarse understatement that “kings are always whimsical” and apt to suffer the rebellion of their minions: “It always happens. The leader knows it will,/ next time be worse.” Not even Peter Pan, in “Child’s Play,” is spared. Most viewers respond to the appearance, the form, the certainty their experiences tell them to trust: “They ooh and ah delight, surprise,/ who do not see the piano wire/ or the rigging in the flies.” Slavitt seems to suggest that history is a tale of loss, rejection, deception, and uncertainty. The question is, “What/ do you tell your children?”

The answer in Vital Signs is that one tells them one’s personal history and arranges history to reflect in its very form, in its continuous efforts to clarify, who, exactly, one is. The section of “selected poems” includes all the poems from his previously published books, as is often the case in such collections. Slavitt, though, said in an interview with John Graham in The Writer’s Voice that arranging poems in a volume is “about the same sort of thing as determining what order the acts ought to go on, say, an Ed Sullivan show,” here he carefully arranges his poems by subject and theme. By viewing his life’s production in this way, Slavitt is able to tell his children—and his readers—“This is the way I thought about the cello,” for example, “as a young man, but this is the way I think about it now.” Vital Signs reads like home films, carefully edited not to show the random events of passing years, but to reveal the changing perception, the certainty turned uncertainty in the growth of the poet’s mind. Even the new poems are so grouped, in a careful effort to re-create the formal rendering of the changing mind, perhaps offering a truer picture of history than the events others have recorded for posterity and study. As Slavitt writes in “Wishes,” “who can be so knowing/ and still believe there is luck in a meteorite?” The arrangement of poems in Vital Signs might be seen as exactly this statement aesthetically applied, a commitment to the form as one way of knowing and to the content of knowledge or theme as something more changeable, less dependable.

Rounding the Horn

Rounding the Horn reinforces Slavitt’s continuing concern with form. In this collection of fifty-five poems, all of them written in different forms, Slavitt is committed in some epistemological way to rhyme while dealing with some of the old subjects and themes, built around the metaphors of voyaging, escape, and adventure. Many of these poems seem simpler, though darker in their simplicity: “The clown is supposed to be sad,” writes an earnest Slavitt, “but what about the xylophone player/ who has more reason . . . ?” Slavitt calls attention to his learning less in this collection, perhaps, than in his earlier books. Still, he is a disciplined craftsman, writing with humor and wit about life and its complexity. He deals with people, including a vandal, an old woman with a cane, the painter Claude Monet, and a pitcher. He deals with events, such as college reunions, youth, age, and life. He takes his reader abroad, to Poland and Italy, to Greece and Charles Dickens’s inkwell. There is still an urge to find something permanent, but in the world of this collection, one sees the product and wonders whether one will become a part of it. “Garbage” notes “the tendency of/ things to turn sooner or later into junk,/ scrap, detritus” and clarifies that this tendency exists not only among “objects and ornaments” but also “ideas and people.”

Dozens

Dozens seems to be an effort to eschew as garbage all ideas and people and hold instead to the certainty of form. The collection is exactly what the title suggests, a book-length poem of 144 twelve-line stanzas. What is clearly of greatest importance about Dozens is not the subject, which has failed to impress some of Slavitt’s critics, but the power of form when put to the use Slavitt intends in this collection. There is a narrative plan here, and the narrative is spoken in a voice not always reminiscent of the earlier Slavitt, the poet who has served as a resigned observer of the human condition against a background of history and classical literature. Slavitt’s invective in this long poem would be incorrectly approached, however, if one were to try to separate it altogether from his earlier work. In “Touring,” the opening poem in Child’s Play, Slavitt wrote, “Architecture, painting, tapisserie . . . / but gore is what we tour. The seriousness/ of a nation comes from the seriousness of its crimes.” In stanza 18 of Dozens, he describes “a dreadful city, as Whitman’s/ Camden is a dreadful city. The worse/ it is, the better it is.”

Perhaps the persistence of this view sets critics on edge. The poem seems to take place in Central America (though it might be any number of other places). A revolution is taking place outside a hotel. The point of it all is “not the end of the world but, say, the fun/ of the end of the world.” No doubt one can hear irony in this statement, but the argument is unrelenting, forcing the reader to recall “Garbage” from Rounding the Horn in an effort to understand this particular assault on the human condition. At the end of “Garbage,” the speaker claims that he tries to believe in God, and pictures God as a garbage-picker with gloved hands, who comes across the speaker as he sifts through debris. Perhaps God will pause and remember, says the speaker, “that I/ was once supposed to fit somewhere, that I was/ not always garbage.” Dozens captures a world-turned-rubble: “Let the grubby truth/ be carted away with New Haven, a grubby place.” If one does not look too long at dismal reality, the poem says cynically, one may be able to imagine that “the broken down world” can “heal/ as the poets have taught us to think it may. It may/ if we say so often enough and loud enough.”

Big Nose

Big Nose, Slavitt’s next collection of poems, does not “say so often enough and loud enough.” In fact, the introductory “To His Reader” is hardly charming. The voice, once again, rings with invective that jolts the relaxed reader into defensiveness. Slavitt concludes, “You and I depend thus on one another, and serve, but you are not my friend. Nor am I yours.” Slavitt does not seem to be in the “lit biz” to make friends, but he is clearly able to stimulate readers and tell stories. “Big Nose” is an excellent narrative of a Western criminal, Big Nose George Parrott, who is hanged and then made into a pair of boots to be worn by the sheriff. Soon the sheriff, who wears the boots proudly at first, becomes the object of horror and leaves town still trapped, however, by his past. This narrative represents something new for Slavitt, though it was foreshadowed by the long narration of Dozens. One must wonder why the introductory material was so long in coming, considering Slavitt’s long affection for Vergil.

