1950s American Poetry (II)

American Literature, 1945 to Date

Mihai Mindra, Spring 2013
Contents with List
San Francisco Renaissance
Beat Poetry
Confessionalism
Allan Ginsberg (1926 1997)
Robert Lowell (1917 1977)
Background
Harry S. Truman (Democrat, 1945 1953)
Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: August 6 and 9, 1945
The Korean War (part of the Cold War: mid-1940s to the early 1990s): 1950 -
1953
McCarthyism (Republican senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy [1908-1957]):
activities associated with the period in the United States known as the
Second Red Scare (First Red Scare:shortly after the end of World War I
and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; fear of anarchism: 1917 1920)
roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s
characterized by heightened fears of Communist influence on American
institutions and espionage by Soviet agents.
Background
Term coined by Washington Post cartoonist Herbert Block.
Block and others used the word as a synonym for
demagoguery, baseless defamation, and mudslinging.
Later, embraced by McCarthy and some of his supporters.
"McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled,
(McCarthy, a 1952 speech; later that year he published a
book titled McCarthyism: The Fight For America).


Background
Dwight D. Eisenhower (Republican, 1953 1961)
commanding general of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II
truce in Korea
moderate policies
continued most of the New Deal and Fair Deal programs; balanced budget
reinforced desegregation of schools
"atoms for peace" program--the loan of American uranium to "have not"
nations for peaceful purposes
tried to ease Cold War tensions
ordered the complete desegregation of the Armed Forces.

Background
Postwar years:
economic boom - started at the end of World War II and continued
throughout the '50s, '60s, and early '70s
military victory by Allied forces & the American move into spaces
formerly dominated by European imperialism
new developments in science and technology = sources of increased ease
and comfort in the imminent future
improvements in middle-class living conditions many people
overlooked ongoing inequities in the distribution of wealth
a sense of power and even invincibility among Americans. (Sterritt
20)
Background
Consumerism vs. Economic anxiety and Existential distress (materialism):
growth of a credit-card economy the acquisition of debt and obligations as well as
goods and services
Explosion of road and highway systems rootlessness as well as mobility;
suburban homes were comfortable but undistinguished and indistinguishable
explosion of marriage, childbearing, and "togetherness" more household oriented living
new worries about education, juvenile delinquency, health care, and other family-
related issues;
purchases of alcohol and tranquilizers boomed, indicating unease and insecurity despite
the many signs of abundance that surrounded people in material fact and media
representation. (Sterritt 20)
Background
media representation culture of consensus (IGNORING THE
INDIVIDUAL; FOCUS ON SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC WELL-BEING;
SELF-ALIENATION) :
message of group-adjustment via self-manipulation
social and economic advancement via thrift, hard work, and
similar virtues
inspirational literature of the Dale Carnegie or Norman Vincent
Peale variety (pragmatc success oriented thinking), incl.
periodicals with such titles as Journal of Living and Your
Personality, which recommend "self-manipulative exercises for
the sake not only of business success but of such vaguer, non-
work goals as popularity" (Sterritt 28)
BEAT POETRY
Members of the original New York group : Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac & Gregory Corso.
Associated with a specific time frame and a particular state of mind.
No shared formal aesthetic beyond their practice of experimental free-verse forms &
interest in poetry as performance, frequently with jazz accompaniment
Roots in the manifestos of the Black Mountain school of poetry:
Group of poets at Black Mountain College (North Carolina), under the guidance of the
rector, Charles Olson
Charles Olson in his Projective Verse (1950) called for a unit of poetic expression based not
on a more or less fixed metrical foot but on the poets breath and the rhythms of the
body
The poem should represent FEELING AT THE MOMENT OF COMPOSITION THE
POEM WAS PROVISIONAL
Contrary to New Critics claims. FILM BREAK


BEAT POETRY
Earliest published writing by the New York Beat authors - autobiographical:
John Clellon Holmess Go. (1952),William BurroughsJunky (1953) ,
Distinguishable feature: the poets rebellious questioning of conventional
American cultural values during the Cold War.
put the American dream of individual freedom to its ultimate test
rebelled against what they saw as their countrys social conformity,
political repression, prevailing materialism by championing
unconventional sexual aesthetic & spiritual values.
In the dissemination of this movement, LIFESTYLE was as important as
literary values / principles; the Beats introduced new social forms and
practices (bohemian) [M. Davidson, x]

