Experiments in Language : TRUTH AND LIES THAT PRESS FOR LIFE: Sixty Los Angeles Poets, <i> Edited by Connie Hershey (Artifact Press: $12.95, paper; 215 pp.)</i>

There is a tendency in every generation of writers to shrug off the paternal inheritance of an earlier style in pursuit of something new: It is an impatience with “standing still” in another age’s achievement, which is hardly unique to this century.

John Dryden, England’s poet laureate in the 17th Century, wrote numerous discourses justifying his use of the elevated “heroic” style in his poetic satires. It was a challenge that succeeded, helped by other masters such as Alexander Pope, and became an accepted addition to poetry.

What is pertinent in this to a review of modern poetry is the nature of Dryden’s innovation, primarily concerned as it was with subject matter, while structure remained untouched. “Poetry” is something more of an umbrella term today, describing many things with vague affinities to one another, and the blurring of its distinctive qualities is partly because the challenge to poetry in the 20th Century, unlike Dryden’s challenge, has been greatly directed against form.

“Truth and Lies That Press for Life” reflects the best and worst of this challenge as it has filtered down into the understandings of households and writing workshops--the two major habitats of its writers.

The volume’s subtitle indicates an obvious bond they share, but this highlight is arbitrary unless it is used to draw some conclusion about the artistic integrity of Los Angeles. The poems are plainly about more than locale: They “press for life,” suggesting the more apt themes of struggle and personal conflict uniting them.

In “One Day I am Thinking,” Shirley Love undermines the comfort of middle-class life with a skepticism that finds menace in the ordinary:

There are wingless butterflies

hanging

over the doors of houses

that I hate

and elephant teeth bleeding

on the tables.

There are blue princess phones

that have died

from exhaustion.

There are tablecloths everywhere

and fluted purple tea cups and

wax beans

There are women here who will

kill from shame and terror.

Reminiscent of Adrienne Rich’s style, the scene is complicated further when the speaker concludes: “Still I go on living serenely with my husband and children.” The disturbing overtones of violence in her images insist that life is anything but serene.

In contrast to Love’s quiet desperation, the speaker of Fran Berman’s short poem, “Tiles,” avoids such a fate in spurning the ideal mate, “who spent his days pimping patients/ And his nights studying for his MBA,” for the unconventional but workable love of a younger man.

Caught between struggles such as these, between truth and lies, there are similar expressions of imprisonment and victimization throughout the collection. Some poets mix a stronger sense of the absurd into their experiences, creating a highly effective dark humor. Johnny Bender’s poem, “The Ten Year Itchy Trigger,” tells the story of a high school grudge and the revenge planned for the coming reunion. The violent reasons for the speaker’s hatred are juxtaposed with a promise to his wife, once the grudge is settled: “I’ll eat less red meat/ I’ll forgive by then.” The rationalization, given in the midst of a story of revenge, shows the absurd, contradictory circumstances of human behavior.

Lee Rossi has a different approach in “7-11,” showing how even the grandest of commonplaces in the modern world, a convenience store, has its liberating moments at 3 a.m.:

I met the Buddha in the dogfood

aisle

and decided to ask him a question.

“Gaines burgers,” he said before

I could,

“Egg and bacon flavor.”

“Is that all?”

I asked but he politely kept

sweeping.

“The wind in your face,” he said

suddenly,

“The wind in your face,” he said

slapping the air. “I’ve thought

about that

now; you should too.”

There are other poems with scenes familiar to a Southern Californian, especially the commuter:

The afternoon light angles across

a slow-moving tableau of cars,

four abreast. Thousands of

singular drivers struggle

homeward

under the flat indifferent sky.

The formal rhetoric of Carey Miller’s vision of traffic, “Rush Hour,” places one of Southern California’s trademark phenomena in an unaccustomed perspective. A different kind of imprisonment is suggested. The speaker’s later confession, that the journey home leads to a bottle of Scotch “with the anchorman,” gives jarring impact to the poem’s focus upon human loneliness.

