Sylvia Plath would have turned sixty-six this year, and it’s hard to imagine that burning, frantic, misshapen talent receiving Social Security. She died unwrinkled as a Romantic, older than Shelley but younger than Byron. Whether her talent would have developed further is that deceitful question we ask those who die young—the poems might have continued in angry gouts, or found domestic contentments, or withered up completely. She might have ended a fussy old Wordsworth, blowzy embarrassment to the Plathites who made her a feminist martyr; more likely she’d have reveled in each new award, a grande dame cigarette-waving into her seventh decade, unrepentant as an aging Hollywood star.

Plath is a crucial figure in American poetry. Understudy to confessional poets who were older, even much older, she exceeded their worst nightmares—however darkly Robert Lowell’s madness rises into his poems, he sounds like a scholar in slippers compared to her (“My mind’s not right” isn’t half as scary as “Lady Lazarus,” though it’s better poetry). Ariel (1965) was not just the climax—it was the end of confessional poetry. No matter how shocking the revelation or how steely the revealer, every confessing poet afterward suffered her terms of engagement.

Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters, which in January burst unexpected into print, includes three decades of poems written secretly to his dead wife (only a few had appeared in print before).[1] Hughes has been famously silent about Plath’s suicide, and just as famously stoic in the face of thirty years of vicious feminist attacks that branded him a murderer (“Hughes” has been repeatedly chiseled from her gravestone). Only rarely has he bothered to defend himself, and then usually in gruff letters to the editor. His “birthday letters,” addressed to Plath, show that keeping silence was a measure of keeping faith.

The faith is much more impressive than the poetry. Though composed over decades, the poems are remarkably similar in their fireside tone and fleshy style (listless at times, at times overstuffed with metaphor). The garrulous free verse is a much toned-down version of Hughes’s muscular line. He must get awfully tired of hearing his verse called muscular—the good news is, the verse isn’t muscular any longer. That’s the bad news, too.

In the long battle over Plath’s memory, Hughes’s reticence has been dignified, his suffering almost magisterial. The early sympathies were hers by right—abandoned by her husband for another woman and raising two babies in a London flat during one of the most bitter British winters this century, at thirty she squalidly committed suicide, on her knees with her head in a gas oven. Her death grotesquely mimicked the gassing of the Jews at Auschwitz, Jews whose murder she so adroitly appropriated in poems. The publication of her letters and journals (the journals remain unpublished in Britain) and, among a clutch of others, a biography by Anne Stevenson, has slowly redressed the balance.

Hughes was no saint (though often saintly in his treatment of her); but the portrait of Plath that has emerged, with some difficulty, is of a young woman with the grinning rictus of ambition, a terror to friend and enemy alike, selfish, greedy for attention and willing to use any means to achieve it, vindictive, subject to manic rage and blinding depression. She was also a little gauche and new-minted, mocked by fellow students at Cambridge University (she arrived with a matched set of suitcases). One of her early suicide attempts was over being rejected for Frank O’Connor’s summer writing course at Harvard. However much her admirers provide one version after another of incense-laced Sylviolatry, the “misfit self-display” and “dybbuk fury” of the letters and journals muscle in. Memoirs by Dido Merwin and Richard Murphy, appended to Stevenson’s biography, are x-rays of a woman at the edge of madness.

These rakings of the past are necessary to criticism of Hughes’s poetry, because the past puts him in such an awkward position. He can’t blame his own wife without attacking the dead, can’t defend his actions without seeming exculpatory or self-righteous. The only moral position is supine, and it helps explain why these awkwardly pious poems (dull when they’re not overdramatic) cower before events, why in crisis they excuse themselves in metaphor, or flights of rhetorical fancy, or symbolist fairy tale. The poems are a long apologia, but all they can do is prostrate themselves before a memory and clothe themselves in guilt. Any other position would seem monstrous.

