The organizing principle of Norman Rosten’s poems is the ironic double-take: “Kisses were given, and lightning seen: / It was later I heard the thunder.” The principal material of the poems is an attractive personality, too well-mannered to be overtly sentimental. The limitation of the poems is that the form exists independently, acquiring a familiar quality, like a favorite container. The container-form is useful but lacks interest. Each poem is built in the same way to a punch-line ending. Since Mr. Rosten’s book is now in its second printing, his formula is worth noticing: a controlled lightness aimed at a reader socially but not literarily sophisticated. 

The art of Harriet Zinnes’s An Eye for an I, in contrast, is sophisticated and impersonal. The book itself is a beautiful object, both in paper and print and in its art reproductions. The interaction of these arts with music (in poems on electronic music) suggests a completeness beyond the personal, the completeness of art itself which—as in Rauschenberg’s sculpture or electronic music—can incorporate non-art units into art units. These poems too, wittily incorporate “debris” and offer, like marvelous Picasso trouvailles, a selection of things really used by men. 

But although Harriet Zinnes the person seems hidden in her book, we must notice that she has taken the trouble to tell us that she is giving us an “eye for an I.” She is evidently willing to lose “personality” to assert an identity. We sense that identity first in the poetry’s wit and in its independence of the continuity that depends on statement. Of course, what any poem “says” is never equal to its paraphrasable content. But these poems elegantly extend that logic toward the elimination of lyrical statement. What remains is not the voice’s message, but its presence. “Electronic Music I” asserts: “I must go to hear the lullaby / of that plumbing / aged with the Rauschenberg patina / or Metropolitan fallout / and gutter gangrene.” 

Keats’ idea was that intelligences—“sparks of divinity”—become identities “through the medium of a world like this.” Through perception we exchange “divinity” for a human soul. A sense of the value of this loss of the absolute for the authority of experience runs through most modern poetry and the best of Mrs. Zinnes’ poems. You can see it in the book’s sustained energy: the energy of changing into things, as in the poem “Stoned” where the voice is earth-like, enduring the “agony of that pain! / the bearing up under it! / Stoned and snailed. / Paced and pounded.” Absorbed into a Rauschenberg assemblage, the voice is delighted: “What an antic traffic jam I am.” 

In setting picture or thing over statement, the poet’s style asserts the truth of experience over prescriptive knowledge. In the poem “It Is Well Known,” some McGuffey Reader statements (“The path is hard.” / “Error is everywhere.”) are set against a “light blue eye.” In the pictorial statement, the “center holds.” In the McGuffey Reader statements, the center will not hold: “the page is white / and the President is dead.” Another poet in another time observed the same phenomenon: “It is not for want of admirable doctrine that men hate and torment and deceive and subjugate one another.”

The trend toward publishing poetry in paperbacks takes away every literate person’s excuse for not reading the poetry of his contemporaries. Harvey Shapiro’s Battle Report is another in the handsome Wesleyan Poetry series, like W. R. Moses’ Identities reviewed last year. Without recourse to “container-form,” Mr. Shapiro’s poems sustain themselves by meaningful tone, diction, and line movement: “The Collectors come for the sagging brain / Lugged flesh, tired lungs. / ’Right here, men!’ I shout, / In that manner I lacked / All my life.”

The voice movement often seems to move on and out of certain poems at the end, as if they were parts of an action already in progress. In “For Job At Forty,” Job appears “fingering the spots where the boils will be,” and the voice observes, “What a mark for the spoiler, / Who is there, at the corner, / And now you turn his way.” In fact, that energy of which a poem is a hard-to-achieve segment is the theme of these poems. Society converts energy into law. The poems recognize “How everything gets tamed. / The pronominal outcry, as if uttered in ecstasy, / Is turned to syntax.” The poems’ attitude toward this is comic in Auden’s sense; the subject of comedy is “the law which we cannot alter.” In that large sense, these poems are “comic art,” recognizing that “there must be / Narrative. The people must go to the mountain.” Indeed, the very worst is perfectly recognizable: at Auschwitz “the Angel of Death whistles Mozart.”

Such poems acknowledge that the energy outside of “syntax” which they hanker after is destructive in its raw form, and that this 

is the child’s wish: 
To see the earth a dancing flood
And the new home floating free,
And all irrational, outside, inside.
The packed beasts padding through
The comforts of the living room.
And the old man, his hand forced
By the impossible command,
Compass lost and out of touch.

Still, across the page is the absolute alternative, the absence of all energy, the “National Cold Storage Company,” which contains, bitterly enough, “more things than you can dream of.”

