One problem with [defining poetry] is ourselves: we keep getting in the way, obstructing the viewfinder with all these stray edges of selves. We cannot read without putting ourselves into the text, nor speak without letting loose a flood of idiosyncracies. So how should we ever find what poetry is, when we cannot stabilize our own vantage point …? (p. 355)

One answer is fairly simple. Perhaps when poetry is working at its best, it is simply drawing upon the world we live, in order to see and speak of the world we have…. This may even be the most positive answer for poetry, because it strives to work on established ground—the "given" of the realm that we are born to—and strives to make our participation in that realm somehow fuller and more aware…. But, whatever else it is, this life-connected choice is the choice taken by the poets Galway Kinnell and William Everson, although the latter travels from the immediate to the broad and hopeful possibilities of faith and the future, and the former sees our possibilities, our sins and our chances, in the items and shapes of the way we amass our lives. Going through their retrospective volumes—Everson's The Veritable Years [1978] … and Kinnell's The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World [1974] …—one is not only closer to what poetry is and where its possible participants fit in the pattern, but one also becomes more aware of the individual responses to the material, the independent chords, the separate questions. One becomes aware of the difficulties of individual choice—there is no final, saving consensus, we have to try for ourselves.

Reading the poets apart from each other and then returning to them in tandem, one may come to suspect that the operative element in their art is captured in a conjunction—"what poetry is and where its … participants fit in the pattern," as I wrote earlier. That small word is so important. These are not poets who will expend all their souls in pursuit of poetry's place or who will scurry down every philosophic rag-tag alleyway in search of metaphysical assurances alone. These are poets—people whose outlet happens to be words first and foremost, but people just the same. They are struggling with the questions of perception and expression and significance. They are asking after the human situation in a pattern that is not exclusively poetic but also cosmic, historical, social, cultural, individual. Poetry for these poets is inextricable from common human need. But they are perhaps most genuinely poetic because their craftsmanship, their poetic efficacy is not blatant. Finish The Veritable Years or Kinnell's Avenue and you do not throb and race along with memories of the artworks. Finish them and you think for some moments on the questions, you begin to ask the same things. (pp. 355-56)

Both are religious poets in their confrontations with the substance behind whatever we behold. Kinnell sees the sadness and the individual estrangement in our inadequate grasp and in our inability to do much but hold on for an instant and experience the passing. Everson is the more passionate—he rails, he roars, he pummels forth with passion and fear and burning needs. He will not be quiet, he will not go gently down the dwindling pathways. His perspective is not the same as Kinnell's, and yet they are the same, in a sense. Theirs is the same word, ultimately, despite the differences—the word of all poets, the word of all art, the word "now"—and both do what they can to savor it, encounter and embrace all its messages and significances, whatever they can do to make it continue to speak…. [As] Kinnell puts it in the title poem of his collection—

         It is cold suddenly, we feel chilled,
         Nobody knows for sure what is left of him.

The God sought is sought because of man's condition, and sought either as a cure or as a reason. The reality confronted is one of loneliness, helplessness, uncertainty, pain. And the peace at the end of the junket is not welcomed, because it only stills, it does not resolve…. [Kinnell and Everson] are religious poets but not of the Hopkins or George Herbert variety. They yank at the temple curtains, uncover the Holy of Holies, and are frightened even in the act of revelation, frightened for finding nothing there but a wall. And is the wall ours—or God's? (pp. 357-58)

[Kinnell's religion] is not so much Christianity as it is philosophical humility and understanding, not so much pantheism as openness to wonder and change. Everson sounds at times very much like John of the Cross; often in reading Kinnell, I will think of Augustine in his preconversion rumblings (not the excesses, but the confusions and askings), or some of those medieval religious writers who came closer to God by delineating the rapture and the trial of their everyday lives…. Kinnell is still "telling what is told," is still working out the strategies for continuance needed and utilized by "lesser" folk, by those not powerful enough to shout at heaven or proud enough to want to see God wherever He is. That may be the comfort of his "faith"—yes, it continues to be dark and narrow and suddenly-ended, but others have gone by before and man still finds himself agreeable to singing and smiling…. [The] question Kinnell's belief inspires [is] not Where is God, but Why do we think Him there, What does that say about us.

