Richard Wilbur's Uncouth Muse

Koneazny continuedfrom previous page television obsessively, which functions as escape, tutor —"Oprah has trained Americans to say anything anywhere"—and newsreel. Watching is what she does when there is nothing to be done or when she can't sleep. Indeed, some ofus are already dead although still alive. Among the "illustrations" included in Don 'tLet Me Be Lonely are images of medicine bottle labels and television screens (some with pictures, others black except for lines ofwhite text or the white static snow one observes when the TV is on but there is nothing on). With their phonemic slip and slide of separation, the words mediate and medicate function as the flip sides of Rankine's thematic coin. She describes how at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are staring into our medicine cabinets and at our television sets. This is how life happens to us: while under medication and as filtered through the media. Instead of a system ofvalues, instructions on how to live, we're left with the warning labels on our medicine bottles, our "life-saving" poisons. She draws a line between healing and harming that appears ever so thin, a border we can cross over as easily and as absurdly as her relatives crossed from life to death. We are always at that juncture. For this reader, the center of gravity in Claudia Rankine's poem/essay lies at the bottom of page sixty-three where she says, "A husband wakes up beside me, stretching, asking, // Sweetheart, honey, dearest, / how did you sleep?" As if to say that in the midst ofdevastation, despite an existential loneliness, there can be tenderness. However, not even such evidence of love seems sufficient to keep her mind focused on the elusive present rather than upon death. For her, death is the condition, the fact, and life the story, the fiction. Claudia Rankine's prose is both elegant and eloquent. In Don't Let Me Be Lonely, she holds up a mirror (the mirror on the door of the medicine cabinet ?) and what we see there can be chilling indeed. The loneliness she describes throughout her book "stems from a feeling of uselessness," a uselessness redeemed in the end by a handshake, which is the poem. As Rankine concludes, "In orderfor something to be handed over a hand must extend and a hand must receive. We must both be here in this world in this life in this place indicating the presence of." Paula Koneazny lives in Sebastopol, California. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Spinning Jenny and Double Room and isforthcoming in 580 Split, Volt, and Luna. Richard Wilbur's Uncouth Muse Anthony Cuda Collected Poems: 1943-2004 Richard Wilbur Harcourt http://www.harcourtbooks.com 608 pages; cloth, $35.00 ForYeats, the internal voice with which the poet struggles over the course ofhis career arose from the irascible daemon of the soul. For Eliot, it came from the dark angel of moral corruption. But for Richard Wilbur, who steps squarely into the modern tradition in this regard, its source isn't always so mysteriously angelic or demonic. "I set two voices going against each other," he reveals in a 1977 interview: "One is a kind of lofty and angelic voice, the other is a slob voice.... The slob, in whom I trust a great deal, is saying to the angelic part: 'Come off it. Get down here where you belong.'" Though he published his first volume, The Beautiful Changes, in 1947, he didn't submit to this belligerent muse until his Pulitzer Prize winning Things ofthis World (1956), in which he demands that the angels hidden in the radiantly clean laundry fluttering outside his window "[descend] once more in bitter love / To accept the waking body" and adorn "the backs of thieves" and lovers. The magisterial lyric "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" was a breakthrough for Wilbur, and the chord that it strikes somewhere between the ideal and the actual (between the angel's impersonal "deep joy" and our own bitter, imperfect hopes and regrets) reverberates throughout his entire body ofwork, among the most generous, distinct, and accomplished of the later twentieth century. "The...