Hubert:

Yes, when I think of Dickey the poet, I think of “The Performance” and his Twilight-Zone-ish chiller, “The Sheep Child.”

Only for the brave:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42713/the-sheep-child

Hubert:

You’re welcome!

Geez, I just realized that more than likely in the poem for my father Coulette was thinking of those photos of the Whole Earth which NASA had recently made available.

Gives the poem a whole new feeling.

I’ve been fascinated with Dana Gioia ever since I read his controversial essay, “Can Poetry Matter?” He was looking square at the decline of poetry outside its own bubble. Not pretty.

Joseph Langland–another forgotten poet–kindly critiqued my teenage juvenilia when I had him as a professor at UMass. Way too kindly, looking back on it. I sent some of my later work to Dana Gioia after running into and recognizing him at an airport in Connecticut. He liked it and encouraged me to publish. I didn’t have the guts to back then. Still don’t. Anyway, as Richard Wilbur said about some other activity (running, if I recall correctly): the god of that has left me.

I think I have the same collection of Merwin’s first four books of poetry that you have. Published by Atheneum in the mid-1970s on fine paper. Nice book, but Merwin’s poetry never quite clicked with me. That said, I found his work to be more accessible–and more enjoyable–than John Ashbery’s neo-absurdist stuff. I half-suspected Ashbery was a very clever literary con man.

One of James Dickey’s poems has a line that would serve as a pretty good gravestone epitaph for anybody:

“Having done all things in this life that he could.”

From “The Performance”:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/28057/the-performance

About a fellow USAAF aviator who was shot down in the Pacific and executed–beheaded–by the Japanese.

I think it was you who made the point in a previous poetry-heavy thread that poets seem to be disproportionately susceptible to mental illness and substance abuse (alcoholism) and to lead disproportionately messy lives. Many fit that pattern. Dickey partly did: he was an alcoholic and (I gather) a bad husband. But he also had a fairly successful business career (Coca-Cola), at least for a while. Other businessman-poets are T. S. Eliot (banking), Wallace Stevens (insurance), and Dana Gioia (food industry). Richard Wilbur–perhaps the best American formalist poet of the 20th century–was formidably sane. He was also deeply religious. Not coincidental, I’ll bet.

He was also my father’s best childhood friend, while growing up in Santa Fe. Coulette wrote this poem after my father’s death:
_______________________________

On the Horizon
for John Trainor

–Henri Coulette, “The Family Goldschmitt” (1971)
_______________________________

When I moved to California in 1982, I met Henri in a Beverly Hills coffee shop, which was halfway between where he lived in Pomona and I was staying in Thousand Oaks.

He was a kind, generous man who loved my father and even encouraged me as a young poet. I feel so fortunate to have met him.

Dang. Forgot James Dickey! (Also author of “Deliverance.) I recall his review of “The Moving Target” which reinforced my impression above:
_________________________

What matters most, though, is that these poems [of “The Moving Target”] are so incomparably the author’s best as to make the reader inadvertently believe that Mr. Merwin’s previous books were by somebody else.

–James Dickey, “The Many Ways of Speaking in Verse” (1963)
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/04/specials/merwin-moving.html
_________________________

I bought a book, which collected the first four books of Merwin’s poetry, and Dickey was quite right. Those books seemed to have been written by someone else.

Dickey was a force of his own. His poems were more formal than I liked but he could make a poem happen. The first line of “Deliverance” is practically a poem unto itself:
__________________________

It unrolled slowly, forced to show its colors, curling and snapping back whenever one of us turned loose.
__________________________

Dickey is describing the map to the river our adventurers plan to tour by canoe.

BTW, did you know Nemerov was brother to Diane Arbus, the photographer?

Sarah Hoyt wrote a post on this very thing, looking at population “data” as reported by most countries, all of which have an agenda that incentivizes cooking the books.

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2023/02/20/the-power-of-lies/

Howard Nemerov 1920
Richard Wilbur 1921
James Dickey 1923
Anthony Hecht 1923
Louis Simpson 1923
Edgar Bowers 1924
Donald Justice 1925
W. D. Snodgrass 1926
Galway Kinnell 1927
James Wright 1927

My taste differs from Huxley’s. He likes the Beatnik, West Coast, and Black Mountain School poets. I prefer the formalists. Wilbur, Hecht, Bowers, and Simpson were G.I. poets and WWII combat veterans. Nemerov served in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Dickey served in the USAAF in the Pacific. Snodgrass served in the Navy. I heard Hecht speak about his war experiences a few months before he died in 2004. He had no use for talk about “the Good War” and “the Greatest Generation”.

Honorable mention to Joseph Langland (1917-2007), another WWII combat veteran poet and my old English prof at UMass.

Air

–W.S. Merwin
http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/w__s__merwin/poems/19920
_________________________________

However, there are other views such as:

https://poemanalysis.com/w-s-merwin/air/

Which gets the part right about Merwin walking between the past and the future, but the rest strikes me as overwrought critical bull.

“Lemuel’s Blessing” is from Merwin’s early collection, “The Moving Target,” in which he was struggling to find his own voice and how to write poetry. The book title is a clue.

Merwin had already published four books of poetry in that rather dense, allusive, formal style of the 50s (which I generally don’t care for). He was well-regarded as an up-and-coming young poet.

In “The Moving Target” Merwin broke with his past and launched himself into a more open, accessible, yet experimental style influenced by his wide readings in international poetry particularly surrealism.

One might say “The Moving Target” was Merwin’s “Revolver” album. Exciting stuff for aficionados.

Merwin never looked back. He produced a unique and rich body of work. He walked his own path between academic poetry and the various other movements percolating in his time.

If you liked “Lemuel’s Blessing,” try “The Moving Target.”