It’s hard to believe, but poetry was once a dangerous enterprise: Plato suggested that in his Republic, poets would be banished because they were, at heart, rabble-rousers and dissimulators. What Plato couldn’t accomplish Stalin did, executing anyone who dared to cross the dictator with unflattering verse. But we, a more humane breed, would never think to harm our poets. We watch “American Idol” instead.
The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets is meant as a shock to the system, a shot across the bows at an establishment that too often promotes verse that is willfully obscure or hermetically self-involved. Edited capably by David Yezzi (with whom I have worked at the New Criterion, but whose poetry I have not encountered before) it is a compendium of more than thirty poets who, though already established, are charting their own self-assured trajectories through the politicized vagaries of the poetry world.
The concern here seems to be with writing poetry, not playing the role of poet: formal experiments and flights of fancy are generally discarded. “[All] of them are craftsman rather than bards,” says J.D. McClatchy in his foreword about these anthologized poets. “Their sense of poetic form is less the virtuosic display than the sign of care being taken to shape a thought or ease an emotion into unexpected consequences.”
One of the Swallow Anthology’s most laudable achievements is a reluctance to join any one camp and proceed to assail its opposition. “[When] division leads to dogmatism there can be no forward movement,” Yezzi cautions in his introduction. “The old battle lines in poetry, between old and new, classic and romantic, formal and free, have become so entrenched that the young find little in the traditional to love an the old little in the new.”
Still, some trends emerge. Several of these poets (Daniel Brown, Bill Coyle, J. Allyn Rossler and Geoffrey Brock) are winners of the New Criterion Poetry Prize. Among these Brock is especially promising. His “Homeland Security: 2006” hauntingly evokes the phantasmagoric landscape of insomnia in our addled age:
The four a.m. cries
of my son worm
through the double
foam of earplugs
and diazepam
Several of the contributors are also prominently involved in the publication of literary criticism. Among these is Ben Downing, who edits the estimable poetry yearly Parnassus and David Barber, poetry editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Carefully treading between pathos and comedy, his verse as solid as it is grave, Barber eulogizes Arabella Young, who died in May 1771 and thus “began to hold her tongue,” according to her epitaph:
Here beneath this slate
You can sense her mute dismay,
Who was the soul of wit
And reveled in repartee.
And then of course there’s Adam Kirsch, a fine literary critic for the New Republic and the erstwhile New York Sun. Here, he achieves an authoritative voice in poems like “Heroes Have the Whole Earth for Their Tomb,” in which he asks a question that must have confounded many a classicist: “when did the majesty of act / Imperceptibly dwindle down / To indifferent, objective fact?”
Much like Kirsch, many of the poets here show a certain erudition that informs their work, but their learning is often tempered by a sense of humor that is all to rarely found in “serious” verse.
Whereas Richard Eberhart famously mourned a dead rodent in his “Groundhog,” J. Allyn Rossler writes a “Letter to a Young Squirrel,” advising it, “Invest in work. All else is risk. / Go on, get cracking. Just watch me. / And stay away from my tree.”
Yezzi, who has included four of his own poems here (including selections from Azores, which Slate called one of the best books of 2008) seems also to be playing with tradition in “The Good News,” a meeting of old friends that echoes Li Po’s “Exile’s Letter.” But while Li Po’s heroes “were drunk for month after month” (in Ezra Pound’s famous translation), Yezzi’s narrator and his companion “sip old Scotch, the good stuff.” Li Po ends by lamenting that “There is no end of things in the heart.” Yezzi’s conclusion seems more fitting for today:
Our drinks were done, that’s all
We haven’t spoken since. By morning, I
couldn’t remember half of what the guy
had said
But even among the hugely accomplished poets in this anthology, it must be said that A.E. Stallings stands out as a special talent. A classicist who makes her home in Athens and has recently translated Lucretius’s challenging The Nature of Things, she filters her dark sensibilities through the bright Greek landscape
In the arresting “Asphodel,” she encounters Achilles “who had preferred a name / And short life to a long life without fame,” an evocation that alludes to both Homer and Auden without mimicking either.
In “A Postcard from Greece,” she writes, wrenchingly, “I saw the sea, the sky, as bright as pain.” From the underworld, Persephone says, in another poem, that “The dead are just as dull you would imagine.” And “On Visiting a Borrowed Country House in Arcadia” begins with awful premonition: “To leave the city /Always takes a quarrel.”
Who knows what will happen with poetry? Something other than a protracted extinction, I hope. But if poetry is to survive on the page, poets need to appeal to broader audiences, to leave off their self-imposed insularity in the rarefied precincts of Yaddo. With its accessible, sure-footed selections, the Swallow Anthology is a step in the right direction.
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