I have criticized John Ashbery so often for what he is, I would like to praise him for what he is not. [1] American poets have always been uncomfortable with a poetry whose designs remain in language. We are a content-minded country, where language is a McCormick reaper, an old manual typewriter, a Frank Lloyd Wright blueprint. Ashbery writes as if language were a medium. With its swooping declensions into the colloquial, its quick-change-artist’s unmasking, his poetry reminds us that the soiled, complacent manner of our poetry —its do-it-yourself Romantic style—is a slavery of our own invention. Ashbery is a tone, not an argument; and his delight in spraying graffiti on every monument has been indulged with deep puckish delight, all the while without his writing a memorable poem except on the rarest occasion.

An Ashbery poem begins in the following way:

A loose and dispiriting
wind took over from the grinding of traffic.
Clouds from the distillery
blotted out the sky. Ocarina sales plummeted.

Believe you me it was a situation
Aladdin’s lamp might have ameliorated. And
where was I?
Among architecture, magazines, recycled fish,
waiting for the wear and tear
to show up on my chart. Good luck,

bonne chance. Remember me to the zithers
and their friends, the ondes martenot.

Here is the confidence of tone and vagueness of reference, the absurd and irrelevant statement (“Ocarina sales plummeted”), the slangy phrase (what other poet would dare say, “Believe you me”?), the Scheherazade allusion, the rhetorical question (immediately answered), the surreal list (those recycled fish owe Dada its due). His poems are always daring in this wintery, winsome way—one of the delights of Ashbery’s poetry is that anything might happen, and one of the despairs that so often anything does.

Reading such stanzas, you feel they might have been arranged in another way without loss, that a typesetter might have jumbled two or three poems together without anyone noticing—without even Ashbery noticing! Ashbery is our Nabokovian genius (at times he seems invented by Nabokov): he’s the great lepidopterist of language and life in our late century. He delights in English as if it were his second language, or not his language at all; and like Nabokov’s fictions Ashbery’s poems talk best when they talk about themselves. No poet argues better about poetry; perhaps it’s best that he does so offhandedly. As he says in one poem, “he had forgotten the art/ of knowing how far to go too far.”

There’s a weird compulsive mania beneath Ashbery’s work (the poems in Can You Hear, Bird are arranged alphabetically by title). Among repetitive poets, you think of Clare, not Hardy, of Felicia Hemans, not Emily Dickinson. In the past four years Ashbery has published 650 new pages of verse—it’s not just too much, it’s too much by a fabulous, Arabian Nights amount. Those readers of the future, our inevitable critics, may be grateful for every scrap; but those readers haven’t been born yet, and we are stuck with the readers we are.

The finest poem in this new book reads like deranged Beckett.

A hears by chance a familiar name, and the
name involves a riddle of the past.
B, in love with A, receives an unsigned letter
in which the writer states that she
is the mistress of A and begs B not to
take him away from her.
B, compelled by circumstances to be a com-

And on through A-4, A-5, A-8, Angela, Philip, W, Petronius B, and dozens of other characters related by happenstance. It’s a comic soap opera, preposterous and longwinded; but it provides what Ashbery so rarely provides, the illusion of narrative, of motion through character, of a past.

Ashbery uses one part of his imagination with genius—the random, absurdist, associative part—and the other parts not at all. I’m sure that critics like Helen Vendler are right, that Ashbery makes sense more often than is said; but when his poems make sense they are rarely likable: they seem pinched and competent. It’s in the making of nonsense—or the not making of sense— that he becomes a larger individual, a Stevens without the galumphing philosophy (though there’s plenty of galumphing in Ashbery).

Compared to Ashbery, most poets look diminished in their language, trapped by their conception, not just of what verse does, but of what it can do. His limitations are more peculiar than those of any poet writing, perhaps among the most peculiar of any poet who has written in English. Who would have loved Ashbery’s work? Christopher Smart, and Lewis Carroll, and Erasmus Darwin. This isn’t to say that Ashbery too isn’t trapped by the machinery of his verse, merely that his poems are often the triumph of their limitations.

Anyone who likes jeremiads will want to own Adrienne Rich’s new book. [2] Dark Fields of the Republic has more of the sketchy, angry poems she has been writing for the past decade—they’re like rough jottings torn from a notebook, like dark scribbles of Goya’s. Who are her enemies? Society, Cap- ital, Law, Men—they’re never named, but you hear them conspiring behind the lines:

There’s a place between two stands of trees

Who or what is being persecuted is not explained, but Rich doesn’t have time for explanations (when she’s not preaching to the converted, she’s just preaching). Rich makes a cunning point, that ours is a poetry leaning toward pastoral even when steeped in blood; but she wants to have it both ways, wants to ride her high horse through a shadowy poetic landscape.

