Three Great Modern Poets

No art has suffered more from the trends of anti-conceptualism, subjectivism, and naturalism than poetry has. After a half century during which poets threw away the tools of their craft and published work that deliberately avoided meter, metaphor, and meaning, one can hardly blame readers who now take it for granted that poetry is a subjective, “anything goes” act of self-expression, simultaneously over their heads and beneath their notice. Americans once named schools and streets, even cities (such as Whittier, California), after poets. Today, most would be hard-pressed to name a single living poet, let alone a great one.

Those readers and writers still enthusiastic about poetry are largely divided into an elite class of the serious, consisting mostly of academics who speak almost exclusively to each other; and the unserious, which includes some poets of extraordinary popularity who are relegated to a niche or ignored altogether by the artistic community. The rest stick to the classics that, great as they are, typically are at least a century old. Dana Gioia, a poet and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, puts it plainly in his celebrated book Can Poetry Matter? Poetry is still “supported by a loyal coterie,” but it “has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture.”¹

This collapse is due to the same influences that have wreaked so much havoc in other art forms over the past century. What Dianne Durante has written of painting and sculpture is also true of good poetry: skilled artists select materials, in this case words, and find ways to “suggest what you should pay attention to, and where you should focus amid the chaos of impressions that assaults your senses every minute of every day.”² An effective poem allows the audience to experience, however briefly, the sort of world they would want to live in (or not).

Poets of the past strove particularly to achieve integration: synthesizing images, sounds, and memorable phrasing to encapsulate perfectly what they sought to express. Poets often thought of integration—of profound coherence—as the prime value of their craft. As Alexander Pope put it, “true art is nature to advantage dress’d / What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.”³ Anyone reading a masterpiece such as W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” or E. E. Cummings’s “may my heart always be open to little,” can see how they used language in a disciplined way to create specific moods, express unique insights, or capture ideas in unforgettable phrases. The success or failure of their efforts may be hard to measure, but until the middle of the past century, poets generally understood their goals and were trained in a long and honorable tradition of methods. Even radical innovators such as Cummings were engaged in an essentially creative and communicative enterprise and used existing tools or fashioned new ones to achieve fascinating effects.

But just as musicians in the 20th century turned away from melody, and painters and sculptors from representation, so poets were taught to reject conceptual meaning and to regard their traditional techniques, such as meter and imagery, as somehow artificial. The “confessional” school, championed by Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath in the 1950s and 1960s, focused on subjectivity—producing work that was often comprehensible only to the poet himself and was sometimes little more than melodramatic shrieking. Plath was capable of outstanding work, but in league with the confessional movement she published unreadably tedious poems, including what is perhaps the most infamous “confessional” poem, “Daddy,”⁴ in which she likens her father to a Nazi soldier—(“I have always been scared of you, / With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo”)—and herself to a victim of the Holocaust.

In the years that followed, the “language poets”—heirs to Gertrude Stein and John Ashberry—eschewed meaning and sought to “deconstruct” the artistic form. Rejecting poetry’s essential devices and creating an art of dis-integration, they substituted mere sensation for meaning and concept. They consciously avoided intelligibility and communication, purporting to unmask poetry as “constructed by relations of power, and not as either transcendent, universal, or natural,” and demonstrating their radical negation of “the politics of cultural production.”⁵ In their eyes, meaninglessness became a positive virtue—a way for poets to prove themselves free of the “chains” of reason.

It might seem ironic that a leftist culture that claimed to seek the liberation of the working class would produce work that no member of the working class would ever choose to read, but these writers were motivated by something deeper than politics: a fundamental rejection of logic and coherence. This was framed as a reaction against poetic formalism. But in fact it was, like the work of Jackson Pollock in painting, John Cage in music, and Louise Bourgeois in sculpture, an attack on the process of artistic integration.⁶

Along with such outright anti-intellectualism came the plain collapse of standards. Even if not committed to avant-garde movements, today’s poetry critics often struggle to avoid criticizing poets, out of an “Emperor’s New Clothes”-type reticence to assert a definitive verdict—or out of what poet Matthew Buckley calls the “allure of incomprehension.”⁷ The outbursts of today’s poetry elite are applauded even when incomprehensible, trite, or just plain sloppy, because today’s artistic elite regard communication and conceptual thinking as hindrances, standards as judgmental and exclusionary. The result, Buckley writes, is that “nonsense has become a defining virtue of contemporary American poetry.” And many of those still committed in some way to poetry’s traditional methods of meter, narrative, and metaphor—particularly the cowboy poets and rappers—are largely content to wink and amuse or disgust and terrify, rather than to convey themes worth conveying.

