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WORKING TITLE A dissertation presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy David Bruzina June 2005 This dissertation entitled WORKING TITLE by DAVID A. BRUZINA has been approved for the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by Mark Halliday Professor of English Leslie A. Flemming Dean, College of Arts and Sciences BRUZINA, DAVID A. Ph.D. June 2005. Department of English Working Title (81pp.) Director of Dissertation: Mark Halliday This dissertation is divided into two parts: a discussion of contemporary perspectives on poetic quality and a collection of poems. Approved: Mark Halliday Professor of English 4 Table of Contents Abstract...............................................................................................................................3 Part One: The Knowledge of Poetic Goodness................................................................6 Part Two: Distance..................................................................................................................28 The Egg..................................................................................................................29 The Chemist...........................................................................................................30 You Had to Bring It Up .........................................................................................31 The First Concession..............................................................................................32 First Duckling in the Water....................................................................................33 Furniture of the Mind.............................................................................................34 The Flood...............................................................................................................35 The Label Inside Unsigned ....................................................................................36 The Whale..............................................................................................................37 Kitchen Prayer One................................................................................................38 Addresses the Evening...........................................................................................39 The Museum ..........................................................................................................40 The Surgeon Speaking ...........................................................................................41 The Gift..................................................................................................................42 The Committee Dissolves......................................................................................43 Hello?.....................................................................................................................44 The Hunter Calls Rabbits.......................................................................................45 Wanted: Friendly Streets, Good News, Warm Bed ..............................................46 The Cook and the Lady..........................................................................................47 Self Butcher and Cook...........................................................................................48 With Sandwich.......................................................................................................50 5 We Feel at Last the Bump of Shore.......................................................................51 From the Log of Lost Cooks..................................................................................52 The Affair...............................................................................................................53 November...............................................................................................................54 Jessica Drowning in Irene......................................................................................55 The Gift..................................................................................................................56 To Rest...................................................................................................................57 Looking for a Teacher............................................................................................58 The Guest...............................................................................................................59 Zoned Commercial or Residential .........................................................................60 Last Duckling to the Water....................................................................................61 Witness...................................................................................................................62 Fly ..........................................................................................................................63 Kitchen Prayer Two ...............................................................................................64 The Cannibals ........................................................................................................65 Loyalty ...................................................................................................................66 Close Quarters........................................................................................................67 Step One Is in Any Direction.................................................................................68 Shooting Lessons ...................................................................................................69 Boom......................................................................................................................70 Christmas ...............................................................................................................71 Works Cited......................................................................................................................72 Appendix 1: John Ashbery’s These Lacustrine Cities .................................................74 Appendix 2: Robert Frost’s The Exposed Nest.............................................................75 Appendix 3: John Berryman’s Dream Song 14 ............................................................76 Appendix 4: Richard Boyd’s Homeostatic Consequentialism.....................................77 Appendix 5: Wendell Berry’s The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer.........................79 Appendix 6: Heather McHugh’s What He Thought ....................................................80 6 Part One: The Knowledge of Poetic Goodness 7 The Knowledge of Poetic Goodness Mother: It’s broccoli, dear. Child: I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it. --Carl Rose1 1. Introduction: Merwin’s Berryman In his well-known homage to John Berryman,2 a speaker (who I will assume is Merwin)3 recalls Berryman giving him advice, in the years before WWII, …it was in the days before the beard and the drink but he was deep in tides of his own through which he sailed chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop….(270). The advice Berryman is giving in the poem is about being a poet, …as for publishing he advised me to paper my wall with rejection slips his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled with the vehemence of his views about poetry he said the great presence that permitted everything and transmuted it in poetry was passion passion was genius and he praised movement and invention I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can’t you can’t you can never be sure you die without knowing 1 A caption for a cartoon by E.B White, as quoted in McPhee. 2 To enance the reader’s experience by making more clear the trajectory of the essay, I use italics whenever returning to, and discussing, this poem. 3 Merwin was a student of Berryman’s at Iowa in 1954, along with Philip Levine and Donald Justice, introduced later in this essay. For the purposes of this essay, the relationship between fictional and “real” Berrymans and Merwins is, I assume, immaterial. 8 whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don’t write. Merwin’s poem is moving for a number of reasons, not least because, in its retrospective movement, we sense its speaker slowly being reminded, by his recollection of Berryman’s words, of Berryman’s suicide, a memory that lends gravity to both the implied warning in the last line and the permission the poem seems to offer. In the poem, the Sage Berryman seems (at least initially) to give young poets (as symbolized by the naive and unread younger Merwin) an aesthetic or moral carte blanche—don’t worry about whether or not what you write is any good; poetry is passion (not responsibility); if you have to be sure what you’re writing is good, don’t write. And yet, we sense—as the older Merwin, speaking the poem, now understands in retrospect—that Berryman’s vehemence, his insistence in the last stanza, reflects his own deep concern with whether or not what he wrote was any good. A concern with a distinction between right/wrong, good/bad, better/worse practice is entailed by the feeling that that practice is important, and, clearly the Berryman of Merwin’s poem felt the practice of poetry was important and