There’s some revision of Plath’s subjects (her earthenware head, her owl), and occasional dry criticism of her (“rhyming yourself into safety”); but mostly this is a shrine, not a star chamber. You need a good biography in order to follow these poems; virtually every incident is better explained in prose. Hughes’s version of student life has all the plummy abstractedness of the worst of the Prelude:

The nursery care of nature’s leisurely lift
Towards her fullness, we were careless
Of grave life, three of us, four, five, six—
Playing at friendship. Time in plenty
To test every role—for laughs,
For the experiment, lending our hours
To perversities of impulse, charade-like
Improvisations of the inane,
Like prisoners, our real life
Perforce deferred, with the real
World and self. So, playing at students,

we filled
And drunkenly drained, filled and again

drained
A boredom, a cornucopia
Of airy emptiness, of the brown
And the yellow ale, of makings and

unmakings …

It’s not just badly written, it’s badly Wordsworthed—O the brown and the yellow ale! Here the lovers’ first passion is Donne writ small:

How I smuggled myself, wrapped in you,
Into the hotel. There we were.
You were slim and lithe and smooth as

a fish.
You were a new world. My new world.
So this is America, I marvelled.
Beautiful, beautiful America!

The young married couple later visit the Grand Canyon, “America’s big red mamma!” Hughes is bold and big and clumsy, like an action painter given gallons of free paint (he’s prone to crude foreshadowing and garden-shed mysticism). Plath’s death and her afterlife as vengeful spirit and muse have been a vast private canvas for him. He is, after all, the surviving partner in one of the century’s great love stories—these are the poems Romeo might have written, or Abelard. But Hughes, a considerable poet when young, has survived to write a poetry of cruel incompetence, with hamhanded allusions to Prufrock’s peach and Rupert Brooke and “The Burning Babe.”

The poems in Birthday Letters have an instinct for the ridiculous. There are touching moments, moments that make you despair for the lives Plath crippled; but the poems collapse in a mumble of metaphor:

Your typewriter,
Your alarm clock, your new sentence
Tortured you, a cruelty computer
Of agony niceties, daily afresh—
Every letter a needle, as in Kafka.
While I, like a poltergeist fog,
Hung on you, fed on you—heavy,

drugged,
With your nightmares and terrors. Inside

your Bell Jar
I was like a mannikin in your eyeball.

Later, Plath’s father is “The god with the smoking gun”—there’s Freud for you! Sometimes the problem’s the dry listing of fact, sometimes the teary sentiment:

Like love forty-nine times magnified,
Like the first thunder cloudburst engulfing
The drought in August
When the whole cracked earth seems to

quake
And every leaf trembles
And everything holds up its arms weeping.

No one who has read the biographies will find much new revealed here; indeed, Hughes is strangely close-mouthed about their lives together. Plath’s final days, like his disastrous affair with Assia Wevill (later to kill herself and their child), dissolve in a cloud of metaphor. The secrets of the marriage, however sane or sordid, are kept secret, largely by making it tiresome as any middle-class marriage. So it may have been, but where the facts might have purchase, the poetry can offer only banal insight— thirty years of brooding and all Hughes will hazard is a moral cliché, that he became the embodiment of her father.

Occasionally, only occasionally, as in a poem about their honeymoon, the mists clear for a few lines:

Spain frightened you. Spain
Where I felt at home. The blood-raw light,
The oiled anchovy faces, the African
Black edges to everything, frightened you.
Your schooling had somehow neglected Spain.
The wrought-iron grille, death and the Arab

drum.

On the honeymoon, Plath gets food poisoning or a fever. She loses all control— shrieks that she’s going to die—and Hughes first glimpses the uncontrollable in her, glimpses something a little deranged. The best poem in the book, tellingly, isn’t about Plath at all—it’s about bats.

Birthday Letters has been welcomed with a pyroclastic flow of praise, more grotesque and misguided compliments than any poetry has probably attracted this century. British poets and critics, mostly male, have been nearly unanimous. For Andrew Motion in The Times, where the poems were first serialized, “Reading it is like being hit by a thunderbolt… . There is nothing like it in literature… . this is his greatest book.” For Tom Paulin, “It’s a knockout volume, absolutely staggering.” Douglas Dunn, in the Financial Times: “Birthday Letters is of an order that practically places Hughes beyond the ranks of ordinary mortals.” Only a few critics have suggested otherwise.