Still, as with painting, sculpture, and music, brilliant practitioners continue to labor, often without recognition, to create outstanding new art. In the 1990s, a movement known as New Formalism began reasserting the importance of selection and communication in poetry.⁸ Today the New Formalists no longer seem so radical because their demands made such impressive progress that they largely have been accepted within the poetry community. Even authors who did not align themselves explicitly with that movement persisted in writing metrical, integrated poetry that adhered to the high standards of poetic craft. Although still in the minority, many contemporary poets—including Dana Gioia, Mark Jarman, X. J. Kennedy, Ted Kooser, William Baer, and others—and journals such as Think, Able Muse, and Measure are keeping alive an honorable artistic tradition focused on selectivity and integration. Three poets in particular—Richard Wilbur, A. E. Stallings, and Stephen Kampa—prove that greatness lives on in poetry today.

***

Wilbur, who turned ninety-five this year, is probably America’s foremost representative of formal poetry. Twice recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, and former poet laureate of the United States, Wilbur is best known for his translations of Molière and is a respected authority on the work of Edgar Allen Poe. His most recent book of poems, Anterooms, was published in 2010. He is a master of form and sound who for many years was regarded as the last holdout of a passé tradition. In his seventy-year career, he has never aimed to shock or scandalize. Instead, his poetry has conveyed ideas and feelings best described as bourgeois—reflective, intelligent, gentle, and benevolent. In a 2005 review of his Collected Poems, the New York Times aptly labeled him “The Well-Adjusted Poet.”⁹ Wilbur’s writings, the reviewer said, “form an argument, about how one goal of the well-lived life might be composure, rather than the mad flowering of a personal signature.”

That composure is nowhere more evident than in “Cottage Street, 1953,”¹⁰ a poem that contrasts his own sense of life—and his own poetic style—with those of Sylvia Plath. The poem tells a true story of a visit between Wilbur and the then twenty-one-year-old Plath only a few months after she had tried to kill herself with sleeping pills. (A decade later, her third suicide attempt succeeded.) Plath’s mother—a friend of Wilbur’s mother-in-law, Edna Ward—had hoped her daughter might take direction from meeting with an established poet.

Framed in her phoenix fire-screen, Edna Ward
Bends to the tray of Canton, pouring tea
For frightened Mrs. Plath; then, turning toward
The pale, slumped daughter, and my wife, and me.

Asks if we would prefer it weak or strong.
Will we have milk or lemon, she enquires?
The visit seems already strained and long.
Each in his turn, we tell her our desires.

It is my office to exemplify
The published poet in his happiness,
Thus cheering Sylvia, who has wished to die;
But half-ashamed, and impotent to bless.

I am a stupid life-guard who has found,
Swept to his shallows by the tide, a girl
Who, far from shore, has been immensely drowned,
And stares through water now with eyes of pearl.

How large is her refusal; and how slight
The genteel chat whereby we recommend
Life, of a summer afternoon, despite
The brewing dusk which hints that it may end.

And Edna Ward shall die in fifteen years,
After her eight-and-eighty summers of
Such grace and courage as permit no tears,
The thin hand reaching out, the last word love.

Outliving Sylvia who, condemned to live,
Shall study for a decade, as she must,
To state at last her brilliant negative
In poems free and helpless and unjust.

Wilbur pronounces a gentle but firm judgment on the question Plath presents: In his view, Edna Ward, who lives to the age of eighty-eight in grace, courage, and love, has experienced a fuller and deeper life than the romantic¹¹ Plath can imagine, notwithstanding her seeming depth. He does not deny Plath’s poetic talent—he acknowledges the “pearl” inside her—but her rebellion, no matter how “large,” is not the measured step that makes for abiding joy. Plath comes off as a Byronic character; for all her professed desire to feel genuinely and profoundly, she is ultimately a self-destructive, antilife force. “I am better acquainted with depression and alienation than some who romanticize them,” said Wilbur in a later comment on the poem, “and I know that mental anguish can be ‘immense’; but there is also magnitude in a long life well lived in the world of others, and stanza six, without chiding Sylvia, laments that she was deprived of those dimensions.”¹²

