Boston Review Books

Islam and the Challenge of Democracy
by Khaled Abou El Fadl
(Princeton University Press)

JamesLongenbach

Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963–2003
Richard Howard
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30 (cloth)

Paper Trail: Selected Prose, 1965–2003
Richard Howard
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27 (cloth)

8 Once upon a time, in the middle of a large, flat country that nobody wanted to visit, a foundling boy was adopted by a family of considerable means. The house in which he opened his eyes was magical—a library with coffered ceilings, leather-bound sets of Sand and Kipling lining the shelves. By the age of five he was speaking French, having been instructed by a distant cousin in the back seat of grandmother’s LaSalle. Columbia College, Paris, graduate study forsworn for the company of Roland Barthes, Nathalie Sarraute, Jean Genet—it is a tale worth telling, except that its protagonist has spent most of his life not telling it.

Or has he? By the age of 40 RichardHoward had won the Pulitzer Prize for his third book of poems,Untitled Subjects, published simultaneously with what remains themost elaborate account of his contemporaries, Alone with America:both the essays and the poems are devoted to other people. Now, 35years later, Howard has birthed a second set of twins—matchingvolumes of selected poems and prose that encapsulate his entirecareer. Some of the poems and essays afford glimpses into the lifebehind the work; Howard has nothing to hide. But even while theessays range from Emily Dickinson to Robert Mapplethorpe to ClaudeSimon, they constitute an intimate autobiography. Howard’srelentless capacity for otherness—other centuries, other books,other voices, other writers, other people—is at all times driven bythe wish to discover himself.

Emily Dickinson produced “the most relentless epic of identity in our literature,” says Howard in the opening essay of Paper Trail. “Compared to her, Whitman is an epigrammatist.” This remark plays off Dickinson’s well-known obliquity; applied to Howard, it invites the question of his preference for dramatic utterance, the performance of the dramatic monologue rather than the intimacies of the lyric. But no monologue by Richard Howard succeeds by virtue of ventriloquism; his poems never actually sound like, for example, Mrs. William Morris:

                                                         Will you
     do as I say, save it all—
the rest of the things are mere images,
not medieval—only middle-aged:
lifelike but lifeless, wonderful but dead.

These poems sound exactly like Richard Howard—notso much because of what they’re saying but because the saying isenacted by the movement of the sentence, a great looping, spiralingboa draped upon the thorns of pronomination.

I’ve stolenthat metaphor. Howard offers it to describe not his own sentences butthose of Henry James, whose influence on American poets (Bishop,Hecht, Hollander, Merrill) he documents in the third essay of PaperTrail. Listen to one of Howard’s sentences:

If notactually upbraided in the matter of what so many of the besieging newpoets like to call experimental form, the poetry editor (of, say, agilt-edged, bon bourgeois, blue-chip magazine like The Paris Review)is pretty often laced into—I have seen it said, in a distinctlyanti-bourgeois periodical, in Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts, infact, that only iambic pentameter was acceptable to the editor of TheParis Review—so that it is with regard to a stance, or at least aleaning, toward the experimental that I would extend my foregoing“submissive” gloss on that dialogue between two interlocutors whonever speak, their pre-text being, quite literally, on the one handthe poems submitted in all their thousands, and their text—theirpost-text, really—being the poems eventually printed on theother.

This sentence makes syntax feel like a plot: itforces you, through manifold strategies of qualification and delay,to become obsessed with the act of discovery. Reduced to its simplestform, the first half of the sentence would say the poetry editor isoften criticized. But all the allure is in the saying—the onslaughtof alliteration (“upbraided,” “besieging”), the punchyrepetition of heavily stressed syllables (“gilt-edged,”“blue-chip”), the sudden infiltration of a string of mostlyunstressed syllables into this strategically thickened texture(“that only iambic pentameter was acceptable”), the opening ofthe figurative to the physical (“a stance, or at least aleaning”), and a sense, encouraged by all these strategies, thatevery word comes shrouded in a history of usages in which we mustrevel. To read this sentence is to watch a parade, and it can bedifficult to get information from parades. What does Howard want thesaying of this sentence to say?

