[In the following essay, Milburn differentiates between poems he loves and those he merely admires, classifying McHugh's “I Knew I'd Sing” in the former category.]

People ought to like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if the poets wrote it.

—Wallace Stevens

Affection for poems is a personal thing, transcending time, fashion, and even friendship. We return less often to what we admire or approve of than to what we love, and there are surprisingly few poems which we will read again and again just to feel pleasure. We keep what we love close to us, unable to say exactly why one poem sticks in our minds, reciting instead favorite lines as if to say “There, don't you see?” to others' unsatisfactory nods and good intentions. And who has not discovered in print or conversation soul-mates who hate precisely what we hate, love what we love, only to find these kindred spirits unexpectedly praising writing which we find execrable, or worse, writing execrably themselves?

All readers will acknowledge personal affection as poetry's final arbiter, while bemoaning the extent to which this arbiter has been obscured. “There's so much bad poetry around,” we say, with no definition of what we or others mean by bad, so that whoever hears us could interpret this statement as critical of poetry which we actually love, or as an endorsement of verse which we meant to insult in the first place.

The number of poetry books published in the United States each year which receive high praise proves how easy and misleading our standards have become. What regular reader of blurbs, reviews, and award citations would recognize an original best poet of his or her generation if one actually came along? Hyperbolic praise is applied to so many poets that it no longer means anything. We would find it much more helpful to hear how poems had moved another reader, and to be enlightened and moved ourselves, than to learn where the poet ranks compared to his or her peers or the young Auden. Recently in this country there has been a great improvement in the quantity of poetry offered to the reading and listening public. What we lack now is a concern for quality, a recognition that while it's fine to produce hundreds of handsome books, there is no reason to expect that most or even a few of these will be great.

Ideally, in assessing any poetry, we try to leave the bad behind us, assuming that, as the federal judge said about pornography, we know it when we see it. But when we say bad, we exclude technically polished but empty-headed poetry, or interesting subjects composed in randomly chopped up prose. We keep such mediocre poetry in a different category in our minds, partly because of its unnerving potential for critical and popular success, but most importantly because it's a powerful motivator. This lifeless verse always reminds us how easy it is to look decent, to carry oneself well, show a flash of charm here and there, and how far this sort of thing is from anything we could ever actually love. Ultimately, we must realize that this merely crafted or appealing poetry isn't poetry at all, for poetry consists of those few poems whose page numbers we know, whose opening lines (at least) are on our lips as we look them up, and to which we return simply to feel pleasure—not to think about feeling, or to try to feel, but to enjoy as the sole end of the act of reading.

My thesis in this essay will be that in art, as nowhere else in life, it is pointless merely to like something: one must feel love. Obviously, a reader may feel passionate about poems which I find merely passable, or bored by those which to me are unforgettable. My goal, however, is not to change anyone's opinion, but to challenge the condition of opinion itself, and to explore precisely what contemporary taste is that has suffered such a broadening in recent years. We live in a time when there are as many promoters of poetry as poets, not to mention blurbs more appropriate to the Last Poems of Yeats than to a first book of moderately skilled narratives and lyrics.

It is time for readers to compare their affection for poems which they love—really love and return to and keep close to them like a cherished voice or face—to their feeling for a poem that does what it sets out to do safely and charmingly, or risks success in a way that seems properly risky, if not truly successful. Then they must realize that these two feelings not only differ as much as love for a first born son differs from satisfaction with that son's competent new math teacher, but that the latter feeling has little place in art. A reader may admire a poem, or its achievement relative to the poet's age, or aspects of technique or content, he may even love those aspects, but he must always separate what he admires from what he loves. The inability to make this distinction, and the resulting tendency toward a passive and intellectual criticism, affects not only the general readership of poetry, but poets themselves.

An example of this lax criticism occurred in a recent review of The Evolution of the Flightless Bird by Richard Kenney, which the reviewer called “an outstanding first book of poems.” By examining lines singled out for praise, I hope to prove the extravagance of this claim, which ultimately deceives writer and reader. In looking at both Kenney's poem and Amy Clampitt's poem following, in fact, I will concentrate on specific lines and stanzas rather than on the whole. This is not to disadvantage the poems I consider unsuccessful, but to emphasize recent criticism's major flaw—the lack of a precise examination of how well or poorly a poem is written, the actual quality of the lines on the page. In many cases criticism stops here, or ought to: some writing is simply not good enough to merit a study of the whole. In the McHugh and Janowitz poems discussed later, however, everything depends crucially on everything else. There is almost a magnetism among the lines and stanzas, so that no single sound or meaning exists in the mind without another resonating through it and extending it, deepening it.

