Rhyme and reason

One of the main impulses in the Western lyrical tradition has been the desire to bring together the pleasures of verse with the pleasures of the intellect: to use poetic forms to think with the heart and feel with the mind. Adam Kirsch, one of the most promising young poet-critics in America (his book recently won the New Criterion Poetry Prize), writes from within this lyrical-intellectual tradition. It is an ambitious agenda, since it proceeds with the notion that the art of poetry, when it is done well, can lead the poet and his audience to a harmony of idea and sense, emotion and intellect, image and abstraction, gravity and levity. By way of contrast, a lot of recent poetry -- the spoken-word or confessional styles, for example -- seems to be all emotion or sensation, lacking intellectual contour; or, as in Language poetry and other post-structuralist approaches, it is too cerebral, short on emotional ballast.

“The Thousand Wells” is composed of 31 poems, often in urban settings, which express an individual’s search for lyrical intensity, historical perspective and moral bearings amid the artifacts of Western culture and the mechanisms of modern life. At 26, Kirsch already has a voice distinctly his own and has gone a long way toward mastering several traditional lyrical forms. He has a wonderful instinct for the line and the stanza, and is one of several poets now writing in America (sometimes dismissed as the “New Formalists”) who demonstrate that traditional European forms are viable mediums for contemporary American expression. He uses a variety of strict forms very skillfully as a foil for lines and phrases that are less metrically regular, a varying of pitch that creates the sense that you’re following the organic development of the thought in the poem.

The collection’s first poem, “Arcadia (Spring),” evokes a scene in Central Park in spring, when everyone is kicking back and enjoying the weather, forgetting for a while the conflicts of daily life:

Now that on Cedar Hill the trees

Regain in April shower and breeze

Their winter-severed canopies,

And on the rooftops bedded flowers

Exfoliate in sunlit hours

Or drowse in the shade of water-towers,

Somehow notorious Central Park

Where men would hesitate to walk

In the murderous, abandoned dark

Becomes a remembered garden, where

Even defenseless women dare

To lie undressed in the open air.

The use of the word “exfoliate” is an example of Kirsch’s keen sense of diction, where the cerebral, Latinate word, in an otherwise purely lyrical passage, foreshadows the demise of Arcadia and the speaker’s philosophical detachment from it, which come about at the end of the poem:

How can the day end otherwise

Than every previous paradise?

Love from its own perfection dies,

As spring against the stronger

Predatory summer

Fights briefly and goes under.

The abrupt change of meter in the last tercet conveys the feeling of finality and inevitability that goes with the statement’s literal meaning. Kirsch is successful in using regular forms because he knows how to vary them, working the rhythm or musical phrase inside the strict meter.

The careful technique is part and parcel of another exciting aspect of “The Thousand Wells”: Kirsch treats serious traditional ideas without fashionable irony, cynicism or relativism. He expresses these ideas with remarkable compression, playfully and seriously as the poetry demands. In “The Patient Lookers,” a poem about appreciating the things of this world without demanding penetration into their “meaning,” he refers to the traditional, hermetic idea of the “signature of all things.” The reference comes at the end of a passage about the Neoplatonic urge to see behind appearances (in contrast to the poem’s opening about just looking and seeing):

Others, unsuited for the slow

Unfolding of that kingly show,

Bypass seductions of detail;

Their vision, rapid, prying, pale,

Urges the tearing of the veil,

Sure that behind a gorgeous screen

The substances of things unseen

Are trying to tell us what they mean,

In characters the whole world tall.

Perhaps no passage is more characteristic of Kirsch’s viewpoint than one from “Indecision.” After describing the various conflicting alternatives before the speaker on a beautiful summer day -- from girl-watching to listening to music to having to face work -- he concludes:

Our fate is not to be the sum

Of all these joys,

But to offer them a medium

And counterpoise.

This is a basically humanist perspective. All of Kirsch’s writing, both poetry and criticism, is remarkable for insisting on the values of the human spirit, qualitative values in a time that emphasizes size and numbers. In “Away,” the speaker prays for respite “From this place where the heart does not belong,” namely, the modern, Titan-scale metropolis. In other poems, Kirsch affirms individual human experience, whether vis-a-vis the pharmaceutical industry, which markets antidepressants like breath mints, or the genetic determinism of our day, which similarly insists “We are body, to the end.”

In fact, Kirsch is basically affirmative: of language, culture and the life of the mind. Accordingly, perhaps, a tension between the ideal and the actual runs throughout his work. A poem that liberally reworks part of Goethe’s “Harzreise im Winter” (Winter’s Journey in the Harz Mountains) depicts the sensitive city dweller, isolated despite the teeming life, or “thousand wells,” around him and ends with a prayer for the unnamed man’s deliverance from his own narrow perspective:

O Father, let

Your thirsty one know the redeeming taste

Of the thousand wells that stand around him in the waste.

Elsewhere, the tension is seen between the timeless present and history, innocence and memory, fresh beginnings and the accretions of civilization. The last is the theme of a deftly handled sonnet sequence, “The Dawn,” which portrays Plato and his Athens as the prototype of this bipolar split:

For Athens, already immemorial,

Looming between him and the primal sun,

Cast a distorting shadow on the earth,

In whose dark he struggled ....

It is a position in which Kirsch seems often to see himself. The speaker in “Away,” mentioned above, describes how

... the city’s titan towers

Shine out as pure matter, glass and steel,

Proclaiming indisputable powers,

Standard and guardian of the real

-- a place, in other words, that is both a depository of culture and a threat to individual vision.

Section 3 of this book’s four sections is a series of poems about a young person’s erotic and romantic struggles. These are not love poems that break your heart so much as ones that lead into a measured apology for the never-fully-settled marriage of love and lust. The book’s longest poem, a 128-line “love letter” in ottava rima, succeeds in being engaging and amusing and, in its indirect way, in being quite an affecting piece about the unsayableness of love. Another key word for Kirsch’s approach is decorum, and this section, with its formal treatment of romantic love, is the most clear instance of Kirsch’s unmodish determination to affirm the power of artifice.

First, the preliminaries. Let me tell

Why I will try to say these things in verse,

Which I know by experience is hardly well

Suited to heartfelt explanation ....

One of the things that is so impressive and exciting about Kirsch’s work is his use of a contemporary idiom that is also traditional, natural even as it is decorous. This is a recipe for a poetic language capable of handling elevated themes in our present culture. Dante called it the volgare illustre, heightened vernacular, and it is good news that Adam Kirsch is trying to realize and encourage such writing in contemporary America. *