Bright Essence

OF POETRY AND POWER, edited by Erwin A. Glikes and Paul Schwaber. 155 pages. Basic Books. $5.95.

A month before he was assassinated, President Kennedy took time out to comment on poetry at the dedication of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College: "When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses." The poets have now repaid the compliment. Not since Lincoln's assassination has an American's death inspired so much poetry, the best of which has been collected in this volume. Established poets--W. H. Auden, Richard Eberhart, John Berryman, among others--lent their usual talent; lesser-known poets rose to more than usual eloquence; and all expressed an admiration for J.F.K. that undoubtedly would have shocked him: Robert Hazel ("President I love as my grandfather loved Lincoln"); Ruth Yorck ("We may stop worrying./ Our best man died./ We know of no one now we can not spare"); John Tagliabue ("precise politician of such steadfast shaking Luminosity"); Edward Pols ("There, still, your bright incontinent essence/ Inclines to its own completion, still/ Shapes almost its own actuality, still contrives/ Some reason, measure, humor in our lives").

Most of these poems are restrained when compared with Walt Whitman's effusive When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd. Nor are they elegiac in the usual sense. In poetry as elsewhere, the sea of faith has receded, and poets no longer have recourse to the traditional symbols of comfort and deliverance. The poems are for the most part stoical, terse, plainspoken. But all of them bespeak a grief as great as any poetry of the past.

Some are simple tributes to a beloved figure, like the one by Barry Spacks: By this to remember, this spring again As we walk by the river, the tidal

Charles, And the golden dome of the Statehouse

glints In the sun, and the cars on Storrow

Drive Glitter, rushing chrome suns before

them:

A tangible world and the pride of life. The urban seagulls drift on the sky Like words upon silence; and needles of

light Striking the water, flash as they enter.

One dark November we lost a man Who was like this day.

Others comment sardonically on the senseless event, as in Frontier, by Josephine Miles:

Daniel Boone stepped up to a window (What! a window?) with his trusty rifle, And he shot his bear . . . It was a millionaire, A Harvard, London and a South Sea

bear

A French, a football bear . . . Daddied and deared and dared, Indomitable bear . . . Daniel is angry That after the eighth grade This bear should travel So far ahead. Unfair That a bear

Should rock so big a chair. So gets him, and as he is got Shows him Shows us

It takes no complicated bomb or plot To win again us back to wilderness, But just one pot-pure, individual shot.

A few of the poems, like the one by "Beat" Poet Gregory Corso, are full of fury and disgust:

Aye you are punk killers not assassins! Ah the Disney dinosaur's light laughter

& a little blonde girl's tears What sad which sick what damned juxtaposition!

monster and child, punk and

President society and poet, bullets and

flesh.

Bullets the size of Coney Island fishing

worms

can obliterate blix pow-out the whole shebang . . .

Most of the poets try to salvage some meaning from the assassination. W. H. Auden's quiet meditation has been set to music by Stravinsky and will have us U.S. premiere in New York on Dec. 6: Why then? Why there? Why thus, we cry, did he die? The Heavens are silent. What he was, he was: What he is fated to become Depends on us. Remembering his death, How we choose to live Will decide its meaning. When a just man dies, Lamentation and praise, Sorrow and joy are one.

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