second book,After Experience(1968), a poem
unfortunately left out ofNot for Specialists:
Sorting out letters and piles of my old
Canceled checks, old clippings, and yellow
note cards
That meant something once, I happened to
find
Your picture.Thatpicture. I stopped there
cold,
Like a man raking piles of dead leaves in his
yard
Who has turned up a severed hand.
Here is the sense of shock my poet friend
missed on rereadingHeart’s Needle,a rancid
memory instantly transforming domestic life
into gothic horror. Snodgrass comes closer to
Larkin, however, in presenting the accumulated
disappointments of modern daily emotional life,
cast into formal structures that keep them art, as
in ‘‘Leaving the Motel,’’ whose mildly despond-
ent, postcoital mood highlights the tawdry side
of adultery.
...Yet Snodgrass’s particularly American
confessionalism—his lack of reticence in appro-
priating his own life and family for poetry—also
distinguishes his early work from Larkin’s.Not
for Specialistsincludes six poems from his 1970
chapbookRemains,a bitter expose ́of unhappy
family life centering on the early death of a hope-
lessly mousy wallflower sister, a sequence appa-
rently so personal that he first issued it under the
anagrammatic pseudonym S. S. Gardons.
...This poem, ‘‘Disposal,’’ also describes
how ‘‘One lace/Nightthing lies in the chest,
unsoiled/By wear, untouched by human
hands,’’ and notes ‘‘those cancelled patterns/
And markdowns that she actually wore,/Yet
who do we know so poor/ They’d take them?’’
That ‘‘actually’’ serves a vital role, not just filling
out the meter, but expressing quiet amazement
at her impoverished taste and acceptance of
her shriveled emotional circumstances. As in
Donne’s elegy ‘‘Going to Bed,’’ clothing becomes
a synecdoche for the woman who wears it, but
here creating a scenario of isolation and misery
rather than erotic play.
As a student I loved Snodgrass’s poetry,
especially how its formal elegance domesticated
the worst shocks of our emotional lives, intensi-
fying them by ironically pretending they partici-
pated in an orderly universe we could endure. I
chose Syracuse University’s writing program
expressly to study with him, and found a man
as boisterously outspoken as his poems were
movingly restrained. He attended intensively to
detail, the minutiae of rhythm, rhyme, and
sound, as you would expect from a poet with
such an impeccable ear, but he also encouraged
a tendency to sarcasm I wished, at the time, to
exorcise from my work. He would declaim poetry
to us each week, and if his exuberant perform-
ances of ‘‘Frankie and Johnnie,’’ Wyatt, Words-
worth, and Whitman, designed for a thousand-
seat hall with no amplification, felt overbearing
at the seminar table, they offered an antidote to
1970s poetry-reading syndrome—a monotonous
delivery distanced from expressiveness, punctu-
ated by a rising inflection at the ends of lines or
sentences. Snodgrass helped me learn to read
aloud by demonstrating that, yes, poetry could
stand dramatic emotion in oral delivery, and I
borrowed from his approach while softening it by
several decibels. When I tested my new style one
Sunday, reading at the local art museum, Snod-
grass joined our quiet chatter afterwards to con-
gratulate me in his booming voice: ‘‘That was
WONderful! That was deLISHious! And YOU
used to read SO BADly!’’
With the first installment of his next poetic
cycle, The Fuehrer Bunker (1977) [originally
titledThe Fu ̈hrer Bunker], the first book ever
published by BOA Editions, Snodgrass’s subject
shocked us all—interior monologues in the voi-
ces of Hitler and his circle during the war’s final
days—as did its explosive, often obscene lan-
guage: ‘‘if any foe rejects us,/We’ll broil their
liver for our breakfast/And fry their balls like
bacon!’’ (‘‘Chorus: Old Lady Barkeep’’). It
showed an encyclopedic understanding of
form—ballads, tetrameter couplets for Goeb-
bels, envelope sextets for Goering, a pantoum
for Magda Goebbels—in addition to experi-
ments in free verse, especially for Hitler. (Snod-
grass had used free verse inAfter Experiencefor
some of his poems based on paintings. ‘‘Van
Gogh: ‘The Starry Night,’’’ the lone example
included inNot for Specialists,is unfortunately
rather slack; I prefer the psychological drama of
his Vuillard poem, on ‘‘The Mother and Sister of
the Artist,’’ which harmonizes chillingly with the
tensions of Snodgrass’s other family poems.)
As a sequence, a gesture toward a long
poem,The Fuehrer Bunker, which Snodgrass
kept expanding and revising until the complete
cycle appeared in 1995, fails for all the reasons
that his other work succeeds: The monstrousHeart’s Needle