Explaining America: The Poetry of Robert Pinsky
[In the following essay, Parini offers a positive assessment of An Explanation of America, praising his unique and original verse.]
Robert Pinsky's book-length poem An Explanation of America falls somewhere into that magical fold of "major poetry": it offers a steadiness and wholeness of vision rare in contemporary poetry. Pinsky writes with a deeply humane sensibility, drawing new water from old wells, but also reaching into areas where nobody would have guessed that poetry could be found. "A country is the things it wants to see," he tells us, and the particulars of his America materialize before us as a necessary exterior analogue to the "common dream" of humanity.
Pinsky addresses the poem to his daughter, Nicole, saying: "I want our country like a common dream / To be between us in what we see." With a range of pedagogical and fatherly tones, he instructs first by summoning the scene:
I want for you to see the things I see
And more, Colonial Diners, Disney, films
Of concentration camps, the napalmed child
Trotting through famous newsfilm in her diaper
And tattered flaps of skin, Deep Throat, the rest.
This is an inclusive vision, able to contemplate and to "explain" a breadth of ideas, objects, images, and events. And it is quintessentially American in its effort to include so much, yet another attempt to fulfill the Emersonian quest for a poem able to contain the vast reach and complexity of this continent.
Dissatisfaction with the brief Romantic lyric propelled Whitman to write Leaves of Grass, and, even before Whitman, prompted Joel Barlow's Columbiad; it has been an abiding obsession with American poets. In the era of Modernism, the great efforts of Eliot, Pound and Williams stand out; the next generation includes Lowell's Mills of the Kavanaughs, Ginsberg's Howl, and Robert Penn Warren's Brother to Dragons. More recently we have seen Anne Stevenson's little-known but exemplary epistolary novel in verse, Correspondences, and James Merrill's dialogues with the spiritual world; both of these try to recover for poetry some of the ground lost in this century to the novel and are narrative in essence. Robert Pinsky, however, has managed to write a successful long discursive poem. In doing so, he appears to have sacrificed none of the narrative compulsion without which it is impossible to read a long poem.
Although reminiscent of Wordsworth, Whitman, and Stevens, Pinsky's verse is something new. The newness enters with the poet's meditative, modest, oddly affecting tone and in the way he moves effortlessly from abstract formulation to vivid particulars—a technique which Pinsky developed concretely in his first book of poetry, Sadness and Happiness, and on a more theoretical level in his criticism.
I
An Explanation of America is Pinsky's second book of poems but his fourth book. He has also written a book on Walter Savage Landor, a celebrated study of contemporary verse entitled The Situation of Poetry, and innumerable essays and reviews. Like Johnson, Coleridge, and Eliot before him, Pinsky is determined to create the taste by which he will be judged. The Situation of Poetry is dedicated to his great teacher at Stanford, Yvor Winters, whose tough-minded intellectual tone underlies Pinsky's own bemused voice. Winters's principles are in evidence throughout: the firm anti-Romantic bias (in severely modified form), the disposition toward argument in poetry, the willingness to admit and appreciate abstraction and discursive statement. Pinsky writes:
Modem poetry was created by writers born about a hundred years ago. The premises of their work included a mistrust of abstraction and statement, a desire to escape the blatantly conventional aspects of form, and an ambition to grasp the world by using the static, general medium of language. These premises are paradoxical, or at least peculiar, in themselves. Moreover, the brilliant stylistic inventions associated—notably the techniques of "imagism," which convey the powerful illusion that a poet presents, rather than tells about, a sensory experience—are also peculiar as techniques.
Or, as he says, they once seemed peculiar. The climate of expectation is such that these Romantic premises have simply been absorbed into the current fund of tacit knowledge. Thus, elder poets will regularly advise their students: embody an experience, don't tell about it; avoid abstraction and concentrate on a "deep image;" let the shape of a poem evolve, don't prescribe a form. I have myself mouthed these truisms during writing seminars as though they fell somehow outside the realm of arguable notion. Horace, Virgil, Milton, and certainly Pope would have been desperately puzzled. We may be grateful to Pinsky (as to Winters and J. V. Cunningham) for pointing out the historically anomalous nature of our current presuppositions.
Pinsky's own tacit presuppositions emerge as he discusses the work of other writers, such as his interest in "traditional verse" in the older, broader sense in which the poet employs discursive statement and "detail is handled in the proportioned, natural way of great art." His readiness to accept abstraction of a certain kind stands out, as does his intuitive grasp of the symbol-making function and its relation to the concrete image. His ideas about poetry, interesting enough on their own, acquire added significance in the light of Sadness and Happiness and An Explanation of America, wherein Theory and Practice, those infrequently married travelers on the open road, meet happily and wed.