The confessional poetry Plath practiced was, for all its purportedly therapeutic value, rooted in a toxic obsession with psychic wounds—and thus it tended to glamorize sickness and suffering. Wilbur sympathizes with that suffering, but his poem answers that a life of reasoned self-awareness is both more human and more humane. Plath’s tragedy is partly self-inflicted: she is “drowned” to some degree by herself, and her poems, thought “brilliant” and “free,” are also “unjust”—a word perfectly chosen to express her failure to fit cause and effect, means and ends, in a proportionate and life-affirming way. “‘Cottage Street’ is sympathetic to Sylvia throughout,” commented Wilbur. “It does, however, potentially quarrel with those who glamorize emotional illness and regard suicide as honorific.”¹³

There is nothing Byronic about Wilbur, whose own work is typically calm but ultimately joyful. His sense of life is best expressed in what is probably his most famous poem, “Love Calls Us to The Things of This World,”¹⁴ in which Wilbur, an Episcopalian, sees a vision of angels in the white laundry that New Yorkers hang out to dry on clotheslines between apartment buildings:

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,
And cries,
“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.”

Perhaps no line in his repertoire more perfectly expresses Wilbur’s appraisal of life than “rising together in calm swells / Of halcyon feeling.” This is not a poem of unmixed rapture, or the fabrication of some alternative world without evil. It is a clear-eyed look at real life, which is sometimes rough-edged but always marvelous. The poem rises in a calm swell, expertly straddling the spiritual and the mundane, in which “dark habits” and “pure floating” keep a “difficult balance,” and in which we are by turns drawn down and lifted up, like bedsheets in the wind, “astounded.”

Yet Wilbur does not stop at forming this happy notion—he helps us rise together by conveying his worldly benevolence in an expressive and memorable way. This demands the fullest technical skill. His attention to meter, and his precise and playful word choice, make the poem succeed where more avant-garde poetic styles would have failed. A self-professed radical might have satisfied himself by naming splotches of white, or attempted a dull irony with words such as “flapping.” Wilbur, on the other hand, deftly uses his tools to fashion an unforgettable and effective mental image. Each word is precisely chosen to avoid subjectivity, let alone unintelligibility.

Wilbur’s aesthetic views are so mature and magnanimous that he often finds something to value even in poets whose approach differs radically from his own, such as Plath’s. But in a 1959 lecture on the work of Edgar Allen Poe, he made a revealing statement. “Poe is a great artist,” he said, yet “Poe’s theory of the nature of art seems to me insane.”¹⁵

This is unusually strong language for Wilbur, but the explanation is simple: Poe is fundamentally Wilbur’s opposite. He was—at least in Wilbur’s eyes—a prototypical 19th-century romantic, professing a Platonic worldview according to which the physical world is a counterfeit, and man is torn between the material and spiritual universes. Poe’s basic antipathy to realism pervaded such poems as his “Sonnet to Science,” which chided scientific inquiry as a “Vulture, whose wings are dull realities.”¹⁶ He believed the job of the poet was to articulate the higher dimension of mystical insight, but this required an unrelenting struggle against physical nature and the desire for ordinary life. Only in dreams, and ultimately in death, could man, and particularly poets, find harmony with the infinite. Wilbur summarizes Poe’s beliefs: “Since Earth is a fallen planet, life upon earth is necessarily a torment for the poet. . . . His only recourse is to abandon all concern for Earthly things, and to devote himself as purely as possible to unearthly visions, in hopes of glimpsing that heavenly beauty which is the thought of God.”¹⁷

In his extensive writings on Poe, Wilbur makes it clear that he thinks his predecessor a master craftsman whose literature expertly conveys his ideas—but whose basic premises are the opposite of his own. “To say that art should repudiate everything human and earthly, and find its subject matter at the flickering end of dreams,” he writes, “is hopelessly to narrow the scope and function of art.”¹⁸ Wilbur points to his late friend Robert Frost as an apt contrast, even a refutation, of Poe.

