THOMAS LARSON

(Written June 1, 1992)

Someone asked me what summer is like for a schoolteacher. It’s one long Christmas day, I said. The eyelids snap open, “It’s here, we’re free, the work and waiting’s over.” Our stocking’s trimmed and brimmed—an hour at the paper, a clock’s delightful noise, a higher pile of clothes. The world pauses for us, no need to see to but our own.

To shock us, though, the opposite also occurs. So early a bud wilts anticipation’s bloom: Anxiety flowers instead. Are we no longer due? Is this relief or depression? Was summer better expected in the stressful lion-taming days of May when the students’ sap drowned their indiffer­ence?

(San Diego Writers' Monthly April 1992)

Eight floors up in a college dormitory conference room that overlooks the University of California campus and the dark blond beaches of the blue Pacific, I am finishing a long discussion with a writing student. Max. The one who waits. The one who ponders everything I say. Who wants me to tell him more about what’s really wrong with his work, the pained yielding behind those round glasses I can’t help but conjure in a young John Lennon. Behind him, through the sliding glass doors and beyond the railed ledge, is the water.

(High Plains Literary Review. Vol. VI, No. 2, Fall 1991)

Poetry With and Without Feeling

After reading three poets of highly dissimilar focus I am again amazed at the truthfulness of a simple rule, one that may seem obvious to any reader. Poetry which forges with its subject a depth of feeling that is honest and personal and grave cannot be ignored.

But woe to that poetry which forges without feeling.

Of the three before us, Roger Weingarten's verse (Infant Bonds of Joy) has little in it to recommend. His emphasis on mercurial objects stirred with ponderous discourse succeeds too often in trivializing emotion. The result as Leonard Kriegel wrote of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography is "something missing . . . something essential, an absence not merely of the deeper self but of the very possibility of a deeper self."

(Poetry Flash Number 220, July 1991; revised March 2011)

1.

My regard for James Wright’s poetry is something I have always found difficult to describe. It is made that much harder when before me I have his Above the River: The Complete Poems, holding potentially a new and unassimilated view of his work. To read and write about his entire opus will unloosen the spell, comfortable and known, which a few of his poems have had over me for decades. That spell was cast first in 1967 when I read his brilliant poem, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.”

Some ache lingers from that poem’s ending irony to the pastoral landscape Wright created: “a chicken hawk floats over, looking for home./ I have wasted my life.”

I have not wasted my life because I feel more sensitive to the world and the unconscious because of his poetry. I wonder, though, if this posthumous volume will not change my sense of the kind of poet Wright was.

The rest of this critical essay is available in eBook form from Amazon.com: "On the Poetry of James Wright" $2.99.

(Pembroke Magazine Number 23, 1991)

Heart to Heart

For Cynthia Ozick essays are the houses of ideas, not the doorway to her personal experience. Consequently, in this collection of some thirty essays and reviews from the 1980s, she writes about herself only sketchily: She grew up in the Bronx speaking Yiddish and English; she fell prey to a few ethnic-hating schoomarms who lessoned out the oi sounds from her Bronx-cum-Jewish brogue; and at seventeen, she she kew she would devote her life to writing "literature."

Judging by her much lauded, complexly textured fiction—three novels and four story collections—her devotion (and talent) has produced some excellent work. Read the recent "A Shawl," the haunting story of a mother and her two daughters interned in a concentration camp and the shawl's nourishing power over their living and dying. The story is about self-disclosure and religious strength, subjects common to her fiction, and about Jews whose faith manifests itself struggling with annihilation or the temptations of secular life.

(Written March 1991)

Since its publication in September 1990 Robert Bly’s Iron John has become a national bestseller. At the end of 1991 the book was beyond its twentieth printing, and there was still no word on a paperback edition. The book also seemed certain to remain for a second year on the New York Times bestseller list. Quite a feat for a book by a poet whose subject is men. Never before has a book about male psychology sold as well and galvanized the attention of American men as this one has. If men are seriously reading Iron John, then they are exploring a more joyous masculinity, examining the emotional pain of their lives and developing maturer psyches. But Bly’s book may have also attracted the anxiety and confusion that many contemporary men feel. If men are ambivalent about their condition today, then what has caused this feeling and why are men turning to Bly for help?

(Written January 1991)

Rebecca West and Ursula K. Le Guin are two writers whose work spans the century and are both devoted to the cause of feminism. West, the English novelist, historian, autobiographer, and critic, died in 1983 at the age of 91.

And Le Guin, novelist, poet, and critic, is one of America's leading fantasy writers. Unlike the wide range of subjects addressed in their fiction, a commitment to safeguarding the lives of women is primary in these essay collections. Both volumes reveal writers who convey their convictions with a reproachful pen.

The rest of the review is available here (opens a PDF).