To Open Doors to the Possible

130 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW ony hands talk ? da questshuns ov da wata — da shingles drip da lamps perspire, ah da peepas! Like the dialectic on which it rides the art of this language transcends cynicisms and despair. Look at how the poem ends, with life-sounds that penetrate the murky silence of "dis isolate ? misty communicashun" of which "Da Fog" speaks. The comedy and laughter which follow in poems like "Midget Shut You Face & Open Uppa," "Da Nose," "I Dendi Cry Sez," and "Aboard Da Emilie: Wit Fingas ? Fernando," point beyond a negative conception of art. Elsewhere, Ferrini says of Gloucester, "dis town is our poem ? I'ma eets eye." For this art, the eye, and the "I," must be participants in the life of the place. Ferrini is a poetparticipant in the daily creation of Gloucester's life, and his work raises the possibility of poetry becoming once again a communal, folk form. If "Know Fish is the city I live in," then the book must be seen as the work of the people as well as the poet. And similiarly with that other creation, at the same time more real and more difficult to perceive. In our time conditions are such that the identity of poem and people appears as a doubtful reality. Ferrini himself is under no delusion about the extent to which art and life are one, in Gloucester or anywhere else in the country. In a letter he writes, "Art is not a need for the many, only the few. When the people of any community rises with a song, a play, a picture, a leaflet, a street scene of immediate issue, then we will know that we are in the bloodstream of daily life." Still, there is value in Ferrini's epigraph about his book. It offers a radically alternative poetics to younger poets who have not yet decided that poetry has only to do with literature. In Know Fish, Ferrini brings to a close his intellectual relationship with Charles Olson, friend and fellow Gloûcesterian poet. Ferrrini, who could never win him over to a people's art, reflects how "da taste of powa twista bumblehead," and then presses the issue one more time: "doan HE know wyrds are anarkiku" ("Ring Song at Divida: Fa '63 Olson"). There are many sides to this literary friendship. Here Ferrini is looking at the "factotoom to literatours," the cultic and hierarchic condition of our art. The cultural "dispersal" we are seeing in this country along with growing interest in the arts suggests that perhaps the opposite is beginning to take place, and that we now have the opportunity to nuture the growth of that organic relation between past and present, between poetry and people, as existed in the old folk world, and still exists at the periphery or underground in places where economic and social control is maintained through legalized terror. Know Fish seizes this opportunity and this is its strength. P. J. Laska TO OPEN DOORS TO THE POSSIBLE Jay Meek, Drawing on the Walls. Pittsburgh: Carnegie-Mellon Univ. Press, 1980. 81pp. $9.95 (cloth), $4.95 (paper). William Meissner, Learning To Breathe Underwater. Athens, Ohio: Ohio Univ. Press, 1979. 66pp. $7.00 (cloth), $3.50 (paper). Leonard Nathan, Dear Blood. Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1980. 80pp. $9.95 (cloth), $4.50 (paper). 131 REVIEWS Cary Waterman, The SalamanderMigration and Other Poems. Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1980. 66pp. $9.95 (cloth), $4.50 (paper). Bruce Weigl, A Romance. Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1979. 47pp. $8.95 (cloth), $3.95 (paper). Frederick Will, Our Thousand Year Old Bodies: Selected Poems 1956-1976. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1980. 103pp. $8.50 (cloth), $4.50 (paper). One wonders what there is about the academy that makes for grim or exclusive poetry: poetry which draws a circle around itself, celebrates little and expects the reader to rise to the poem. Certainly there is amble evidence for such a judgment. Even when the poet is a good one, as Leonard Nathan is in his latest book, Dear Blood, there is something of an inverse to political Reaganism: instead of having to prove how reactionary one is, the...