POETS

Alumni compose a vivid crross-section of Contemp orary American literature.

Fred Carlson

THE BEST of today's poets are capable of transporting, bewildering, stunning, and seducing their reader, all within the passage of few lines. Poems deliver more emotional drama, kinetic force, and linguistic invention per cubic inch than any other form of writing. The group of poets presented here, who happened to be students at Dartmouth at one time or another, cannot be thought of as a literary school, given their countless stylistic and temperamental differences. Still, this diversity is significant in itself, offering a revealing cross-section of late twentieth-century American poetry.

How much credit can Dartmouth claim for these poets? I remember a class in which Richard Eberhart '26 lamented that in decades of teaching he hadn't "produced a single: major poet." Maybe that misses the point slightly. Dartmouth's teachers never produced the fine poets considered below: indeed, as Whitman proclaimed, a young artist must "kill" his or her teacher, if symbolically, in order to flourish. But fey their example and unflinching love of the art, they helped keep literature alive and fostered conditions conducive to a few of their students choosing the difficult vocation of poet.

Visualist

Carl Little '76

Often he jumps from bed at two a.m.,crashes to the desk, the shade less lathy,shouting of his dream, interruptingmine. I watch over his shouldera poem appea another lie about me.

from "The Poet's Wife Complains"

In 1992, Carl Little published 3,000Dreams Explained with Nightshade Press (P.O. Box 76, Troy, Maine 04987) Little is better known as an art critic. than poet, yet these poems handily sidestep the expository obligations of prose. While intensely heady, they're also.very funny in a dour, persisting way. Little makes great use of fragmented visual detail, and his stanzas are so distinctly paced and placed that each poem is a mosaic of juxtaposed insights.

Mesmerist

Nora Mitchell '78

There are rings in our bodies,the stretches of what was:the durationswe outwaited or outgrew.At the center I reachfor the dark spot.

from "Pure Dawn"

Mitchell has published one book of poems, Your Skin is a Country (Alice James Books, 1988), with another due later this year. Mitchell's poems have an uncanny quietness. She gracefully wraps sentences around the staves of her line breaks, and her visual settings are subtle, as the narrator's voice dissolves almost to transparency in its phrasing. The effect is mesmerizing. Mitchell also designed and illustrated the striking cover of her book.

Diarist

Victoria Redel '80

Ninth Month

Already you are moving down.Already your floating headengaged in the inletfrom where you will Head out.Already the world, the world.And you art slippingdown, away from my heart.

Forked Animist

William Bronk '38

I Am

Sense in the world what was the world beforethe creation of the world. Not the world but the world'sintention is the true world. We feel it here:the uncreated still. The rest will go.

For decades the books by William Bronk were available only as magnificent but hard-to-find limited editions, until North Point published the magisterial and comprehensive Life Supports: New dl Collected Poems, which justifiably won the American Book Award in 1982. Now with the demise of North Point, and no doubt with the best of intentions, New Directions has issued a Selected Poems (1995) to ensure that readers can at least find some representation of Bronk's work in print. The book is intelligently and carefully edited, but those who know the larger body of work will miss poems constantly., and suffer their absence. Bronk's is the most astringent voice in American poetry-at once oracular and skeletal, as if this were Lear's "unaccommodated man...a poor, bare, forked animal" speaking to us from the abyss. Again and again, he has achieved the impossible: to marry the syntactical elegance of a Wallace Stevens with a subzero philosophical starkness akin to Beckett's. Sample the poet's new Selected, then seek out the earlier books in libraries and used-bookshops.

Redel is the newest Dartmouth arrival on the national poetry scene. Her"book, Already the World", was the inaugural volume in Kent State university Press's Wick series. Redel's first book of fiction was also published in. 1995, by Knopf, under the title Where theRoad' Bottoms Qut. Her poems combine the seemingly spontaneous riffing of a scat singer with deftly shaped narrative. The subject is often the hard, rough relations of love and family, including the violent feelings that buffet a new parent.

