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New study focuses on
the living power of poetry
POETRY 12/05/99 By Tom Mayo An excellent choice for "Poetry Book of the Year" is a not-so-slender tome with a somewhat misleading title and not a lot of poetry inside. For poetry lovers everywhere, however, Michael Schmidt's Lives of the Poets (Knopf, $35) deserves a special place on their bookshelves. Mr. Schmidt's ambition is staggering, but it is more than matched by his scholarship and his critical abilities over the course of 975 pages, including a moderately helpful index and a "brief bibliography" that runs from the middle of the 14th century (when Church and royal utterances began to embrace the English language of commonfolk) through the appearance of Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters in 1998. Many poets have been omitted, a fact repeatedly lamented by Mr. Schmidt himself. But any reasonable reader will rejoice at the inclusions, which make the exclusions at least tolerable. Mr. Schmidt is not the least reticent about his critical judgments, which are generously interlaced between biographical sketches. He offers his opinions with enough humor and empathy, however, that they never grate upon the reader. Throughout the book, he maintains the roles of "reader" and "companion" and avoids the bombast of, say, Yale's Harold Bloom.If Lives of the Poets were only a series of essays on 250 poets across six centuries, it would be a curiosity but probably not the compelling read that it is. The book is much more, however, thanks to Mr. Schmidt's ability to sustain three or four story lines that connect otherwise disparate writers. One of these is the story of the English language itself, of its geopolitical usefulness as a language of domination as well as a language of liberation. Cultural and political developments, including wars and plagues, therefore feature prominently in Mr. Schmidt's Lives. Facts attest to the singular power of poetry Another of his constant themes is the impact of a lone poet, an individual poem, even a single line of poetry from one century and continent to another. "A living poem can energize another poem at five hundred years' distance, or across the other side of the world," he writes, and he's as good as his word. One of the true joys of the book is the author's deft handling of poets from all the countries where English was either born or imported, creating an intercontinental ballistic missive of great force. Mr. Schmidt, therefore, has chosen not to write a history of the poetry of regions or nations, or of poetic genres and rhetorical schools or other groups (including the poetry of ethnicity and gender). Instead, his organizing principle is "to look at the development of form, prosody, the language of poetry, connections between poems and poets, rather than record political and literary fashions." Amazingly, it is a story that holds together. As he draws the lines of opposition and absorption, of rejection and embrace, he also makes the case for poetry as a single, continuous conversation, a sort of chain novel, that is as much about the nature of poetry itself as it is about our lives. A great surprise and pleasure is Mr. Schmidt's inclusion of publishers and editors as an important part of the history of poetry. Beginning with William Caxton and including John Taylor, Richard Tottel and John Murray, publishers of poetry (of whom Mr. Schmidt himself is one) are celebrated here. As a result, the sound of the typesetter and the whiff of the ink pot are never far away, keeping this life story of poetry grounded and avoiding the trap of the insufferably magisterial. € € € Because of Mr. Schmidt's focus on the role of publishers, the books I have turned to after Lives of the Poets are some of the past year's offerings from small publishers, without whose passion poetry would never get into our hands. Jeff Davis' collection, City Reservoir, published in 1998 by Robert Trammel's Barnburner Press in Dallas, is a fine example. Mr. Davis' ability to combine dreamlike interior monologues and Dallas cityscapes expands and enriches our notion of a civic life. The same is true of Mr. Trammel himself, whose gift to Dallas and the world is to bring out poetry like that of Mr. Davis and to add to what it means to be a member of this community. € € € Another remarkable example of the publishers' passion is the Curbstone Press, out of the coastal town of Willimantic, Conn. Curbstone recently published a bilingual edition of Distant Road by Vietnam's best-known poet, Nguyen Duy. The poems are world-class and deserve more attention in a future column. For now, praise be to the Curbstones and Barnburners of the world. Tom Mayo, an associate professor of law at Southern Methodist
University, teaches "Law, Literature and Medicine" at the law school and
at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School. |