Frost’s classic poem “Birches,”¹⁹ for example, subtly chides the romantics of Poe’s era. It begins by describing the ice that breaks off from birch trees after an ice storm. “Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust— / Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away / You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.”²⁰ Yet rather than be swept up in this extreme metaphor, Frost stops and accepts the “matter-of-fact about the ice-storm.” He recalls how, as a boy on the farm, he would sometimes climb the springy trunks of young birches to leap the air, “Kicking his way down . . . to the ground.” Now, however, he thinks he would prefer to climb a tree “Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, / But dipped its top and set me down again.” Rather than seeking some other dimension and shattering the celestial spheres, Frost concludes that “Earth’s the right place for love.” Like Frost, Wilbur sees little charm in the illusory conception of freedom Poe endorsed. “It’s not about unlimited aspiration to the heavenly,” he explained to an interviewer in 2011. Instead, poetry “gives you a more intense and surprised perception of the interlaced objective world, of things as they are.”²¹

The impulse to deny reality or to transcend life is the theme of another of Wilbur’s great poems. In “Lying”²² he contemplates the way that falsehood, even if apparently harmless, ruptures our connection to life and distorts “the delicate web of human trust.” In a later essay, Wilbur explained that he wrote the poem to refute the view of some writers that creativity consists of inventing fictions.²³ He recalled reading that Dylan Thomas considered it “a poetic act to inform his mother that he was carrying a handkerchief in his right-hand pocket, whereas in fact the handkerchief was in his left-hand pocket.”²⁴ “Lying” rejects this counterfeit theory of art. The beauties of the world, it declares, are “there before us . . . there to be seen or not / By us,” and we do violence to it and to ourselves when we succumb to the temptation to fake reality. Wilbur likens that temptation—whether it be as fleeting as a comment about a handkerchief, or as massive as the coordinated deceptions of warfare—to the rebellion of Lucifer in Paradise Lost, who looks upon the “given world” and sees it only “as another prison.” Appreciating reality, Wilbur answers, is actually the highest form of creativity—and is “Closer to making than the deftest fraud.” For a poet to regard nature as confining and transgression as liberating is perverse.

Where Poe thought poets were obliged to struggle against reality, and Thomas seethed for the chance to throw himself against the so-called restraints of nature—to “rage, rage against the dying of the light”²⁵—Wilbur finds wisdom in calm appreciation for the hidden meanings and connections of existence. “The world,” he concludes, “is fundamentally a great wonder and a great order.”²⁶

***

Nobody is better positioned to inherit Wilbur’s mantle as the nation’s best formalist poet than A. E. Stallings. So it’s appropriate that Stallings, now forty-eight, won the prestigious Richard Wilbur Award in 1999 for her first book, Archaic Smile. Since then, she has garnered many more awards, including a MacArthur “Genius Grant.” Like Wilbur, she begins with a firm grasp of poetic tradition but brings to it an innovative expertise all the more extraordinary for its apparent effortlessness. Consider, for instance, her ingenious “Alice in The Looking Glass”²⁷:

No longer can I just climb through—the time
Is past for going back. But you are there
Still conning books in Hebrew, right to left,
Or moving little jars on the dresser top
Like red and white pieces on a chessboard. Still
You look up curiously at me when I pass
As if you’d ask me something—maybe why
I’ve left you locked inside. I’d say because
That is where I’d have reflections stay,
In surfaces, where they cannot disquiet,
Shallow, for all that they seem deep at bottom;
Though it’s to you I look to set things right—
(The blouse askew, hair silvering here and here)—
Where everything reverses save for time.

At first, this poem looks relatively simple. Stallings, whose first name is Alicia, alludes plainly to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. She catches glimpses of her aging face in the mirror and thinks briefly about her younger self. That inner self looks back, “curious” to know whether she is remaining true to her past dreams. The questions are both disquieting and necessary, and the poet alternately wishes to shy away from the thought and to examine her past commitments “to set things right.” This is not an unusual theme for a poem, but what makes this one unique is its clever metrical device—a device the poem subtly invites us to discover if we look beneath its “surfaces.”

Instead of rhyming, Stallings ends each line with a word that alternates from the center in opposite meanings—“there”/“here,” “left”/“right,” “top”/“bottom.” This creates a mirror effect between lines 7 and 8 (“why”/“because”). The only words that are not opposites appear at the ends of the first and last lines—and that word is “time,” which, the final line tells us, is the only thing that does not reverse in the mirror. Time somehow marches on—and that is the answer to the “why”/“because” that forms both the mirror and the question at the poem’s heart. This masterpiece of integration combines form and content to express the theme of what it means to reflect—a pun Lewis Carroll would have appreciated. In his novel, Alice could climb through the looking glass into a backwards world. Here, the poet can only figuratively climb into her own mind, and then only in brief moments.