With every book Rich has sunk deeper into a malaise of hatred, of wronged innocence, of violated trust. Her poems have become censoriously sincere, unbearably high-minded, self-important, Babbitt-like, and yet devastating in their dissection of pain. The causes of pain are disembodied and abstract—her enemies are looming presences, unnameable gods of the machine, her poems like raw wounds:

Narrow waters rocking in spasms. The torch

hand-held and the poem of entrance.
Topless towers turned red and green.
Dripping faucet icicled radiator.
Eyes turned inward. Births arced into

dumpsters.
Eyes blazing under knitted caps,
hands gripped on taxi-wheels, steering.
Fir bough propped in a cardboard doorway,

bitter tinsel.
The House of the Jewish Book, the Chinese

Dumpling House.
Swaddled limbs dreaming on stacked shelves

of sleepopening like knives.

“Here/ it is in my shorthand,” she says in another poem. At times, even now, she can’t help being a poet; but the hair-shirt purity of such lines is that of a martyr to language. Only a poet beyond argument resorts to the tawdry insinuation of lines like “Swaddled limbs … opening like knives.” It’s not that her poems make assumptions (all poems make assumptions); it’s that they start so long after the assumptions are over. They never have the startling rough vision of any old political line of Lowell’s.

When the best poem in the book seems to consist of lines reset from one of Karl Jaspers’s letters after the war, something has gone terribly wrong. The lines may be invented (I can’t find them in the Hannah Arendt correspondence), but Rich can no longer suffer such pained self-knowledge or necessary regret, such a pathos of attention, in her own voice. A poet as good as Rich shouldn’t be capable of writing lines like “worms have toothed at your truths” or “She could swim or sink/ like a beautiful crystal.” These new poems revel in so narrow an emotional realm, reading them is like staring into a dark closet until the monsters appear. What they reveal is almost more surprising than emotion. Imagine Adrienne Rich not knowing that “the dyer’s hand” comes from Shakespeare.

Rich now lives in an icy tundra of abstraction. Her “Narratives,” her “Inscriptions,” suggest how much she wants from the present for the future: she has increasingly become the myth of herself. In her poems there are only victims, only the unidentified “you,” the shadowy “I.” In the absence of argument, the poetry of witness becomes just another poetry polluted with self-advertisement.

When you read August Kleinzahler’s work, you think of William Carlos Williams. [3] You think that everything half bad in Kleinzahler was half good in Williams; you think that whatever Kleinzahler does well, Williams did better. How deft, how economical, how unassuming the line in Williams; but you can’t try to be just as unpretentious as Williams without seeming pretentious. The economical in Williams is a famine in Kleinzahler.

Kleinzahler is a cool, knowing student of urban grunge. He knows the bar scenes of Bukowski, the sidewalk shop talk of O’Hara (“and asparagus already/ under two dollars a pound”), the beaten and broken characters of Selby and Rechy and Auster—he knows them all from books, and his poems read like an encyclopedia of the traffic in secondhand responses. He’s got all the bad of his models and little of the good: the poems are full of falsely hearty bonhomie, cities by Piranesi (and landscapes by Laura Ashley), intellectual anti-intellect (Catullus becomes “Heyho, loverboy/ is that a radioactive isotope you’ve got/ burning through your shirtfront/ or are you just glad to see me?”). Like tough guys everywhere, he’s got a heart of Ivory soap, and it doesn’t take much to turn him frothy and sentimental:

There is an abundant peace to be found here

in the blue, then gray and mauve eyes
of the voluptuous women cutting bread into an embossed tureen.

That’s “Follain’s Paris,” and the rest of Kleinzahler’s poems about Paris read like a brochure for the Chambre de Commerce.

For a poet like this, someone else’s tragedy becomes a lyric celebration of the knowing eye. He wants an audience that appreciates blackface and minstrelsy:

—Are you an Ex-is-ten-tial-ist,
Mr. Mister?

—Oh, no, no,
I would prefer to think

of myself, ahem,
as a Collision-Ecstasist.

—You undress on impact,
sir?

—Oh, hohohoho,
not no more.

