Three Millsaps Poets

“Can poetry matter?” asks poet and critic Dana Gioia in his widely discussed essay of that title. In the past year three poets connected with Millsaps have published volumes which show that poetry does matter. The poets are two alumni, Turner Cassity, B.A. 1951, and James Kimbrell, B.A. 1989, and faculty member Greg Miller, E. B. Stuart Professor of Language and Literature and Chair of the English Department. Their poetry matters for the reasons that excellent poetry has always mattered in the education and renewal of our humanity. These poems transcend the more or less vague and superficial qualities of everyday talk and remind us what speech can do when it uses every resource of language to embody the greatest fullness of meaning. Each poet’s work places us in a consciousness different from the others and our own, but all heightened in the discrimination and judgment of thought and feeling. And all are revelatory; in some measure each “sheds,” to borrow a phrase from the philosopher Jacob Klein, “new light on things, their roots, their relations, their very being.”

Turner Cassity’s The Destructive Element contains a selection of 129 poems from his first nine volumes, published over 25 years, and adds 45 new poems and an epilogue. As one or another favorite poem from the earlier books fails to show up, one realizes that this is a true selection. Cassity himself has begun the rigorous winnowing judgment that in his opening poem he assigns to tradition.

The opening poem, “At the Palace of Fine Arts,” is like the pediment over the entrance of a building, carved with icons of Cassity’s poetic commitments. These are images of the classical. In comic and serious accordance with classical modesty and indirection, Cassity offers as exemplars of classical art Duplicate Bridge and High School Track with its twelve-inch, gilded trophies – “tiptoeing Wasps,” he pictures them. (He leaves us to assess the overtones.) These are the qualities of classical art: “skill, proportion, fact,” skill rather than the roughness of the inspired genius – or the amateur; proportion rather than the exaggerated and grotesque; and fact as truth to things rather than consoling or stimulating fantasy. The revelations and judgments of this art are “generic,” aimed at universal truths, rather than mere particularity. What this offers the poet is “the ease of working by the rules,” the kind of excellence that renews tradition rather than the originality that aims to overturn it. There is a danger in such working by the rules, however, for it can stamp the poet’s performance with “the hint of going through the motions.” But such imperfect work does not debase its classical base, because classical art acknowledges a built-in corrective: the tradition, which measures the work and ultimately allows only the excellent to survive.

Cassity is not only a classical poet, he is a satirist, in the large, human sense of Alexander Pope and Edward Arlington Robinson, poets whom he resembles in his talent for supporting a flexible and brilliant use of language by the framework of regular meters and in his capacity for memorable direct statement. His poems, too, like theirs, do not invite the reader to enter the poet’s private experience, but to gaze with him at a common, objective world which we all share, but do not all see.

Yet these poems do embody qualities that classically stand in opposition to the classical, for their images are often grotesque, fantastic and original. Perhaps as a companion piece to his own “Meaner than a Junkyard Dog, or, Turner’s Evil Twin,” someone should write a praise of Cassity as “Turner, True Maven of Pop Studies and Multiculturalism.” For it is amazing how much he can make premodernism seem like postmodernism. His poems, for example, everywhere assimilate pop culture, the Katzenjammer Kids, Ming the Merciless, the Ziegfeld girls, or, slightly askew (or perhaps not), Tarzan and Baby Jane. And they dislocate from their original context and juxtapose wildly the elements of many different cultures. Thus the fated figures of Ibsen’s Ghosts are reimagined in Galveston. And Kurt Weill, the composer of Knickerbocker Holiday, is invoked to suggest a different “September Song,” not in Dutch New York but in a bar in the modern Dutch Antilles. Finally, he is aware of the way we project onto the world the constructions of our minds, which we then adore as real (“The Power of Abstraction”), or the constructions of our pride and desire for power. For example, the way the successive French and Vietnamese conquer- ors imagine the compliant voice of the Tonkinese girl in the opening lines of “La Petite Tonkinoise,” which sum up the substance of many postmodern treatises:

I am not person, and am not opinioned.
I exist as I have been companioned.

You create me. Legionnaire or Viet,
I was your Somewhere East of Cigarette. . .

What makes these poems premodern is Cassity’s conviction that there is a difference between appearance and reality, not a mere play of appearances among whose truth one cannot distinguish. For Cassity there is wisdom, right seeing in accordance with proportion, fact. Beyond a sheer delight in exuberant play and a connoisseurship of the grotesque and fantastic which is, indeed, part of the prop room of any satirist, these poems invite us to resee, and in reseeing, to reevaluate, our conventional assessments and the conventional assessments of our culture. Cassity’s work is a gift which critics have not yet fully unwrapped. I hope that despite the valedictory tone of his epilogue, he will give us further volumes.

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