FRANK O’HARA, JOHN ASH, JAMES SCHUYLER, KENNETH KOCH, MARK STRAND, CHRISTOPHER MIDDLETON, ROY FISHER, MICHAEL HOFMANN, JEFFREY WAINWRIGHT
At Harvard, John Ashbery says, Frank O’Hara “had a very sort of pugnacious and pugilistic look. He had a broken nose. He didn’t look like a very cordial person.” Ashbery got to know him properly a month before graduation. They became friends in New York.
Many people get O’Hara wrong, as a man, as a poet. His biographer Brad Gooch seems more interested in O’Hara’s libido than in the poet himself, and does little to bring the poetry alive in the life. O’Hara was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1926 and raised in Grafton, Massachusetts. He served in the navy for two years, then went to Harvard, where he took a degree in music. After graduate school, in 1951 he settled in New York and took a job with the Museum of Modern Art. His life became New York and the art scene of the time: Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline and Jackson (“Jack the Dripper”) Pollock, the Abstract Expressionists. He was an editorial associate of Art News, to which Ashbery and James Schuyler contributed—his friends and “members” of the informal grouping of poets called in retrospect the New York School. In 1960 he became assistant curator of the Museum of Modern Art. He was killed on Fire Island in an accident with a beach buggy, struck down in the early morning of 24 July 1966 in the dark on the dunes.
His casual attitude to his poems tells us much about him and them: it’s not that he didn’t value them, but he didn’t worry much about them after they were written. He was not especially interested in a final permanent text. Donald Allen, editing the posthumous Collected Poems, found more than five hundred (others have been added since), many previously unpublished. Some survived not in O’Hara’s manuscripts but in transcriptions sent by Ashbery to Kenneth Koch when Koch was abroad and Ashbery was trying to bring him round to liking O’Hara’s work. Chance survivals, like the poems jotted down and put in a drawer—the wrong drawer. What mattered was the writing of them. He published only four collections, A City Winter (1952), Meditations in an Emergency (1956), Second Avenue (1960) and Lunch Poems (1964), none of them with “leading” publishing houses. He preferred to work with galleries, as though the poems were entries in an exhibition catalogue, an exhibition made of his daily life.
In “Notes on Second Avenue,” appended to his longest and most ambitious poem, he rejects theories of poetry: “I have a feeling that the philosophical reduction of reality to a dealable-with system so distorts life that one’s ‘reward’ for the endeavour (a minor one at that) is illness both from inside and from outside.” Ashbery is of the same mind: “I would prefer not to think I have any special aims in mind, as I might then be forced into a program for myself,” he says.
In the five-hundred-odd pages of the Collected Poems O’Hara begins with a rather witty, spoken simplicity, the poems in the language he used with his friends, wry, light, a little naughty, but without the scatological grittiness of the Beats. Ginsberg may have affected some of his poems, “Second Avenue” in particular, but while Ginsberg is always comfortably unwashed and hairy of face, O’Hara is cleanshaven and unobtrusive, keeping his own rather than everyone else’s counsel. There is a reticence about the man and the poems. In many ways he is closer to Whitman than Ginsberg ever gets; and to Lorca and Mayakovsky because he understands Futurism and Surrealism, and when his poetry surrealizes it is with a knowledge of what he wants the surreal to do for the poem. He doesn’t blunder and risk like Crane, or rant like Ginsberg. His poems are busy in the world; they haven’t the time to stand back and preach or invent monstrous forms. He is the most New York of the New York poets.
There are experiments with prose poems, mixtures of prose and verse, and a complication of formal choices, with Williamsesque lineation here, a touch of Auden there, where he experiments with sonnets or (lovingly?) ridicules Wyatt, or apostrophizes friends, or celebrates. There is Jane Freilicher, the woman he loves asexually, whom he watches as a painter would watch his models and portrays in a hundred postures and gestures. He’s the Big Apple Bonnard. Other women, too, feature repeatedly. At no point does he disguise his sexual imagination. He doesn’t foreground it, either. His camp is a natural manner, less refined than Firbank’s, less crafted, more off-the-cuff.