Something happened to Hughes’s poetry after Plath’s death. Though his first books look like period pieces now, their wrought-iron language and animal passion deepened the psychology of nature well before Lowell’s “Skunk Hour.” Later the language flattened into conversation or grew muscle-bound (as if it hadn’t been mannered enough already), the poems at times surprisingly glandular and amateur. Plath’s Faustian bargain was to die young, writing poetry of scathing brilliance; his was to live into old age, having lost his tongue.

That old rascal John Ashbery has long passed the grand climacteric (he turns seventy-one this year), and perhaps it’s too late to expect the dog to learn new tricks. His softly inflated, discount surrealism looks as easy as ever. Like many poets who settle into the comfort of a style, he’s inimitable—if you imitated him you’d not just sound like Ashbery, you’d be Ashbery. I don’t know why poets don’t open Renaissance workshops and have apprentice poets knock off poems in the master’s style, but perhaps that’s what writing workshops do already.

Wakefulness is like a lot of recent Ashbery (has anyone noticed there’s an awful lot of recent Ashbery—over 700 pages this decade?), seamless in its disjunctions, playful in its nonsense or pretend sense, irritatingly elusive, woolly and woolgathering.[2] He’s like a music-hall comedian who doesn’t bother to vary his delivery one year to the next: you hear the catchphrases and you laugh, not because he’s funny, but because he’s not funny. His comedy has a tragic edge, though he’s now less like Keaton than Beckett—with a lot more words.

Ashbery’s most delicious lines are about language or literature:

We thought we had seen a few new
adjectives, but nobody was too sure. They

might have been
gerunds, or bunches of breakfast …

The poem drifting off here is titled “Last Night I Dreamed I Was in Bucharest,” and the movement toward waking and hunger is something Freud would have understood. It has the dreamy logic that makes so much of Ashbery’s poetry a storehouse of half-forgotten phrases, giddy echoes of other poems: Whitman, say (“Once, on Mannahatta’s bleak shore,/ I trolled for spunkfish”), or Yeats (“Things break. Yes, they fail/ or they are anchored up ahead”). One poem is composed entirely of quotations.

Ashbery’s poems revel in their detachments, their refusal of narrative, their refusal of most of the traditional supports of poetry. He proves how little poetry depends on creating meaning—the urge to make meaning is so strong, the reader will supply what the words cannot. Ashbery’s poems indefinitely postpone the promise of sense; but, even as they promise, the poems erase their own existence, falling forward rather than leaning back (poetry is one of the arts that usually depend on acknowledging the past)—you can’t remember at the end of a poem how or why it started. The poem itself doesn’t remember. Ashbery’s poems have the equivalent of Alzheimer’s disease.

He took off in a manner that betokened

bats
when it was over and they came over.

It’s time, now, some are good

and alone,
lost up unto the rest. They can go and cancel
around it’s too moot to be played at.

They are, for the rest unsavory,
thyme in the corral, three jumps from last

school
the patio ignited, sworn to safe-conduct,

like bread out of a school
conducted at last to here.

Ashbery isn’t often so dreadful (there are few lines like “all over the paisley fields dominoes are braying” or “A diagonal lipstick/ chased him across the street”), but when he’s bad he’s as rotten as poetry gets. The destitution of his phrases is also his strength. His work reminds us how much of contemporary poetry survives on its little narratives, its clumsy emotional urgency: the impertinence of his poems acts most tellingly not in books but one by one in magazines, where they mock little gray-flannel poems (well, poems of any cloth). Ashbery’s work looks better the more you forget it (the more you suffer from Alzheimer’s, perhaps), and he has become a poet of severe importance for what his verse denies rather than what it accepts. There’s scarcely a poem worth reading again; but few poets have so cleverly manipulated, or just plain tortured, our soiled desire for meaning. He reminds us that most poets who give us meaning don’t know what they’re talking about.

Frank Bidart’s new poems are nightmare fragments, stories that begin so in medias res the res are never clear. The hidden stories (often elegies) are sexual, but the sex is shamed or confused—the poems of Desire live in mystery and withholding.[3] In this world of secret sharers, where the self reaches toward the rejecting Other, the poems are loveless versions of self-hatred because no Other releases their blocked loathing.