These are also two poets of geographies. Everson's is primarily the contours of California, every poem—even those set in the Bible, such as the retelling of Christ's Passion—evoking the mountains, the valleys, the ever-present ocean. Kinnell, on the other hand, ranges farther afield, taking scenes from New England, New York, Europe, even Asia. He is not so much a poet of place as he is a poet of people, and the Indian beggar who appears at the end of a street and runs towards him, calling out, "Galway!" could have been born in any Kafka-ish country. It is what we do in those places and what those places reflect of us that is tantamount to these men. (pp. 359-60)

The last section from the title poem of his collection will show clearly enough Kinnell's orientation with geography. The locale is Avenue C in lower Manhattan, the time seems to be all time and the interminable present of stifledness (shades of Bloomsday, perhaps). Section fourteen looks out towards the East River, "into which fishes leak" and which is mostly in darkness despite being in the vicinity of a power station. The fish are rank sewage, bypassed even by the gulls…. The ancient mother of man, the ocean—and the seed she collects for her rebirth is only a flow of dead and dying fish…. Akin to the seaward-floating fish are the panhandlers and winos, also drifting by in masses towards the open anonymity of death…. Not only is the sea infertile, so is womankind, and the Incarnation has become a threat, a distasteful oath. We next board a taxi for the ride through the city at night, past familiar traffic lights blinking together to nearly compose "one complete Avenue of green" when "The little green stars in the distance blinked." The stars are traffic indicators, not dreams in the sky, not diamonds in the evening, and just when we feel the way ahead is clear, they begin to change, to halt us. Nature is manufactured, unsynchronized, seemingly random and bothersome. From the avenue, the addressed "you" of this section gazes downtown, "Towards Houston in the rain, the living streets," the places where the fishes recur as "instants of transcendance" that

   Drift in oceans of loathing and fear, like lanternfishes,
   Or phosphorus flashings in the sea, or the feverish light
   Skin is said to give off when the swimmer drowns at night.

There are moments, scant, precious moments in the overall dread, moments that will glimmer for a short time before guttering in on themselves. (pp. 362-63)

The image of the mass of desperate lives carries throughout the remainder of this section…. The fury of the last few stanzas may be disconcerting in the light of the leisurely, if despondent, opening of this section. We seem to have found Ulysses' Nighttown on Avenue C. But we should not let the pace lessen the intensity of the desperation…. There is no Eden, no new land, no paradise near the ocean like Everson's California. There is only a landscape of hopelessness and stagnation, the Waste Land of particular New York lives. The hand of Providence has been stayed, but we have not, mortal and brutish and hungry as we are. We have no place to go, nowhere to hide or to be, and our casements, our body is coming apart, snuffing the only light our small world recognizes—the light in life. And yet we smile and sigh at the neighborhood, we pride ourselves on the amiable place of our deaths. We have settled here (in more than one sense) and have little to occupy us until the end. There is no room for poetry in this world. Man is the perpetual vagrant, the transient, and his burden as well as his glory is his homelessness…. Kinnell sees all our land as the embodiment of the rootless, meager drifting towards doubt and death that ends the cycle. But what, he yet asks, of that comfort, that hope, that pride? Where does that particle go? Is it as important as it feels?