This focus on time hints at one of Stallings’s finest qualities: her confidence with literary tradition. “Poetry is a conversation with the dead and the unborn,” she told an interviewer in 2011. “In this way, one never feels lonely or unappreciated just because one has a small, select readership in the present. One feels a kinship with like minds across the ages, and no, it is never going to be the majority.”²⁸ She recalled being struck as a student by how modern the poets of ancient Greece and Rome sounded. “They seemed fresher and more modern than most of the contemporary poetry I was reading in journals in the late eighties and early nineties. It was a revelation, for instance, that a poet like Catullus was writing about contemporary (and raunchy) things in contemporary Latin diction, but in tight, elegant metrical forms.”

This was the origin of Stallings’s most prominent characteristic: her clever blending of ancient myth with modern themes. Stallings—who went to college in Athens, Georgia, and now lives in Athens, Greece—is currently at work on a translation of Hesiod’s Works And Days, and her own poems include a letter from Persephone to her mother about life in Hades, a speech by Charon to Psyche while crossing the river Styx, and a monologue by Cassandra about being cursed so that nobody believes her prophecies.

At their best, Stallings’s poems are precisely carved gems of artistic integration, with every attribute working toward the whole, a whole reflected and amplified by each element—the sound, the form, and even the physical appearance. Her writing is consistently marked by an attention to clarity, proportion, and theme-driven selectivity, and the results are poems with layers of meaning and effect, all perfectly poised on the theme.

A characteristic example is her sestina “Sisyphus.”²⁹ A sestina is a poem of six six-line stanzas, typically followed by an “envoi.” It does not rhyme; rather, the lines end with one of six words that the poet chooses at will but that follow a rigid order. The first stanza ends with the words in order 1-2-3-4-5-6; the second ends with the same words, but in the order 6-1-5-2-4-3 and so on to the end. The envoi employs all the prescribed words to sum up the poem’s meaning. The sestina is an extraordinarily demanding form, but in the hands of an expert such as Stallings, it manages to combine style and content in a way that expresses a whole larger than the sum of its parts.

Stallings begins “Sisyphus” not with words picked at random but with a passage from a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge titled “Work Without Hope,” which she uses as the envoi. Coleridge’s original makes no reference to the Greek legend of Sisyphus,³⁰ who was punished in Hades by being cursed with the eternal labor of pushing a rock up a mountain, only to have it slide back down, whereupon he had to begin again. But Stallings gracefully folds Coleridge’s words—“work,” “obsessive,” “draws,” “hope,” “object,” and “live”—into a delicate masterpiece of integration:

It is good to work
the dumb, obsessive
muscles. Exertion draws
the mind from hope
to a more tangible object.
To live

is to relive.
This can only work
when there is an object
to push, cursive and recursive,
up the hill, when you hope
this draws

to no close as day withdraws,
but will replay in dreams. You live
in hope
of dream-work,
its regressive,

Awake, abject,
the conscious mind draws
into a ball; the Elusive
tongues it like the pit of an olive.
The quirk
of hope

in recurrent nightmares is the hope
at last to be the object
of the murderer’s handiwork,
when he draws
the knife to relieve
the stutter, to make passive

the massive
machinery of hope,
the broken record of alive.
Why object?
The luck of all the draws
is the weight of stone.

Work
without hope draws nectar in a sieve
and hope without an object cannot live.

Stallings bends the sestina’s strict rules a little, but only where necessary to convey the theme of Sisyphus’s longing for relief from his unrewarded toil. Throughout it all, she uses the tools of language, form, meter, and metaphor to produce a poem that expresses her theme in both form and content. She even stretches the lengths of the lines in some stanzas to suggest subtly the mountain that Sisyphus climbs eternally.