All of the poems in The Evolution of the Flightless Bird consist of fourteen-line sections, with sentences frequently overlapping from one section to another. The result is a provocative sonnet sequence/stanzaic effect of sporadic fourteen-line brilliance or, at its best, the cumulative power of a good long poem. Kenney succeeds when he relaxes his demanding grip on language and lets his own voice prevail. Often, however, the reader must plough from one lush, dense image to another to be released finally into such clear and evocative lines as these:

                    Lake Champlain looks flat,
black by starlight; even the sheaved winds
are flat as feathers on a sleeping raven's wing—
Later, forecast rains will toss down Smuggler's Notch
in silver skirtveils, hiss across the flatiron
lake like drops on a woodstove, into the night—

“La Brea: Early”

The opening of the next section shows how quickly the writing can turn self-conscious and turgid:

and hideous broom-flaps here, unfolding condors
knuckled to the vague bed rail, and hung door-
jamp anthropoid with clothes—

“La Brea: Tranquility”

The following section from Kenney's long poem “Notes From Greece” was quoted favorably in the review mentioned earlier:

The candled icon of a horseman flashed gold
a hero and a dark form prone, lance-pierced.
Was this Byzantium? A holy monk
in hightop sneakers carved the cruciform
treads off your vibram bootsoles with a gelding
knife at Lavra to appease his mongrel
sense of sacrilege you guessed. A creased
old monk with bread in his beard and gold
mouth grabbed my hand in the dark shaft-lit sacristy
someplace showed an icon brought from St. Sophia
long ago he showed a chest of human bones
like precious driftwood arms with silver wristlets
silver casings(1)

The language here overwhelms what is actually being said. There are too many modifiers and the hard, sped-up rhythm jolts to an uneven pause at the end of several awkwardly enjambed lines. For no apparent reason, words are repeated which sound like just plain words to us. We wonder if we're missing something or if the poet simply neglected to rid his language of redundancies or to vary his word choice. He seems to want to elevate mundane events and observations into poetry solely by overwriting. In Pope's “The Rape of the Lock,” a man boldly snipping off a lock of hair and catching hell for it in the eighteenth century calls for this type of high-flown, stylized rhetoric, while a Greek monk in hightop sneakers going at a pair of hiking boots with a gelding knife must be a case of “the detail is sufficient” if there ever was one.

We want increasingly to know what is happening, but in the poet's own voice rather than in the voice of this poem. He has lain a grid of rhetoric over what appears to be quite simple and interesting information. I'm as intrigued as anyone by what he has to say, but not by how many adjectives he can tack on or how unlike the casual attentiveness of a tourist he can sound. Like a self-involved conversationalist, he appreciates for us, constantly assuming our sympathy. Poetic skill, however, lies in distinguishing between what is best for the writer and what will benefit the poem.

Midway through Kenney's third line an obnoxious double-rhythm draws our attention away from content and plants it squarely on conspicuous technique—the worst kind. “Candled icon;” “dark form;” “lance-pierced;” “holy monk;” “hightop sneakers;” “cruciform treads;” “vibram bootsoles;” “gelding knife;” “mongrel sense;” “da da dum.” When we try to pare away some of the adjectives, the language disintegrates: “the icon of the horseman flashed a hero and a form.” No less is communicated, but this skeleton remains overwrought and confused.

It is instructive to watch a more successful adjective slinger at work in Yeats's “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen:”

Many ingenious lovely things are gone
That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,
Protected from the circle of the moon
That pitches common things about. There stood
Amid the ornamental bronze and stone
An ancient image made of olive wood—
And gone are Phidias' famous ivories
And all the golden grasshoppers and bees.(2)

Trying to take a bead on rhythm in these lines is like aiming at a bird buffeted by wind—there's no predicting the motion, every turn is a surprise. By the time one reaches “lance-pierced,” in the Kenney lines, however, rhythmic expectations are already satisfied to the point of boredom. Similarly, the ear cannot help but relax after the unvaried iambic pentameter of Kenney's “like precious driftwood arms with silver wristlets.” Yeats's stresses, on the other hand, always show not only variety but a rhythmic comment upon variety and upon sense. When his meter becomes more regular—“that pitches common things about—” he's subtly writing about regularity (common things) going awry.