BEAT POETRY
They insisted that Americans could find an alternate life-style despite the
prevailing conformism of their time
like Emerson and Thoreau , they reaffirmed the essential sanctity of
individual experience.
Definition of the term :
The Random House Dictionary credited Jack Kerouac for defining the term
Beat Generation as members of the generation that came of age after Worl
War II who, supposedly as a result of disillusionment stemming from the Cold
War ,espouse mystical detachment and relaxation of social and sexual
tensions.
BEAT POETRY
first heard by Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs in New York City, Times
Square,1944, from a hustler, Herbert Huncke, meaning exhausted, at the
bottom of the world, looking up or out, sleepless, wide-eyed, perceptive,
rejected by society, on your own, streetwise.
According to Ginsberg they (the earliest Beat writers in New York) shared an
awareness of the PAHNTOM NATURE of being, the transitoriness of
existence.

BEAT POETRY
Ginsberg wrote the poem Howl in August 1955.
two months later he organized a poetry reading at the Six Gallery,
San Francisco, with five other poets (Gary Snyder, Michael
McClure, Philip Lamantia, Philip Whalen, Kenneth Rexroth) -
October 7, 1955.
A change of MEDIUM: poetry as VOICE not as printing
(Rexroth)
Michael McClure: all the poets participating at the event felt
oppressed by the pressures of the war culture. We were
locked in the Cold War and the first Asian debacle-the Korean
War (1950-53)...As artists we were oppressed and indeed the
people of the nation were oppressed

BEAT POETRY
We had to speak out as poets. We saw that the art of poetry was
essentially dead- killed by war, by academies, by neglect, by lack of
love, and by disinterest. We knew we could bring it back to life.
...The audience [knew] at the deepest level that a barrier had been
broken.
The Beats: destruction of the barrier between popular & high art (poetry read at street
corners, jazz clubs & Playboy) [M. Davidson, x]
Return to the pre-Enlightment meaning and purpose of literature, i.e. not of civilizing
but of enriching ones spiritual life
BEAT POETRY
Allen Ginsberg, Interview with Thomas Clark
Recorded in 1965; published in Spring 1966 in Paris Review
About 1945 I got interested in Supreme Reality with a capital S and R, and I
wrote big long poems about a last voyage looking for the Supreme Reality.
Which was like a Dostoevskian or Thomas Wolfeian idealization or like Rimbaud
what was Rimbauds term, new vision, was that it?
Object / Experience of poetry (ref. to Blake):
that sense sublime of something more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is
the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and the living air (..). So I think
this experience is characteristic of all high poetry. I mean thats the way I began
seeing poetry as the communication of the particular experience not just any
experience but THIS EXPERIENCE.

BEAT POETRY
Associated to / outgrowth of Romanticism [M. Davidson, 2]
As opposed to modernist doctrines of impersonality (e.g.: A. Ginsbergs relationship with W. C.
Williams, for instance, as reflected in Ginsbergs first volume of poetry, Empty Mirror) & New
Criticism principles (formalism: the author is not important, the text is all that matters).
Romanticism & Beat common point:
Perception of life in allegorical terms, each moment intersecting with the divine (M. Davidson,
2)
Differences many, including among the members of the Beats / San Francisco
Renaissance
E.g. impulse toward orality and performance; popular / low culture; significance of the political /
contingency; surrealist techniques etc.

BEAT POETRY
Howl and Other Poems (1957)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: The great obscene wastes of Howl are
the sad wastes of the mechanized world, lost among atom
bombs and insane nationalisms.
seized by the U.S.Customs in San Francisco on March 25, 1957,
with the charge that Ginsbergs language describing
homosexual acts was obscene.

BEAT POETRY
Finally the judge ruled that Ginsberg had not written an obscene poem.
His decision established judicial precedent by stating that if the printed
material has social importance, it is protected by the First and Fourteenth
Amendments of the United States Constitution.
What had been the private cultural rebellion of an obscure literary group in
New York was energized and given political focus by the contact of the East
Coast Beats (New York beats) with the West Coast poets (the San Francisco
Poetry Renaissance), who were sustained by a flourishing tradition of radical
poetry .
Not only an aesthetic revolt but also a radical assault on mainstream
cultural values.
ROOTS : Whitman & William Carlos Williams.

BEAT POETRY
1970s the Beat and the San Francisco Renaissance poets were
recognized as a vital part of American culture
The Beat and Beatnik labels were changed for hippie
leading writers were gradually accepted into the literary
establishment
four of the poets, Ginsberg, Baraka\ Jones, Ferlinghetti, Snyder,
entered the literary canon.