Nature's Exegetist

Henry Hart 76

Mowing carelessly, I gutted one. His cherub flesh

left no blood on grass. Gentle gestures, suave steps,left no trace. Quietly I raked his shredsover, rose roots where water could right themup stalks on rainy days, so grayhaired womencould snip them, grandchildren pluck them:those bloodred ghosts, those mouths fried open.

from "The Red Eft"

The first book of poems from Hart, who is also earning a reputation as a critic, is The Ghost Ship (Blue Moon Books, 1990). Hart's poems are more conventional than Carl Little's, but his descriptions of the natural world are uncommonly vivid. As with many first books, the influences to which this poet has been apprenticing are slightly too audible, though in Hart's case, since his mentors are fine, stern ones Hopkins, especially, and the present-day Anglo-Irish triumvirate: Hughes, Hill, and Heaney he has been well served. A poem such as the unforgettable "The Red Eft" will give readers some indication of what may happen to this poet's work as he extricates his voice from the magnetic field of his models

Metamorphicist

Louise Erdrich '76

According to God, your place is low,

under Adam's heel, but as for me,a woman shaped from a secondary hone,who cares if you wrap my shoulders? Who cares if you whisper? Who caresif the fruit is luscious Your placeis at my ear.

from "Hydra"

Erdrich is one of this country's most admired fiction writers and essayists. Dartmouth classmates may also recall her extraordinary undergraduate poems. Her second book of poetry, Baptism of Desire (Harper Perennial, 1989), extends and transmutes her previous work. Erdrich has a metaphorical capacity like few others. Her poems encapsulate or reenact all the drastic transformations that yield conception, growth, and demise, as one skin after another takes shape and then splits open, giving way to more shapes. Erdrich's voice is as pliant and ferocious as that of Sylvia Plath—a sane, regenerative Plath and she is as eloquent a comic as her peregrine trickster Potchikoo, a character in one of this book's marvelous linked sequences.

Wind Instrumentalist

David Graham 75

Yet it is song, song fadingand swelling with these back roads,that keeps rite awake tonight,that sweeps like my headlightsover the trembling clotheslinesand moonstruck farm ponds,wedging a delicate arc into the past.

from "Planxty Beatles"

Chaoticist

Richard Kenney '70

Suspense is what mails this pyrotechnictale, I think: we wait, we watch the deckswarp up, the sailors wet and wet again the kerchiefs.clenched against their breath like hot red gills and the reefsof floating pumice bobbing in the slow simmerof the harbor, the ship itself a brown sphinx mothperched on a roaring lantern's rimfrom

"The Encantadas"

Kenney, whose third book is The Invention of the Zero (Knopf, 1993; paperback,1995), has been fashioning an unforeseen path from the past to the future. Kenney's Invention is a gorgeous, if arduous, book, almost overwhelming in its fusion of jubilation arid menace. His subject is huge: the technological precipice society careens toward. Kenney has found a way to enact chaos with everyday words. He mines and milks every imaginable variety of discourse, jargon, terminology, and vocabulary; the book is an inseparable series of typographical and conceptual gestures, circular riddling, and vatic puns. While others write ballads and impromptus, Kenney's books are symphonic in their breadth and sustained impact.

The third full-length collection by Graham is Second Wind (Texas Tech University Press, 1990), recipient of an award from the national Associated Writing Program. Graham has been invited to spend this coming summer as resident in the Frost Place, Robert Frost's homestead in Franconia, New. Hampshire one of this country's most prestigious 'fellow ships. Second Wind is a book filled with vitality: mental energy and physicality are melded by means of shrewd sculptural maneuvers. I would love to their sonorities are manifold on the page.

Puppeteer

William Carpenter '62

The Hooting Instructor

There's no room for idealists on the tree of life.They mutate until their wingtips become handsand every feathery claw becomes a shoe.Little by little the mathematician learns to talkfrom pupils screeching at him in their native tongue.The summit of all this evolution is a paradigmthat makes us a little anxious, because, ifwe wish to proceed beyond it, we have to leap.

Another third-book poet is William Carpenter, whose SpeakingFire at Stones (Tilbury House, 1992) is a suite of fantastic, wry poems, each one paired with an equally fantastic drawing by Robert Shetterly. Carpenter is like a puppeteer with dozens of voices and guises, shifting tones as a performer changes costumes. Like Redel and Erdrich, Carpenter has published fiction as well the highly commended novel A Keeper of Sheep (Milkweed, 1994), which is partly set on the Dartmouth campus.

