"Black Bones"

That is a human skeleton under the cataract,

The jet bones shining in the white noise,

The black bones of a man of light.

It is a cascade that accepts

Human form from the bones

That have walked into it, and stand;

It must have been his method of death

To walk into a waterfall and be washed away,

Licked clean down to the jetting bones;

And the bones articulate the roar

Of the cataract that seems to speak

Out of the ribs and skull: 

His white-haired sermon from the pelting brow,

The unfathomable water-lidded sockets;

Clad in robes that are foam-opulent,

And never the same clothes twice.

Peter Redgrove

From his 1994 collection, My Father's Trapdoors

Most poems in the English-language tradition, whether lyrical, dramatic, or narrative -- the poems of Keats, Wordsworth, Eliot, and Larkin -- express an emotion about a past experience, often in an effort to understand it.

But English poetry has another tradition. Those poems too can take many forms, but they are after something else. They try to present experience more directly -- and as vividly and truthfully as possible. This is a poetry of the present tense, in which the writer tries to capture the flux of life itself, in the hope that an experience that has provoked a particular emotional and intellectual response in the writer will produce a similar one in the minds of readers.

Practitioners of this second kind of English poetry include Thomas Traherne, William Blake, and Allen Ginsberg. And one of the leading exponents of this 'poetry of the present tense' in the postwar period has been the British poet Peter Redgrove.

In an interview with The Hudson Review in 1975, Redgrove said, 'The poems are supposed to be experienced, I would say, in a light trance. That is to say in a trance of concentration.' The result has been a body of richly imaginative work, which I began to explore when Redgrove first gained widespread attention in Britain in the 1970s.

If you find this Redgrove poem intriguing, I hope you'll look for his Collected Poems, which I reviewed for The Manhattan Review (see the second link below.) It is in print in both the UK and North America, and many municipal and university libraries should have a copy.

Peter Redgrove in 1982
(Photo by Lynn Saville; courtesy of The National Portrait
Gallery, London)

• The Manhattan Review 2005 tribute to Peter Redgrove: poems, essays, an interview, and a review. It begins on page 55 of the pdf
  
• My review of Redgrove's Collected Poems for The Manhattan Review
• Paul Batchelor's review in The Guardian
  
• Robert Crawford's review in the London Review
  
• More about Peter Redgrove from the Poetry Foundation

'Black Bones' is from Peter Redgrove's Collected Poems (edited by Neil Roberts, Jonathan Cape, 2012); reprinted with the kind permission of Penelope Shuttle.

Sonnet XXX

Edna St. Vincent Millay (circa 1920)

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink

Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;

Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink

And rise and sink and rise and sink again;

Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,

Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;

Yet many a man is making friends with death

Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It well may be that in a difficult hour,

Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,

Or nagged by want past resolution's power,

I might be driven to sell your love for peace,

Or trade the memory of this night for food.

It well may be. I do not think I would.

Edna St. Vincent Millay was one of the writers -- along with Whitman and Dylan Thomas -- who drew me to poetry as a teenager. More than 50 years later, I still love and admire her work.

Millay was born in 1892 on the rocky coast of Maine; she and her two sisters were raised by their poverty-stricken mother. (Her middle name came from the New York hospital where her uncle's life was saved shortly before she was born.) She attended Vassar as a scholarship student and published her first collection of poems the year she graduated.

She then moved to New York's Greenwich Village, where she made friends among the writers and artists there and supported herself by writing stories for magazines, under the pen-name Nancy Boyd. Meanwhile, her poems were acquiring a wide readership, based as much on her frank sexuality and feminism as on her skillful writing. 

At 31, Millay became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver. She went on to write many more poetry collections, six verse dramas and the libretto for the opera The King's Henchman. Despite her convictions as a pacifist, she worked tirelessly to support the war against fascism in the 1940s, writing both poetry and propaganda for the cause.  Millay died in 1950, at the age of 58, at her home in Austerlitz, New York.

Millay's poetry belongs to English verse traditions that stretch back to Shakespeare, but, like Robert Frost, she infused them with the vital cadence of American speech and a distinctly personal voice. Seldom has any American deployed rhyme so effortlessly: no wonder she was one of Thomas Hardy's favorite poets. 

If Millay's work seems too overtly emotional to many 21st-century ears, that loss may be ours. Her best poems seem likely to live as long as English does.

• Millay reads Sonnet XXX
• A large selection of Millay's poems from the Poetry Foundation
  
• Millay's 'polyamorous love letters'
• Nancy Milford's 2002 biography of the poet
  
• The Edna St. Vincent Millay Society
  

Millay at Steeptletop, her home in Austerliz, New York, in the 1940s

"People"

In any man who dies, there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.

There are left books and bridges
and painted canvases and machinery.

Whose fate is to survive.
But what has gone is also not nothing:

by the rule of the game, something has gone.
Not people die, but worlds die in them.

Whom we knew as faulty, the earth's creatures.
Of whom, essentially, what did we know?

Brother of a brother? Friend of friends?
Lover of lover?

We who knew our fathers
in everything, in nothing.

They perish. They cannot be brought back.
The secret worlds are not regenerated.

And every time, again and again,
I make my lament against destruction.

From люди (People), Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1961
Translated by Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi
Yevgeny Yevtushenko: Selected Poems, Penguin Classics, 2008

In my twenties, I came under the spell of modern Russian poetry, especially the work of Boris Pasternak, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Bella Akhmadulina. I encountered their poems not only in English translations but through recordings. (Yevtushenko was an excellent performer of both his own work and the poetry of Pasternak, Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva and others.)

The Russian poems were full of open vowels, rolled r's and emphatic consonants that made them more sensual that the English-language poetry I knew, and the Russians seemed more at ease expressing powerful emotions. The link below to a 1979 Yevtushenko reading will show what I mean.

Returning to Yevtushenko's work now, it still impresses me with its warmth, its insight, its lightly-worn eloquence. In this poem, which closes the Penguin selection of his verse in Robin Milner Gulland and Peter Levi's fluent translations, Yevtushenko reminds us that every lament is, in part, a celebration of those we mourn.

Yevtushenko performing in 1979 (see second link below)

• VIDEO: 2006 interview with Yevtushenko (in English)
• VIDEO: A complete Yevtushenko reading in Russia in 1979
• Yevtushenko's Selected Poems from Penguin Classics
• Boris Pasternak: one of Yevtushenko's poetic heroes

Arthur Miller, New Yorker artist Saul Steinberg and Yevtushenko in 1966.
(Photo by Inge Morath, courtesy of the Saul Steinberg Foundation.)