Kenney's “candled icon” is not an unusual pairing—both words suggest church interiors, dim archaic atmospheres, and a vague darkness which “dark” repeats before combining it with that ironically formless word “form.” Yeats's “ingenious lovely things,” however, remind us that much of what we consider ingenious is only incidentally lovely. We reserve that word for garage door openers and talking toasters. Picasso's “Bull's Head,” for example, composed of an upside-down bicycle seat and handlebars, certainly exemplifies ingenuity in art, but its accomplishment is to make us think about beauty in a new way.

Even when Yeats sets up an apparently conventional image such as “And gone are Phidias' famous ivories,” we create a world for those ivories. Why does “famous” work and a similar word like Kenney's “precious” (in “precious driftwood arms and silver wristlets”) fail? Because the ivories are gone. While Yeats has been training us to conceive of these spectacular things, he has also been saying that we're too late to see them. The word “gone” occurs twice; its second appearance reminds us that what has been described is no longer around. Kenney's “precious” just sits, too vague to appreciate semantically, too predictable to savor musically, and thus too facile to love poetically. It confirms what we know, while “famous” is accompanied by the dark brothers tragedy and loss, heightening its poignancy.

Much unsuccessful contemporary poetry suffers from wordiness and unmusicality and the Kenney lines suffer from both. By wordiness I mean an excess of modifiers and specifically “thought up” words which most of us find too grandiose and self-conscious for use in everyday communication. Wordy poets think themselves responsible for circulating the entire English vocabulary and for keeping it awake and on its toes. There's an expressionist side to this, a conviction that one noun won't suffice if a more complicated one can be found and that to add adjectives only adds sublimity and meaning. The reader never forgets that he is reading a made as opposed to a natural thing. I'm always struck by how close such poems sound to what most non-readers of poetry dread about it, and to what I dreaded before escaping from my college professors.

Amy Clampitt has been praised for revitalizing the dull language and over-personal subject matter which afflicts much contemporary poetry. Her poems brim with complex words, literary echoes and allusions, and unexpected topics such as the Hackensack River. The flaws which Clampitt avoids are real. Many poets do write as if deaf to the resources of their language or of conditions beyond their own. A reader of literary magazines finds innumerable good and bad poems about destructive parents and disastrous relationships. Clampitt's current popularity may reveal the eagerness of readers to see language and experience mined in more innovative ways. Still, Sidney's “Look in thy heart, and write,” will continue to inspire future great poets, whose poems will undoubtedly improve upon these same themes.

Unfortunately, it's easier to praise Clampitt's potential effect than her poetry. In the notes to her book What the Light Was Like, Clampitt cites W. J. Bate's 1963 biography of John Keats as the inspiration for her sequence “Voyages: Homage to John Keats.” Reading the poem itself, one wonders what Clampitt accomplishes that Bate didn't achieve brilliantly in prose twenty-two years ago. What Keats did and said and what Clampitt thinks he felt are presented in dramatic but unstriking language. There is none of the inevitability of subject and writer found in, say, Elizabeth Bishop's “Crusoe in England” or Milton's “Samson Agonistes.”

Elsewhere in the book, notes identify various writers whom Clampitt quotes or echoes, and provide background for some of the imagery. They also place extraordinary pressure on the poems. Poets who get away with this do so only by writing flawlessly themselves, placing their borrowings to sound as if they wrote them for that very poem. Too often, Clampitt's references sound pedantic and unearned.

As always, it comes down to music, to the way words sound when combined with one another to make a thoughtful statement. If a poet or reader refuses to demand music in poetry, then any assortment of swollen, modifier-loaded lines will suffice. No one can deny, for example, that the success or failure of these stanzas from Clampitt's “The Reedbeds of the Hackensack” depends on how musically this mass of words is phrased. We find no attempt at lucid statement and, barring the resurrection of Dada, the poet can't intend to embody ugliness in her language. Still, her syntax and word choice are clearly meant to mirror the clutter of the ugly river she describes.

Dreckpot, the Styx and Malebolge of civility,
brushed by the fingering plumes of beds of reeds:
Manhattan's moat of stinks, the rancid asphodel
aspiring from the gradually choking Hackensack,
ring-ditch inferior to the vulgar, the snugly ugly,
knows-no-better, fake but not quite fraudulent:
what's scandal but the candor of the fraudulent?
Miming the burnish of a manicured civility,
the fluent purplings of uncultivated reeds,
ex post cliche survivors like the asphodel,
drink as they did the Mincius, the Hackensack
in absent-minded benediction on the merely ugly.(3)

Like a tightrope walker who continually preens and points to the thinness of her wire, this poet calls attention to herself at every turn. We much prefer an artist who strolls casually across the ceiling as if this were the most natural act in the world. We usually think of plant life in beds so that our interest lapses at the blunt metaphor “beds of reeds.” It's easy to envision the reeds as plumes, too, but we have the vague sense of having made that comparison by ourselves before, when what we want is something we've never heard before but instantly recognize as true. “Brushed” (for the plumes) rings true, but again in a familiar rather than an enlightening way.

