For Kooser, poetry’s main selling point is that it doesn’t have any rules, because rules are apparently very bad things to have. He doesn’t much like rhyme and meter (he doesn’t like the word “prosody,” either, because it “sounds so stuffy”). Still, I’m always eager to learn how to write poems, so I opened the Home Repair Manual at random and got some important advice: “Say a poet writes, ‘She had eyes like a chicken.’ Presto! A chicken pops into your mind.” And, presto, a chicken did pop into my mind! Why, it was simple as that! But things soon got a bit more complicated, and I began to wonder if this metaphor and simile business wasn’t harder than it was cracked up to be. A couple of paragraphs later, the poet complained, “You know what I’m talking about. We’ve already got a lot of chickens and a couple of washing machines on the table.” And, presto! there were a lot of chickens and a couple of washing machines on the table, clucking and sloshing away, so I turned to another page. There I found Kooser—I imagined him whittling away at a stick all the while—comparing the words of a poem to a bunch of ham cubes on a styrofoam tray, covered in shrink-wrap. And, presto! …
The odd thing is, on rare occasions Kooser writes as if he knows more about poems than he lets on. A widow speaks:
How his feet stunk in the bed sheets!
I could have told him to wash,
but I wanted to hold that stink against him.
The day he dropped dead in the field,
I was watching.
I was hanging up sheets in the yard,
and I finished.
Though the poem is unambitious in the virtuous, Calvinist way Kooser admires, there’s a darkness here that Frost would have recognized.
The prairies were once so lonesome and dreary and treeless that men called them the Great American Desert. A hundred and fifty years later, they’re growing lonesome once more, and the unspoken subject of Kooser’s poetry is the gradual depopulation of the Great Plains. There has always been emptiness and madness in those small towns (Kooser was a life insurance executive—the one thing such an executive knows about is death), and also the silent desperation that leads to Kooser’s whimsies about, say, mice abandoning a newly ploughed field, dragging tiny carts and carrying miniature lanterns. It’s a pity that these strange, unsettling poems were all written more than twenty years ago. There are a couple of disturbing narrative poems in his new volume (Kooser’s real gift may be for narrative), but everything else is straight as a rail fence and just as wooden, too. Before he let plain speech become its own tyranny, before he started worrying about “poetry cops” intent on enforcing the “rules,” he showed signs of becoming a poet who knew something about cruelty and had a retrospective melancholy eye. Then he decided he’d be better off chawing plug tobacco and selling straw hats to tourists.
Richard Wilbur
In the past, I have written with such pleasure on Richard Wilbur’s elegant and well-mannered verse that perhaps I may be forgiven for not cracking a full bottle of champagne across the bow of his latest Collected Poems. Wilbur has added a dozen new poems, as well as the contents of Mayflies (2000), to the New and Collected Poems of eighteen years ago (he has also provided, like sweepings, a few show lyrics and his verse for children). About the best that can be said of the new poems is that they are reminiscent of Wilbur’s late Frostian style and impressive poems for any octogenarian to write. Here are houses seen at night in Key West:
Yet each façade is raked by the strange glare
Of halogen, in which fantastic day
Veranda, turret, balustraded stair
Glow like the settings of some noble play.
…………………………………
A dog-tired watchman in that mirador
Waits for the flare that tells of Troy’s defeat,
And other lofty ghosts are heard, before
You turn into a narrow, darker street.
There, where no glow or glare outshines the sky,
The pitch-black houses loom on either hand
Like hulks adrift in fog, as you go by.
It comes to mind that they are built on sand,
And that there may be drama here as well,
Where so much murk looks up at star on star:
Though, to be sure, you cannot always tell
Whether those lights are high or merely far.
This is the sort of thing Wilbur does well on a good day and on a bad one does so half-heartedly it calls the whole enterprise into question. The quiet intelligence of these lines—the calm unfolding of their perceptions—looks so easy anyone should be able to do it; and almost no one can. I love the reference to the watch fires that begin Agamemnon, love those houses drifting along in the fog like mysterious ships, love the reminder that the houses are built on sand; but the end, however quietly it invokes Frost’s “Desert Places,” seems muddled and listless. It’s curious that John Ashbery, who is only a few years younger, still seems our contemporary, while Wilbur sounds like an old fussbudget sorry he threw out his last pair of spats.
A year ago American poetry, very briefly, possessed two centenarians, Richard Eberhart and Carl Rakosi. Rakosi has since died, but this year there will be another, Stanley Kunitz. As far as I know, no country has ever been able to boast of so many centenarians among its poets; and I suspect we will see many more (I’m not sure whether this trend is scary or not—what Keats was able to accomplish in four or five years is quite beyond what most poets can do in eighty). I trust that Richard Wilbur will be writing poems for a long while to come, and that some will be better than the new poems here. His Collected Poems, which includes poems so ornate Faberge would have wept, deserves to be on the bookshelf of any serious reader.