The sentence says one thing,and it reveals another. Howard is writing about the complexity ofediting The Paris Review in a time when the definitive standards ofwriting verse (as opposed to poetry) are in a state of what seems tohim decline. But even if Howard says that he wants to return poetryto “a certain discipline, a certain strictness, VERSE,” the veryartistry of his sentence reveals his devotion to darker, morechallenging truth: the poet’s tool kit must inevitably be too heavyfor any one poet to lift. Countering the claim that translating LesFleurs du Mal without replicating Baudelaire’s rhymes might be akinto stretching a tightrope across the floor, Howard says that he has“investigated other tactics for keeping the poemsuspended.”

The investigation of other tactics is a euphemism forthe act of writing poems. If rhyme is jettisoned, what tactic mustflex its muscles in order to keep the poetic contraption in the air?Meter. And if meter is forsworn? Line. And if line is abandoned?Syntax. Are great poems employing all these mechanisms being written?Are great poems employing only one of them being written?Certainly—though usually not by poets who congratulate themselvessimply for writing in one way rather than another. Sometimes it willbe necessary for a poet to remember every tool in the kit; at othertimes it will be equally crucial to forget them, though nothing canbe forgotten if it has not first been remembered. A declaredintolerance for what goes by the name of traditional or experimentalpoetry is too often a euphemism for I have no ear.

“WhateverModernism may be,” says Howard, “we know this much about it, thatits modes and mechanisms are those of fragmentation, dissociation,erasure, and opposition.” The boy who grew up in the middle of thelarge, flat country seems not so much opposed to these mechanisms asunbeguiled by their allure: why would anyone embrace an aestheticthat encourages us to reject accumulated knowledge, to leave behind,to sunder, to break, to forget? Howard’s entire project is one ofrecovery, the exquisitely American need to create what Van WyckBrooks called so many years ago a usable past. Recent poems such as“The Masters on the Movies” are devoted to American culture assuch, but like Henry James, Howard reveals his American roots moststrongly when he travels most extravagantly. The very expanse of hissentences, their twist and torque, is an American dream ofplenitude.

Convention, for Howard, is no restraint but the cloud ofglory trailed by every word, every turn of syntax. No single poetcould dispel those clouds even if he wanted to: they are the placewhere we live, our only source of abiding freedom.

Listen tosix sentences by Richard Howard, these ones set inlines:

   Curious symptoms withal
   for migraine:patterns moving
       over surfaces, faint
       most often, finedesigns
  that would come as a kind ofcobweb
cast iridescent upon others, anet
  intervening between me and them.
Lord! thethings one sees when a fever-lit mind
       grants no middledistance.
       Prolixity of the real!
  And just when we aregrateful
  for the dark, when night resumes us,
comesprolixity
of what is unreal,
       the melting waxworks of oursleep
       called dreams. I am against dreams,
         not being oneto trust
         memory to itself.
  In my delirium, then, Ihad
conviction of divided identity,
  neverceasing to be two persons who
ever thwarted and opposedone another.

By what “other tactics” has Howard keptthis contraption airborne? The poem does not rhyme in theconventional way (at the ends of lines), and neither is the length ofthe lines determined by any metrical pattern. Instead, the turns andreturns of syntax are draped across an intricate syllabic pattern: apair of seven-syllable lines, then a pair of six-syllable lines, thena quatrain of alternating nine- and 11-syllable lines . ..

You can count the rest yourself, though what matters isnot so much the count as the tension between the syntax and thepoints of terminus created by the count. That tension is called line,and the aural pleasure we take in this performance is due to the wayline marshals the language into patterns of alliteration (“wouldcome as a kind of cobweb”) or assonance (“cast iridescent uponothers, a net”) that don’t necessarily have anything to do withthe parameters of syntax. On the rare occasions when syllable countand syntax match (“Prolixity of the real!”), we feel thethrilling absence of the endless spill of enjambment that otherwisethrills us because of the way it determines intonation and stress.Were the line merely “cast iridescent upon others,” there wouldbe no tension, no rising of the voice toward the terminal syllable“net,” which pushes us forward to the next line but also tugs usback to the sound of “cast” and “-scent.” Without thattension, there would be no line, only a string of syllables.