Synapsist

Robert Pack '51

some synapse-leafing current stirs the windand whistles it alongeven before the candle's flame upon the spoonlifts to our lips, even beforethe window frosts more stillness from the moon.

from "Still Passing"

lows 11 previous volumes of poems and numerous other books of criticism, transgardedsuperficially would seem old-fashioned beside the work of an abstract expressionist such as Kenney But Pack, like Kenney, is fascinated by the metaphysical Matures between poetry and science. Pack's poems are expansive in their stories, even jocular in tone but tightly controlled in their measures The reader can hear the resulting tension in an ongoing conversation between mind and body Like few of his contemporaries, Pack succeeds in building a cadenced blank verse reminiscent of the soft-spoken grandeur of WordsWorth.

Improvisationalist

Philip Booth '47

He's Half

He's half beside himself.Wanting. Dreading. But hemust love his misery:he's stayed outside halfhis life already, keepingwatch on his inside self,who keeps saying he's dyingto set himself free.

Ten years ago the collected work of Philip Booth appeared in a splendid retrospective, Relations: Selected Poems 1950-1985 (Penguin, 1986), much of which is drawn out of the details of an isolated community on the Maine seacoast. Since then he has published two books, Selves (Penguin, 1990) and Pairs (Penguin, 1994). Booth has a virtuoso improviser's ear. His poems are set to be read aloud, like scores for exceedingly engaging talk—not talk that or meanders but the chiseled structures at the core of conversations that take place unceasingly in our heads, waking or dreaming. Booth's phrasing is concisely tempoed, with just two or three beats per line, giving his voice a tough, lean, abruptly candid air. Booth has also been assiduous in documenting, without nostalgia, the actual conditions of aging as he experiences them. There is no refuge in these poems, but there is humor, astonishing vigor, and an insatiable love of life and friendship.

Certaintist

Richard Eberbirt '26

If I could only, live at the pitch that is mar madnessWhen everything is as it was in my childhoodViolent, vivid, and of infinite possibility:That the sun and the moon broke over my head.

from "If I Could Only Live at the Pitch That is Neat Madness"

Eberhart must be part of any conversation about Dartmouth Poets. The longtime poet-in-residence at Dartmouth has won nearly every one of this nation's highest distinctions for literature, including the Pulitzer Prize and.National Book Award. Now in his nineties, Eberhart has outlived all off hispeers save Stanley Kunitz. Included among Eberhart's colleagues and contemporaries are all of the poets of this century: Yeats, Eliot,;Stevens,-Williams, Lowell, down to the students who studied with him at Dartmouth in his last.decade of teaching. Eberhart's poetic mannerisms are no longer in .style; he favors a declarative abstraction in which Spirit and .Beauty are lauded as universal. In the era of Srebenice. today's readers may find it difficult to raster such certainty. Eberhart is also dauntingly prolific, as demonstrated massive Collected Poems, 19301986(Oxford, 1987). Selectivity and discernment have been the aims of editor Jay Parini in compiling for Eberhart a New and Selected Poems (Blue Moon Books, 1990). This newer collection features Eberhardt's greatest hits as well as more recent poems.

Archangler

Evan S. Connell Jr. '45

In the sand we have come upon two fragments of rotted woodon which there are traces of what may once have beenwhite faint, turned aureate by the sun. My brother thinksthese were sticks lashed together to fashion a cross;but I have told him they signify nothing, and our dayis quickly over.

from "Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel"

Thanks primarily to the success of cinematic adaptations of his novels Sonof the Morning Star and Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, Evan Connell has made his name in mass-market publishing, a dominion almost never approached by poets. Connell's popularity is especially ironic or appropriate given the staunch independence of this writer's writer. For decades he has crafted intricate, supple, brilliantly architected novels, short stories, and essays. Connell has also written two of the strangest and most indispensable volumes of poems ever published in this country, Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel (Viking, 1962; North Point, 1984) and Points for a Compass Rose (Knopf, 1973; North Point, 1985). Composed of hundreds of epigrams, aphorisms, notations, and annotations, and written as if from the vantage point of every conceivable moment in our history, these books read like field guides to human culture recorded by archangels who apprehended each insight ever spoken, written, or thought.

JIM SCHLEY is editor in chief of Chelsea Company.