The sound doesn't work much better—words are too hard edged. The “u” of “brushed” and “plumes” and the “e” and “ee” of “beds of reeds,” and even the better short “i” of “civility” and “fingering” are overwhelmed by the structural complexity of every word. There's no room for enjoyment—line after line requires too much of our intellect and ears. The solution is not simply to mix in slack constructions, but to attend instinctively to the ear's hankering for music, which can only admit so many words like “Dreckpot” and “purplings.” Compare these lines from W. H. Auden's “In Praise of Limestone:”

If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones,
                    Are continually homesick for, this is chiefly
Because it dissolves in water. Mark these rounded slopes
                    With their surface fragrance of thyme and, beneath,
A secret system of caves and conduits; hear the springs
                    That spurt out everywhere with a chuckle,
Each filling a private pool for its fish and carving
                    Its own little ravine whose cliffs entertain
The butterfly and the lizard …(4)

So many words here, instead of abandoning us in a complex world which we feel pressured to learn as we read, recall us to what we know: “homesick;” “secret;” “chuckle;” “private;” “little;” “entertain.” While Clampitt resorts to harshness and an almost foreign complexity in describing her landscape, Auden conveys his through appealing rounded slopes, caves and conduits. He delights us when a stream surprisingly “spurts out everywhere,” chuckling at its own un-streamlike energy, as if the poet were laughing at the same paradox in himself. Intimate words and phrases endear us to a speaker unquestionably in love with his subject, and eager to convey this love in terms we'll appreciate: “it dissolves in water.”

In comparing these poets, it's interesting to speculate upon their methods of choosing words. Clampitt appears to have taken great care in selecting her nouns and adjectives, even beyond the manuevering required to organize a sestina. One imagines thesaurus words auditioned like a songwriter's rhymes. To judge from these lines, her process, while precise, remained intellectual and lexical, based on the physical appearance of a word rather than its sonic effect and compatibility with others. Auden seems to have been equally diligent in picking “entertain” over, say, “distract,” and “homesick” over “pine”, but his results influence the entire landscape of the poem. He chose words as individual contributors to an overall poetry. As Eliot said of Shakespeare, “the auditory imagination and the imagination of the other senses are more nearly fused, and fused together with the thought.”

For all their surface simplicity, Auden's sounds are actually subtle and complex. The “r”s, “f”s, “a”s and “s” sounds of “surface fragrance” inconspicuously charm our ears, and how clear and ringing that single syllable “y” in “thyme” strikes immediately following.

One must tread warily in criticising a poem as self-conscious as Clampitt's, for fear of being told that one didn't get the point, that of course it sounds glutted and unsayable, for that's the irony—the poet rejoicing in the fullness of English while commenting upon our expectation that art celebrate the beautiful beautifully. This argument makes me uncomfortable, because my head accepts it while my ear finds the poem flat and strained. So while I will grant the poet her intentions, whether they be those I've mentioned or others, I maintain that she fails and that similar poems fail and are praised until we gradually lose sight of what a successful poem sounds like.

When I tried to improve Kenney's lines by reducing their load of adjectives, they fell apart—the overwriting disintegrated into non-writing when its symptoms were treated. Good writing survives in the Yeats and Auden lines in spite of any tampering. In fact, it's worth abusing them just to hear the indestructible voice sounding through. In Clampitt's lines, however, when words apparently chosen for their uncommonness are removed, few words remain. All of her words are semantically and musically replaceable. When they're replaced, we sense no poetic vacuum such as opens in the first line of Auden's “Musee des Beaux Arts:”

About suffering they were never wrong
About tolerance they were never wrong

How indelibly do we find Clampitt's line stamped on our ears when confronted with

in absent-minded benediction on the merely ugly.
in forgetful devotion to the simply gross.

We sense a different hand on the pen, certainly, and are affronted to choose, but we do pause to choose, while

Many ingenious lovely things are gone
Several inspired pretty things are gone

instantly sets the original ringing in our ears.