Such a work of integration is the mark of a virtuoso, and Stallings repeats the feat in poem after poem. “First Love: A Quiz”³¹ takes the form of a multiple-choice exam; the first line of each stanza is followed by four possible answers, all of it in meter, gradually blending in elements of the Persephone myth to convey the dangerous thrill of high-school love. In “Four Fibs”³² she exploits a form called a “fib”—because it is based on the Fibonacci Sequence of numbers—in order to dwell on the meaning and origin of lies, or “fibbing.” These and other poems fully justify an early critic’s comment that Stallings writes “with a jeweler’s attention.”³³

Where Wilbur’s poems express a commitment to realism and a fundamental affirmation of life’s wonder, Stallings’s “isolated moments” are often slightly darker, sometimes with a tinge of eeriness not unlike a Twilight Zone episode. Her poems capture perfectly the feeling of an argument with a spouse (“The Argument,” “Aftershocks”), a narrow escape from a car accident (“Postcard from Greece”), or the fear that a telephone call might “dial into the room and change our lives” (“Telephonophobia”). Typically, the most touching and benevolent notes appear in her poems about motherhood, but even these are more often solemn and intimate than lighthearted or fun. Even “Ultrasound,”³⁴ in which she permits herself a quiet joke while looking at the image of her growing child (“Listen, here’s / Another ticker / Counting under / Mine, and quicker”), ends with a pang of humility at the cycle of life and death: “I am the room / the future owns, / The darkness where / It grows its bones.” Her playful poem “The Catch”³⁵ employs gentle puns to express a wry ambivalence about how her young baby interrupts her marriage: “Something has come between us,” the poem begins. “Separating husband from wife, / Lover from lover . . .  / The fierce love of our fashioning / That will have no brother.”

But Stallings’s clearest expression of her sense of life comes in “Tulips,”³⁶ which in her 2012 book Olives appears immediately before “Alice in The Looking Glass” and hints at that poem’s reflections. “Tulips” abounds in perfectly chosen metaphors—likening the flowers to paintbrushes and straws, commenting on the passage of time—and conveys Stallings’s characteristic themes of wonder, contemplation, and transiency:

The tulips make me want to paint,
Something about the way they drop
Their petals on the tabletop
And do not wilt so much as faint,

Something about their burnt-out hearts,
Something about their pallid stems
Wearing decay like diadems,
Parading finishes like starts,

Something about the way they twist
As if to catch the last applause,
And drink the moment through long straws,
And how, tomorrow, they’ll be missed.

The way they’re somehow getting clearer,
The tulips make me want to see—
The tulips make the other me
(The backwards one who’s in the mirror,

The one who can’t tell left from right),
Glance now over the wrong shoulder
To watch them get a little older
And give themselves up to the light.

***

Stephen Kampa is an emerging poet—author of two collections, Cracks in The Mirror (2011) and Bachelor Pad (2014)—who teaches at Flagler College in Florida. But Kampa makes his living primarily as a musician, and much of his work is inspired by his experiences playing harmonica in a blues band. Other poems reflect his devout Christian beliefs. As a result, his writing often mixes religious ideas and popular culture in unusual and amusing ways. His approach is consistently precise and disciplined, and the results are superb examples of a gifted poet’s skill at integration. When an interviewer asked him how his musical career had affected his poetry, Kampa answered that in music

you play the song, which sometimes means playing less dazzlingly than you are able because a flashy solo would ruin the beautiful, elegant simplicity of the song. All too often the temptation is to play the most technically complex, astonishing thing you can; you play one bebop solo on a country song, however, and what you’ve managed to demonstrate is not that you’re a great musician, but that you’re an asshole. The same can go for a poem: perhaps one does not use abstruse Latinate diction, virtuosic syntax, and elaborate stanzas when writing a lullaby.³⁷

Kampa is certainly capable of dazzling, but his commitment to artistic integration ensures that he does so only in service to the poem. Consider one of his most impressive pieces, a sestina titled “Masterpiece Interrupted by Hobo, Park Bench, 1999.”³⁸ Here, Kampa demonstrates his virtuosity by choosing particularly difficult end words for his lines: “horizon,” “sentimental,” “Marseille,” “wither,” “Martian,” and “silent.” Given the sestina’s strict demands, a poet who picks complicated words or proper nouns for end words is making trouble for himself. But Kampa solves the difficulty with clever wordplay, punning or rhyming to meet the form’s specifications. The result is so smoothly written that, except for the meter, a person hearing it read aloud might not even realize it is a poem.

