The Advocate

AFTER years of printing nothing or nothing but the juvenalia of great poets and the margenalia second-water ones, the Advocate has this year turned its attention back to the local community and our generation. So even if one refused to acknowledge any other virtue in the present issue, its editors would still have to be praised for continuing this happy policy of relying on undergraduate contributors. Nor, in fact, is the issue without other merits, notably a poem by Rachel Hadas and a short story by Alice E. Dorcas (the pseudonym for a sophomore in Lowell House).

Too many of the pieces, though, are simply mediocre, and mediocre in the same ways. For besides the nominal unity conferred on an anthology by covers and critics; the material in the Advocate manifests a troubling coherence. Many of the pieces are acts of prudence. In the best of them this becomes a systematic, if not willful, deference to modernity in choice of theme, form and language. In the worst it appears as the author's profound unwillingness to make himself responsible for his work. These failings, moreover, seem to be endemic to the Advocate. An issue of the Lion Rampart, also published this week, was bolder on every level.

The pattern of irresponsibility is presented with metaphoric clarity in "Hot Dog," the first of three prose poems by Molly Jones:

Sand, sea and sky are an essay in greys, the water blackest. Syllables flow from our throats, ours and mine, but I am shamed by the distant hot dog man whose trousers reach almost to the armpits. He has no chest or stomach, in fact, no body.

"Come to the Point."

The language is wretched but was it meant to be? Whatever we decide Miss Jones has the best of it. Her self-deflation, ponderous and abetted by a bit of typological cuteness, is nonetheless successful, and we are left to wonder whether it was diction or sexuality or both which fretted her. such antics, like self-criticism in general or romanticism in general lead only to an adolescent recognition of self--which is the beginning not the end of investigations.

Prudence can achieve its ends in a less dogmatic fashion by treating the creative act as a purely intellectual one, an exercise in homeopathism in which noxious vapors are conducted into the chambers of the healthy to produce in them in mild form the symptom of disease. Poetry becomes not the hallucinations of passions or wishes but the hallucination of having wishes or passions. The most awful themes can thus be considered with a grotesque and unfaltering sincerity. Observe Elise N. Rosenhaupt on the hobby-horse of the mind-body duality:

Wax doll, outside of it

Must pull back, don't react.

I a doll, made of wax

--people paper, celuloid--

I am wax and humanoid.

Doll, I am alive in paper

Laugh when others laugh, then freeze

Move outside and see them squeeze

against each other and react.

Wax doll tries to act

among the paper celluloid.

Doll, I can no more than watch

the others moving; I am wax

and pull back, can't react.

So genial, so temperate, the puppet-dance of "humanoid" and "celluloid" but never the anarchy of unmeaning ragged syllables. Is it unfair to ask for a little brain spread on the table?

Then there is the artifice of diffusion, that lively apologist for lives as well as works. Peggy Rizzo, who is quite talented, still managers to leave her "Three Studies from the Bridge" in a confusion, fine passages ("rain loosening from the leaves," "thoughts neved and birthed in the flesh of words") tumble together with passages buoyed by neither wisdom nor sound (I moved to dreams unpeopled, but birded"). There exists then no poem but only favored portions; there is no totality to like or dislike, certainly none to analyze. Something is perversely appealing about this nonchalance, for too often here writers or directors claim integrity for works which have none, thereby forcing an appraisal which assumes precisely what they are trying to achieve and is inaccurate or confused to the extent that the assumption is. Still, to beg of the responsibility of proper formulations is to foreswear the possibility of creating more than suggestive phrases.

That the elements of a decent poem are so construed that they take meaning only in relation to the totality, indeed that the progressing of a poem can make unnecessary and even harmful the coagulation of inspiration, is proved, if it needed proving, by Rachel Hadas' exposition of a paradox in "Lucretius Widow Thinks Aloud." Miss Hadas adopts the epistemological methods of the rationalism she explodes and argues her case in spare language simply arranged:

You only wanted to get rid of fear

Put fear behind you and the sky is open,

you said, and fear was finally fear of itself

shattered and put together cleverly

with only love left out.

So the argument proceeds, convincing the ear before the meaning is fully catalogued. If it is not a great poem it is at least an interesting and superbly controlled one.

Like Miss Hadas' poem Dorcas' story is uncluttered with glosses to Lowell and Eliot and the assorted deities of last year's tutorial. This is probably so because, to judge from the numerous references to anthropology, the author concentrates in Folk Mythology.

There is no room here to give a sense of the story's wonderful place nor to indicate some of the marvelous flashes of originality. An entire epoch of a fascinating life has been dumped onto paper. It is blessing to find someone admit to love of good wood, to talk about concerts and buses after the dedicated artistry which burdens even the good material in the Advocate. Why, the price of admission would be well spent if it bought you nothing but an introduction to Mr. Dorcas' mind, whoever's mother's son he might be.