My point is not that only conventionally spoken words and phrases should inhabit contemporary poems, but that language must do more than call attention to itself. It must effect a marriage between sound and subject such that the reader hears every line as if it had lived within him forever. Even disorienting Modernist works persuade us that we know the author's world as well as the more orderly one portrayed in realistic and naturalistic art. The general effect of Clampitt's lines could be reproduced in the statements “there are words we rarely use; let's use them,” and “an ugly river inspires me in spite of itself; I shall celebrate it.” What survives in her lines is prose, whereas what survives of poetry is unchangeable, unparaphrasable, and motivated solely by a desire to explore one's self, language and world. If the fancy vocabulary and beauty-in-ugliness gimmick are removed from “Reedbeds,” nothing remains. If we take W. B. Yeats from Auden's “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” not only does a good deal of the poem survive, we realize that it's as much an elegy by and even about W. H. Auden as to an Irish poet.

Another method which generally results in bad poems might be named “cultivated articulation” for its resemblance to drawing room banter, where all voices sound effortlessly wry and well-spoken. One reads and is not too bothered by reading. The world described sounds pleasant and the end arrives stylishly on time. Contrasted to Auden's and Clampitt's processes, the word-search here seems exclusively musical. It fails simply because (unlike music) purely musical poetry bores us very quickly. We object to a world rendered in falsely charming stanzas, much as idiosyncratic popular songs nauseate us in the dentist's chair as neutralized Muzak.

The unwitting father of this kind of poetry would appear to be Wallace Stevens, whose work avoids the barrenness of his less skilled followers' through the sheer vivacity of his ear and imagination. He celebrates the marvelous and marvelling qualities of language like a child obsessed with shapely communication, taking Hopkins's dual energy for God and the English language and investing it all in the latter.

“A man may be a great artist,” Eliot said of Milton, “and yet have a bad influence.” Stevens's influence reminds me of a phrase sixth graders might pass in whispers around a classroom in a game called “Gossip.” What begins as “Miss Smith's in the hospital” usually ends up as “Miss Smith ate a horse.” Most of the original vanishes. In the same way, much of Stevens's grace has descended to a younger generation without his fire or heart. Of course, many poets may be blamed for bad contemporary poetry but Stevens seems particularly responsible for this elegant school. Its members have inherited his ability to write charmingly all the time with periods of profundity (with Stevens, of course, those periods were extended and his profundity was great). They abuse his example by always preferring dazzle and invention to a more confronting realism. Robert Lowell's perception of something occasionally “too blandly appropriated” in Stevens's work aptly characterizes these new poets who, concealed within the master's cajoling blank verse or short stanzas, may more easily wear his hat and gray suit while lacking the unique smile.

Such imposters should remind us to attend to poems and not to formulas and rules. Even when new poems make new rules we stay on track by continuing to enjoy them as poems. So many intentional movements result in impassioned, provocative criticism and uneven poems because poetry is always uneven. The only critical theory which accurately predicts its quality is Randall Jarrell's. Great poems, Jarrell says, result from poets being struck by a kind of poetic lightning. Such direct hits can occur a few times, or once, or never in a lifetime of standing out in the rain.

The following two poems seem to result from just such chance brilliance. Like many great poems they sound as if they were written directly from the poet's heart. Most importantly, they embody Robert Lowell's comment about Elizabeth Bishop that “each poem is inspired by her own tone.” A poem's tie to its author's tone is its tie to humanness, and we respond to humanness with our most intimate feeling: love.

Like the best songs, Heather McHugh's poems move forward with an always perceptible liveliness and rhythm. She avoids the self-indulgence of poets who abuse Modernism's legacy by offering as poetry the artless rendering of their own thoughts. Whereas Amy Clampitt directs us to uncommon words and the potential of art itself as a subject for poetry, McHugh restores us to the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

McHugh rises to two kinds of occasion in her poems. In some, she seems less inspired by any insistent emotion than by humor and a desire to “play” language into poems that refer to themselves as much as to the poet's world:

You ask me what
is blind and I insist.
Not love not
love not love.

“What is Blind” (from Dangers)

Elsewhere, McHugh tones down her playfulness to articulate an extraordinarily moving pain, often the result of lost or uncertain love, and accompanied by a wondering at the causes of loss. In these more substantial poems, McHugh writes not so much as a crafter of words but as a human being making urgent use of her expressive talent:

I swear there is no frame
that I would keep you in; I didn't love a look
and find you fit it. Every day
your sight was a surprise—you made my taste,
made sense, made eyes. But when you set me up
in high esteem, I was a star that's bound,
in time, to fall. The point's the sorrow
of the song. I loved you to no end
and when you said, So far
I knew the idiom. It meant so long.(5)

The narrator of “I Knew I'd Sing” reclaims her lost word “cunt” by making a beautiful poem which centers on that word. She reclaims herself through her ability to sing of herself. In this poem McHugh fuses her two greatest strengths—power of language and power of emotion—into one.

