Signal: Noise, and: The Common Life, and: Apollo Helmet (review)

126 the minnesota review And in a change of milieu, in "Poetry Editor" the speaker in the poem is trying franticaUy to read through a manuscript before the arrival of its author, who is coming to learn what the speaker has to say about it. But with the confidence born of experience, the "I" of the poem isn't worried. Even if he doesnt finish reading the manuscript, he knows the manuscript's author will be content with even a smaU amount of praise: one connection and they will be satisfied, two and they will die for you In relating such truths —however brutaUy or humorously presented—about thejobs most Canadians spend their Uves at, poets such as White and McLean not only blaze a fresh trail in our literature but simultaneously are producing what to me are the best and most original of the new writing Canada has to show. To paraphrase White: the poetry we have had up to now is strong, Uke a book. But the new poetry of writers Uke McLean and White is stronger, Uke human beings. TOM WAYMAN Signal:: Noise, by Miriam Goodman. Cambridge, Mass.: AUce James Books, 1982. 61 pp. $4.95 (paper). The Common Life, by David McKain. Cambridge, Mass.: AUce James Books, 1982. 71 pp. $4.95 (paper). Apollo Helmet, by James Scully. Willimantic, Ct.: Curbstone Books, 1983. 84 pp. $12.00 (cloth), $7.50 (paper). Here are three volumes of poetry, each quite distinct and distinctly accomplished, which seem if read together to compose virtuaUy in and of themselves a kind of conversation on the possible contemporary sites and strengths of progressively-engaged poetic forms in this country today. Yet before resuming this conversation and attempting at least to indicate the powers, Umits, and problems of each of its constituent voices, we would do weU to recaU the general context in which this dialogue takes place: the context, that is, of American poetry, characterized as it is by an overwhelming and ever-more institutionalized array of formal—and formaüstic—practices, a more and more necessarily subsidized set of outlets, and, for the most part, an ever smaller audience of dispersed academicized coteries. Within this context, moerover, it is still fair to say that a certain narrow spectrum ofpoetic practice is still so widely viewed as normative as to be strictly speaking hegemonic. Indeed, critics as divergent in approach and commitment as Peter Stitt in The Georgia Review and Henry Sayre in this magazine have noted the determining power of what we have come to call the contemporary lyric: the epiphanic, personaüst, scrupulously worded spot of transcendent time, the poem as fistula of private insight, whose methods, workings and vocabulary may indeed need to be refreshed from time to time by new raw material from Vallejo or El Salvador, but whose touchstone presence as The Real Thing, true poetry, still dominates our tiny scene. Thus, inevitably, contemporary American poets must be heard as speaking either through or in spite of the lyric, brushing the language of the poem either with or against the grain. And accordingly, as the choice is made, we will find the results either more or less acceptable as poetry. Yet such choices, however conscious or unconscious they may be, are not innocent; for the lyric as a determinate aesthetic convention is, like all conventions, a congealed form of social behavior, lending itself more or less readily to one range of experiences and expressions while just as obdurately, intractably resisting, even censoring, 127 reviews others—including, in this case, the political itself. The dilemma, then, for the American political poet is on the one hand of whether (and how) to seek the poUtical through immersion in the privatistic universe of the lyric; on the other, of whether (and how) to find and claim convincingly as poetry an expUcitly social, political voice—a new aesthetic variation, in effect, on the old common no-win of the devil or the deep blue sea. Of the three poets, then, whose works we review here, David McKain in The Common Life seems most immediately recognizable as The Poet, miner of his own veins of personal experience, furnisher of small moments...