The American Century: Literature since 1945 543as it may appear at first sight, a desire for impersonality or anonymity, but for a
language so simple and apparently inevitable that it seems to be the only possible
way of expressing the subject. It is, in sum, another version of that commitment to
authenticity – the precise application of word to event without superfluous gesture
or ornament – that characterized so many earlier American poets from Whitman to
Oppen and Williams.
Oppen and Williams were, of course, very different poets; and it has to be said that
the search for authentic language among recent writers has had some strikingly
various consequences. With Alan Dugan (1923–2003), whose Poems Seven: New and
Complete Poetry appeared in 2001, the result has been a tough, brittle, determinedly
populist style. “Here the world is,” he declares in “Prayer,” “ / enjoyable with whiskey,
women, ultimate weapons, and class”; and he does his best to express that world as
it is, together with all the detritus of contemporary life. John Ciardi (1916–1985)
also clearly likes the radicality of the colloquial, the voice of the plain-speaking,
rough-and-tumble man who tolerates no nonsense, verbal or otherwise, as a
collection like The Little That is All (1974) illustrates. The opening line of “In Place
of a Curse” is typical in its candor and bluff wit: “At the next vacancy for God, if I am
elected.” Ciardi frequently tries to shock the reader into attention in this way, whereas
the poems of William Stafford (1914–1993) (included in Stories That Could Be True:
New and Collected Poems (1977)) tend to open quietly (“Our car was fierce enough;”
“They call it regional, this relevance – / the deepest place we have”) and then
move toward some muted discovery of a small truth, a partial explanation of things.
“The signals we give – yes or no, or maybe – / should be clear,” Stafford says at the
conclusion to “A Ritual to Read to Each Other,” adding “the darkness around us is
deep.” Clarity of language, verbal modesty is for him, it seems, a stay against oblivion,
something to illuminate or at least hold back the surrounding dark.
David Ignatow (1914–1997) is just as verbally modest as Stafford, as his Against
the Evidence: Poems 1934–94 (1994) amply illustrates, but not in entirely the same
way. An avowed imitator of Williams’s formal experiments, and concerned primarily
with urban life, Ignatow has said that he has two main purposes: to remind other
poets that “there is world outside” in the streets, and to reveal to people in general
“the terrible deficiencies in man.” “Whitman spent his life boosting the good side,”
he has claimed. “My life will be spent pointing out the bad” – although pointing it
out, he adds, “from the standpoint of forgiveness and peace.” The quarrel with
Whitman, and by implication with the moral dimension of Williams’s work, runs
through Ignatow’s poetry, generating a poignant contrast between method and
message. The limpidity of diction and movement that those earlier writers had
used to celebrate human innocence is now harnessed to a haunting vision of guilt.
A similar combination of verbal clarity and visionary sadness is notable in the work
of Philip Levine (1928–). “I was born / in the wrong year and in the wrong place,”
Levine has written; and many of his poems are in fact concerned with his childhood,
spent in the Middle West during the Depression. The bleak cityscape of Detroit, the
lonely farmlands of Illinois and Ohio, the sad, wasted lives of family and friends
condemned to drudgery in factories and “burned fields” – all this is recounted withGGray_c05.indd 543ray_c 05 .indd 543 8 8/1/2011 7:31:30 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 30 PM