Our
Post-
Soviet
History
Unfolds
Eleanor Lerman
(Sarabande Books)

Recently I was wondering just how William Butler Yeats would have fared in contemporary America, trying to survive as a poet.

It would be pretty tough sledding, I imagine. He would, like most of the writers nowadays, be attempting to sup at the teats of the National Endowment for the Arts. Since its funding comes from Congress, NEA is notoriously wary of political types, especially anyone who could be cast as, say, a neo-terrorist. Yeats' lady friend Maude Gonne was an Irish revolutionary, and he himself was enthusiastic about Irish culture and the Gaelic language (though he could barely understand it).

For this alone, he'd probably be singled out as a trouble-maker, investigated by the secret police, spied on ... certainly not given benefit of the grants handed out by the limp American artistic establishment that runs The Endowment.

Think about it, the Gray Panthers would probably be down on him for "Sailing to Byzantium" ("This is no country for old men.") And --- even though he ended up as a favorite of the British Broadcasting Corporation --- with his parlous distaste for war (vide, "The Second Coming"), he would probably be blacklisted by the candy-haired set at NPR.

The poem itself, with its parody of the birth of the Divine, along with its anti-Christian pacifist notions, would be set upon by the militant soldiers of Christ as irreligious, or worse.

Most fraught of all, because of his gratuitous portrayal of a bird as the brutal rapist from above --- see "Leda and the Swan" --- he would probably have his house at Coole Park picketed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, if not burned to the ground.

Pity the poor poet who has to survive in this country. God knows how Ms. Lerman does it. What she finds in this world is a ruthless sense of wonder, whether it is shopping at the Food Lion, Oswald and the assassination theory, a view of "the large Magellanic Clouds," and a friend who is a member of the local bondage club ("Little thing that you are, I / understand the need to slap someone around.")

Would we ever run into such language, thoughts and sensibility with the American Poet Laureates, the ilk of Mark Strand, Richard Wilbur, Robert Pinsky?

To an anonymous woman "standing on a terrace," Lerman says we should bring her a drink that "tastes of melon,"

                                And as the sky
hangs out its starry animals --- a fish, a bear
a canny dog, tell her how long it took to form
these constellations.

And always, there is a merry sense of anarchy, time in a beach town, where "Breakfast is thinking about making itself. And for the rest / of the night, the radio continues to say hello."

I have said before, and will say again, that the greatest loss to American poetry came from the crowning of the clones of Robert Penn Warren --- Louise Glück, Denise Levertov, Gary Snyder, Richard Wilbur, James Wright --- writers who in their verse have lost (or never had) the fire of the heart. Alan Ginsburg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Pete Winslow, Lew Welch wrote wild songs to, for, and about the soul gone barmy, but they were scorned by those who ran the publishing houses (and the prizes) to the east.

More recently, in their camp, we can find Carolyn Creedon, Leslie Seamans, T. F. Bierly, Aquiles Nazoa, Oscar Hahn, Marlene Joyce Pearson, and John Bricuth ... and now, Ms. Lerman. Obviously she has a warm kinship with this woolly band, and she merits our attention and affection as one of the originals.

--- A. W. Allworthy