Volume 4, Number 5 · April 8, 1965
Mixed Company
By Robert Mazzocco
Hands Up!
by Edward Dorn
Totem Press-Corinth Books, unnumbered pp., $1.25 (paperback) (paper)
Destinations
Companion volume edited by Wilmer F. Lucas Jr.
Essence Publications, 41 pp., Essence LP Record (no price listed)
Country Without Maps
by Jean Garrigue
Macmillan, 82 pp., $3.95
A Roof of Tiger Lilies
by Donald Hall
Viking, 63 pp., $3.50
A Time of Bees
by Mona Van Duyn
University of North Carolina, 57 pp., $3.50
An Existential Nerve Cell
by Richard F. Henchey
Metcalf Printing and Publishing Co., unnumbered pp., no price
The writing of poetry today is an immense free play. It somewhat resembles the modern household, each member going about his or her business, meeting fortuitously, the contact producing sometimes a flare-up, sometimes a guilty rapport, or simply indifference. That pleasant political dichotomy of just a few years past, the Academics vs. the Beats, no longer holds. Splitting the ticket is very much the thing. As for definitions, is poetry a 'criticism of life,' or a 'symbolic landscape,' or a 'barbaric yawp'? No one knows, and certainly, despite the occasional call-to-arms, hardly anyone cares. The poets I discuss come from different generations, they reflect different ends and means; taken together they offer, I think, a good cross-section of disparate modes. Yet the scraggiest of them drag in some bit of intellectual esoterica, the most genteel now and then use slang. Not one works in what could be called a pure tradition, a term which, in any case, has become problematic. As will be seen, each review is self-contained and, with one exception, I have made no attempt at 'bridging.'
Review, 3030 words
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