The characters in his city are poets, painters, editors, arts administrators, delicatessen people, booksellers. He calls God “The Finger” and has dubious and riotous thoughts about him. As he develops, the poems experiment with “painterly” approaches, the cubism of language. He reifies language. Words fit things and periods and attitudes, and it is getting that fit, for descriptive or ironic purposes, that interests O’Hara. Hofmannsthal said in the famous Chandos Letter that we find the depths on the surface. That is certainly O’Hara’s depth. This is a debt to painters he knew and with whom he collaborated, whose persons and work he celebrated in many poems. There are also celebrations of Pasternak, Mayakovsky (whose Brooklyn Bridge poem, along with Lorca’s and Hart Crane’s, was part of O’Hara’s intimate anthology). He has a love/hate relationship in the poems with the wild excesses of Rachmaninoff, whom he apostrophizes time after time; also with the miniaturism of Satie. Crane may have left a mark on some of the increasing precisions, ambitions and obliquities of O’Hara’s language. He sends Emerson up, but never Whitman. “Second Avenue” is dedicated “In memory of Vladimir Mayakovsky” and Pasternak is never far from his thoughts. But his love of the Russians stops with Yevtushenko and Voznesensky, whom he sees as reductivists and opportunists, unworthy dwarfs inheriting the language of giants. He did not live long enough to form an opinion of Joseph Brodsky.
There are grand poems about big and little themes, lightly ironized, and then the larger ironies of the mature work, where heartbreak and laughter hold hands (as in “The Day Lady Died”). The poems to James Dean are passionate and adolescent, and his address “To the Film Industry in Crisis” joyfully eloquent:
Not you, lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals
with your studious incursions toward the pomposity of ants,
nor you, experimental theatre in which Emotive Fruition
is wedding Poetic Insight perpetually, nor you,
promenading Grand Opera, obvious as an ear (though you
are close to my heart), but you, Motion Picture Industry,
it’s you I love!
He describes the different constituent experiences of the poem “Second Avenue,” then says: “I don’t know if this method is of any interest in taking little pieces of it. You see how it makes it seem very jumbled, while actually everything in it either happened to me or I felt happening (saw, imagined) on Second Avenue.” There is a warning to the close-reading critic: “The verbal elements are not too interesting to discuss although they are intended consciously to keep the surface of the poem high and dry, not wet, reflective and self-conscious. Perhaps the obscurity comes in here, in the relationship between the surface and the meaning, but I like it that way since the one is the other (you have to use words) and I hope the poem to be a subject, not just about it.” This is one of the most important sentences, throwaway though it is, in the poetry of our time, confirmed by Ashbery in another formulation: “The poem is the chronicle of the creative act that produces it.” It is not a question of “poetry about poetry” but “poetry as poetry.” “Process” and “product” are one.
“Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you,” O’Hara warns us. Authority produces logic, too, perhaps because it produces pain. Legitimacy produces logic. And logic is invariably reductive and constraining, leading to rules and programs and building the prison house. “I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? They’re just ideas.”
He hardly revised his later poems. They are part of a process of living, the acts of thinking and feeling slowed down just long enough to get them on paper, a quick sketch, but not held still and worked on or worked up to a mighty semantic canvas. Authenticity is in the avoidance of finish, as in Abstract Expressionism, but with a less serious, more spirited sprezzatura. There are postcard and letter poems, jottings, odes, each bound up in its occasion, some of the occasions of a seemingly trivial dailiness. The city is the center—not even Baudelaire was so citified a poet as O’Hara. And it’s not just any city, but New York, its specific streets, buildings, cafés, rooms and persons, present as “living facts.” A poem does not seek to translate or refine them. What matters is the fit of the language to its occasion, its time, and the sequence time gives it. He jokingly calls his technique personism. He could if he’d wished have telephoned his beloved, but he wrote a poem instead: it exists between two persons, not between two covers.
The English poet John Ash first introduced me to O’Hara’s work. His own poetry is indebted to the New York poets, but also to the writers, music and art that affected them. He shares sources with them, his poems like theirs are synesthetic, mixing senses, and allusively mixing media. Cinema is a crucial ingredient for all the poets of this kidney, cinema with its exaggerated feelings, its giant images, the passion and the kitsch. Born in Manchester in 1948, Ash built New York for himself well before he emigrated. Imagination disposes of parents and replaces them with a benign grandmother; the poet is freed into an undistorted infancy of wonder and curiosity, though there are also nightmares that intensify with time.