II
Sadness and Happiness (1975) was not a typical apprentice volume because it excluded a fair number of poems which had already appeared in magazines, but which Pinsky discarded as juvenilia. Thus, with his first book of poems he stepped into his majority at once. The book is richly textured and complete in itself, though in obvious ways if foreshadows An Explanation of America. The title poem, for example, plus the final sequence, "Essay on Psychiatrists," look forward to the discursive style of Pinsky's later book.
I must confess here a special liking for this poet's shorter lyrics. In the brief aubade, "First Early Mornings Together," his technical brilliance, a bemused and generous tone, and a talent for evincing with a single stroke the image perfectly suited to convey the emotional atmosphere are evident:
Waking up over the candy store together
We hear birds waking up below the sill
And slowly recognize ourselves, the weather,
The time, and the birds that rustle there until
Down to the street as fog and quiet lift
The pigeons from the wrinkled awning flutter
To reconnoiter, mutter, stare and shift
Pecking by ones or twos the rainbowed gutter.
Without fuss, the poet joins inner with outer weathers, the subjective state of feeling shared by the lovers with the physical state of the outside world, represented by the birds, the fog and external sounds. Pinsky often affects the simplicity of, say, Pound in his Cathay poems or the breathless clarity of Chinese verse as we in the West have come to know it.
Many of the poems in Sadness and Happiness evoke the decaying streets and emotionally pathetic atmosphere of the small New Jersey town where the poet grew up. They share with the poems of Williams, though little else, a profound affection for ordinary objects. The poems are alive with, as Pinsky says, "the things I see," which include: "houses and cars, trees / grasses and birds," as well as incidents: "dusk / on a golf course" or "white / selvage of a mockingbird's gray / blur as he dabbles wings and tail / in a gutter." A poet is one who looks close enough, long enough, at objects so that they take on something of the poet's life; the point at which an object resists assimilation is the point of poetry. Pinsky understands this and perches, breathlessly, on that very point in poem after poem.
My favorite poem in Sadness and Happiness is called "Tennis," and it is a masterpiece of elaborate conceit. Written in the guise of an instructor's manual for tennis, for winning at tennis, the poem explores the American obsession with victory. Notice the cool, detached tone of the final section, "Winning":
Call questionable balls his way, not yours;
You lose the point but have your concentration,
The grail of self-respect. Wear white. Mind losing.
Walk, never run, between points: it will save
Your breath, and hypnotize him, and he may think
That you are tired, until your terrible
Swift sword amazes him. By understanding
Your body, you will conquer your fatigue.
By understanding your desire to win
And all your other desires, you will conquer
Discouragement. And you will conquer distraction
By understanding the world, and all its parts.
The poem is worth rereading merely because of its verbal brilliance: Pinsky dances on the high wire of metaphysical wit. But it is also worth rereading for its innate wisdom, its insight into our condition as competitive animals. "Tennis" is something new for poetry and, for me, the most accomplished poem in this book.
The final "Essay on Psychiatrists" has fine moments, expecially the portrait of Yvor Winters in the "Perforation, Concerning Genius," but on the whole it fails because in a sense there is nothing to say about psychiatrists apart from what Pinsky does say:
The effort "to find a healing speech" is what makes us human. Poetry is a language adequate to experience, and most language is inadequate and unhealthy. What is important here, however, is Pinsky's direction; we see him stretching the boundaries of contemporary poetry, invading territories once held intact by prose. "Essay on Psychiatrists" is a warm-up for the marathon to come.
III
An Explanation of America divides into three sections, all of which maintain the elegant yet conversational style of the opening stanza:
As though explaining the idea of dancing
Or the idea of some other thing
Which everyone has known a little about
Since they were children, which children learn themselves
With no explaining, but which children like
Sometimes to hear the explanations of,
I want to tell you something about our country,
Or my idea of it: explaining it
If not to you, to my idea of you.
This stanza is a single long sentence, full of qualifying clauses and whimsical digressions. C. S. Lewis said of Paradise Lost that one has to get used to reading paragraphs, not lines, and one quickly learns to read beyond Pinsky's line. The blank verse movement becomes unobtrusive as one falls into the narrative swing. Though prose-like, this verse will not be mistaken for prose. Pinsky stretches the colloquial phrase across an underlying meter with superb naturalness, what Robert Frost calls "breaking sounds of sense with all their irregularity across the regular beat of the metre." Although the primary movement of Pinsky's verse is iambic, many of the lines are "sprung" to accommodate the tone or texture as it evolves. Enjambements occur easily, giving the verse its aura of intelligent conversation.