And finally, these are poets of the self, and master craftsmen at singing its stories. Everson treats of the self in agonized, lonely, sometimes frenzied search, and Kinnell dwells on the loneliness of the search, the disappointment, the failure and the minor triumphs. And both are in full control of their mechanisms—when running at full speed, at greatest effectiveness, when functioning at their peaks, both poets fashion poems that speak, that take all of man's languages and make art out of them. An example of this for Everson might be "A Frost Lay White on California," his clearest and most Freudian poem about the search for God and the need to feel as if in control, and for Kinnell, his "Homecoming of Emma Lazarus," where he works on the theme of the ultimate ineffectiveness of poetry to contribute to life and on the idea of a life's ruling dream, and emerges with a poignant imagining of the end of a certain existence. Both poems are deliberate, skillful evocations of self and both are technical achievements of high order. They come closest to being "pure" poems in that they have their own terms upon which to function and do not need the impulsion to be "useful" and "contributing." They are rooted in life, they throw light back upon it, but they do not need to come to it for excuses or justifications. These are poems that "live" despite life's reactions, if any. (pp. 363-65)

["The Homecoming of Emma Lazarus"] is not as orally complex as [Everson's "Frost"], it is more metaphorical, more personal. Poetry is seen as a kind of opponent, perhaps, who is at bay perpetually for all the sadness this poet has wept. She shrugs—acceptance? resignation? weariness?—and there is an image of the jerking motion scattering birds which "weren't intending / To alight," joining Emma with Liberty's statue, a perch for birds that no longer choose to settle there. A sense of abandonment, exclusion? And then, what Kinnell does best—the interweaving of symbol and abstraction in a physical setting. The "conscript bugler" sounds the "old vow of acceptance into the night," and in its going out, the intaken strangers hear, as do all our other "wounds," and the pains "open" and throb in remembrance. That bugler, that instigator of a fond yearning, is not even a volunteer—he is a "conscript," he is made to sound his horn. And the lives that have alighted compare promises with the found actualities, and bleed anew.

The poem is full of such keenly evocative moments…. (p. 367)

There are other poems in these collections that will reward scrupulous readings—Everson's "Falling of the Grain" …, and Kinnell's "The River That is East" and "For Robert Frost," sad but receptive studies of human ways, whether in a style of life or a reaction to a place…. And there are instances here that will possibly disappoint or disenchant some readers, no poet being always or everywhere perfect. I, for instance, more than once found Kinnell's world-weary sympathy with loss a little hard to take, smacking a bit of surrender before the contest is half-through. He was able to smirk effectively at the literary art of "manful" resignation in "For the Lost Generation" (with its excellent concluding line, "No generation was so gay as the lost"), but when I got to his "For William Carlos Williams" and "For Denise Levertov," with their elements of tactical reservation, the superficial hardness that makes functioning easier but may close out emotion and compassion, I could only ask, "But what does he want them to do?" "You seemed / Above remarking we were not your friends," he recalls of Williams, but I do not understand what else he would expect. He warmly, delicately paints the portrait of the medieval poet Guillaume de Lorris, a man who declined to seize his goal because he had been too long in reaching it and was wistful for the quest, but Williams is somehow not allowed the stiffness that probably came from his didactic temperament but could also be a fruit of his attempt to practice literature and medicine concurrently. Both worlds just demand too much—is a slight on either side such a horrendous sin? It hurts, yes, but isn't it one of a piece with being human and therefore limited in one's subtlety? What else would you have us do?

Everson, in my view, tends to sin on the side of the angels. I may be uncomfortable with a faith, a belief so obviously more comprehensive and vital than my own…. But I am more seriously put off by his lapses in craftsmanship, which (given his intentions and modes) can seem colossal. I find his major poem, "River-Root" … not only too long for its purposes, but somehow inconsistent in voice…. There is also an unfortunate tendency towards abstraction that does not speak as vividly as sensations do. (pp. 368-70)

But these are minor points to poets who have spoken so clearly and honestly on so many occasions. Minor points for poets who have used the languages, the disparate worlds in synthesis…. These poems cannot speak to everyone, but they have made, and are still there to keep on making, the attempt to take the languages of life and use them to construct passageways between the worlds. That attempt says something about our possible willingness to try and take up various articulations and, through them, try to see. (p. 370)