As the title suggests, the poet begins by sitting on a bench thinking to himself and trying to write. He is interrupted, and what follows alternates between high and low language—echoing the separation of the panhandler and the educated writer:

First lines are tough. Let’s see . . . The red horizon
—Scratch that. Red: passion, rage—too sentimental.
The APRICOT horizon near Marseilles
Blossomed briefly, and then began to wither.
I felt time loosen. The tree leaves lisped ça marche in
Regretful French, and their imperfect sigh lent

A wooden weight—or should the trees be silent?
Is this too much “gaze toward the drear horizon”
Drivel? More academic, then: When Marcian
Summoned the Council, the note he sent—a mental
Note to self: find the note—asked bishops whether
Jesus was human or divine and—
“Mars, eh?”
A hobo eyes my sheet. “Name’s Omar. Say,
You got a light?” I glare at him, am silent;
If glares were pesticide, this clod would wither.
“A cigarette?” I gaze toward the horizon
And am unaffected by this sentimental
Stereotype of poor—
“I seen a Martian

One night while I was driving past a marsh in
Northeastern Florida. Crashed my truck.”
“Marseilles,”
I start to say to instill a sentiment—
“All
Hell done broke lose! At first, my wife was silent,
But when them bright lights almost done her eyes in,
She started screaming. Fog rolled up, the weather

All wonky—see my thumb? They made it wither.
Hot damn, no! Never want to see a Martian.
Needed a cell phone—what’s their name? Horizon?”
To him, I say, “Verizon”; to Marseilles,
The sunset, trees, and Marcian, I mouth a silent
Adieu. Perhaps I’m just a sentimental

Poet who struggles under a sentimental
Model of composition, smitten with—
“Er,
You listening buddy? You been awful silent.”

My eyes drop. Bleeding cut on Omar’s shin,
Split sides on Omar’s shoes. Could Omar say
Anything now that would not be hair-raising?

I think of water, robes, a choir raising
Voices as priests march in. I think of silence,
The only mercy not too sentimental.

Even more impressive than Kampa’s ingenious puns (“Marseilles,” / “‘Mars, eh?’” / “Omar. Say”) is the layering effect by which three voices are convincingly overlapped: the poet thinks to himself in one way; the poem being written sounds a higher, self-consciously poetic register in italics; then the hobo speaks in a third, more disheveled voice. We easily picture the poet’s irritation as he “glares” at the man, and Kampa hints at his deeper meaning when the writer, having just chided himself for the “drivel” of staring at the horizon, does that very thing when confronted by a real person instead of the abstract sentimentality of his work. The hint becomes clearer if we know that the “Council” Marcian summoned was the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451, where theologians declared that Jesus was a man with two unmixed natures, divine and human. The same division is reflected in the poem’s two characters. Only when the poet’s “eyes drop” does he notice Omar’s poverty and begin to think of “mercy.” In structure and content, the poem reinforces its theme: the division between the artist’s abstractions and the human world; between sentiment and sentimentality; between sophisticated theological debates and the ordinary demands of Christian morality.

Kampa’s religious poems often focus on the long-standing theological problems. In “Mirror Image,”³⁹ for instance, the poet stands before his reflection in a steaming bathroom, where the water vapor reveals the words “I am with you always.” He wrote them on the mirror the night before. “I see my face / Behind the letters, peaking through each break / In the opaque / Surface.” The writing brings to mind two paintings: Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, which portrays God about to give Adam life; and Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast, which depicts a passage from the Book of Daniel in which God’s hand appears and writes a prophecy of doom on the wall of Belshazzar’s home. The poet, poised between these two possible fates of damnation or holy life, concludes that the handwriting is not on the wall—he remains free to choose his own path: “The script is always mine.” Whatever one’s opinion of Kampa’s religious beliefs, this poem, like “Masterpiece Interrupted,” is a superb expression of them.

Kampa’s most satisfying poems are those in which he embraces life, not with the fervency of a Byronic hero but with calm and abiding goodwill. In “Not at The Grave of Dylan Thomas,”⁴⁰ for instance, he answers the poet who authored “Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night.” Thomas’s classic lines are often quoted as an expression of a zeal for living; but for all its talk of blazing eyes and lightning, the poem was actually the ranting of a desperate and depressive man who drank himself to death at the age of thirty-nine. To “rage, rage against the dying of the light” is not the mark of a life well-lived; it is an irrational cry of terror. Kampa answers that we should not be “taken in / By letting it all hang / Out, as if authenticity depended / On histrionics.” He urges us to put aside such “forceful lamentations” and “call / A spade a spade”: accept that death will come for all. That is not such a dismal thought as it may seem, because we have life to celebrate. Kampa rejects both Thomas’s fanaticism and the illusory seriousness of artists who meditate on gloom.