In many ways the personal experiences filling much of this volume indicate the continuing popularity of confessional poetry, a style said to have begun with W. D. Snodgrass’ book, “Heart’s Needle,” in the 1950s. The confessional style introduced what was considered unpoetic material into poetry: The poet’s eye turned from external turbulence to make its material, sometimes more turbulent, from the tissue of private life. The heightened obscurity this poetry produces is characteristic of poems such as Susan Well’s “Don’t give me all of that diddly garbo,” in which an intimate encounter, or just the idea of one, is given with a Plathesque cadence:

why don’t you corner me now,

night man? why

don’t you limber me? I can be belly

for you,

night man . . . I can be sweet

basil, cucumber, rubbings,

lemon on your tongue.

The sensuous self-references project emotions of a very personal nature, but they retain a privacy behind strange metaphors and an address to a figure known only as “night man.” However, what the language doesn’t conceal is the strong submissive quality of the desire. Debra Pearlstein’s “Fumbling for Feathers” similarly emphasizes a mood instead of the particulars of an experience:

we fit in our fury

like clandestine hookbugs

trapped in barbed-wire,

lightning-struck children

in popsicle panic

painting by nightmares

The excitement and fear of desire is at the poem’s center: Strikingly odd word combinations (“digital pigeons,” “juggling dandelions”) and the surreal treatment given to sex suggest the frenzy, both negative and positive, of an experience the speaker wants us to understand.

Unusual imagery such as this, an excellent feature of the collection, is often frustrated by a style only resembling poetry. Reading aloud dispels the illusion that much in this volume is arranged under any musical pattern. Instead, there is a tepid formlessness known notoriously as “free verse.” Nothing else, as this volume presents it, shows more immediately how poetry is losing its distinctiveness today as an art form.

Certainly there are reasons for the predominance of formlessness here: Connie Hershey, in her editor’s preface, salutes the “experiments with extending language” that she sees, and some poems do suggest they are exploring poetic avenues lesser known than familiar rhymes and structures. Valerie Johns’ poem “Waivers” seems written with this intention. Its syntax challenges the common assumptions of reading:

I where did you he blooms parking

easy

restless

they wander he calls out she casts

Want I there don’t please yes he

patient

Whether this succeeds depends upon how much intelligibility one believes poetry should have.

When Hershey explains that the poets’ experiments involve “language as it is spoken, rather than a more formal written idiom,” she is recalling what poets said about free verse early in this century when it was considered a refreshing alternative to the repetitive pattern of older styles. In some circles it acquired a stronger ideological context: It was the egalitarian response to an elitism that traditional poetry imposed with its rules and structure.

Politics should be considered if one notices the volume’s recurring theme of victimization, and its association with a feminine voice. The choice to write in a “free” style, with liberation coming from a decision for that style, becomes a political statement, and traditional poetic forms are said to mirror an unfair social hierarchy.

However, free verse can exist without ideology when a writer is lazy. The confessional style that many embrace here, and its expression through formless patterns of verse, suggest that no other discipline operates beyond sitting still long enough to write down one’s impressions.

Dr. Johnson called poetry the “most difficult of labors,” and this review argues for a more noticeable element of rigor, anticipating those who will call this “wrong from the start” because of what is lost with an approach that neglects the formal aspects of poetry. So often music is what makes verse memorable. Who would deny the grandeur that formal rhythm and and rhyme add to the meaning of the lines, “Do not go gentle into that good night./ Rage, rage against the dying of the light”?

Hershey comments that the poets of “Truth and Lies That Press for Life” have discovered the “voice within.” This is certain, yet such a premium upon inner expression recalls what Yeats once said: “If I wrote of personal love or sorrow in any rhythm that left it unchanged, I would be full of self-contempt because of my egotism and indiscretion, and foresee the boredom of my reader. Ancient salt is best packing.”

Although the metaphor in the last sentence suggests the deficiency of raw experience, there is also an element of preservation in the word salt that implies future generations who will remember us according to what we leave for them; and some methods are more likely to survive the trip.

A poem from “Truth and Lies That Press for Life” is reprinted on Page 6. Artifact Press is located at 900 Tanglewood Drive, Concord, Mass. 01742; telephone (508) 369-8933.