"The giant race of American poets between the two world wars agreed that the great, the permanent, subject of poetry is the ennobling transformation of common existence by the imagination. Their axiom was old enough, in a sense, for they believed also that wherever art rises beyond the motives of religion, politics and vanity, it accomplishes the great purpose."

- Irvin Ehrenpreis, in a review of Donald Justice & others, published anonymously in TLS # 3760 (March 30, 1974). Quoted in Certain Solitudes : on the poetry of Donald Justice (Univ. of AK Press, 1997).

(This seems to me like one of the best, most accurate formulations of "what it's all about" I've ever come across. Even though it reminds me that my own poetry, most of the time, is a murky obscure mixture of religion, politics & vanity - my own private Amazon jungle.)

p.s. Happy Birthday, Walt.

First some reviews by William Logan, then the book of essays by D. Justice, have got me looking in new directions. Reading Geoffrey Hill now, another powerful writer I've passed over for a long time. Forces me to focus more closely on the issue of rhythm.

Justice has also got me reading Sherwood Anderson, too. I may be the only person in America who never read Winesburg, Ohio in high school. It's a treasure.

Justice, in his essays, shows a curious specificity & exactitude. I mean the lit-historical events are there, to be pinpointed. Thus, in his essay on free verse, he notes not only the poet, but the specific poem, where it all began (in 20th cent. America, that is). The poet is Pound, the poem is from 1907:

Lips, words, and you snare them,
Dreams, words, and they are as jewels,
Strange spells of old deity,
Ravens, nights, allurement:
And they are not;
Having become the souls of song.

In his Stevens essay, he pinpoints particular lines which document the poet's careful & gradual opening-up of iambic blank verse; & how he does it (anapests...)

Not to be polemical, but I'm sort of tempted to turn my attention away from free verse for a while. It would make things both easier & more difficult. For one thing, I'd have to turn away from a lot of my own poetry. On the other hand it would allow me to block out a lot of sub-literary noise.

This unknown recommends Oblivion, a book of essays by Donald Justice (publ. in 1998). Should be a benchmark, lighthouse, guidebook.

In an essay on metrics, he debunks the notion that meters have some kind of organic basis (breathing, circadian rhythms, etc.). He offers a very persuasive (to me) interpretation of the paradoxical (subsidiary, understated) role they play, in the process of hammering together a memorious art work.

In a subtle essay on Baudelaire and "sincerity", written in 1957, he undermines the rationale for confessionalism - just a few years before that movement burst on the scene.

In an essay on Stevens' meters, he gives a sparkling mini-course on the "Imagist moment", followed by a discerning analysis of the pentameter background in Stevens, & what he did with it.

I'm loving this book.

Reading a long (book-length) interview : Donald Justice in Conversation with Philip Hoy (London: Between the Lines, 2001). Hoy is the most well-informed (about his subject) interlocutor I've ever read.

Justice is one of those poets that po-blog world would generally like to forget about. & he wouldn't think much of us, either.

I think a lot of him, though. & could learn a lot from him, if I had any self-discipline.

If I find time & energy, I'll write an essay on Donald Justice's poetry.

Yet one more example of my backward-looking, reactionary, anachronistic, out of touch, obsolete "poetics".

Justice : melancholy, nostalgia, aestheticism - almost fatalism. A very old issue - running back to ancient times - regarding the dangers, the seductive temptations, of aesthetic fatalism. The beauty is a crystallization, a register of stoic passivity, a... a... I'm forgetting the word I'm trying to think of.

Nevertheless... I'm finding many other, different, things in this poetry. Don't want to ramble on about it here.

He's a wonderful craftsperson. Inspiring, exciting in that way. Manifold.

I'm drawn to the understatement. & the music, piano themes. (He started piano lessons when he was 5. I started about that age too.)

p.s. & I like the "balance" he achieves. These are very much "poem-song-artifacts", and yet, at the same time, they have a humane, documentary, down-to-earth quality - feeling, emotion, sensibility. Southern I guess. Wry, funny, mournful, sweet, bitter, etc.

There's always a person there : yet he avoided Confessionalism of any kind! A major victory for that time.

I suppose Donald Justice & his poetry slipped over my radar, while I was young and anti-academic & anti-MFA and anti-poetic, when I wasn't burrowing into long-poem theory & practice.

But I'm catching up now, & enjoying it.

someone could write a very good article on the affinity of Weldon Kees & Donald Justice, if it hasn't been done. Kees - Justice - Stevens form a sort of affinity constellation.

Beautiful day here today. I was home today.

Minor literary miracle : I discovered (with help) the poetry of Donald Justice.

Ignorance is a gift from God, as Nick de Cusa explained.

Like a door opening on my own life.

Justice.... Stevens, Rilke, Bishop, Crane.... Kees. Listen to the music.

Reading more Weldon Kees. A terrific poet. Here's an interesting article by Dana Gioia on Kees's influence & reception. Gioia raises a number of questions about the neglect & "non-canonizing" of this poet, who has been praised & imitated by so many other poets (as opposed to critics & anthologists). But he doesn't really answer them, possibly because Gioia doesn't examine the poems themselves very closely. Donald Justice addressed the issue directly back in 1960, in his intro to the collected poems, which he edited. Referring to Kees's (suicidal) vanishing act, he wrote: "If the whole of his poetry can be read as a denial of the values of the present civilization, as I believe it can, then the disappearance of Kees becomes as symbolic an act as Rimbaud's flight or Crane's suicide."

If we shift the "disappearance", here, to refer to Kees's critical reception over the decades, then Justice's statement makes sense as an explanation for same : ie., there is something in the "whole of his poetry" - in its thematics, in its bitter, painful, satirical, harshly stringent, mournful tone - which makes it very demanding and hard to take. Kees's playfulness skimmers over depths of grief, sour laughter, moral outrage. There's a vertigo of despair & social rejection at work. Yet it's also thorny in another way : Kees can't be typed as a bohemian or dismissed as just another lightweight visionary "poet". Apparently he was careful & conservative in dress & manner : it's reflected in his writing. The surrealist & experimental elements are employed with prosaic clarity & force; the diction is simultaneously plain and baroque; the rhythms are steeped in blank verse, sharpened & enforced by echoes of the iambic beat of Crane, the long measured lines of Eliot. The impact of individual poems is a combination of pleasure & shock.

To repeat : Kees is a terrific poet, from whom many have learned & many more could learn. But his stance, his worldview - its clear-eyed, emotionally-overwrought bleakness - has its costs. It's not something teachable, and it's not something societies of any place or time have welcomed with open arms. To paraphrase one of the former Iran hostage-crisis hostages (who was referring to the new Iranian President), Kees is "not on [anybody's] Christmas card list".

Perhaps Kees himself - the person, in life - was victimized by his own acidic art, the melancholy bleakness of its tone. He was undone by his own vision.

I'm going to be reading & studying him from now on.