The poems are so full of dumb, jokey moments that you may miss the quiet clamor of beauty, a beauty Kleinzahler obviously distrusts but doesn’t know how to argue against. In the strange fable of a Weasel and a Ponce, or the narrative of a sailing trip, one sees the mark of a very different poetry; but, wedded to his minor and repetitive designs, to finding the trivial and leaving it trivial, Kleinzahler would find it hard for any other poetry to get hold of him. His best poems are direct forces, lacking that “poetic” attitude that makes poetry more depressing than daily life (that makes daily life more depressing than daily life). He has a taste for beauty, but then it’s off to writing ludicrous “sapphics” (“Festinating rhythm’s bothered her axis”), or a Gulf War poem of broken phrases (“Assault plasma star launch”), or a dream (“Gland burgers excrement/ If it’s a dream/ Give the projector a flip, willya”). Poetry has to be more than infinite variety and finite shallowness. It has to be more than Robinson Jeffers rewritten as film noir.

Billy Collins has a sideshow owner’s instinct for hoopla and a taste for one-ring-circus ideas; but his poems are gentle, mild, and awfully dull. [1] It’s like finding that the weightlifter is an accountant and the bearded lady a housewife. He has an unthinking passion for nature that makes you long for a few polluters—his is a nature of continuous and helpless loveliness. In his peaceable kingdom, the mourning doves look like Robert Penn Warren and the titmice like Marianne Moore.

Collins is an idea man—ideas are his shtick. Auden was an idea man, and so is Les Murray; but Collins wants to be a comedian, too. He’ll start a poem, “How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,” and he’ll tell you everything he won’t be seeing (it’s hard to stop Collins from telling you everything); then he’ll tell you what he will be seeing back home at the coffee shop. It’s all very agreeable; but you don’t believe him for an instant, because you want to be standing by that sarcophagus in Italy. His poems start with the hypothetical and end with a view.

An idea man is hungry for subject, and the titles of Collins’s poems show how starved a poet can become: “Death Beds,” “The Biography of a Cloud,” “Thesaurus” (“It could be the name of a prehistoric beast”), “On Turning Ten,” “Keats’s Handwriting,” “Budapest,” “Man in Space,” “The Invention of the Saxophone,” “The End of the World.” It’s no great shock a lot of the poems are poems about poetry.

Oddly enough, just when you’ve grown irritated with this nattering, sweet, educat- ed voice, there are one or two surprises. “Workshop” is a poem I would have thought impossible to write—it’s composed of the things students say in writing workshops; but Collins has found a way to make these comments the poem itself, a poem that devours itself like a hall-of-mirrors:

The other thing that throws me off,
and maybe this is just me,
is the way the scene keeps shifting around.
First, we’re in this big aerodrome
and the speaker is inspecting a row of

dirigibles,
which makes me think this could be a dream.
Then he takes us into his garden,
the part with the dahlias and the coiling

hose,
though that’s nice, the coiling hose,
but then I’m not sure where we’re supposed

to be.

This is the poem Ouroboros would have written, if worms had teeth. It’s a haunting little Magritte, the better for being perfectly insubstantial: nothing said is the least interesting, except as it creates—as it is—the poem you see.

There are other signs of the poet Collins might be, if he weren’t afflicted with terminal whimsy. At his best he sounds like Elizabeth Bishop: “In the dining room there is a brown fish/ hanging on the wall who swims along/ in his frame while we are eating dinner.” That poem ends deliciously possessed by the fish’s “one, small, spellbound eye,” but Collins tries too hard for his lightness of being. Then it isn’t lightness anymore. He’s a glutton for every hokey moment of transcendence, for “the vast, windless spaces between the stars,” for “the immensity of the clouds,” for a woman “offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.” Some poets get sentiment the way others get religion: “But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,/ I skin my knees. I bleed.”

Collins is a good representative of the mild-mannered middle voice of American poetry. It’s the voice of sensitive middle-class middle-aged American men (or younger poets who write as if they were middle-aged)—the honorable time-servers. Like parodies of moderation, they take nothing too far—they make failures of extremity like Ashbery look like virtues.

Mother Love works like mad to jazz up the story of Demeter and Persephone, but Rita Dove’s fragile, prosy talent cannot turn life into myth. [5] She has a naïve and antagonistic relation to her chosen form (“I like how the sonnet comforts even while its prim borders [but what a pretty fence!] are stultifying; one is constantly bumping up against Order”). Her sonnets are therefore laggard, ill-kempt, weak-spirited things, sonnets that condescend to have fourteen lines. The lines tend to run like this:

In the sixth grade I was chased home by
the Gatlin kids, three skinny sisters
in rolled-down bobby socks. Hissing
Brainiac! and Mrs. Stringbean!, they trod my heel.
I knew my body was no big deal
but never thought to retort: who’s
calling who skinny?