Ash’s technique is not to transform the image or the occasion by metaphor but to extend and distort it, the variations taking us into progressive keys of implication, complicity: the whole burden carried by an image or plot modulated by voice or voices, the interplay of voices: “You do not need to understand, / You do not understand.” In a writer like Ash poetry reaches an awkward cultural puberty, stimulated by film, Surrealism, Expressionism in art, opera, the classics coming alive out of the marble ruins. Memory is treacherous, and this “puberty” does strange things. The past is at once enchanted and terrible, the future at best a Chekhovian adumbration. The poems are “about” points of change, regret, partial recognition. Ash is a wonderful elegist, very funny and very sad.
The drive to understand leads to questions rather than answers. Each question has a specific voice, not Socratic (there are no right answers, every answer is wrong) but curious, childish in perspective if not in language. The questions are about use and connection, but never about truth; Ash avoids moral generalization despite his social satire.
The morning was clear
And I could have wished the taxi ride
From the airport longer, a week
Of that comfort and postponement
Would not have been too much.
I did not know what to do
When my mother opened the door.
She was a worn curtain.
She was a Trojan heroine.
The sky resembled a still lake surface.
The roses were bright but ended early.
This is the ending of the year.
Cities surround us, they shimmer
Under different names.
My mother’s hair has not turned white.
The roses were bright but ended early.
His Selected Poems draws on his four collections. “A little querulous, perhaps?” Carolyn Kizer asked in the New York Times Book Review. “Never mind. This may be the most auspicious debut of its kind since Auden’s.” Richard Tillinghast describes how he “moves easily from the hieratic to the demotic.” The language is not unstable: it is going about its playful, powerful business of saying and seeing. Ashbery commends the poetry as “resonant with gorgeous imagery that distracts one from the super-lucid, rational argument that quietly continues to assert itself. It seems both familiar and strange, noble and funny, romantic and level-headed.” There is more traceable plot and paraphrasable content in Ash than in Ashbery, but then their missions are rather different, their worlds distinct. Ash now lives in Turkey. A Byzantine Journey, his remarkable prose engagement with his favorite subject, Turkey, was published in 1995.
James Schuyler (1923–91), like Ashbery and O’Hara, owed a large debt to Auden, with whom he stayed for a time on Ischia and whose poems in Nones he typed (as Lowell had typed for Roethke). His elegy for Auden is matter-of-fact in the way O’Hara is, but the moments are in the past, as so often with him: the things not done, the love not quite spoken, the things not to be done again.
On Ischia he claimed to take
St. Restituta seriously, and
sat at Maria’s café in the cobbled
square saying, “Poets should
dress like businessmen,” while
he wore an incredible peach-
colored nylon shirt. And on
Fire Island his telling someone
“You must write each book as
though it were your last.” And
when he learned that in Florence
I and my friend Bill Aalto had
fished his drafts of poems
out of the wastepaper basket,
he took to burning them, saying,
“I feel like an ambassador burning
secret papers.”
“So much / to remember, so little / to say,” he chides himself, and says with gratitude too late, a poem too small, “Goodbye.” Auden felt at home in the relatively relaxed company of the poems and persons of the New York School; to some extent (because he could not really change) they helped make his later work too comfortable with itself and with his sometimes monstrous attitudes—monstrous because of what he had been and because his retuned, rekeyed rhetoric was still intact.
Schuyler chose New York, but not with O’Hara’s absolute and exclusive devotion. He too worked at the Museum of Modern Art for a time, and at Art News. He was affected by painting, but not in the fundamental way that O’Hara was. “The Morning of the Poem” and “Hymn to Life” are not as urban, or as brisk or brittle as O’Hara’s poems. He is a city pastoralist, rambling through seasons that affect stone and brick quite as much as trees and fields. O’Hara in love is overwhelmed, hyperbolic, preening or contemplative; Schuyler is weakened and sentimentalized by desire. One of his best poems, “Buried at Springs,” opens with a hornet and the poet in the same room, passes in brilliantly painterly detail through landscape and timescape to elegize O’Hara, the imagery understated to the point of heartbreak.
