Darcie’s post got me thinking about range. Range has always been something that I have valued in a poet, but I’ve never really thought hard about how to quantify ranginess in poetry. I think that there are (at least) two different kinds of range: stylistic range, which is using a variety of aesthetic approaches and/or a variety of ways to make meaning, and tonal range, which is working in different tonal or emotional registers. Darcie rightly points out that The Shadows of Sirius doesn’t show much tonal range in that it is, to use her great phrase, “a compendium of losses.” Its music is mostly left-hand-low-end-of-the-piano notes. A call for levity is fair when it comes to this book. Darcie’s post also reminded me of this review by the critic David Orr on Carl Phillips’ The Rest of Love from the New York Times. The review starts off positively, but Orr quickly begins to take issue with the consistent high seriousness of the poems, saying that, in the book, “Words like ‘light’ and ‘dark’ and ‘water’ appear regularly; words like ‘Schenectady’ and ‘flop’ and ‘boxer shorts’ do not.” You could apply this remark, and indeed all of us Merwin bloggers have done so in our own way this month, to The Shadows of Sirius. At the end of the review, Orr sums up his critique of Phillips’ range:
The second problem is that he can be so thoroughgoing in his rejection of ironic whimsy that he crosses the fine line between solemn and pompous (”Is fervor belief’s / only measure? Is there / no saving / what betrays itself?”). There’s much to be said for unfashionable earnestness, but when a poet sounds like he’d have to struggle to order a taco without sermonizing about ”desire” and ”the body,” his readers are liable to get a little impatient.
When this review was published, I was a student of Phillips’ at Washington University in St. Louis. Someone brought the review up in workshop, and while it was clear he wasn’t going to lose sleep over it, he did bristle at this idea that his work, or any poet’s work, is beholden to not be serious all the time.
Being a fan of Darcie’s poems and judging from her posts in this blog, I doubt that her and David Orr’s taste overlap to any large degree (sorry Darcie to keep talking as if we’re not in the same virtual room), but in this way we do see this similar preference, if not expectation, that a poet use humor. It’s quite possible that this is simply a matter of taste: if you respond to humor, you want to see it in what you read. Me? I feel like I might be the opposite of Darcie. I like dirges. I like “In Memoriam.” I like Slayer. I like the black Rothkos. I like the Cubs. When I read a poet who is operating mainly through humor or wit, I get impatient. Poet! Look! I have a ripe heart! Smash it! It’s the same desire for a certain tone, only on the other end of the spectrum.
Is either form of this impatience fair? Must we expect that a poet contain multitudes? Can’t we let Merwin use his fistful of words to write 100 poems about loss? Or should we demand more from a book? And how do we judge who has range or not? Through individual collections? Over the course of a career?
If we are taking the long view of a career, then we could say that Merwin has some range, since he started out as a mannered formalist. That being said, he has been writing in his current style for over 30 years, which knocks him down in the range-o-meter. Perhaps that’s why The Shadows of Sirius can feel claustrophobic in terms of its range, because it is stylistically AND tonally so consistent. I personally feel like range is pretty hard to judge, whether a poet has one book or 40. One book isn’t really enough of sample size. 40 is too many, mainly because over that much of a time span you see styles change overall in poetry that get reflected in any individual poet, and I don’t know if a poet can get much credit for having range if they are just reflecting the general shifts of taste of their day. Or is that what range is: the ability to incorporate the new innovations of a given poetic climate into your work?
Even if I can’t come up with the formula for calculating range, I feel like I know it when I see it. Who are our rangiest poets today? In terms of stylistic range, on my list (there’re so much I haven’t read: feel free to add to or lampoon this) would be James Galvin, Donald Revell, Jorie Graham, Arthur Sze, C.D. Wright and Brenda Hillman. In terms of working in a wide range of tones or emotional registers, I think first of Mary Jo Bang, whose early books often displayed a Steinian playfulness with language, but in her 2008 book Elegy she employs her experimentalism to express deep grief over the loss of her son. It was a remarkable tonal shift, one so sharp that I can’t think of any other recent examples that resemble it (can you?). Albert Goldbarth runs the tonal gamut. Tomaz Salamun does as well. Others?