If I tell the reader that this is better than the average, he’ll think me cruel. There are responsibilities in the sonnet this poet doesn’t accept and freedoms she doesn’t understand: that’s why her substance and her movement are so restricted. She would like to pretend that writing sonnets is a kind of slavery (“all three~dash\mother-goddess, daughter-consort and poet—are struggling to sing in their chains”).

Sometimes the poems are about Dove and her daughter, sometimes Dove and her mother, sometimes about other people entirely—knowing the myth doesn’t help much. Though one sees the point (every Persephone becomes a Demeter), it’s hard not to find all this odd psychologically. A number of poems play out a mysterious vengeance against children (a mother wants to appear before young boys in her daughter’s skin, a mother roasts a baby on a spit —with mothers like this, who wouldn’t want to spend half the year in Hell?). The poetry would be more interesting if it accused the violence at its heart.

Instead, two of the sequences (one of them “Persephone in Hell”) rehearse a post- graduate year in Paris and an ill-considered love affair. Perhaps the Grand Tour qualifies as Hell these days; but the myth makes Dove’s experience vacant and privileged, the love life of another spoiled American abroad. It takes courage to cast yourself as Persephone, courage and an unlimited capacity for self-pity: “He only wanted me for happiness:/ to walk in air/ and not think so much,/ to watch the smile/ begun in his eyes/ end on the lips/ his eyes caressed.” Bathos is not solely the property of greeting-card writers.

The former Poet Laureate ends Mother Love with a crown of sonnets (or “sonnets”) on visiting temples in Sicily—they’re witty, alert to landscape, and almost always too pat; but they show a poetic intelligence entirely absent from the rest of this self- indulgent and painfully misguided book.

When Thomas Hardy died at eighty-seven, among his papers was the manuscript of his final poems, Winter Words. Its unfinished introduction read in part, “So far as I am aware, I happen to be the only English poet who has brought out a new volume of his verse on his … birthday.” The touching blank remained when the volume was posthumously published.

Stanley Kunitz, the old and honorable warhorse of American poetry, has exceeded Hardy by publishing new poems on his ninetieth birthday. [6] Kunitz was long into his sixties before his work became distinctive, and then much of the distinction was his friend Robert Lowell’s. The Testing Tree (1971) took over Lowell’s characteristic movement and burly, shifting language (reading Lowell is sometimes like watching the land slip during an earthquake).

That year of the cloud, when my marriage failed,
I slept in a chair, by the flagstone hearth,
fighting my sleep,
and one night saw a Hessian soldier
stand at attention there in full
regalia, till his head broke into flames.
My only other callers were the FBI
sent to investigate me as a Russian spy
by patriotic neighbors on the river road …

Oh, you think, that’s from Life Studies—or, no, For the Union Dead. The influence salvaged Kunitz from an earlier poetry with too many phrases like “rose-gilded chamber” and too many lines like “On the anvil of love my flesh has been hammered out.” Such poems survive only in the museum of period diction; and Kunitz has excluded from this volume of new and selected poems everything he published before The Testing Tree, an act of courageous abandonment and scarifying renewal.

Kunitz’s poems are lessons in the sickness of history. Drawn to visions of hell, he is drawn to the victims of history’s great bland mill of neutrality. The four exemplary anecdotes in his poem “Signs and Portents” concern the last giant tortoise of St. Hel- ena, the pollution-scarred caryatids on the Acropolis, the decaying mummy of Ramses II, and the Caves of Lascaux, its paintings slowly eroded by people’s breath. An Ozymandias in every direction.

The nine new poems in Passing Through are intelligent, rubbed-over recollections and allegories, a little round-eyed and professorial—the work of a professor trying to forget he’s a professor. They have his homely, courteous, shambling manner, as well as his mawkish insistence that “Art is that chalice into which we pour the wine of transcendence.” The worst of Hardy’s last poems were far worse, but the best were much better. Kunitz has often gone as far as intelligence can in humble organization, without the lines ever seeming unbearably right or revealing. Even his good lines never quite escape the prison of impersonation. I wish he had written more dark Kafkaesque fantasies like “The Custom Collector’s Report,” or fits of tragicomic morality like “The Gladiators,” or quirky Landorian epigrams like “The System.”

