The American Century: Literature since 1945 565End (2001) the natural world is seen in terms of internecine conflict (“Here too are
life’s victims,” he exclaims), and so too is America (“There are too many ... / ... /
columns of brutal strangers”). His aim, evidently, is to identify himself with these
conflicts: to participate in a struggle that is at once elemental and political. The tone
of this involvement is sometimes celebratory (“I believe in this stalled magnificence”),
sometimes meditative (“I walked among them, / I listened and understood”) and
occasionally angry (“There will be many poems written in the shape of a grenade”).
Whatever, it constantly recalls that great poet of participation, Whitman; for Haines
shares with Whitman not only a populist impulse and a feel for organic rhythms but
also a radicalism that is both personal and political – a commitment to revolution in
the self along with revolution in the state. Similar echoes of Whitman, tracing a
correspondence between inner and outer worlds, are to be found in the work of
Robert Pinsky (1940–), a poet who tries to capture what he calls the “mothlike” life,
the “thin / Halting qualities of the soul” hovering behind “The glazed surface of the
world.” Pinsky’s voice, quieter than Haines’s, may sound ordinary, but that is
precisely the point: like Whitman, he is obsessed with the heroism of the ordinary –
or even of the apparently banal. So, in volumes that include Sadness and Happiness
(1975), The Figured Wheel (1996), and Gulf Music (2007), he describes “the tyranny
of the world visible,” and in particular the suburban landscapes of New Jersey, and
hints at the “unique / Soul” beneath this, the “hideous, sudden stare of self ” that can
be glimpsed by the sympathetic imagination. American life is marked for him by its
doubleness: there is “cash, tennis, fine electronics,” certainly, but there is “music,...
yearning, suffering” as well. A favorite setting, the seashore, implies this duality of
perspective. Set between the mysterious ocean and “vast, uncouth houses,” Pinsky
and his characters inhabit a border area. They want the shock of vision and they
want simply to make a living: they work “For truth and for money” – two very
different yet related “stays / Against boredom, discomfort, death and old age.”
Dave Smith (1942–) also secretes the poetry of the personal in the poetry of place:
“Grandfather,” he declares in one poem, “Cumberland Station,” “I wish I had the
guts to tell you this is a place I hope / I never have to go through again.” Only in this
case the place is Southern: the “anonymous fishing village” where he lives, perhaps,
the woods and rivers (“The Last Morning”), a disused railway (“Cumberland
Station”), or a Civil War cemetery (“Fredericksburg”). His poetry, gathered in
collections like Wick of Memory (2000), is saturated in locality, focusing in particular
on what most art, in its pursuit of an “entirely eloquent peace,” “fails to see”:
the disinherited, those victimized by society and often excluded from its frames of
reference. And through this plenitude of landscape moves the poet himself, trying to
“hold ... obscure syllables / one instant.” He, it seems, is given presence by the “eye,”
the observation of extrinsic detail. Another way of putting this would be to say that,
for all his interest in the personal, Smith – like Haines and Pinsky – chooses to
refract personality, to clothe the naked self in the warm details of circumstantiality.
Something very similar could be said about such otherwise different poets as
Maxine Kumin (1925–), Carolyn Kizer (1925–), Jay Wright (1935–), and Charles
Simic (1938–). It is also true of many poets of a later generation, like Ai (1947–2010),GGray_c05.indd 565ray_c 05 .indd 565 8 8/1/2011 7:31:31 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 31 PM