The State with the Prettiest Name
The names of the American states—those pioneer hopes, homage stained with arrogance or contempt—have long since lost the furtive tang of accident. They have become what they never could be at first, inevitable. Think how many pay dubious respect to the natives slaughtered, driven off, forced onto agencies (as reservations once were called), or who, having no immunity against smallpox or measles, did not survive the encounter with trapper or trader: Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, Missouri, North and South Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah, with perhaps fifteen more taken from Indian words. Think of the names that courted the favor of kings or queens (Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana) or acknowledged a founder’s father (Pennsylvania) or a founding father (Washington). As soon as a thing is named, it begins to acquire associations that divide it from what it was named for. Who thinks now of Hampshire, Jersey, or York?
Of all these, can “Florida” really be the prettiest? If so, it will always be so, no matter how overrun with shopping malls and pasteboard houses it becomes. Elizabeth Bishop’s was the Florida of the late thirties, though—undeveloped, larval, not yet emerging from the 1925 crash of the land boom that ruined John Berryman’s father. This was the South beyond the South, a land with an atmosphere no less seductive than the gauzy, hand-colored views of Egypt, or Samarkand, or Japan, all sites once of Western reverie and bemusement. Depression Florida was still in touch with the days when Henry Flagler, one of the founders of Standard Oil, reorganized and extended the state’s East Coast rail lines, having already started to build his giant miragelike hotels, the Disney Worlds of their day.
During his American tour in 1904–1905, Henry James felt he had to see that peninsula of the “velvet air, the extravagant plants, the palms, the oranges, the cacti, the architectural fountain, the florid local monument, the cheap and easy exoticism.” He stayed, almost as a matter of course, at Flagler’s Ponce de Leon in St. Augustine. This grandiose example of “Moorish” architecture was otherwise as up-to-date as the Tiffany glass with which it was filled or the poured concrete from which it was made. Rockefellers and Vanderbilts trained south in private railway cars, when Florida was the winter destination of those who summered in Newport or beside Long Island Sound (T
he Age of Innocence has its St. Augustine scenes). Henry Plant, another railroad baron, built a verandah onto his Tampa Bay Hotel more majestic than the Grand Union’s more famous one in Saratoga. Plant’s Moorish extravaganza saw, in its heyday, performances by Sarah Bernhardt, Nellie Melba, and Anna Pavlova. Surrounding everything was that air of strangeness, of otherness, of things newly seen and yet always known, a place slightly hostile to human presence. Normally the most buttoned up of writers, James comically grasped after images adequate to what he had seen: “I found myself loving, quite fraternally, the palms, which had struck me at first, for all their human-headed gravity, as merely dry and taciturn, but which became finally as sympathetic as so many rows of puzzled philosophers, dishevelled, shock-pated, with the riddle of the universe.” The flora’s oddity, its vacant and humid sulkiness, its erotic silkiness, had fascinated and appalled the first explorers. Elizabeth Bishop might have understood:
The state with the prettiest name,
the state that floats in brackish water,
held together by mangrove roots
that bear while living oysters in clusters,
and when dead strew white swamps with skeletons,
dotted as if bombarded, with green hummocks
like ancient cannon-balls sprouting grass.
(“Florida”)
Portraits of Florida, its beauty almost too beautiful, often risk a shallow, shoreline prettiness, the preciousness of the postcard, whose penny purpose is always to incite a twinge of jealousy. Bishop’s poem instead recalls the “brackish water,” the skeletons of dead mangroves, swamps pummeled as if by cannon. Her poem contains people only at its edges: those “ancient cannonballs,” though merely a simile, have the memory of conquest behind them (her “green hummocks” mark her as a tourist—the locals call them hammocks); the turtle skulls have “round eye-sockets / twice the size of a man’s”; the lists of shells and alligator calls are those of a naturalist; in the “gray rag of rotted calico,” in the very mention of “obbligatos” or a “post-card,” there is evidence of an absence. This is Bishop’s characteristic strategy, to push the center to the margins (making more intense what cannot be seen, merely implied). Civilization, already encroaching acre by acre on a prehistoric Florida, here just nibbles at the borders.
In Bishop’s day (she lived in Key West off and on from 1936 to 1949), primeval nature had already been half destroyed. Today you have to go farther to see it; yet, even in my sprawling north Florida town, cattle graze beside shopping malls, sandhill cranes stalk the university feed lot, flocks of ibises and wood storks browse the mall retention-ponds, and every body of water bigger than a bathtub seems to boast its alligator—glowering, patient, inhuman. When an alligator has seen enough of you, has decided you are larger than its appetite, it sinks back into its watery home with an air of condescension.
William Bartram, tramping through Florida in the 1770s, mentioned that the “noise of the crocodiles kept me awake the greater part of the night” (he used “crocodile” and “alligator” indiscriminately). Bishop’s alligator, with its bold calls of war and warning, is reduced to a whimper after dark, when it “speaks in the throat / of the Indian Princess” (what some critics have called a buried or mythic figure is more likely the flowering shrub). One of the alligator’s calls is a throaty growl, a “speaking in the throat.” Does Bishop mean the gator tells of the land’s lavish beauty, of which the flower is a convenient symbol—with a sidelong glance, perhaps, at real Indian princesses, who might once have provided objects of longing for a lovesick reptile? Or is that gator whimpering into the throat of the flower or skeletal girl—out of fear, desire, or merely sudden shyness, to make common cause or merely to seduce it, trying to speak to what cannot reply?
