Poet of Manhattan
New and selected Poems
By Kenneth Fearing
Indiana University Press. 143 pp. $3.95.
It is one of the peculiarities and, probably, weaknesses of modern American verse that so little of it is concerned in any significant way with New York life and that not one of its outstanding figures can be readily identified as a New York poet. This phenomenon is even more striking when one remembers that the changes in poetic practice instituted by Pound, Eliot, and their American successors had as a major objective the assimilation into English of the accomplishments of French verse from Baudelaire onwards. For much of the best poetry of the French school derives its strength from its profoundly serious, discriminating approach to metropolitan life—an approach which actually has little in common with Eliot’s literary disenchantment with the modern world or Crane’s imagistic use of the industrial scene or even Cummings’s lyric “studies in decrepit life.”
It has been Mr. Fearing’s fortune to have been almost alone (at least among poets of any prominence) in having some tincture of this attitude, however diluted, filter down into his verse. He has, for a number of years, had the language, the mores, the quotidian life of Manhattan almost all to himself, a vast terrain of unparalleled possibility, the very novelty and reach of which have probably deterred our more perceptive artists. Indeed the discrepancy between the magnitude of the subject matter and the resources at Fearing’s command are apparent constantly, in the style of his poetry as a whole, the attitudes that control it, and the quality of the individual poems. The dynamic force generated by the encounter of the poetic sensibility with metropolitan life is attenuated at the very outset by a socio-political ideology that slows down the imagination at every turn and itself inspires nothing but the vague rhetoric of such “revolutionary” verse of the 30’s as: “Sky be blue and more than blue; wind be flesh and blood; flesh and blood be deathless.” For Mr. Fearing is really hardly less hostile to contemporary actuality than the traditionalists, he merely arrives at it from a different direction. At least in his early work, he is, so to speak, a traditionalist of the future, a projected future which is for him the sole positive reality as the past alone remains real for the orthodox traditionalist, with the difference that, for Fearing, the present does achieve a limited status both as the negation of the past and that from which his special future will be derived.
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It is for this reason, in all likelihood, that poem after poem in this collection begins auspiciously, admirable in the simplicity of the poet’s relation to the events described and the energetic, colloquial style, and then batters itself to pieces with incredible speed on the rocks of a barren ideology or a stereotyped attitude:
Whether dinner was pleasant, with the windows
lit by gunfire, and no one disagreed;
or whether later we argued in the park
and there was a touch of vomit-gas in the
evening air:Whether we found a greater, deeper, more
perfect love, by courtesy of Camels, over
NBC: whether the comics amused us, or
the newspapers carried a hunger death
and a White House prayer for Mother’s
Day:
The difference between the two paragraphs is remarkable, the first exhibiting (despite the indifference to the integrity of the poetic line) a considerable technical felicity and a live sensibility, the second being just about as bad poetry as can be written, choppy in phrasing, at once sentimental and meaninglessly sarcastic, violent and trite. It is, of course, a poem written quite a few years ago when that sort of thing was in vogue, but time is the most merciless of critics and those who have been overindulged by fashion must expect the imbalance to be corrected sooner or later. Another poem from the same period, “Dirge” is probably Fearing’s best-known effort and certainly one of the best, though it, too, tends to follow the same curious pattern:
1-2-3 was the number he played but today
the number came 3-2-1; Bought his Carbide
at 30 and it went to 29; had the favorite at
Bowie but the track was slow—
O executive type would you like to drive a
floating-power, knee action, silk-upholstered
six? Wed a Hollywood star? Shoot the course
in 58? Draw to the ace, king, jack?
The opening lines have the rhythmic propulsion (they could actually be sung to the tune of “Casey Jones”) and sharp language one would expect from urban verse that was not primarily occupied in maintaining an artificial state of detachment from the experiences involved. In the succeeding lines, the mechanical irony destroys these qualities and gives us something as tawdry as the phenomena it is presumably directed against. “Dirge,” though it moves erratically and a good deal of its slang has dated badly, gradually recovers some of its lost impetus and achieves a forceful, original climax. It is the kind of poem that leads one to believe that Fearing might have developed differently, that as the political fervor of the 30’s died down, the lyric element of his work might have become purer, more continuous, able to sustain a poetic whole.
For some reason this has not happened. Instead the work as a whole has cooled down along with the ideology and whatever vision once motivated it. Since Fearing’s early writing gained its force by a series of collisions with the everyday world rather than participation in it and there is no adequate principle of opposition left, we get many poems that are simply hum drum, banal in content and language, relieved occasionally by a flash of fantasy, whimsy or perceptiveness. Whatever other values may have accrued, of smoothness and ease, it is now all minor poetry in its very essence, all the major conflicts having been buried rather than resolved. But there is still enough left in this collection, in phrases, passages, poems, to remind us that Fearing has been all by himself on a terrain of immense importance, one that still remains almost wholly uncultivated.
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