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.