I’vequoted this passage from “November, 1889,” a monologue in thevoice of the greatest practitioner of the monologue, Robert Browning.Howard’s Browning describes the world as it appears throughsickness, but he also describes the poem in which he speaks: it is anet, a design, a moving pattern through which the world is perceived.And if Browning initially thinks that the mind might be cured, heeventually sees that anything we know—the past, each other,ourselves—we apprehend through “a net that covers the world.”Howard has known this all along, of course, for it is his greattheme. We would not want immediate access, purity, singleness, evenif we could find it. We exist because we are, in sickness and inhealth, in dramatic monologue or in lyric, “twopersons.”

“November, 1889” is reprinted among thepoems of Untitled Subjects, but it was originally published in alater volume, as were several other poems now sitting comfortably inthat sequence of monologues and apostrophes to the great Victorians.Inner Voices represents not just a winnowing but a reconfiguration ofHoward’s career: although the selection seems to proceedchronologically, poems from Like Most Revelations (1994) and TalkingCures (2002) are tucked back into the Pulitzer Prize–winning volumeof 1969.

More than suggesting the continuity of Howard’scareer, this rearrangement crystallizes the transformation that hastaken place in its last decade. For while he has continued to writethe elaborate Victorian monologues for which he is known best, Howardhas also been writing other kinds of poems. These poems do not sounddifferent, though they tend to be less theatrical, more liable toforeground the intimacy tucked more surreptitiously into earlierpoems. Nor are they less involved with the quest for a usable past, aquest that consoles us only inasmuch as it also condemns us. Here arethe final lines of “The Job Interview,” in which Howard createshis own past: the young American poet negotiating André Breton’s“legendary loathing of queers” in order to secure thesurrealist’s permission to translate Nadja:

of course Iknew in my heart that the one
                surrealistact

—O coward heart! would be to challengethis
champion of liberation, this foe of all
society’sconstraints, but I could do
                nothing ofthekind,

nor need I have. O reason not theneed:
I left the Master of the Same New Things
with every warrantof his trust in me
                as histranslator

(Traditorre—tradutore! infact,
if not in French), and forty years have passed
since thattraduced encounter. Where are we?
                Nadja inEnglish

is still in print, and people stillhate queers.
I allay that heart of mine with the words
Bretonwrote to Simone, first of his wives
                (and a Jew likeme):

criticism will be love, or will notbe.

This poem also sounds exactly like Richard Howard,though the impression has little to do with autobiography. Howard’ssyllabic procedures determine the shape of these stanzas, and theshock of the final line is due to the way in which itswisdom—borrowed from a source the poem also abjures—completes thepattern, syntax, and syllable count colliding to make a line thatfeels spoken by a voice beyond the poem, beyond the grave. Along withother recent poems (remembered encounters with Lee Krasner, JamesMerrill, Alice Neel, Muriel Rukeyser, Mona Van Duyn), “The JobInterview” suggests that we can only be remembered inasmuch as weare forgotten, that we can forgive ourselves only by recognizing thevalue of what cannot be forgiven. Reading these poems does not feelmuch like reading other contemporary poets; it feels like readingHenry James or Marianne Moore—uncompromising stylists who aretherefore our most unflinching, most heartbreakingmoralists.

Like James and Moore, like Dickinson, Howard is an American original. Like theirs, his language is closest to home when it is most arcane. Like them, he makes the world in which he walks. Paper Trail is something much larger than an argument about the shape of American poetry, and Inner Voices is something less than the record of 40 years of devotion to the art. “Once upon a time,” says Howard, “there was only time.” His poems are happening now. <

James Longenbach's most recent books are Fleet River and The Resistance to Poetry. He teaches at the University of Rochester.

Originally published in the December 2004/January 2005 issue of Boston Review