272 - Conference On Poetry

Conference On Poetry
University of Maryland, Catonsville Campus. Spring, 1968.

"If selfhood is eliminated, what tongue can poetry find?" Judson Jerome asked in a recent article. He continued: "'John loves Mary' will not be carved on the trees, but '76776X0 relates to 932G001' may be programmed on tape."

The question is not facetious. A craft called "concretism" offers an opening to poets who have nothing to say: a combination of pop art and typewriter doodles, concretism promises that meaning will spring from the juxtaposition of words or letters on a page.

But there are poets who believe they have something to say. And they say it well, joining with educators, to bring the poem where it surely belongs-to the mind and heart of the young. In early March, a two day program on "Contemporary Poetry and the Teaching of Poetry" was alive with promise-not of the loss of selfhood, nor the failure of language, but of the vitality of the poet's craft and of the teacher's reach for the ideal in the work of the real.

Sponsored by the Humanities Department of the University of Maryland, Bink Noll of Beloit College (The Center of the Circle, 1962, and The Feast, 1967) and Robert Wallace of Case-Western Reserve (Views from a Ferris Wheel, 1965, and Ungainly Things, 1968) read their poems in a kind of dark-light dialogic pattern to an open-to-the-public-audience. Both poets know how to read. Each had his own intensity. Bink Noll's bardic voice intoned from his sequence, The Nude, seven poems which celebrate a dark awareness of sex: the precarious balance it poses between delight and despair. He spoke freely of one of these poems, "The Hunchback's Bath," telling the audience that another well known poet had criticized it as an unnecessarily bald description of the grotesque in the physical. Bink Noll did not defend his poem. He read it.

In the medicine-chest mirror she views
her head with pride, turning it side to side

273 - Conference On Poetry

while she twists that torso and dries
the hump, familiar as an elbow . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
She has a husband, but once or twice
she must have found his taste grotesque
and love between them so. Still, I failed to guess
such handsome breasts crowded on these ribs. . . .

The poet ponders her feelings--doubt? fear? loneliness? and concludes:

I don't know. I don't understand
how her heart shoulders the birthright
swollen from her waist and-bared like this-
enough to make children screaming run.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
[and men] compress their knees to hide the flinch.

The listeners responded with their own "flinch" but felt the compassion of the poem or, perhaps, their own compassion.

Robert Wallace proved that the comic offers a fine relief-even in bitter truth-when he read an unpublished ballad on the killing of a mouse, and a group of other poems on animals, one of which may be cited:

The Dictionary Armadillo

This scurrying pine cone of a fellow has an out-
side all leather-shingle and -quilt and -scale
from snout
to tail.

It probably is, however, more his habitat
than any
churlish habit that
makes him so much harder and homelier than many.

Small wonder he goes
nosing along with his roof and his bed on,
and tiptoes,
between Armada (Spanish, 1588) and Armageddon.

The following day, each poet talked about the way in which poetry should be (could be?) taught. Both men teach. Bink Noll's position, "The Lyric Seen Through No Glass Darkly," calls for teaching poetry as experience, as "heard event," as "Whole with Order." It is a pull away from meaning, away from analysis. The appeal of a poem is "not its brains, but its combination of brains (wit) and guts."

"Form in Poetry: the Necessary Nothing" was the title of Robert Wallace's excellent description of how a teacher might guide a student toward poetry. He said: "It is in form that the value of the content lies: we

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treasure a poem as we treasure a diamond, not for the carbon in it, but for the form or shape it has taken under pressure."

Good talks were followed by honest questions, honest answers. To What end? In the final panel of poets teachers, the areas of difference seemed to blur. Neither poet wanted a poem under scalpel dissection. Each called for particular response to a particular poem; each accepted the limitations as well as the radiance of human work.

The teachers of the Baltimore secondary schools, for whom the Conference had been planned by Dr. Robert Shedd of the University of Maryland, had shared an active interchange; had listened to two mature young poets. What they probably came away with was an oblique kind of fulfillment, something that Robert Wallace wrote of in his satisfying poem, "Giacommetti's Dog" (in the Museum of Modern Art):

We'll stand in line all day
to see one man
love anything enough.

Sister Maura, S.S.N.D.
College of Notre Dame of Maryland
Baltimore, Maryland