Dog Days for Younger Poets

The Harvard Advocate, Winter Issue [Vol. CVI. Number 4.] Available today at the Advocate building and in the House offices.

THE AMOUNT OF ADVICE given to poets in the latest Advocate should give you the feeling (if you don't already have it) that these are dog-days for poets everywhere. It may be indicative of the times that Allen Ginsberg gets top billing at the Quincy House Arts Festival and Rod McKuen can actually be paid (by the editors of Saturday Review) to ask with owl seriousness whether Mao Tse-Tung is really a poet. But the lapses of an uncritical audience aren't the same as the problems of young poets because (as the writers about poetry in the Advocate keep suggesting) young poets don't seem to know what to do with themselves or how they would go about it if they did.

David Perkins's short memorial essay on Ezra Pound as the instructor of a great generation of writers now dead is an appreciation and not (though it could be) an invidious comparison between Pound's time and ours; but there is a point to his repeating Pound's advice: to remember the old virtues of economy, force and precision; not to be afraid to make readers think; to remember that poetry should be at least as well-written as prose. And Marc Leib's review of a posthumous collection of Sylvia Plath's play and poems has some points to make about what's wrong with the tendencies of contemporary poetry-writers. He complains about the endless, pointless description that bad writers insist on producing and after clearing Plath of the usually valid suspicions brought to confessional poetry, Leib makes a hopeful statement about the pointlessness of making apologies for poetry when "the art awaits." But he obviously isn't too happy about what poets are writing, and neither is Richard Dey. In the issue Dey has five poems (the best an elegy for Pound that redeems Pound's memory very satisfyingly against the odds of his political faults) and a manifesto for poets. Titled "On the spot" to echo Pound's "Date Line" of the thirties, the manifesto begins like this:

"Come, Makers. Be makers of our own Age. Be obstreperous." It goes on, in a kind of heroic nautical language of personified abstractions ("Mediocrity," "Presence," "Vision,") to call poets passionately to action as artists and leaders of the age. Dey's analysis is that too many poets are bored, sloppy, uncommitted, dispassionate about their work, and unconscious of the role they might be playing in society as artists; his desperate advice is to re-establish old values:

"Resist...Resist the insurance of professorships ... Perform ... be tough ... Move beyond urban anxiety to the next era, our era ... Now is the time for art to lead man." If there are times when poetic manifestos are needed, this is one of them, and Dey has made himself a man of the moment. But I really don't know whether poets will sift out Dey's commitment from the quirks of his style. As manifestos should be, "On the Spot" is daring and cranky; depending on how you look at it, though, its manner can be so self-consciously elevated that its poetic-prose works against the real interests of the statement.

ALMOST HALF THE contributors to this Advocate are Harvard students, and a few more are recent graduates-a healthy change for the magazine, and one that makes the issue a more than usually valid one for seeing what student writers are and aren't accomplishing. Dwight C. Barnaby's first chapter from a forthcoming novel (Durftenfaust) is too short to demonstrate more than a snatch of potential, but Alice Van Buren's "Twelve O'clock" (another first chapter) does more. It begins the memoirs of a self-pitying, broken-down, and impotent young Bohemian painter who's retreated so far from the world that he has absolutely no one to talk to-an unlikeable schlemihl, except for his occasional self-denigrating humor. The problem Van Buren gives him is a variation on a dusty science fiction device-he finds he can stop time at will for everyone in the world but himself. As far as the chapter goes, the time-fix is more a pivot for the neuroses of a neatly conceived anti-hero than any kind of crucial element itself, and the combination works well in an unpretentious way-well-enough that it seems too bad you can't start reading the second chapter when this one ends.

This Advocate is a fairly slender magazine, but most of the pages are filled with writing, not graphics; almost all the poems and stories inside are more serious and more polished than the usual run of student literature. The soft-spots of the collection are mostly in various short poems; as it turns out, most of them help prove what Dey's manifesto says about journeymen-poets: that they get bogged down in simply mastering details of techniques, that they must be more than occasional poets to catch the eye of an audience, that they have to resist the temptation of formalizing trivial sensations and impressions, and that, somehow, they have to find subjects - or invent them - that are strong enough to match the potential of verse.