Kenneth Koch is the maverick among the mavericks of the New York School. Born in 1925 in Cincinnati, Ohio, he saw action during the Second World War in the Pacific. He graduated from Harvard and was drawn to the poets (O’Hara and Ashbery especially) and the painters of New York. He spent three years in France and Italy. In 1962 he published Thank You, a work that—like Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath—remains a benchmark for his later experiments and developments. Here are the wild, strange inventories, the humor that in Koch becomes a chain of hilarity, a Rabelaisian sensuality and reveling in exclamation marks. He is a parodist, a fine formalist when he wants to be, a minidramatist, a writer of urban eclogues. In “A New Guide: 13” (One Train, 1995) he says,
Look at the clouds.
They may be what I look at most of all
Without seeing anything.
It may be that many other things are the same way
But with clouds it’s obvious.
The motorboat runs through the sky reflected in the river.
Look at the long trail of clouds behind.
Beneath the bright surface run serious currents; the poems “maintain power,” writes Denis Donoghue, “by rarely choosing to exert it.” He is “a masterly innovator,” writes David Lehman, “who has used his extravagant powers of wit and invention to enlarge the sphere of the poetic.” He has collaborated with other writers and with painters. He has an insatiable hunger for new forms, new directions, new kinds of writing, for example, the themes and variations of “One Train May Hide Another,” and the “poems by ships at sea,” the post-Apollinaire couplets of “A Time Zone,” the orientalizing quatrains of “The First Step,” and the hundred or so little poems that constitute the big poem “On Aesthetics.” “He is above all a love poet, therefore a serious one,” Frank Kermode said. “The Art of Poetry” paints us out of a corner.
It is true that good poetry is difficult to write.
Poetry is an escape from anxiety and a source of it as well.
On the whole, it seems to me worthwhile. At the end of a poem
One may be tempted to grow too universal, philosophical and vague
Or to bring in History, or the Sea, but one should not do that
If one can possibly help it, since it makes
Each thing one writes sound like everything else,
And poetry and life are not like that. Now I have said enough.
Mark Strand begins “almost as a painter would”: the spirit of Edward Hopper (on whom he has written) hovers over the large clarities of a poetry that gathers its energies widely, from the visible world and the world of languages (he is an eminent translator and has taught and traveled widely).
“This is my Main Street,” he said as he started off
That morning, leaving the town to the others,
Entering the high-woods tipped in pink
By the rising sun but still dark where he walked.
“This is the way,” he continued as he watched
For the great space that he felt sure
Would open before him, a stark sea over which
The turbulent sky would drop the shadowy shapes
Of its song, and he would move his arms
And begin to mark, almost as a painter would,
The passages of greater and lesser worth, the silken
Tropes and calls to this or that, coarsely conceived...
The visible world includes the unprovable reality of dream, assembled to read like allegory, but uprooted from any system or theology, making oblique truths against the waking world.
Strand was born on Prince Edward Island, Canada, and studied and taught in the United States (Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Harvard, Iowa, Utah, Wesleyan), Italy and Brazil. His first book was Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964). The surrealism of his early writing, learned from the Latin American rather than the European Surrealists, gives way to more defined and profound intentions. Octavio Paz says that he “has chosen the negative path, with loss as the first step towards fullness: it is also the opening to a transparent verbal perfection.” He writes poems of autobiography, remarkable elegies and love poems. Yet he can seem—in his humor, his positive ironies—a first cousin of New York poets, one of those who did not end up in New York.