The course between the inhuman force and the inhuman form is what Wordsworth calls “knowledge not purchased by the loss of power,” and what Mr. Shapiro calls “human eloquence.” We see that kind of life in older speech: “Jerome and Origen can tell / How Greek redactions of the text / Stalled at the Tetragrammaton.” What stalled them was the violence of The Name “in archaic script.” By the way the names work in Mr. Shapiro’s stanza we can see how the oldest poetry may have been a roll of powerful names (“Parthians and Medes and Elamites and the inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia and Pamphilia”). The title recalls the poet’s days as an Air Force gunner. That activity was almost an absence of life: “For the gunner the world was unhinged,” “gloved and chuted, wired into my bones,” “I mixed into my own breathings / and waited, exposed as stone.” The life of that time waited to wake in the words of the poem. “Human eloquence” is the only rememberable focus both of intelligence and life.

Karen Gershon’s Selected Poems are remarkably painful, blunt poems, whose art is to look artless. They look artless because the material is directly personal, the rhythm is a pounding, regular tetrameter, largely end-stopped, and the rhymes hurry in with an excessive emphasis. It seems at first like children’s art. But it is, in fact, the “children’s art” of Blake’s poems of innocence, of Wordsworth’s ballads, and of much of Auden. In lines like these: “As I am now my mother was / when she was summoned to be killed / I cannot mourn her as her child / I have disowned her for life’s sake,” you can hear Blake’s “The Babe that weeps the rod beneath / Writes Revenge in realms of death,” or Wordsworth’s “At all times of the day and night / This wretched woman thither goes,” or Auden’s “Intellectual disgrace / Stares from every human face.” 

I emphasize the literary tradition because a poet writing some version of the pastoral is always thought naive. All these poets have in common a need to scrutinize experience and make it yield. Like Wordsworth, Mrs. Gershon writes about a personal loss which is associated with and can be talked about in terms of a great public crisis. For Wordsworth it was the French Revolution; for Karen Gershon, it is the murder of the European Jews. A large event does not in itself make poems important. In fact, this material has often proved overpowering. The real importance of public material is that it steadies personal experience and stands as a token for its universality. Wordsworth, Karen Gershon, and the reader have all the same experience: the loss of childhood and its landscape or light, the loss of parents and the consequent sense both of being deserted (“they might have lived to succor me”) and of having deserted them by surviving them (“I must atone because I live”).

These poems, apparently so direct and personal with their excessive need to scrutinize, to relive what has been lived once, are what Karen Gershon calls “poems of return”—really a doubling back of consciousness into self-consciousness.

It is as if I must explore
all possibilities and match 
imagination with the truth
it is as if they cannot die
until my mind is there to watch 

But imagination and truth will not easily match, and in our awareness of the discrepancy between events and our response to them, self-consciousness and spiritual questioning begin. Every poem turns on this recognition. The response always begins ordinarily enough: “I was not there to comfort them,” “I could not have saved them,” “Every child must leave its home / time gathers life impartially.” But in the end, the truth is something only the imagination could march: “So glad was I they could not claim / compensation from me for / the martyrdom they had to bear / that I did not grieve for them.” The first fruit of this “matching” is an awareness—that is to say, a loss—of innocence. Others have known what we did not know: “My mother sold my bed and chair / while I expected to return.”

The recognition that nature, or the world outside the mind, does not make reality recurs throughout the poems: “the dawn was neutral,” “the ground is neutral,” “if life is neutral what has made / the fearful pattern of my own.” The recognition that the mind makes reality is crucial: “nature is neutral my own culpable thought created / a setting for tragedy where I might have seen peace.” At this point the poems open up into fuller emotions of sorrow or joy. The singular lines begin to connect and flow into one another. These lyrics are more painful than the blunter poems. It is as if the suffering were there all along, and we could ignore it, but are not allowed to ignore it always. There is a ritual in yielding to the fury and saying it out: “two thousand years of culture made fertiliser from her bones.” From the same source comes joy, the “need to celebrate”: “between their ordinary lives/and their ending must have lain/ an enviable state of grace.” “By the dead in whose debt I am I felt myself bidden / to celebrate being alive on behalf of them all.”

Sorrow and joy come in the center of the book whose dominant mode leads up to and away from such points of rest. As the dominant mode is probing, its true expression is not in emotion but in a finer energy of the mind—not in the heavens and hells the mind makes, but in the making itself. If we have become like our parents, we are unlike others—here called Germans. After the war we sat with them on a tram and realized, “I meant nothing to them and they mattered so much to me.” The real difference is not between German and Jew, but between people on trams whose lives have never been broken by thought and those whose lives have been; it is the difference between consciousness and self-consciousness: “not who I was but what I thought / marked me out as separate.”

Thrive Upon the Rock 
Norman Rosten 
Trident Press, $3.95 

An Eye For An I 
Harriet Zinnes 
Folder Editions, $2 

Battle Report 
Harvey Shapiro 
Wesleyan University, $1.85 

Selected Poems
Karen Gershon
Harcourt, Brace, $3.95