At My Ease: Uncollected Poems of the Fifties and Sixties (review)

David Ignatow’s career presents the reader with a significant test of free-verse practice in twentieth-century poetry. Ignatow goes beyond his masters, Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, in constructing verse outside the bounds of traditional meters, nowhere conceding a line to a regular metrical pattern unless it is also the plainest speech. The poems in At My Ease: Uncollected Poems of the Fifties and Sixties are typical of Ignatow’s mature practice, which eschews regular patterns of rhythm, as well as other repetitions. The lines generally break at grammatical junctures, and the sentences collect into irregular verse paragraphs. Here, in fact, is “prose chopped into lines”: the bugbear of critics who would deny the validity or the existence of free verse. Ignatow, then, is a prosodic test case: if one can defend his practice as poetic, the various charges of diffuseness and formlessness leveled by conservative prosodists against free verse throughout much of this century can be put to rest.

To read David Perkins’s brief account of Ignatow’s career in his 1987 History of Modern Poetry, one would not get the impression that Ignatow continued to live and write until just this year. The entire entry is in the past tense. And it does seem as if Ignatow’s radical simplicity and pessimism have become unfashionable in a period when postmodern irony and bland confessionalism are ascendant. Perhaps necessarily, Ignatow led an almost posthumous existence in the last decade of his life, for his work is incompatible with the comfortable vision of the self ushered in by the right-wing hedonism of the Reagan revolution. Perkins notes Ignatow’s “romanticism,” remarking that it was derived from Whitman. The real source of Ignatow’s romanticism, however, was the very unromantic floor of his father’s book bindery, which he found antithetical to his hopes for his poetry, despite the fact that he took over the business as a way to support his family when his father was old. It is his hatred of the factory that blinded Ignatow to the fact that poetry, too, is a form of production, though I’d argue that it is this very blindness that gives such a passionate tone to much of his poetry.

The value of the collection is that, by completing the oeuvre of a poet recently deceased, it invites us to evaluate the writer’s accomplishments as both poet and theorist of poetry (for the theory of poetry as an act of perception is never far beneath the surface of Ignatow’s poems). In “My Story,” he writes,

I accept the candle handed to me out of the dark where I hear the thunder of Roman troops. The candle is lit, floating down from over the heads of the fighters against Rome. I place it in a candle holder and set the light beside my bed. In its ray the thunderous troops recede. I pick up a history of the Jews and read. My story.

The three ten-syllable lines refuse to be exact pentameters, but that very refusal declares the poem’s responsibility to be a record of the process of perception rather than an aesthetic object. Also interesting are the four lines containing punctuated caesuras. If Ignatow has no official prosody, he substitutes for it the rhetoric of the sentence. In a poem in which the majority of lines are straightforward clauses, the four medially broken lines set up a rhythm of expectation and perception that controls the poem. The process of perception is meant to be shared; it is a social, even political, act.

Ignatow employs two basic “prosodic” arrangements in these poems. The first consists of the grammatical line and the verse paragraph; the second moves toward the prose paragraph, including end-stops within the structure of the line. It is this second sort of arrangement that in the late seventies would lead Ignatow to the...