Mr. Howard's Neighborhood

Page 24 American Book Review mr. Howard’S neigHBorHood steve Davenport Without saying: neW Poems Richard Howard Turtle Point Press http://www.turtlepointpress.com 108 pages; paper, $16.95 More than thirty years ago in a Ploughshares interview, while discussing contemporary poets and the imitators their work attracts, Mark Strand makes this claim: “The only poet that doesn’t have any imitators is Richard Howard. He may be the smartest of us all.” It’s hard to know for sure what those two statements have to do with each other. Let’s assume Strand meant that Howard was the smartest of the poet bunch because only he managed to produce style and content that resisted imitation, warded it off from the get-go. Poetry with built-in bug spray. Without Saying is too often driven by surfaces, the easy, predictable joke, the one-take pay-off better suited to the stage than the page. Here’s a question. Why would a poet bother to shake off pursuers, even want to? You know, with imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, not to mention an effective way for poets, young or old, to pick up a few chops. I suspect buried in Strand’s off-the-cuff statement is a nod to Richard Howard’s erudition, which is readily available in his latest work, Without Saying: New Poems. Like his other collections, Without Saying does a lot of just that, saying, as it fans its poetry feathers in the usual array of high-culture markers that we take to be, for better or worse, learning multiple languages (French and English primarily), specialized or difficult vocabulary (start your engines, “ars moriendi,” “feuilleton,” “sphingal,” “funest,” “corrigendum,” “askesis,” “kapparot”), historical figures (in “To Constantine Cavafy” alone, Gustave Moreau, Anatole France, José María de Heredia, Maurice Barrés, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, Théophile Gautier), European mythology (among other characters, Castor, Pollux, Leucippus, Hilaera, Phoebe, Lynceus, Idas), museum-worthy artwork (e.g., the Rubens’s painting “The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus”). In other words, one of the defining characteristics of his poetry is its pedagogical thrust. Without Saying is full of stuff we ought to know, especially if we want to know our way around Mr. Howard’s neighborhood. And why not want that when, if he’s right, there are folks there we should meet and others we should know more about? (If you’re looking for Boxcar Willie or Dan’l Boone, you’re in the wrong neck of the woods.) Some, like Robert Browning and Henry James, are primary residents. No surprise then when Browning makes an appearance in “Mind Under Matter.” Howard’s debt to the master of the dramatic monologue has always been in full view. His poems love to talk in character, and at such length the act of talking becomes the point. For a perfect example, see “Ediya: an interview.” Dramatic utterance is the vehicle that allows Howard to people his neighborhood , not just drop names (though he does plenty of that), but give them voice, quite often in a poetic line that is, despite the syllable rationing, chatty and might just as well be delivered in, and improved upon through, free verse. Read, for instance, “School Days,” count out the syllable pattern, find it fairly regular, appreciate the work it took, then ask yourself why not another pattern, almost any other? The arbitrariness becomes the problem and raises the question itself. When syllable counting becomes merely that, counting, the poem, or this reader, wants to know why that pattern. Why not another, more organic form, one whose shape or rhythms better suit the material, strengthen it, become something more than a delivery system for poems that, in the process, become thin, anecdotal , at their best merely clever? Again, “School Days,” but “Ediya: an interview” and Exposures” make the same case. People may talk the way they talk in Mr. Howard’s neighborhood, but sometimes they might talk a little less like each other, stretch their legs, get out of the neighborhood occasionally , do the watusi, something, to improve the stock, the breed. Which leads us to Henry James and no surprise that the first...