Attention,
Please. Now
by Matthew Pitt
Graffiti
by Komal Patel
Shocking,
Surprising Snodgrass
by Jay Rogoff
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Shocking, Surprising Snodgrass
Jay Rogoff
Almost two decades ago, when W. D.
Snodgrass’s last Selected Poems
appeared, another poet told me how different she felt revisiting
his Heart’s Needle sequence after many years. Back in
the 1960s, she said, those poems had shocked her—had
shocked everyone—with their subject matter: the guilt
and anger of the speaker’s divorce and the anxious difficulty
of maintaining a loving relationship with his estranged young
daughter. But the poetry now seemed tame, decorous in its
formal restraint, and she had difficulty perceiving what had
created such a fuss. And truly, it was quite a fuss: The 1959
Heart’s Needle, Snodgrass’s first collection,
took the Pulitzer Prize over, among others, Life Studies,
the now-iconic book by Snodgrass’s teacher Robert Lowell
that, together with Heart’s Needle, brought
family trauma and psychological disturbance out of the closet
and made them fair game for verse, inspiring M. L. Rosenthal
to create the label “confessional poetry.” These
books shocked readers in 1959 precisely because Snodgrass
and Lowell presented themselves not as wild-man outsiders
like Allen
Ginsberg, who, guided by Blakean vision and elegiac Whitmania,
ran naked through America, but strong traditionalists who
clothed disturbing personal dramas in technical beauty, so
the rawness of the wounds they examined seeped through the
gold tissue of their poems’ finery.
Our difficulty today in seeing Snodgrass’s special quality
actually derives from his success and his influence, as well
as the influence of Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, and
others: What looked forbidden in his poetry, what made it
new and startling at the time, has become the norm. The wrong
turns that in the 1950s counted as dirty secrets of private
life—divorce, adultery, and the emotional snarls they
make of parent-child relationships—have become common
American experiences and, therefore, common poetic subjects.
The culture has caught up with Snodgrass and Lowell, and poetry,
as always, has pushed beyond the culture, outing all of its
skeletons from the closet into cold print.
Continued in volume 42, issue 4, autumn
2006
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