Bidart’s earlier dramatic monologues by Nijinsky (1983) and the anorectic Ellen West (1977) carried some of this unlovely passion; but they were preposterous overreadings of character, all too eager to make their points. In Desire, other texts lie beneath the texts—Dante and Ovid, who understood the dark torsions of love, shadow the poems like learned vultures. Marcus Aurelius contributes a refrain; Tacitus and Plotinus and the Manichaeans make quiet appearances, as if classical authors had the authority of reassurance. When Bidart retells the story of the disappearance of Varus’s legions in the Black Forest, that bedtime tale for bad little Roman boys and girls, it’s more moving than the surrounding poems, but awfully like a history lecture. There’s even a prose poem on the author’s split personality, a sluggish and self-regarding prose poem deriving from Borges’s “Borges and I”— “Frank”’s problems as speaker are a long distance from Proust’s idea of le moi profond.

The shorter poems here prepare the psychology of “The Second Hour of the Night,” a masterwork whose first part is as good as anything Bidart has done, juxtaposing the memoirs of Berlioz, whose wife died slowly and horribly, with the death of the poet’s mother. The not-so-subtle merger of Bidart’s mother and Berlioz’s wife, in the erotics implicitly embraced, is the most important psychological gesture in these poems. The second section, alas, is an overlong rehash of Ovid’s tale of Myrrha, whose incestuous love for her father causes disaster all around. The myth doesn’t nearly repay the thirty pages it takes to recount (it’s only two hundred lines in Ovid), and the thwarted love and doom-laden incest are a textbook parody of homosexual psychology.

As Myrrha is drawn down the dark corridor

toward her father

not free not to desire

what draws her forward is neither

COMPULSION nor FREEWILL:—

or at least freedom, here choice, is not to be
imagined as action upon

preference: no creature is free to choose what
allows it its most powerful, and most

secret, release …

This sounds like a speech for the Mattachine Society. The grief that rises so longingly in the first part is here endlessly deferred until we forget that the Ovid was a means rather than an end. After Myrrha is finally turned into a bush, her crime against nature at last become nature itself, she gives birth to Adonis. If Myrrha is a stand-in for the dying mother, that makes the poet … well, the answer isn’t exactly modest.

Bidart has been a peculiar predatory poet, restricted to techniques more dramatic than recognizably poetic (witness his frequent soapbox typography)—this has given his monologues an unpleasant hysteria. His poems are too often declaimed from the Greek stage, his personae masked as Fates or Furies. My complaint against Bidart’s earlier work was the thinness of the fiction: even Browning, most Jamesian and psychological of poets, could not fully adapt poetry to fiction’s grammar of display (though weakness of character accords well with the gestures of satire, as in Don Juan or The Rape of the Lock). A character like Ellen West can’t exceed the drama of her disease —how could she, given a sickness so freighted with meaning, so calculatedly metaphoric? Twenty years before, she would have suffered polio; twenty years later, AIDS. The choice was too easy, easy as the fate of real victims was hard (it takes a Camille to make disease more than its metaphor). Bidart treats homosexual love as a pathology, even a virtuous pathology (“outlaw love,” perhaps); but a part of nature can’t be against nature—nature is all its instances, not an average.

Karl Kirchwey’s new poems are soaked in the blood of empire, the history now roped off for the tourist rather than interred by the historian. The Engrafted Word follows the grand tour through Italy and the Mediterranean, a Mediterranean still lying under the shattered visage of Rome (a very bookish Rome).[4] Recent American poetry has been so domestic in its harmonies, so commonplace in private quarrels rather than public angers, a passport elsewhere can be an escape. Kirchwey has a sensitive, even soulful manner (a little too soulful at times)—amid dusty ruins, the cruelty and casual blindness of the past make him wary, embarrassed by the culture he enjoys, embarrassed by the privilege of travel. The tourist is the voyeur of old violence.

Even the empire’s humble fish contribute to the gory passions of power:

a fisherman once surprised Tiberius
on his rugged island of pleasure;
there is blood in the crisscross of scales
where the guards used the gift of the poor
man to rub the skin off his face.

Beauty and malignant shame mingle
in a fry of albino gold
and whiskered calico. Witness this hunger,
flamboyant and utterly normal,
as their poached blindnesses suck the mud
and bask in the sun with a dull glitter.