The anthologies of the next century will have great swatches of Auden and Lowell, half a dozen gorgeous miniatures by Bishop (changing from anthology to anthology but always and depressingly including “The Fish”), Roethke’s “The Waking” (and Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” and Empson’s “Missing Dates”—the future will think the age wrote only villanelles, but will still fall helplessly in love with Bishop’s “One Art”), four Dream Songs, and “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” If Kunitz will not be among them, neither will many peers more deserving; but there will be readers who discover him by accident, the way we now discover and are pleased by Churchill or Sandys or Barnes.

Kunitz’s work is isolated and lonely, with an almost biblical presence, where mysteries half revealed call down the centuries. The patriarch in poetry is no longer admired, and Kunitz is too mild and flinching to be much of a desert father; but he has seen the vacant spaces and acknowledged them. Occasionally, in his verse, the desert places have spoken back.

Most of the poems in Elizabeth Spires’s new book are stiff with contemporary sentiment, but toward the end a voice of surprising grace and moral resilience appears—she manages to write lightly about the most mortal subjects. The opening half of the book is a sequence about the birth and childhood of her daughter, and you have to like baby photos a lot to get through it. Maternal pride shades too easily into something coquettish and hectoring and drenched in tears.

Children bring out the worst in poets, giving them leave for all the sententiousness (“I have had a child. Now I must live with death”) and self-flattery (“Through corridors of birth and death we were wheeled”) daily life won’t allow—all irony disappears with the severing of the umbilical cord. Spires is much given to little unconvincing fables—at times you feel you’ve stumbled, not into Grimm, but into Andrew Lang’s gauzy wings and fairy dust. All Spires’s bad habits are reflexive—she has to search for her good ones. Worldling is her fourth book; though she has always been an ambitious poet, the poems have been thinner than the ambition.

Half a dozen poems in the second half of the book are simply and impossibly lovely, about mortality but also mortal. They face the loss of youth and beauty with a calm resolution haunted by Elizabeth Bishop. Spires did a fond and thorough interview with Bishop twenty years ago (decades apart, they were both students at Vassar), and one or two of her earlier pieces are the most uncanny, exact reproductions of Bishop’s manner I can imagine. But they did not prepare for the warm mastery of this:

Dusk. The light on the water contracts to a
tear

where only a minute before
it lay like a long spill, and out of the shadows

the great blue heron appears
to stand on the periphery of what is and what
is not.

… … … … … … .

But the hour approaches when you must fly

—fly off!—

fly through the needle’s eye
to save yourself while I must see the winter

through,

carrying this moment as lovers do—meeting,

parting

how many times over one life, two?—
as the night closes in, and cold cuts to the
marrow,

and, distantly, the lights
begin to come on in the great houses of

Baltimore.

This has a mute observing splendor, absorbing the landscape without making it partial or romantic (we are a minor industry of nineteenth-century landscape painters). It is Bishop, but it is Spires too. Bishop, after all, was for years haunted by Marianne Moore; but when we look back now we see what Bishop made her own, not what she borrowed. Bishop wouldn’t have written in quite this way, and the passing on of the good in other writers (sometimes the good concealed, sometimes the good remade) is what we call tradition.

In “Good Friday. Driving Westward,” “The Rock,” “Mansion Beach,” “Two Watchers,” “The Great Sea,” and “Roman Lachrymatory Bottles,” Elizabeth Spires has come into her poetic maturity—touched by the numinous, the metaphysical, the threat of age and fear of the transitory, but also taking them in a fine cautious embrace. I want to recommend these poems to anyone who cares about contemporary verse. Spires has captured a moral universe at the moment it realizes that innocence is no longer a form of knowledge, the moment it embraces the fallen condition that is the world.

Notes
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1. Can You Hear, Bird, by John Ashbery; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 175 pages, $20. Go back to the text.
2. Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995, by Adrienne Rich; Norton, 79 pages, $25 hardcover, with cassette of the poet reading; $10 paper. Go back to the text.
3. Red Sauce, Whiskey, and Snow, by August Kleinzahler; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 94 pages, $19. Go back to the text.
4. The Art of Drowning, by Billy Collins; University of Pittsburgh Press, 95 pages, $24.95; $10.95 paper. Go back to the text.
5. Mother Love, by Rita Dove; Norton, 77 pages, $17.95. Go back to the text.
6. Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected, by Stanley Kunitz; Norton, 175 pages, $18.95. Go back to the text.
7. Worldling, by Elizabeth Spires; Norton, 63 pages, $18.95. Go back to the text.