“I KNEW I'D SING”

A few sashay, a few finagle.
Some make whoopee, some
make good. But most make
diddly-squat. I tell you this
is what I love about
America—the words it put
in my mouth, the mouth where once
my mother rubbed a word away
with soap. The word
was cunt. She stuck that great
big bar in there until there was
no hole to speak of, so
she hoped. But still I'm full
of it, the cunt, the prick,
short u, short i, the words
for her and him. I loved
the things they must have done,
the love they must have made
to make an example of me.
After my lunch of Ivory I said
vagina for a day or two, but knew
from that day forth which word it was
that struck with all the force of sex itself.
I knew when I was big I'd sing
a song in praise of cunt. I'd want
to keep my word, the one with teeth in it.
And even after I was raised, I swore,
nothing, but nothing, would be beneath me.(6)

Often the hardest part of writing is to fashion lines that will resonate by themselves while remaining crucial bricks in the overall structure. A good poem, Mark Van Doren said, must “reveal its concern with humanity in motion. But the final success, as even Homer knew, is when the story sings.” For me, reading this poem is like placing my phonograph needle down in the middle of a Bix Beiderbecke record. I am instantly caught up in the most natural affecting melody, performed with a style that defies duplication.

“The art of poetry is the art of narrative too;” Van Doren continues, “no great lyric but tells its story, regardless of how much action was left out.”⁷ “How much action was left out” must be compensated for by the suggestive life of the language. McHugh could never describe all that went on in her mind between her first utterance of the word “cunt” and the period of time after she was raised, yet we finish reading with a better understanding of her development than seven quatrains might ever be expected to offer.

Multiple meanings within words, lines and stanzas are her primary tools. “Sashay” implies a show-off, a preening skirt-twirler. “Finagle” suggests wiliness, smooth-talking trickery, and when we make whoopee we have fun having sex or simply have fun. To make diddly-squat is to make nothing or, more strictly, to make shit, but with the implication of having promised something more.

All of these words suggest actions that occur beyond the expected—trying to appear fancy; obtaining something by dubious means; a comically uninhibited feeling or cry. All reflect the pleasure the speaker will take in saying “cunt” around the house—an action with a little of the sashay, finagle, whoopee and, of course, diddly-squat about it at the same time. She couldn't have known these connotations as a child, but that's what she loved, those words she knew but didn't know, which sound like the actions they describe. Even now, after she is “raised,” she derives the same poetic enjoyment from words that she once took from “cunt.” This pleasure got her into trouble in the first place, though it remains what she savors about America, or its language.

“I tell you this …” the speaker says at the end of stanza one, and before our eyes drop to the rest of the sentence in stanza two, we fleetingly expect a proclamation, a poet's or child's sweeping “I'm going to tell you how it is.” Instantly, though, we reach “is what I love about / America,” step by step comprehending the whole sentence, which has a different meaning than “I tell you this.” The line breaks have done their job—we think harder about this statement than if it were presented in one line.

“America;” “example;” “vagina;” “Ivory.” Of the 182 words in this poem, only these four contain more than two syllables. Only “America,” the most patriotic sounding of our country's two names and the one most frequently used to connote country and culture, contains four. Thus the word is implicitly emphasized. Even before telling about the controversy she's caused, the speaker wants us to know that her love of language is a patriotic love, and that she's going to fight those who would stop her from saying “cunt.” In fact, she'll repeat it as proudly as the flag is raised, because America—and, we think, who else?—gave her the word, put it in her mouth, and not even that all-American purifier Ivory Soap can cancel its effect.

While all this is happening, the speaker rattles off words just like “cunt”—“soap,” “stuck,” “great big bar,” even “words”—and how similar to a blow-job is the mother filling her daughter's mouth with soap “until there was no hole to speak of,” no mouth because it's full of soap and no cunt because it can't be named. This is a typical puritanical American mother's hope, that if a child doesn't say naughty words, whatever those words describe won't exist.