The Walls of Thebes

The Walls of Thebes brings Slavitt at perhaps his best. This collection walks a higher ground, passing through personal graveyards, forcing the poet to confront episodes of his past, which he does with clarity and surprising objectivity. As he says in “Reading,” in looking through his poems before reading them to an audience, “They’re an album of my life.” This is a sobering collection of poems, often offering accounts of personal nightmare, but unsentimentalized and earned: “Each of us has suffered losses, each/ has felt the terrible wrench of the earth/ shrinking beneath his feet.” In some ways, the old themes return, a search for the appropriate form as well as a search for answers to questions Slavitt has been asking all along: What is of permanent value? What authors one’s understanding of history? When does the simple event become historically significant?

Perhaps the most affectively moving of Slavitt’s poems in this collection is “Bloody Murder,” in which he speaks with unquestionable discipline of events that came “after the burglar bludgeoned my mother/ to death with a bathroom scale and a large/ bottle of Listerine.” At the recommendation of the police, “Ronny Reliable’s/ Cleaning Service” is hired to clean up afterward. “I still wonder/ who would choose that kind of employment,” Slavitt says, and more than that, he wonders who of that occupation could leave behind a bloodstain. More than any other of Slavitt’s collections, this poem reveals a turning inward, relying on snapshots, vignettes, and a variety of reminiscences that force the poet to reevaluate his personal history, much as he did in a more objective manner in Vital Signs.

Eight Longer Poems

The later collections seem to flow from a kind of meditation hinted at in The Walls of Thebes. Equinox and Eight Longer Poems tend to focus somewhat more than Slavitt’s earlier works on domestic events as well as on the time-tested subject of historical and classical study. “Monster Dance,” in Eight Longer Poems, concerns the dance Slavitt’s grown son performs each night at bedtime to reassure the poet’s younger son that there is nothing to fear. Slavitt takes on subjects such as his own partial deafness as a means of exploring larger questions. Naturally, Slavitt looks back in these collections as well, considering “a whole decade/ of what I thought of as civilization.”

A Gift

Amazingly, Slavitt’s productivity accelerated in the 1990’s. He turned out important translations of both familiar and unfamiliar work nonstop; he continued to produce a substantial body of fiction, and his own poetry—often informed by his scholarly pursuits—continued to flourish. While Crossroads and Falling from Silence are strong collections focusing on important themes of identity, suffering, and forbearance, A Gift is perhaps Slavitt’s most remarkable and most original creation of the decade. This long poem treats the life of an obscure writer, Lorenzo da Ponte, a man of grand and frustrated ambition. A contemporary of Mozart, for whose works he wrote several librettos, da Ponte touched greatness but never achieved it. Slavitt’s episodic biography has an intriguing cast of characters among whom da Ponte finds his footnote fate. There is more than a touch of identification, one must feel, in Slavitt’s sympathetic treatment of the unrecognized artist.

PS3569.L3: Poems

Slavitt’s later work becomes slightly more introspective than earlier in his life, as though now that he has a life to reflect upon, and not merely an intellect to play with. Instead, the time has come to reevaluate his relationships with those closest to him, including himself.

Taking its title from the author’s Library of Congress number, PS3569.L3 offers a satiric and witty exploration of several themes, the predominant being the role of God in a profane contemporary landscape. Slavitt also examines history—legendary figures like Helen of Troy, the Comte de Nesselrode, and James V. Forrestal make appearances—and the blending of past and present, evident in “Reading Pindar,” a whimsical piece based on a thorough reading of Pindar’s texts. A range of sensibility and response to the various occasions of chaotic existence in modern times is clearly present here, and Slavitt offers readers his reactions to those stresses and cultural shocks that have snared his attention.

Falling from Silence

A lamentation of Slavitt’s limitations as he ages and experiences loss is the dominant theme in the collection titled Falling from Silence. The poems here examine death and aging and explore what is, for Slavitt, the reassuring connection between the generations. With his characteristic wry wit, he turns to religion, reads the classics, and engages in a cheerful wordplay to assuage his physical failings, but none of these pastimes brings a stop to the passage of time. His passion is the act of argument, and here he questions beauty and its satisfactions, whether the beauty produced by honed talent in “Performance: An Eclogue” or the beauty discovered by honed perceptions in “Against Landscape.” He speculates that Moses was barred from the promised land because by bringing down the Torah, he “did not/ diminish heaven so much as elevate earth.” A spectrum of sentiment also finds a place here, including angry humor (“Spite”), bittersweet resignation (“Culls”), and a grandfather’s love.

Change of Address, William Henry Harrison, and The Seven Deadly Sins

With Change of Address, Slavitt presents to readers a selection of his poetry from a lifetime of writing, poetry that, as one reviewer noted, “one reads to know more.” In William Henry Harrison, and Other Poems, as one critic noted, Slavitt once again addresses “foolish wisdom.” This time, in the collection’s title poem, he humorously debunks the story of U.S. president Harrison’s death of pneumonia soon after delivering his inaugural address in a downpour. In The Seven Deadly Sins, and Other Poems, Slavitt’s wisdom continues. His remarkable poem “Dogfish,” for example, reveals at once both a fascination and an immediate yearning: the possibility that a human being could return to the womb if frightened, as do the young of the mythical dogfish.