New York in the 1960s was a bright nursery of invention and experiment. London wasn’t. English poets who didn’t like what English poetry was doing—the Group, the easy politenesses and tepid satire of the center—stayed in the provinces or went abroad. For over thirty years Christopher Middleton has been “easily the most intelligent and serious of our innovators, a poet with a disconcerting knack of making it new in almost every poem,” according to John Lucas, and with something like disbelief Douglas Dunn agrees: “an avant-garde poet we can actually read.” Middleton is also an astonishing essayist whose most challenging piece, “Reflections on a Viking Prow,” throws down a gauntlet: “To recapture poetic reality in a tottering world, we may have to revise, once more, the idea of a poem as an expression of the ‘contents’ of a subjectivity. Some poems, at least, and some types of poetic language, constitute structures of a singularly radiant kind, where ‘self-expression’ has undergone a profound change of function. We experience these structures, if not as revelations of being, then as apertures upon being. We experience them as we experience nothing else.” He turns his attention, first, to the “intrinsic virtues of preindustrial artifacts, not only ones that had explicitly sacred value.”
The roots of such an approach are clearly in the nineteenth century and in the great modernists within the European tradition, German and French as well as English-speaking. But they go deeper, and the argument is hortatory rather than polemical, pulling back the corner on a creative possibility which looks new but is in fact the fons et origo. There are the confessionals, the volcanic forces of Whitman and Artaud, there are the “milieu writers,” and then there are those who “are connected with specific places, solid scenes: they are the ‘artificer poets.’ ” “Never frontal reportage about apparent localities, their writings are formal creations which enshrine and radiate poetic space.” Middleton adduces the Rome of Propertius, the Swabia of Mörike, and he mentions Lorca, Kafka, Baudelaire and others, none of them English until we come to Hopkins, and then to Kipling, not the poet but the writer of travel letters. The best way of moving forward is moving away, following the right lights. Middleton is a man of long traditions. He wrote in a letter about an anthology of English poetry in which all the poems were “dilated anecdotes”: “Whatever can have happened to the understanding that poetry—and not only at outer limits—universalises words, or works and plays words up to a condition of clearest starlight?”
If Middleton’s analysis of the state of the British and American imagination is correct and if poets had the respect for him he deserves, plus the subtlety and tenacity of mind to take his arguments on board, even if only to reject them consciously, it would be the beginning of a change in the creative environment. Middleton has much in common, in terms of outlook, with the New York School poets, but there is a severity in him. He is a trained philologist, a scholar and translator, and a luminous critic. A poet-critic who deserves to be read alongside him is the American Guy Davenport, whose The Geography of the Imagination is a postwar critical classic.
Middleton was born in Truro, Cornwall, in 1926. He studied at Merton College, Oxford, and then taught at the University of Zürich and at King’s College, London, and finally as professor of Germanic languages at the University of Texas, Austin. He has published translations of Robert Walser, Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich Hölderlin, Goethe, Gert Hofmann and many others.
In his poems various historical periods are sighted through a personal lens and in a shifting perspective: those of a man now captive, now free. Transformation is his theme, one kind of moment or thing changing into another. His poems are like miniatures refracting, waking the imagination to larger, gradual, encompassing transformations. There is no heavy Germanic solemnity in the poems, despite the fact that Middleton has for many years been a professional Germanist. His touch is light in both senses. Goethe made his Italian journey, but Middleton has taken the road to Turkey, which is both a modern country and an echo of Byzantium.
If someone barefoot stood in a saloon,
His dromedary might be chomping outside,
That majestic meal. High olive notes
Plucked from a mandolin. Fumes. Leafgreen.
A dark descends. There, with banana palm,
Consorts forbidden music. Ugly. Ocean.
Delay it...
“I seek to interdict the code, so that a true message may be generated.” And, again, “Poems have become experiences which did not exist before the poem.” He has no time for the Movement. “The owls / have built a stinking nest in the Eighteenth Century.” Along the road he tries to take there are stale puddles, and there is fear: fear of the forces lurking in the shadows, fear of taking the wrong turn. The destination is worth the risk.
In Roy Fisher, Middleton may have the poet he is looking for. Born in Birmingham in 1930 and educated at Birmingham University, Fisher made Birmingham, not the most promising of places, it might seem, his “locality.” He also retains a freedom to use whatever form he feels his subject needs, from rhymed and metered verse (which he handles with mixed success at best) to quite ambitious forms of experiment, a versatility like F. T. Prince’s, though Fisher is more copious and more wedded to the contingent world than Prince. His long poem “City” meditates on Birmingham, using prose and verse and learning tonal and technical tips from Williams and Olson. If the imagination makes the world, the best way to understand its power and its flaws is by examining the world it made, the snares and surfaces, the streets and sounds. In proposing “a fresh Matter of Britain” (after all, we have the Matter of Ireland) he recognizes, as Middleton does, the need for some serious engagement with ideas and places, with ways of seeing and connecting that might “enshrine and radiate poetic space.” The title of the poem in which he makes this proposal takes us back to painting: “On the Neglect of Figure Composition.” Fisher is directly political in his poetry, as any writer dealing seriously with place must be.