This calm unfolding of detail has the observant richness of Richard Wilbur, though without the control or taste of meter. Kirchwey dabbles in rhyme (mostly half- or quarter- or eighth-rhyme), and can whisk up pentameter if he wishes; but his flinching from formal responsibilities divorces him from the labored elegance and mannered Europe of so many poets in the Fifties. Kirchwey is much more interesting than most of the New Formalists, many of whom write a pentameter so dull it would qualify for workman’s compensation (dullness being an occupational hazard).

At times, when the quatrains slacken or rhythm vanishes down a prosy whirlpool, Kirchwey’s poems seem secretly to desire a more stringent measure. The beauty of his withholding eye is not always enough— there are passions in this verse still unexplored. That’s why his strangled stoicism is so effective—it admits there’s something to be stoic about. The strain between guilty pleasure and innocent passion is the heart of a Christian heritage whose character the ancient world is all too willing to attack.

Kirchwey’s tone is sometimes unsteady (there’s too much of the mock naïve for my taste), and the poems of New York are less secure in their habitat than the poems of places thousands of miles away—he has a visa for every country but home. Some poems are precious, and a good many end with an earnest hush, the experience exhausted before the poem is over. There’s a villanelle so clumsy it made me want to stop writing villanelles. But just when the defects threaten to overwhelm a poetry otherwise so attractive, the lovely lines or near-perfect stanzas show the richness is not its own reward—richness is the salvation of doubt. With such passionate verbal gifts, the way Kirchwey gets things wrong shows how to make them right.

Frederick Seidel treats the high trash of culture with haute seriousness. No one since Marx (a poet of sorts) has written a poetry so poisoned by capitalism; and you can’t read Seidel without feeling sympathy for Lenin, without feeling capitalists really should be shot. Seidel is a name-dropper— he rubs shoulders with ambassadors and senators (“My friend/ The junior senator from Nebraska”), French film directors, Racine-quoting raving beauties, louche Euro-trash. The poems in Going Fast are a fairyland department store of brand names, always in exquisite taste (so tasteful sometimes they’re not brands at all, merely addresses).[5] He knows where to get a suit fitted in Milan, how to have a motorcycle custom designed, who in Paris makes the right bespoke shoes:

No one has surpassed
The late George Cleverley’s lasts,
The angle in of the heel, the slightly

squared-off toe, the line,
Though Suire at Lobb is getting there.
His shoes fit like Paradise by the third pair.
Like they were Eve. The well-dressed man,
The vein of gold that seems inexhaustible,
Is a sunstream of urine on its way to the toilet

bowl.

Such vulgar display, like a closet of Imelda Marcos’s pumps, might rouse antipathy in any reader. Seidel began as a Lowell imitator; the poems in his first books, Final Solutions and Sunrise (both of which I admired), repeated the sins and syntax of the master with ironic flair—now Seidel’s irony tends to wear jackboots and carry a ball-peen hammer. There’s still power in the blunt phrasings, but the recent books trade in snide juxtapositions (a man “does yoga/ High above the homeless”) and cheap shock (“I want to date-rape life,” “The smell of sperm on the edge of the axe”).

The promise (even the premise) of such poetry is its insider knowledge, its view down the nose toward hoi polloi, all the while saying, “But look, I’m a radical, too!” Seidel has a point, if not an important point: the rich suffer as much as anyone, in their way, and their despair has gold-plated ironies. But Seidel wants to eat his cake and have it: he wants to flaunt his connections, rub the reader’s nose in wealth, and still sneer at privilege. “We’re all guilty,” he seems to say, but you can’t help feeling he wallows smugly in guilt, considering the company he keeps (his Ducati 916 roars into half a dozen poems, but he can’t just ride it —he has to “ride to Syria/ To President Assad”).

It’s one thing to repent youthful folly, to see the sickening void of conspicuous consumption, another to long for display while beating your breast like a reformed sinner. This may be his analysis of a condition, the capitalist condition that sells sin and salvation too; but Seidel’s jet-set tastes and upmarket sinning get pretty tiresome.

Combine a far-seeing industrialist.
With an Islamic fundamentalist.
With an Italian premier who doesn’t take

bribes.
With a pharmaceuticals CEO who loves

to spread disease.
Put them on a 916.