This is most vividly displayed in his poem “Theodicy.”⁴¹ The title refers to the theological discipline that seeks to understand why bad things happen to good people. But Kampa inverts the idea, to revel in the good things that also seem to happen for no explicable reason. The result is a gorgeous if idiosyncratic celebration of domestic happiness:

Sometimes you wake up inexplicably
Cheerful. Substantial reasons aren’t the issue—
You have a queen-sized bed and clean beige sheets
And over scrambled eggs you’ll skim an issue
Of Newsweek, The Economist, or Time—
But that this blessing should be given time

And time again—not every day, but often
Enough to keep you from the chic despair
Young artists wear like an expensive watch—
Strikes you as something rich beyond compare.
This gladness almost makes up for the days
You stagger out the front door in a daze,

Having already called your spouse a name
That echoed through the kitchen like a dropped
Plate breaking; hours will pass, and you’ll call home
Only to find your partner has graciously dropped
That morning’s catastrophic argument
And pardoned you the words you never meant.

You’ll leave the office happy, strolling past
A sunlight-rumpled bed of flame-bright phlox,
Which brings to mind an article you read:
It featured full-page pictures of huge flocks
Of crimson, pink, and even white flamingos.
Although you’d never cared about flamingos

You browsed the “Fun Facts” boxes for the highlights:
Their color comes from beta carotene
Found in the food the filter from their mud-
And-water mouthfuls upside down; they preen
With arabesque contortions of their necks.
You pass a bus bench where a couple necks

Shamelessly in the open; farther down,
Your Eccos grind some broken picture-frame
Glass on the sidewalk, and you contemplate
Flamingos and a question you might frame:
You wonder if they’re thinking when they look
At one another, How beautiful you look!

Somehow you know this deep, abiding joy
Only in part belongs to you: it comes
Unbidden. Maybe you’ll make love tonight.
You love your life. You wonder if it comes,
This passion not created but begotten,
From something you’ve remembered or forgotten.

Like Wilbur’s angelic sheets, Kampa’s flamingos bring delight marvelously to life. They stand as symbols of a world full of outstanding and unsought beauty. Their upside-down mouths parallel the inversion that Kampa himself is playing with the problem of theodicy—they preen away the dirt of the world to appear crimson, pink, and even white.

To the Christian Kampa, the source of this feeling is his having been “pardoned,” which restores harmony to a day momentarily stunned by a fight. Now the world lightens at the thought of love, color, and fun. The second half of the poem builds a crescendo of flowers, birds, and lovers that climaxes with the simple phrase, “You love your life”—a perfectly ordinary sentence that, thanks to Kampa’s careful design, blossoms before the reader’s eyes with understated “gladness.” Kampa’s poetry doesn’t always present such an uplifting sense of life—many poems in Bachelor Pad express a harsher verdict, as in “Walking Home Sober,” in which the poet, skipping a Christmas party, thinks “What is all this but one more stab / At fullness, one more tinsel-thin attempt / To salvage gladness from the drab / And selfish disaffection, savage contempt, / And rage that are this age’s gift to us?”⁴² But in its articulation of the most generous aspects of Christianity, “Theodicy” is among the finest poetic expressions of joy ever written. And his writing consistently reveals a commitment to selectivity and integration, blending together the sound, the meter, and the imagery of his poems to express a world we would want to inhabit.

***

In his poem “The Writer,”⁴³ Richard Wilbur likens a struggling author to a sparrow that once got stuck in his daughter’s room. He recalls how they opened the window to let it escape and watched for a worried hour until at last

our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,
It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

What is true of the individual artist is true of the art form itself: However maddening the struggle may be, a successful poem can soar over the sill of the world to produce a moment of grace never to be forgotten. It’s easy sometimes to despair of contemporary culture and to retreat into classics that, however stale, are at least reliably excellent. But outstanding poets are still writing moving, clever, and elegant poetry today, despite often being overlooked by the artistic vanguard. Every day, they aim for the right window and, however difficult the struggle, take flight.

Editor's note: The original posting of this article misquoted a line from Kampa's "Theodicy." It has been corrected from "You love your wife" to "You love your life."

About Timothy Sandefur

Timothy Sandefur holds the Duncan Chair in Constitutional Government at the Goldwater Institute and is a contributing editor of The Objective Standard.

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