A Poet's Distrust of Poetry

Feshbach continuedfrom previous page it were—is something of an anti-memoir. Here Is Where We Meet is a deeply personal statement by a writer who has consistently denied the subjectivities of individualism. He is unwilling or unable to fill in the times of his life as well as he has filled out the spaces, "and that may be the trouble." The last essay—"S1A," after Fellini's film, and not "9"—is the coda: he repeats his question, "Why did you never read any of my books?" and his mother's ghost's response: "I liked books which took me to another life," etc. This time, however, he interpolates things a bit differently: Just write down what you find. I'll never know what I've found. No, you'll never know. A powerful poignancy is evoked in that "No, you'll never know," especially when we recall how much Berger has written, the thousands of insights he has generated over the decades. Readers may be moved at the recognition that, at age seventy-eight, this "old man in Lisboa" will "never know." "8 1/2" is the clasp of a necklace, holding together a book well worth reading. Sidney Feshbach has published articles on James Joyce, Hermann Broch, A. M. Klein, Wallace Stevens, Marcel Duchamp, Empedocles, and others. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. A Poet's Distrust of Poetry Gary Lenhart Late Poems: 1968-1993 Kenneth Burke Edited by Julie Whitaker and David Blakesley University of South Carolina Press http://www.sc.edu/uscpress 240 pages; cloth, $39.95 Kenneth Burke was one of the twentieth century's great men of letters, with all that the term implies, though he preferred the simpler"word-man." After dropping out of Columbia University because the institution wouldn't allow undergraduates to register for the graduate courses he was eager to take, Burke quickly established himself as a presence in the literary life ofGreenwichVillage, contributing to Others and Contact, and soon succeeding Marianne Moore as an editor at the Dial. As he describes his early career in one poem in this volume, "Beginning with an interest in stories and poems / he made attempts to write some." By the end of the decade he turnedto literary, then socialcriticism, andeventually established himself as a rhetorician and a pioneering , wide-ranging theorist through books such as Attitudes Toward History (1937), A Grammar of Motives (1945), The Rhetoric of Religion (1961), and Language as Symbolic Action (1966). In the aforementioned poem, he describes his work as: culminating in the Logological Enterprise ofTracking Down The Implications of the Distinction Between Nonsymbolic Motion and Symbolic Action. Burke was bom in 1897 and died in 1993. His first published poem was written in 1915; his last, the year before his death. Yet his first collection, which included poems from 1915-54, was fewer man one hundred pages of large print surrounded by a lot of blank space. By the time he published a Collected Poems in 1968, the total ran to almost three hundred pages. This third and final volume collects poems written after his seventy-first birthday, beginning with a long poem composed as his wife was dying from a painful muscle-degenerating disease. Some of these were published during Burke's lifetime in magazines such as the New Republic and Critical Inquiry, but most have been gathered from his papers and letters by the editors, one of whom is Burke's daughter-in-law, the other the author of a book "which brings Burke's theories to bear on composition and the teaching ofwriting." The blurbs are from Jack Selzer, author of Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village (1996), and William H. Rueckert, author of several books about Burke and perhaps Burke's bestknown interpreter. I mention these affiliations to suggest that these people represent readers who may well find anything by Kenneth Burke ofinterest. In this sense, this book might compare to the collected poems of John Dewey, a volume less engaging as poems than for what one learns about the philosopher's gentle relation to Romantic landscape and sentiment; or more aptly, to the poems of E. B. White, whose major talents are demonstrated elsewhere...