And you get Fred Seidel.

Only in his retelling of Ovid (like Frank Bidart he chooses the myth of Myrrha) is Seidel distracted into a sordid, knowing art. Though banished in the end, Ovid knew the richness of Rome and used its vanities (religious as well as retail) beneath the raw matter of poetry.

Things happen to August Kleinzahler, any-old-thing kind of things; and you can’t see why they should be interesting to someone else when they’re not all that interesting to him. The poems in Green Sees Things in Waves have a resistant cool, and with his goofy good-nature and hip diction Kleinzahler is the Nineties version of a poet who hangs out on street corners in a beret and recites poems to passersby.[6]

The sopressata fée outside of Calfasso’s
with the swept-back ’do and blood on her

smock
grabs a quick smoke on the sidewalk,
tosses it in the gutter then sucks back her lips
till they smack, getting her lipstick right.

Like wow, baby! This might be Norman Mailer imitating Norman Mailer, during his white Negro period. Kleinzahler is much taken with the power of the demotic, and when he says, “But still, it was a doozy,” or “Oh shit,// there goes the Parcheesi board,” it’s hard not to smile and wonder what Frank O’Hara would have made of it. At times, I expect Kleinzahler to ask for a copy of New World Writing to see what the poets in Ghana are up to.

Kleinzahler has a way with landscape:

The oleander on Longitude Lane
flares among the languors and fevers of June
below the south-facing piazzas
the sea breezes find
or don’t quite find
along the corridors of ivy-covered brick

Landscape is never quite enough, however. The fast-talking be-bop poet in Kleinzahler likes snappy titles (“Glossolalia All the Way to Buffalo”) and impotent fragments (a series of “tankas” called, appallingly, “Tanka-Toys: A Memoir”). His “52 Pick-up” is a scattering of words and phrases that transiently suggest the nonsense (“Irwin Corey”), simulacra (“Frottage”), and brain damage (“Korsakoff’s Syndrome”) that are part of his technique—his linguistic markers are set as far apart as Chomsky’s “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” and Durante’s “Good night, Mrs. Calabash.”

Every poet longs to make the language his own, and much of the strutting and fretting here is territorial display: Kleinzahler wants an idiom more adaptable than the one he’s inherited, and he has plundered the language to advantage. I like a poet who can use “griseous” and “sintered” and “Sphygmology,” as well as “pattymelt” and “higgledy-piggledy” and “Victor McLaglen.” Unfortunately, as with much avant-garde poetry, these radical methods hide all-too-sentimental secrets. An idiom not yet fouled by the mawkishness of your ancestors is often willing victim to mawkishness of your very own. Too many of these poems descend into vacant longing, weepy regret for dead canaries, for lost chances, even—if I understand him—for pollution (“the aroma/ almost comforting by now, like food”). Daily life becomes all too much like religion, every dinner a main course of transcendence and a dessert of revelation:

because only now, alone in this room

dark and quiet as a chapel
the garlic has slowly begun to bloom

and the wine in the back of your throat
will be made sonorous by it

then it is time, after much stirring
and some contemplation

to find the appropriate tune
perhaps one of Schubert’s final sonatas

Poor Schubert. Here prose meets the death instinct.

I was more taken with Kleinzahler’s previous book, Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow (1995), where you had to put up with a lot of triviality to get two or three poems of subversive instinct. He seems to have decided triviality is enough. When he writes love poems, they come in the most peculiar diction imaginable, somewhere between Thomas Wyatt and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “How well these ladies do contrive, how well,/ to keep me in thrall with their sweet neglect.” It’s a joke, of course. A reader may be forgiven for looking at his watch.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. Birthday Letters, by Ted Hughes; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 198 pages, $20. Go back to the text.
2. Wakefulness, by John Ashbery; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 80 pages, $20. Go back to the text.
3. Desire, by Frank Bidart; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 59 pages, $20. Go back to the text.
4. The Engrafted Word, by Karl Kirchwey; Henry Holt, 65 pages, $13 paper. Go back to the text.
5. Going Fast, by Frederick Seidel; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 103 pages, $22. Go back to the text.
6. Green Sees Things in Waves, by August Kleinzahler; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 80 pages, $20. Go back to the text.