Fisher and Middleton have published many of their books and pamphlets with small provincial presses, yet both have gained if not acceptance at least tolerance from the “main stream.” They span the dangerous gulf between the “poetry establishment” and the generative, discontented antiestablishments. Their real affinities are with the “counterculture” and their presence in the other camp is too tactful, too late: from Derbyshire and Texas respectively, they cannot constitute a center, and change seems to come in British and American poetry largely from a concentration of voices in a place, the availability of publishing resources, and the consolidation of a critical literature which makes a space with access roads and finger-posts for the general public. The diaspora of the avant-garde or its institutionalization in universities ensures that—even in an electronic age—metropolitan interests and values, which are quantifiable and commercial, will call the tune.
Michael Hofmann writes, “I hope to bring with me my own intensity, an almost abstract thing, from the words, like Montale. That’s the only value.” Is this perhaps the new English poet Middleton envisages? There is the mention of Montale, for starters. Here is a man who reads Italian writers. Then, he was born in Freiburg, Germany. His father was a distinguished German novelist. He is bilingual. He came to Britain at the age of seven, studied in Edinburgh, Bristol, Winchester, Cambridge, Regensburg. He translates from the German. He travels.
But Hofmann was doing his research on Robert Lowell, and the ironies and paradoxes of his earlier poems in Nights in the Iron Hotel were only partly paid for. The relationships and underlying themes were his, and by his second book he was moving on, exploring his relations with his father. “Everything for me meets there: German, writing, feeling, sex, self-disgust, the future, the rudder of my life.” It’s at this point that Hofmann might seem to disappoint Middleton’s hopes: “my life.” It is a very singular and distinct life. The poems interest us, as many of Lowell’s do, first for what they tell, not how they tell.
Yet the how is interesting, and in some of the early poems (“Kleist in Paris,” for example, in its curious half-blank, half-free verse, an epistle in the voice of the young poet-dramatist, with a lived sense of place and a living sense of desire) the imprint of Lowell is invisible. When he begins, in his first book, to write in images, whole figurative poems, reporting on experience in a staccato voice without inflection, the self withheld from the first-person experience, there is a sense of willed impoverishment. These poems, of the early 1980s, were fashionable. In “A gymnast swings like a hooked fish” the Martian note sounds, except that Hofmann is better than a Martian, there is a wandering prosody, cunningly irregular. The poems do not flow, they are phrased and full of pauses, and where the pauses come the reader supplies the emotional inflection. The poems about his father do indeed unpack a life, a pair of lives, the theme more deeply and tactfully treated than Tony Harrison’s explorations of himself and his father. For Hofmann there are no easy categories: he is implicated in his father’s world, culture and class. There is no resolution, even in his father’s sudden death a few years later, commemorated in his place and absence in “For Gert Hofmann, died 1 July.”
Michael Hofmann goes to Mexico. In a handful of poems whose accuracy is precise and surreal like Elizabeth Bishop’s (though his tone is not so certain), he takes the measure of places, tying Mexico in via Lawrence to his own literary culture and by Maximilian to his Continental culture. Both are refracted through Mexico’s emphatic otherness; his verse is free with a lingering iambic beat. He is able to see with clarity through his languages and with his language.
