Nr. 2 (19) anul VI / aprilie-iunie 2008 - ROMDIDAC

Rock Poetry and Writing in Form – Rock Sonnets Relevant in
Appraising Mainstream Poetry
David Wojahn was born in 1953 and has published six collections of poems.
He won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1982 and also authored a book of
essays on contemporary verse, co-authored another one on contemporary
American poetry and edited a posthumous collection of Linda Hull’s poetry, an
author who is also present in Jim Elledge’s anthology and who passed away
meanwhile. Wojahn’s second poem in this anthology comes up no later than
after two other poems, one by Neal Bowers, a fan for the “pre-1970 variety”
(Elledge, 237) of rock, a prolific poet and authoritative critic who is a Professor
of English at the Iowa State University, and one by Robert Gibb, a poet who
relishes the blues and R & B original elements which pervaded rock music
before the latter “became simply another commodity” (ibidem, 243). The book
Gibb published after appearing in this anthology, The Origins of Evening
(1998) was a National Poetry Series winner, as selected by Eavan Boland
and the next one, his most recent collection, The Burning World (2004), a
“scrupulously crafted, fiercely elegiac collection” which made Maxine Kumin
diagnose that “not since Philip Levine have we had a working-class stiff write
such moving poems” (Kumin, unpag). Bowers’s poem is called “On The Elvis
Mailing List” (ibidem, 3), an account of his family’s first ordering of an Elvis
Presley album while watching a famous movie starring Ingrid Bergman, Cary
Grant and Claude Rains, whereas “Letter to Russell Barron” by Robert Gibbs
(p 4) is a touching confession regarding the effect played by the musician’s art
and personality on the poet’s taste, experiences, and life itself, to the extent to
which he even declares that he would (“most likely”) always miss attending a
concert like he once did for making love to his skinny Margie Stulginski.
One would maybe feel inclined to perceive these poems as falling into
the “paeans to rock stars” category, although Wojahn’s sonnet is not quite an
ode to Elvis or, anyway, the stronger presence there is the one of Williams’s
rather than the one of the rock star. Rather in the musical style that I have
mentioned above, the anthology proceeds with a second poem in which the TV
is again a way to reach Elvis and in which two cultural registers – the movie/
TV show and rock are bridged by a cultural pattern in which traditional values
(the sonnet and the Williamsian localism in Wojahn, the American family in
Bowers) come to terms with or even dissolves into popular culture. Meeting
and missing (in both senses) such a star is also the theme of Gibb’s poem.
The next poem is indeed again an imaginary testimony of a real event this
time, “Woody Guthrie Visited by Bob Dylan: Brooklyn State Hospital, New
York, 1961,” another subtle masterly sonnet (ibidem, 6):
Ex Ponto nr.2, 2008
122
He has lain here for a terrible, motionless
Decade, and talks through a system of winks
And facial twitches. The nurse props a cigarette
Between his lips, wipes his forehead. She thinks
He wants to send the kid away, but decides
To let him in – he’s waited hours.
Guitar case, jean jacket. A corduroy cap slides
Down his forehead. Doesn’t talk. He can’t be more
Than twenty. He straps on the harmonica holder,
Tunes up, and begins his “Song to Woody,”
Trying to sound three times his age, sandpaper