In accordance with Pinsky's assumptions about poetry, he refuses in Explanation to go in fear of abstraction. He writes in "From the Surface": "A country is the things it wants to see." He follows this up by saying he will not censor anything from his daughter's view on the grounds of its ugliness alone: "Not that I want for you to have to see / Atrocity itself." Like many good fathers, he wants her to see nearly everything: "the things I see / And more," things like "well-kept Rushmore, Chiswick House, or Belsen." We need to see these things "Lest we forget," he says, quoting Kipling. Above, as always, Pinsky follows abstract assertions with hard, shining particulars.
Quoting Mayor Daley, he writes: "All politics is local politics." Moving from a comparison of America and Rome, "the plural-headed Empire," he offers vivid examples of modern plurality from his own life:
Coming back to local politics, the poet refers "to the locus where we vote," the "Nest where an Eagle balances and screams." In a sense, Pinsky's Explanation shuttles back and forth continually between local politics and politics in its widest application, between concrete example and abstract formulation, between autobiography and the history of the West.
In "Countries and Explanations" (Part One, IV.) Pinsky concludes that place is itself "a kind of motion." It is partly permanent, partly blurred by the changes that occur as place recedes endlessly into the future, and as citizens of a particular place continually imagine the point from which they proceed: "Our nation, mellowing to another country / Of different people living in different places." In this section he somehow manages to suggest the dynamic quality of evolution—and, likewise, to suggest how place is as much mental as physical. Pinsky's "explanation" is merely his private mythos becoming public; as such, it is a confrontation, inviting the reader to respond in kind. His explanation spawns explanations, which in their collective aspect constitute whatever we may call a "country." "Countries and Explanations" might well be converted into an equation: "Countries are Explanations."
Part Two, which has four sections as well, is a meditation on "Its Great Emptiness," conceived of physically as a prairie, with its "shaggy pelt of grasses … flowing for miles." In rich language Pinsky composes a geography so vast that, like death, it is finally beyond conception; Part Two provides a negative from which the America of our choice may be printed, positing an "obliterating strangeness" which is "as hard to imagine as the love of death … / Which is the final strangeness." The poet's mastery of literal fact and metaphor, of image and imagination, is evident throughout; where a lesser poet might easily drown in the waves of abstract formulation churned up here, such as the proposition that "the love of death" is "the final strangeness," Pinsky redeems himself time after time with follow-up imagery, such as "The contagious blankness of a quiet plain." The technique is daring, of course, and its results can be controversial (I recall Roethke's "windy cliffs of forever," which some have disparaged), but when it works the result can be a splendid juxtaposition of concept and example.
In "Bad Dreams" Pinsky conjures "The accumulating prison of the past / That pulls us toward a body and a place," concluding with the statement:
Americans, we choose to see ourselves
As here, yet not here yet—as if a Roman
In mid-Rome should inquire the way to Rome.
Like Jews or Indians, roving on the plains
Of places taken from us, or imagined,
We accumulate the customs, music, words
Of different climates, neighbors, and oppressors,
Making encampment in the sand or snow.
The poet risks speaking for us all here, but the risk pays off; Americans do, in fact, live with an eye perpetually trained on the future. We keep reminding ourselves that we are a "young country" vis-à-vis Europe, as if the situation could somehow change in two or three hundred years. The comparsion with Rome, that supremely confident nation, this time points up a difference; Americans are a people of process and adaptation, of assimilation and, perhaps, instability. We are, in spite of blazoned days (to recall Stevens), a dispossessed—and dispossessing—people.
Throughout his Explanation the poet gathers those images and ideas which for him make up America. He becomes increasingly interested, too, in "possibility," as if by naming (what Emerson conceived of as the poet's primary task) he could bring circumstances into existence: a curiously vatic notion for a poet of Pinsky's disposition. The comparisons with Rome culminate in "Horace, Epistalea I, xvi," (Part Two, III.), which is in part a translation of a famous epistle by the great Augustan poet. This section takes the form of a letter from the poet's Sabine farm outside of Rome to his friend and benefactor, Quinctius; here all of Horace's aspirations for Rome, all of his "explanations," are revealed. What Horace really meant by this letter finds a terse, eloquent summary in the next section. Pinsky writes:
That freedom, even in a free Republic,
Rests ultimately on the right to die.
And though he's careful to say that Quinctius,
The public man able to act for good
And help his fellow-Romans, lives the life
That truly is the best, he's also careful
To separate their fortunes and their places,
And to appreciate his own: his health,
His cows and acorns in his healing spring,
His circle—"We here in Rome"—for friends and gossip.
The compressed quality of this verse should be obvious enough; here is a poet in control—emotionally, intellectually, artistically. He risks another of his abstractions (following Horace's lead): the relationship of freedom to the right to die. This notion holds for Quinctius as well as Horace (and Pinsky), while the job of the intellect remains—the separate fortunes, judging each man's success on individual terms. Here, as throughout An Explanation of America, the poet draws the line meticulously between the necessary (therefore true) obstraction and the humane particular. In these terms, Pinsky is the most Horation (i.e., well-balanced and humane) poet that we have.