In stanza four the speaker remains as cheeky as ever, but now she celebrates actual organs as well as words, which take on lives of their own: the pleasurable “u” and “i” in “cunt” and “prick” echo the pronouns “you” and “I” and their shortness recalls the inadequacy that America teaches us to dread. “Him” and “her” also represent the speaker's parents who, she realizes gleefully, couldn't have been so soapy clean; they made love to make her just as by saying and then writing words she makes love to remake them and herself, while the poem makes an example of both for the reader. The isolation of the three-syllable “example” here implies that all this intellectualizing can't last. After trying “vagina” for two days she succumbs to a flurry of monosyllables and iambs, speaking simply again like a child, finishing grandly with “cunt” which, we notice, happens to half-rhyme with “want.”

The final stanza turns slightly darker and more serious. The speaker no longer gently mocks her past flamboyance. Instead, she explains why the experience with words stayed with her and left its mark. In the conviction of this stanza we recognize our own experiences of sticking to our guns. She wanted to keep her word “cunt” as well as her promise to herself, an unspecified promise but one we all know, one that makes us special, one with teeth in it like “cunt” spoken with the teeth, like a cunt through which she feels special and makes new life.

Even after being raised to a polite childhood and adulthood, she swore, but for her it was more than cussing, it was vowing her individuality, the crux of which was never to prettify (sashay or finagle) or hold herself above anything, especially herself. Reading the last line as “nothing except nothing,” we recognize a dig at the mother who both disregards the area “beneath” her daughter's body, and considers it a vulgar topic of conversation. If we interpret “swore” in the penultimate line as “cursed,” there's a marvelous suggestion that when she swears, nothing will be too vulgar for her to say. This appropriately concludes a poem that endeavors to “raise” the American language to be less squeaky clean by celebrating the concise, beautiful “cunt” as if it were an all-American word like valor, say, or power.

“I Knew I'd Sing” proves that it's not enough to contribute curious words to a poem in the name of inventiveness, or to settle for a tactful and uncontroversial rhythm and subject. These have an intellectual appeal at best, and in spite of what many critics seem to believe, writing that only satisfies the mind while starving the heart and ear really does bore us to death. Poetry demands the dressy rustling of “sashay” audibly and semantically rhyming with “finagle,” followed by the bam bam bam beat of “some make whoopee, some make good.”

Sound and sense, however, are only the most analyzable parts of poetry. McHugh writes beautifully right through her penultimate stanza, but her final stanza makes the poem. These are redemptive lines, lines with heart. The whole poem has heart glistening on each line, anchoring music and meaning to the poet's voice. We know it's there but only read it plain with the speaker's promise and vow at the end. Heart might be defined as the reason a poem deserves to be written and read. Most poems, particularly those suffering from wordiness or elegance, conceal their lack of heart under surface dazzle. We read the first lines and think so what, and only keep reading if we have to.

In a few poems, heart is foremost, towing sound and meaning with it as appropriately decorated podiums from which to speak. We feel as if we're reading a soul in such poems, that this is how a soul would speak. There aren't many mediocre poems of this kind—when they fail they sound immediately immature, diary-like and abominable. Elegant and wordy poets don't even write lines with heart. Their poems are so stiffly dressed and preoccupied with how and where to step it's instantly obvious that they were written because it was time to write a poem, any poem.

We never question why the following poem by Phyllis Janowitz was written, rather how the poet ever cohered so much feeling into thirteen short, three-line stanzas. Eventually it occurs to us that this is how we converse with ourselves, each word embracing in its saying other unuttered words that complete our unique worlds.

A friend directed me to this poem on an inconspicuous back page of The New Yorker. A search through Janowitz's books turned up nothing nearly as good. Perhaps it's an isolated shriek of genius or the first of a handful of brilliant poems surrounded by lesser ones. Its solitude encourages by reminding us that we never know where or when poetry will explode. Somehow such a masterpiece reduces the competitive rush of contemporary poetry back, simply, to Poetry, a world stripped of careers and contacts where we confine our judgment to what pleases us on the page.

“WAITING FOR FATHER IN PAWLING, N.Y.”

