Everything That Cannot Be Undone: On Reading and the Poetry of David Yezzi

This great oak speaks through me, . . .. . . the medium, if you will, through whichthe sound of leaves coheres in speech.

—David Yezzi, from “Oracle of the Great Oak”

It is with a sense of recognition that I read lines such as these describing the present state of American literary criticism: “decades of antihumanist one-upmanship,” observes Lisa Ruddick, “have left the profession with a fascination for shaking the value out of what seems human, alive, and whole.” Hers is a voice among an increasing number of readers and scholars skeptical about critical positions that have themselves become threadbare through the exiling of concepts such as individuality, humanism, privacy, intuition, and indeed the texts themselves, from criticism—in a word, all of the qualities by which many are first drawn to literature and that have given readers pleasure for centuries. An intellectual climate such as this, Ruddick continues in her article in The Point, affects not only those already in the profession, but also students of literature, as it “discourages initiates from identifying with their own capacity for centered, integrated selfhood.” These circumstances reveal how very far we have come from Virginia Woolf’s “common reader,” that semi-mythical persona Woolf herself takes on in her literary essays. The common reader, Woolf reminds us, is neither critic nor scholar, and reads for enjoyment, with an instinct toward putting together from the readings, however haphazard the collection, in her words, “some kind of whole.” I suspect that the wholeness Woolf has in mind has something to do with this search for an authentic sense of selfhood that derives in significant part from the experience of the lives of others in literature.

The experience of reading lyric poetry faces this problem of fractured selfhood in an immediate way. Here on my desk it’s David Yezzi’s Azores (2008), and I turn to the first poem, “Mother Carey’s Hen.” It begins,

There are days I don’t think about the sea;     weeks wash by, in fact,then a shearwater—or some such—flutters byon the salt flats fanning out in my mind’s eye,reflected there, a shimmering reverie,               recalling the pact

I once made (and renew today) to hold     to a higher altitude.

A lyric voice such as this provides one antidote to the benumbed. It is the “I” that asserts itself as a coherent presence that is individual in cadence and sensibility, without apology or solipsism. Though in this essay I consider primarily Yezzi’s poems (a number of which have appeared in these pages), of course the qualities I explore are not limited to the art of poetry itself. Neither should his work be taken to be somehow emblematic or merely illustrative, but rather his poems provide expressions in a range of voices that together speak in compelling ways to the overarching issues with which I began.

The speaker of “Mother Carey’s Hen” meditates on something that matters in an experiential way: “altitude,” a curious word to use in relation to the low-skimming birds of this poem, comes to indicate a certain mind-frame that has less to do with transcendence than with an adaptive forward motion, and suggests that this very motion across the surfaces is a form of dancelike engagement, wing with wave. However many differences that may exist between the bird and the speaker, this pact, and its renewal, announces a beginning of some significance. What shape, then, does altitude take in the poetry? What can it mean for the reader? One may just as well start with what shape it does not take. A glance over several of his recent essays—Yezzi is a prolific critic of poetry and art as well as a poet—makes it clear that elevation of any sort does not, for this author, include poetry of “a sentimental, idealizing bent” or that may be described as “high-minded and ‘evolved.’” He likens such poems to the literary equivalent of adult contemporary music, harmless and always in the background. “Like all utopias,” he observes, “the world it...