The final sequence, "Its Everlasting Possibility," opens with a meditation on limits, a difficult task for anyone living in America, where "Possibility spreads / And multiplies and exhausts itself in growing." This first section, "Braveries," points up some of America's confusion about the past:
The country, boasting that it cannot see
The past, waits dreaming ever of the past,
Or all the plural pasts: the way a fetus
Dreams vaguely of heaven—waiting, and in its courage
Willing, not only to be born out into
The Actual (with its ambiguous good),
But to retreat again and be born backward
Into the gallant walls of its potential.
Such ambivalence about history threatens and distorts our visions of the present and, of course, the future. The poet, conjuring his own vision of the future, makes no real proclamations or predictions; rather, his judgments are limited to exactly what he sees. His ear is attentive to both the music of what happens and the music of what might be. One moving section records the progress of a young girl with her horse around a practice arena, while her father "takes crude courage from the ancient meaning / Of the horse." The primitive symbolism of horse and rider somehow liberates him—however briefly—from the binding limits of ordinary life. The mythic image (though I must warn that Pinsky's vision is ironic) works to connect the father, girl, and horse in an antique web of significance.
"Serpent Knowledge" considers the problem of evil, with Vietnam as a pimary specimen—Vietnam, a word almost impossible to use in a poem if you happen to have come of age when that particular war was on. The word burns a hole in any page; indeed, it may take decades for poetic language to suitably embody the complex nexus of emotions associated with that word. Pinsky explains to his daughter:
Someday, the War in Southeast Asia, somewhere
Perhaps for you and people younger than you—
Will be the kind of history and pain
Saguntum is for me; but never tamed
Or "history" for me, I think.
He writes vividly about what Vietnam means to his (and my own) generation; it was a time "when the country aged itself." The famous American innocence will never, after that war, be quite the same.
In "Mysteries of the Future" (Part Three, III.), the penultimate section of his Explanation, the poet reflects on time and remembrance. He begins with a contemplation of surfaces: the bright images of a winter Sunday morning in Chicago which seem to have precipitated this section. As with most meditative poetry (and most of the individual sections of Pinsky's poem could be considered this), the work opens with a recollection, an evocation or compositio loci, and proceeds to analyze by making analogies. This leads, typically, to a conclusion based on what has gone before, an outward turning, what in the old days was called "a moral." Pinsky works in this way, approaching the future via the past, turning images over in his mind and "working" them until their significance yields. "It is fearful to leave anything behind," he says, or "To choose or to make some one thing to survive / Into the future." Thomas Jefferson, whom Pinsky cites, left behind a modest epitaph which did not mention the terms of presidency because they were "something held, not something he had done." What Jefferson actually did was to write the Declaration of Independence and a Virginian law to provide for public education; these facts he chose for remembrance.
The section closes with another epitaph, that of John Jack, an unknown slave, who "Tho' a slave to vice, / He practiced those virtues / Without which kings are but slaves." To speak words "few enough to fit a stone," and to leave them for the mysterious future to absorb, demands that we "be naked, free, and final," Pinsky states. This is, alas, a poet's response to the mysteries first encountered in Chicago in the glint of a Sunday morning; a secular response, to be sure. A few graven words, casting a cold eye on life, on death.
Pinsky's Explanation ends with a magnificent "Epilogue: Endings." It is a conclusion in which the poet, akin to Dr. Johnson's narrator in Rasselas, does not conclude. The occasion of the last scene is a performance of The Winter's Tale by a group of college women; the poet's daughter has a small part in the production. She recites: "A sad tale's best for winter," although, true to the nature of Romance, the statue comes alive in the end and all is well, "frozen Possibility moves and breathes." Possibility—as Phoenix—emerges; and Pinsky is led inexorably into the repetitions, renewals, and refreshments of history as it catches up with the present and pushes forward into time to come. America, Pinsky argues, will not hold still for us, as all confident statements falter in the surge of new evidence. He would agree with his mentor, Winters, who said in an essay on Frost as spiritual drifter, that life is a process of continual revision in the interest of greater understanding. Thus, having reviewed his own and the nation's past with great authority, Pinsky returns to the performance of The Winter's Tale:
The unpredictability and ungovernable sweep of this continent finds not so much an explanation as a selective, intelligent revision in the poem. The poet rehabilitates his own past into a collective past, explaining himself to his daughter as much as explaining America. The vision that Pinsky summons is sane, wry, and wholly generous, an example of what is best in our current poetry.
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