In his first book, Heart’s Desire (1978), Jeffrey Wainwright sets off from a territory very much his own. In “Thomas Müntzer,” a poem in the voice of a Protestant reformer who believed that God was so immanent that he would protect him from his foes and led his peasant army to defeat at Frankenhausen, he brings together the sense of political defeat that came in the wake of 1968 with an historical defeat resulting from analogous ideological naïveté. Into Müntzer he also feeds elements of his own life, not speaking in his own voice but incorporating his own experience as a father, an activist and a teacher. The poem synthesizes several urgent concerns in a single voice, generous, severe, fantastical. The fantasy is in Müntzer’s dream of flying, the severity in his attitude to the empowered, his generosity in his sense of grace and of natural abundance. The poem is a sequence in twelve sections, each a separate “movement” in the speaker’s progress. The epigraph from Antonio Machado also relates the poem to the miasma of commitments in the Spanish Civil War: “I have seen in my solitude / very clear things / that are not true.” This is political writing of a high order because of the “very clear things” it sees which history has made true: not vision but witness.
Wainwright was born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1944. He read English at Leeds University and now teaches at the Manchester Metropolitan University. He studied with Geoffrey Hill, and though his verse does not sound like Hill’s he continues to learn from him. Hill incorporated autobiographical elements into Mercian Hymns and other poems. Wainwright in 1994 wrote, “The strength that poetry—having absorbed the discursiveness of neo-classicism, the subjectivity of romanticism and the fragmentation of modernism—now possesses is the opportunity to combine so many different aspects of experience, knowledge and ways of speaking, and to mix them in a way that is richer, more linguistically—that is to say humanly—diverse than any of the argufying discourses it might feed from. Descartes, a child’s bedtime memories, geology and evolution (popularly apprehended), a bit of argot and verbal playfulness can co-exist here as in no other form outside the literary.” He is not talking about interior monologues or loose associationism, but of the syntheses a poet can effect with voices that transcend individual voice. This is what Hill does, diction, dialect and register conveying images and having the force of images in themselves—of period, class, relation. Wainwright starts with the varieties of language and sets himself apart from poets who, like Hofmann and most of his contemporaries, use poetry to unlock the themes that constitute the self, apprehending through his father “German, writing, feeling, sex, self-disgust, the future, the rudder of my life.” Wainwright’s meticulous and entirely deliberate approach has more in common with the spontaneities of O’Hara and Ashbery and the radiances of Middleton, than with the “milieu writers” who crowd the center stage.
Wainwright’s early poems, which seemed difficult at the time, are now readily accessible: readers have grown with him into his later work, “The Mad Talk of George III and a Hymn to Liberty,” “The Swimming Body” and other sequences and single poems. He is especially fond of the sequence, and in his Selected Poems he disrupts chronology in order to make a larger sequence out of his sequences, suggesting that “development” is beside the point, that “self,” too, is irrelevant: what matters is the poetry, in its integrity, “an instance of itself.” The body of work is small but not cautious: in “getting it right” Wainwright gives no hostages to fortune. His vocation is utterly serious, and even if it takes five years, he will wait (as Elizabeth Bishop, a similarly careful poet did) until it is ready.
The Red-Headed Pupil and Other Poems (1994) includes poems that are difficult but resonant. “The red-headed pupil is worried he is / not following.” But as in “Müntzer,” there’s a lot to follow. What is his body, what is his brain, and what is his mind? How can he be him? What is real, and can he look for it? Is he only a different version of a brick wall? Studiously, peering closer, as though at an anatomy lesson, “he tries hard.” Autobiography again, but tautly controlled. The pupil is the red-headed poet in his youth, or his son.
The earlier themes are there despite the passage of time, the Thatcher years, the wear and tear of growing older. In the poem the imagination is young and puzzled. “There is the idea of mattering, even as against Empires. And of Freedom.” Being free of thirst, hunger, disease, could the red-headed pupil be free of everything—of love, of belief, of the dead? How can he talk of these things? How can all these bits of history, dreams, quotations, family, different voices as well as what he tries to think of for himself, fit together? It is trying to make them fit, combining and recombining, that gives us this extraordinary poem, or rather sequence of twelve-line poems in batches of twenty-four, like the times table. They look tidy, boxed up, as neat as cause and effect—“the click / the this because of that.” Can everything be understood and interpreted? “He looks perplexed.” He tries harder.
“Free Rein” is a companion sequence, in different terms and tone, with broad political and human perspectives and a unique prosody. It is the “Thomas Müntzer” sequence two decades on. The issues are still unresolved despite history. The hunger for justice does not die down, it grows more intense with the passage of years.