If the last, the alligator mimics the poet’s condition and burden—here, where people have been swept aside (Bishop is never all that comfortable with people), this touching and hopeless encounter reminds us that the natural world can never answer the poet. The impasse is reminiscent of the more complicated exchange in “Cirque d’Hiver” (the poem printed just before “Florida” in North and South), where the speaker watches a toy ballerina ignoring the mechanical circus horse she rides. In the end, speaker and horse stare at each other, saying together with a certain dry fatalism, “Well, we have come this far.” This gloomy admission contains a resistant and battered pride.
Bishop’s Linnaean habits hint at the scientific curiosity that did not drive early exploration so much as hitch a ride with it. Joseph Banks in his long journey on Cook’s Endeavour and Darwin in his prowl aboard the Beagle had the smallest roles in a general land rush, partly to discover and record new plants and animals, mainly to claim them as property and ship them around like baggage—tea bushes were hauled from China to India, breadfruit trees from Tahiti to the Caribbean plantations, where the slaves loathed the taste. Pure science does not like to recall its impure beginnings—the very observations that secured our knowledge often condemned, or began the ruin of, what they observed. In every discovery lies the seed of destruction: we are grateful that Audubon saw Cuvier’s kinglet, the carbonated warbler, Townsend’s bunting, and the blue mountain warbler. Perhaps he mistook what he saw, or perhaps to paint them he killed some of the last survivors. In any case, no naturalist has ever seen them again.
Gold miners used to believe their occupation more noble than any conducted in cities, because metal had been left in the ground by God—by mining it, every man partook of the divine. The conquistadors were little different: their rape of the land (think of the old meaning, seizure) was of the very image of Paradise—Bishop’s tropical poems contain some of the explorers’ astonishment at boundless fertility (now we know better the fragility of such flora). Even James caught the whisper of Paradise rediscovered: “Was not the train itself rumbling straight into that fantastic Florida, with its rank vegetation and its warm, heroic, amorous air?”
The casual, florid, uncontrollable growth, unlike anything in the Old World, fostered myths of eternal youth, though perhaps explorers were misled when they encountered tribes where few lived to great age. Behind such tales shimmers the branching river of Eden, where Adam and Eve might have lived into a monstrous dotage. The Fountain of Youth, like the city of El Dorado, proved a frustrating, ever-receding will-o’-the-wisp (the fountain was almost certainly the invention of later writers, a miracle of which Ponce de Leon had never heard). Much of Florida’s later imagery and iconography pays homage to eternal youth and eternal riches, to the romantic idea that amid such plenty no one has to work, because there are always fish to jump into your net and fruit to be plucked—no penalty for fruitfulness but more fruitfulness.
It was once said of an English cricket star, late in his career, that the “legend has become a myth.” A reader may feel, reading poems about Florida, that the myths have been rubbed into ghostliness, referring, not to living tradition, but to tradition’s tradition, the ghost of a ghost—even myths grow old, in a world forever new. What have they been replaced by? Walt Disney, perhaps:
His world’s over that way,
suitably for a peninsula where
the cozy mythologies we’ve
swindled ourselves with, on
taking things easy, might even
come true: sun-kissed nakedness
on the beach, year-round, guilt-free
hibiscus and oranges, fountains
welling up through the limestone,
the rumor of Ponce de León, having
found the one he was looking for,
living at ease in, some say
Boca Raton, others Cádiz.
(Amy Clampitt, “Discovery”)
Of course it was naive to read into the abundant flora and fauna a prelapsarian innocence or to believe the natives were noble savages avant la lettre. But then it is easy to reject notions whose premises we do not share.
When the Pilgrims were washing their shirts in the elbow of Cape Cod, whose beaches they quickl
y abandoned (you cannot farm on sand), Spaniards had been settled for three generations on the coast of Florida. Ponce de Leon had claimed the land for Spain in 1513. By 1564 the French had built a fort at the mouth of the St. Johns; but the Spanish soon overran the Florida coast, murdered them, and erected Jesuit missions inland, religion as so often proving no impediment to bad behavior. Little remains of that early Spanish occupation, apart from the faux city of St. Augustine and place names that litter the maps. Of the natives the Spanish tried to convert, nothing but beads, buried potsherds, and a few names survive.
Florida was nearly uninhabitable before air conditioning, so its traditions are thin as pie crust (Nature’s remittance men, we are a state of renters, not rentiers). Few houses are more than a hundred years old, the missions and ranches of Spanish occupation having long since become, with almost no exceptions, mere archaeology. If everything seems makeshift, jury-rigged, Florida owes its impermanent, elusive nature—the bleached and rotting billboards, the hotels like Moorish castles or Potemkin villages, the houses bespotted with mildew, the trees hung with shrouds of Spanish moss—to its vulnerability, hurricanes sweeping in from the Gulf or the Caribbean, occasionally wiping a beach clean of houses, like chalk from a slate.
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