The Boston Review

"Little" magazines usually achieve the most value when they present work by writers whose energy and mutual interaction will make literary history, or have already made it. The Boston Review doesn't represent a group. You have the feeling that its various contributors haven't gotten to know one another thoroughly, and that there may be fewer of them when they do. But at the core of this new magazine's first issue lies work by three extraordinary gifted poets who lived recently in Cambridge, interfertilized, and graduated from Harvard within a year or so.

Sidney Goldfarb '64 dominates the issue. A limecolored center section presents seventeen poems by the incomparable Sidney -- the barging personalist, the grizzled residumorph of a fat-boy complex who garnished two hundred pounds of soul with a Rasputinian beard, and converted a certain respect for violence into a poetry that is as idealistic as it is aggressive, and as sweet-tempered as it is visceral. The poems are followed by appreciative essays by Richard Tillinghast and Robert Grenier; both talk extraordinarily good sense about a poet who is so skilled in the arts of Personality that he sometimes denies us access to the poem itself.

If Goldfarb were a bad poet he would still be monumental; he is a good one, and magnificent. Tillinghast calls attention to a generously exploited strain of exhibitionism in the preceding verse:

Go ahead. Piece me together. Give me a buffalo's brain

And a butterfly's sense of smell, a bat's eye

A brama bull's balls and a possum's preoccupations.

You still don't recognize me, do you?

and Grenier declares Goldfarb "in his poetry, altogether spiritual." Yes, Goldfarb achieves fire and air by adopting and digesting the realm of earth and water -- viscera mundi. Alimentary metaphors reign:

I enter. So much muffled disbelief.

I am a glutton. I eat your pie.

Without warning...

I do everything with my hands.

I stuff my face with grapes.

I mulch them between my teeth.

Seeds run from my mouth and scatter carelessly

I have no sympathy with what I cannot eat...

And sometimes the aether peeps through:

Within the cave

Songs of winesap apple,

Yellow pear and purple grape

Shape and endlessly reshape

Against the golden rim

Dimly behind the blossoms

I make vestigial women

Dance in a silverweb of

Whispering asymmetry.

Loud, stagey, peripherally vulgar, Goldfarb celebrates himself and his environment in language so accurate, so lusty, so unmistakably public and engaging that no dissent from his accomplishment is possible.

Which is what bothers me a little. Baumgarten suggested, and experience confirms that really "spiritual" poetry stops being poetry pretty soon. It migrates from the particular to the universal too quickly to come down hard on the stuff of experience; it robs us of sensation and pays us back in the inflated currency of Concepts. Goldfarb is too hip, too conscious of what any reading audience wants, to bypass the senses. Maybe he appeals to them too often. We develop such faith in his experience -- such confidence in his brilliantly modulated rhetoric -- that we are willing to accept almost any statement as poetically valid, even passages where epigram takes the place of idiom, and ideology assumes the role of experience.

so here I am,

No less than man, plunged and tossed amid Gods

And Ideologies, trying to find

The place where the least people starve and the most

Are concerned for one another, where my son

Can grow up with a love of the useful

And the beautiful...

Somewhere he writes "I'm the politic man, the poetic man, something for everyone"; maybe he expects too much of the written word. There are, unfortunately, parts of the Goldfarb corpus that imply that saying anything is saying enough, and that no invasion of the senses, if done in the presence of a large number of people, can be ennervating.

Goldfarb composes in breath-length lines -- lines that carry their own immediate weight. Robert Grenier's lines deny that weight exists; they are pure activity. Quoting him is unfair without quoting entirely one of the six poems included -- all, I think, written since he left Cambridge for the Iowa Workshop, from whence he travels this fall to Europe on an Amy Lowell Fellowship -- blut space won't permit it. "For Donald Justice," perhaps the best, is infinitely deeper and wholly more ambitious than early Grenier poems, which tended to be terse conversational fragments of point-blank incorporations of the physical environment, piece by piece. It presents motion without the encumbrances of consecutive common-sense description, and uses syntax without bowing to it. "First Settlement and After" is a brilliantly integrated "topical" piece, just as cinematic as the other.

It is a little difficult to suggest what it is that Grenier has accomplished, just as it was once difficult to understand what he promised. In a way, he fulfills William Carlos Williams' example and Charles Olson's precept together (Projective Verse , 1959: "A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it, by way of the poem to, and all the way over to, the reader.... Form is never more than an extension of content.... One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further...."). But he is wholly sui generis; his present work seems to be of infinite potential.

Two poems of William Ferguson's don't do total justice to the man, but give an enticing taste of what will follow in the next issue, when BR will reprint a mass of his work. Ferguson combines a plastic imagination with an infallible ear; these poems show him condensed into a dense, luminous symbolic vocabulary -- a set of difficult hieroglyphs. After all, it takes more than devotion to know that "an ivory place, where needles thick as mirrors drank to excess" represents a hospital, or that "a foot with a thousand hands" is a pine-tree. His choice of quiet, basically formal structures for his poems should not cloud his insurrectionary style.

Such attention to three superb writers involves slighting others equally good, and at least officially more mature. Richard Tillinghast, irrespressibly bright and in full control of his medium, makes capital out of conversation; James Tate, the Yale Younger Poet of the year, is a sharp, radiant poet with access to striking language; Stephen Sandy's skill and precision need no accolades. Howard Nemerov, Elizabeth Jackson Barker, Thomas Redshaw and the magazine's co-editor Timothy Mayo contribute to a very solid straight flush of poets, with no jokers.

The prose, particularly the fiction, is disappointing. Gregory Dalton's "The Beard Lady," told in a kind of backdoor Joyce via Sebastian Dangerfield, has the feel of a lengthy anecdote with a flat punchline; Frederick Field's more successful story wears on into tedium, and is perplexingly structured.

Much can be forgiven a new magazine, and there is very little in the Boston Review that needs forgiving. Exposure to the rather shrill editorial introduction and the back cover ("The Boston Review is on the MOVE... Hasta la vista, sista) suggests that magazines should either say a great deal about themselves or very little; BR hasn't yet chosen between tendenz and taciturnity. When the magazine recovers from a slight touch of editorialisis, and develops a group of contributors that is distinctly its own, it will, in fact, be on the move. Hasta la vista, Charley. And Ferg, in particular.