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Scanning American Poetry: 1947-1987
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13985 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1988 |
5,309 Words |
| Author
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Richard Stern
Richard Stern is professor of English at the University of
Chicago. |
We've become very sophisticated in the twentieth century about our limitations as observers. Of course, to some degree, human beings have always been troubled by the ease with which they can be fooled. We think we see something and then realize it was not there, we had only been fooled by a shadow or some other trick of light. Then there's the question of distance: How far away should we be from what we observe? One can make out some things about a landscape from an airplane, very different things from the ground. Which things are correct? Both and neither; it depends what one wants.
Asked by my Chinese host to survey American poetry of the last thirty or forty years in a single lecture, I found myself in this observational predicament. In some ways I'm too close and see only those things that have interested me; in other ways, I'm too far away, knowing very little or nothing about too many poets and poems. Some poems and poets have formed my sense of modernity--my rhythmic appreciation of the world I manifest. Others pass me by. Anthologies and critical histories of poetry help fill in the language. But each is itself a special view of the literary landscape, and by its nature a scheme of preference. In the arts such schemes are particularly serious, because they may exclude individual works that break through the barriers of accomplishments and thus reconstitute the language of expressive possibility.
The actor Walter Matthau was asked some years ago to play the part of a very old man. He was then in his mod-forties. He decided he wanted to strike closer to the truth than usual and not play a man who stooped and weak in the knees, who snuffled and spat, had rheumy eyes and trembled. Matthau decided to consult his eighty-year-old father-in-law about playing an old man. The father-in-law, Frank, was very intelligent, alert, erect, a rapid walker and talker. He would be a good man to consult, thought Matthau. "Frank," said Matthau, "how would you play the part of an old man?" his father-in-law thought a minute, then stood up, crooked his back, snuffled, held out trembling hands, wiped his eyes, and spoke in a thin voice. "This way," he said. "This is how I'd do it."
So here's the danger: speaking from a privileged position of observation and knowledge, one may still fall into the clichés of other people. Now, to some extent, these clichés are accurate, and Frank, the eighty-year-old father-in-law, was correct. At eighty, he was, in a way, not old. One day, perhaps at ninety or even one hundred, he probably would be stooped, weak-kneed, rheumy, a snuffler and trembler. Most old people are. So here is another danger:
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