Literature

[Poetry] It’s alive!

Two new collections prove that poetry isn’t dead yet

Richard Abowitz

It is poetry season.

Since the 1997 death of Allen Ginsberg, whose canonical “Howl” can be encountered in survey literature classes, there is no generally known poem written by anybody still alive. Poets like Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot may still have readers, but in the 21st century even the most educated would be hard-pressed to name a poem authored by someone among the living.

As a result, with few exceptions, major publishing houses have all but stopped publishing contemporary poetry. And, when they do, this is the time of year those exceptions occur, just before National Poetry Month in April. (Unlike self-help books or mystery novels, contemporary poetry needs a month to spur awareness of its lingering existence.)

Both Mary Jo Salter and Edward Hirsch have, in the old-school sense, spent their entire careers putting out collections through Knopf, a division of Random House. And, for better and worse, there is something old-fashioned about the packaging of their new volumes. But in 2008 it is infuriating to still be asked by a publisher to pay $25 for the slim 60 pages of poetry collected in Hirsch’s Special Orders. Hirsch’s other six volumes of verse could be included in this book and still offer fewer pages than a typical hardcover novel. A better approach is Mary Jo Salter’s A Phone Call to the Future, which augments her new poems with substantial selections from all her previous collections.

On the book flap, we are told of Salter’s effort: “In the title poem she reimagines the technological simplicities and humanistic verities of the past with a brilliantly disorienting detachment.” Does that sound like appealing reading? The poem itself simply posits that things like rotary phones now seem as unbelievable as the claims made for the future in science fiction. At the end of the poem, wondering at a world of technologies to come beyond even the cell phone, Salter sounds entirely defeated: “All of it was so quaint. And I was there./Poetry was there; we tried to write it.”

Hirsch’s more surreal early poetry of Wild Gratitude (1986) has yielded to more narrative and autobiographical poems, of which some of the best here, like the title poem and “Cold Calls,” focus on the death of his father.

In truth, Hirsch (b. 1950) and Salter (b. 1954) both offer fairly accessible verse compared to the more experimental poetry of earlier generations of poets. Hirsch is the less overtly intellectual poet, allowing the facts and situations of life to predominate in most poems here. Whereas for Salter’s verse, if you are not the sort of person to know that the baroque sculptor Bernini’s alleged mistress was Costanza Bonarelli, be prepared to spend some time on Wikipedia while reading her poems.

Still, Salter’s poetry is worth that sort of effort. Her intelligence and learning in her new poems are always equaled by her ear and insight (something less true of her more obtuse early poems included here). For example, one need not know much about the late poet Anthony Hecht to appreciate Salter’s elegy of his poems and life in “Lunar Eclipse”:

Yet the act of making

was light and lightness still

when a man of eighty-one

immortalized the sun

on his wife’s face when she slept

Such beautiful moments where language and sound merge into a perfect moment of clarity are one of poetry’s special properties, and both Hirsch and Salter are among the most capable at capturing those poems. Here then are poems by the living worth reading and remembering all year.

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