[New-Poetry] Not For Grammarians

[TheOldMole]

Here's one of our elder statesmen, probably not considered often enough these days, and he fits right into our grammar discussion. Brad Leithauser, in the NY Times, on W. D. Snodgrass.


NOT FOR SPECIALISTS 
New and Selected Poems. 
By W. D. Snodgrass. 

251 pp. BOA Editions. Paper, $21.95. 

W. D. SNODGRASS’S sharply titled first book of poems, “Heart’s Needle,” drew blood. Its controlled, intricate stanzas spoke of loss and dislocation with irresistible urgency. The book appeared in 1959, the year its author turned 33, and it won him a Pulitzer Prize. It caused a great stir among poets of a slightly older generation (Lowell, Jarrell, Bishop), as their letters demonstrate, and was a key book for a subsequent generation of aspiring poets, as my memories of creative writing classes taken in the 70’s attest. My hardcover copy, in its blood-red dustjacket, was printed some 20 years after the book’s initial appearance. It’s a 17th printing. 

“Heart’s Needle” was followed by another book of controlled and intricate stanzas, “After Experience,” which was, if perhaps not quite so arresting, more richly varied. And what did Snodgrass do after “After”? He effectively went underground for many years — under concrete. He wrote “The Fuehrer Bunker,” a sequence of verse monologues chronicling the final days of the Nazi central command in their bomb shelter — as grim and grotesquely unrepentant an environment as can be imagined. The various books that followed, often published by small presses and often in collaboration with the painter DeLoss McGraw, were notable for their hymns to the natural world. In sum, a curious career.
And a marvelous one, as “Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems” reminds us. Snodgrass published an earlier selected poems nearly 20 years ago, but this fuller edition, coinciding with his 80th birthday, clarifies as never before the range of his accomplishment.

Snodgrass — it must be said — can be a frustrating poet. Like Marianne Moore, like W. H. Auden, he is an erratic punctuator, creating a level of uncertainty only exacerbated by the slew of typos in “Not for Specialists.” It’s one thing to ask about a poet, What does he mean by this? It’s another to have to inquire, Does he mean what he actually says? 

His penchant for sentence fragments (no other major poet of our time relies so heavily on them) can also be off-putting. At times, the result is wonderfully dramatic — as of a door closing abruptly in the faces of readers more nosily inquisitive than they should be. But where a reader goes struggling through dense syntax in search of a verb and meets in its place a mere period, the effect can be deflating. Even so, all such qualifications happily dissolve before Snodgrass’s finest work — poems like “April Inventory,” “A Friend,” “Viewing the Body” or the “Heart’s Needle” sequence, which belongs, with Yeats’s “Prayer for My Daughter” and Frost’s “Master Speed,” among the 20th century’s most touching poetic meditations on father-daughter dealings.
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