I have been sitting at
the window since morning,
watching whirligig beetles
skim the surface of the pond
and listening to a high,
reedy song like the wind,
only higher, so high
the dog starts to moan
deep in its throat.
I am wearing a black felt
hat in memory of my uncle,
who drowned at City Island
sixty years ago. When you
arrive, we'll bury our
hearts (two small peach pits)
under the picnic table,
set out cold chicken, wine,
strawberries. We won't
speak of my solitude, how
fear for me makes you cry.
We won't wonder why your
left leg is dragging
more than ever. I'll say,
“I can't remember such
a good time, can you?”
After you leave, I will
sit at the window and watch
whirligig beetles wrinkle
the smooth skin on the pond.
I will think of your brother.
How he rented a rowboat,
brought a girl with him,
smoked a pipe all afternoon.
How he told her it was
the best day of his life.
How he was just
twenty when he waved and called
(it wasn't clear)
help and went under.(8)

This poem spits in the eye of mediocrity. How many hundreds of poems have we read beginning with some variation (or none) on Janowitz's first line, and proceeding through a narrative punctuated by familiar statements such as her “I am wearing …” “When you arrive …” “I'll say …” Here, such phrases balance the exoticness and heated torpor of the whirligig beetles, the ethereal reedy song, the dog's selective response—not a wary bark or growl but a response—and the incongruity of wearing a hat in memory of a sixty years dead uncle.

Presented with these incongruous details, we believe that the father and child bury their hearts, that as dust is kicked over the peach pits those ugly, gnawed cores perfectly symbolize the battering and suppression our emotions suffer in their long tug-of-war with family members. Nowhere is the swooping, steering triplet more justified than here. The Williams-like enjambments which sound so hackneyed and redundant in other poems are crucial to this one. Reading these stanzas our eyes dart back and forth with the same jerky hesitancy we have all felt when making a difficult speech to parents. Such lines climb down the page like the best of Creeley's, so that we're always following content, never the machinery of technique.

The speaker's tone creates the relationships in this poem. She keeps digressing, never describing an actual confrontation with her father, which must enfold entirely through the implication of her words. All she will say to him directly is “I can't remember such a good time.” Her tone of “I did this; you did that” is one we use in referring to our parents boldly in their absence, or in admitting to them and to ourselves how powerfully they affect us.

When the father has finally gone, limped away without a word, the speaker can return to the window and exciting thoughts about the brother, back to the Godot-like waiting of the title. Like the short-lived whirligig beetles with their spectacular bodies, the brother is wonderful to think about—young, a ladies' man, a pipe smoker at twenty, impulsive enough to call a day in a rowboat “the best day of his life.” He died a quick, thrilling death before which it's conveniently unclear (we can hear the girl struggling to remember) if he panicked. How much easier to mourn him than the long-suffering father with his deteriorating body, intruding upon his child's idealized thoughts about a foolish uncle who couldn't swim.

But she doesn't really want to keep replaying the movie of her uncle drowning. She wants to be able to feel for her father what he feels for her, to say: “fear for you makes me cry” before he silently goes under. This poem ultimately represents her own panicked cry for help before she drowns, as her uncle did, in foolish, romantic, self-deception.

Readers may defend the lines criticized in this essay with all the enthusiasm that I reserved for the McHugh and Janowitz poems. If their opinions are one with actual feelings, then I would no more disagree than argue the merits of their children. If not, then they have failed to address the poetry on the absolute emotional terms that art requires. Too many poems fall short of these terms while fulfilling other less relevant, though fashionable standards. Similarly, in all writing about poetry, every critical point must originate in affection, so that a reader may trace a line from evaluation to human feeling. The average reviewer or essayist offers many proclamations, but rarely reveals a true personal conviction behind his or her words.

How simple it seems, in this age of a dismaying symbiosis between critic and poet, to let personal affection stand as our sole determiner of merit. We ought to feel confident weighing our favorite poems against Philip Larkin's standard when he advises us to enjoy poetry “in the commonest of senses, the sense in which we leave a radio on or off.” By requiring affection from ourselves and others when we read, we can help to reverse a trend during which, Larkin says, “the reader has been bullied into giving up the consumer's power to say ‘I don't like this, bring me something different.’”⁹

Notes

1. Kenney, Richard, The Evolution of the Flightless Bird.—New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984.

2. Yeats, W. B., The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats.—London: MacMillian, 1977.

3. Clampitt, Amy, What the Light Was Like.—New York, NY: Alfred Knopf, 1985.

4. Auden, W. H., Selected Poems.—London, Faber and Faber.

5. Meyers, Jack, New American Poets of the '80s, edited by Jack Meyers and Roger Weingarten.—Green Harbor, MA: Wampeter, 1984.

6. Henderson, Bill, The Pushcart Prize, VIII.—Wainscott, NY: The Pushcart Press, 1983.

7. Van Doren, Mark, Introduction to Poetry.—New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1966.

8. Janowitz, Phyllis, Visiting Rites.—Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982.

9. Larkin, Philip, Required Writing.—New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984.