Acts of Will

POETRY REVIEW ACTS OF WILL /Markjarman Alice Fulton. Dance Script with Electric Ballerina. University of Pennsylvania Press, (Winner of the 1982 Associated Writing Programs Award in Poetry), 1983. Introduction by W.D. Snodgrass. 76 pages. Michael Pettit. American Light. The University of Georgia Press, 1984. 64 pages. Caroline Knox. The House Party. The University of Georgia Press, 1984. 53 pages. Alan Shapiro. The Courtesy. The University of Chicago Press, 1983. 61 pages. Eileen Silver-Lillywhite. All thatAutumn. Ithaca House, 1983. 63 pages. Carolyne Wright. Premonitions of an Uneasy Guest. Hardin-Simmons University Press, 1983. 67 pages. Sydney Lea. The Floating Candles. University of Illinois Press, 1982. 104 pages. I RECOMMEND all seven of these books, six for their promise, and the seventh for its fulfillment of promise. The seventh is Sydney Lea's The Floating Candles; I think it clearly demonstrates potential made powerful. The other six books are as different from each other as their promise and their problems, though they each involve, in some essential way, an act of will. By acts of will I mean what we know most poems to be: not gifts of inspiration, but the result of hard work. Yeats describes this in "Adam's Curse" and I think, for the poets here, his explanation still holds: A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught. Our sense of seamless verse might have changed since Yeats, but we know the labored, the forced, the willed, when we see it or write it. We have various names for this stitchery when it shows: precious or mannered when it's too flashy; predictable when made by machine; haphazard, crude, even amateurish when it looks loosely basted. Whatever , we still want poetry to seem a moment's thought, even when the poet's intention is to show process. These poets all have more poems than not that are willed, made to work, but only Lea consistently shows the skill that keeps his poems from seeming "naught." Alice Fulton's energetic, inventive language in Dance Script with Electric Ballerina is justly praised by W.D. Snodgrass in his introduction to the book. However, I find inaccurate his claim that intellect The Missouri Review · 83 is somehow dancing through Fulton's work. I would not call Fulton a particularly intelligent poet, but she does bring a lot of verve to her mostly occasional poems. To call a poem about jogging "Agonist of the Acceleration Lane" and speak of herself "alive in the stretch/& the resting of sinews" is clever. But intellect, if it were really on its toes, would make for some restraint and restraint is rarely present in her poems. The problems of "You Can't Rhumboogie in a Ball and Chain," a sestina for Janis Joplin, begin in the title and do not cease until the poem's envoy. The last three lines do seem fitting: Like clerks we face your image in the glass, suggest lovers, as accessories, heels. "It's your shade, this blood dress," we say. "It's you." But this is preceded by all sorts of pseudo-bluesy rock-talk: You called the blues' loose black belly lover and in Port Arthur they called you pig-face. The way you chugged booze straight, without a glass, your brass-assed language, slingbacks with jeweled heel . . . Et cetera. The reference to Joplin's childhood in Texas is genuinely painful ("pig-face"), but the rest is forced, mannered. It may be, like the title of the above sestina, that Fulton's own presiding metaphor, dancing, is what leads to excess. The poem in this book where possibility flickers most strongly, where success is near, is "The Perpetual Light." It recounts a visit with her mother to her father's grave. The poem is good step by step, but her mother's reminiscences raise it to another level altogether, apparently by a will of their own: "Sickness, I remember, had a different smell then. After Azalea's scarlet fever they fumigated the house. Harriet breathed some into her lungs and died at three. As for me, the walls swelled and burst when I...