BEAT POETRY
1974 Ginsberg became a member of the National Institute of Arts
and Letters and won a National Book Award for The Fall of America.
In his acceptance speech he signaled the end of the Beat
Generation as a literary movement
In its place he hoped for the survival of what he called the
sovereignty of the individual mind in post-Vietnam America.
BEAT POETRY
Nation, February 23, 1957: M.L. Rosenthals review of Howl:
poetry of genuine suffering...the elementary need for freedom of sympathy...for the open
response of man to man so long repressed by the smooth machinery of intellectual
distortion.
National Review ,November 18 ,1961, Ralph de Toledano:
an overflow as accidental as a bathtub running over
the Beat artistic revolt was as graceless and unproductive as the copulation of mules.
defending the disciplined sensibility and reverence for tradition shown by T. S. Eliot, Wallace
Stevens, and Marianne Moore, he concludes : the bumps and grinds of the Beat school
may appeal to the blunted tastes and stunted sensibilities of our times, but they have as
little connection with poetry as a strip act does with the sex act.
1960s - growing number of dissident writers and small press publishers became
recognized as the development of an American counterculture.



The Beatnik
Norman Mailer , essay The White Negro:
the American existentialist: sees value in moods, feelings, actions as
opposed to logical causality
Society represents authority from without, he seeks authority within his
ego.
a pioneer, an explorer of inward reality ( see Puritanical roots )
the religious mystic has taken advantage of modern chemistry : drugs.
like the existentialist the beatnik tries to maintain the significance of the
individual personality in a world devoid of God, spiritual values.
an attempt at re-humanizing themselves by a total re-examination of the
meaning of life.
The Beatnik
Human personality is to be defended against the overwhelming pressures of
conformity, competition and respectability- quantitative externals opposed by
qualitative living.
The continuous search for inner reality is a quest for authentic existence & moods
are indices to his reality
would not try, as the rationalist to overcome his fears, his dread, but he would
exploit these feelings in order to reach new levels of truth about himself.
the confessional character of Beat literature (celebration of intimate
biographical detail ) which to the social conservative appears as
exhibitionism.
to the authentic beatnik nothing that is human or personal can be degrading.
So, the alleged foolishness of the hip values turns out to be a criticism of the
accepted American practices.

The Beatnik
Paul ONeil ( The Only Rebellion Around , Life, November 30, 1959) :
the Beats feel that the only way man can call his soul his own is by becoming
an outcast .
They are not reformers. Institutionalized reform would not change anything.
So his solution : he disaffiliates, drops out of the entire scheme of traditional
civilization and asks only to be left alone (e.g. that is why Thoreau is something
of a Beat hero).
Carl Michalson the Beatniks are similar to Existentialists:
Social relations which are based upon existential individualism will be initiated
in the creative force of personal volition. Which means when individuals come
together, they will not lose their identity by social proximity. (Carl
Michalson, What is Existentialism? Christianity and the Existentialists, ed. Carl
Michalson (New York, 1956 ),p.13.


The Beatnik
Modern society has mangled the concept of self by twisting interpersonal
relationships into categories of competition, barter, argument, belligerence -
covering it all with a glossy mantle of respectability.
Howl (1956)
biographical info: documentary screened at the course (The Source)
Howl: 3 parts + a Footnote (another poem)
program stated at the end of Part I - aestheticist:
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless
and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to
the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head.
Part II of Howl
identifies the hostile universe with which the vulnerable sensibility cannot cope - American
capitalism / devouring mechanical civilization




Howl (1956)
Part III
focuses on one person: Carl Solomon - Rockland State Hospital (New York State mental
hospital)
ends, like the other two parts on a note of lamentation combined with ambiguous
affirmation.
Footnote to Howl
begins with a line that repeats the outcry Holy! fifteen times
brings under the same sign of holiness the tragic, the comic, the ordinary, and the
hallucinatory.
Whitmanesque vitality and cosmic vision of mankind as an all comprising miracle.


Howl (1956)
A. Ginsberg - Notes Written on Finally Recording Howl (1959)
By 1955 I wrote poetry adapted from prose seeds, journals,
scratchings, arranged by PHRASING or BREATH GROUPS into
little short-line patterns according to ideas of measure of American
speech Id picked up from W. C. Williamss imagist preoccupations.
() I thought I wouldnt write a poem, but just write what I wanted
to without fear, let my imagination go, open secrecy, and scribble
magic lines from my real mind ().


Howl (1956)
Composition:
Ideally each line of Howl is a single breath unit My breath is long thats the
Measure, one physical and mental inspiration of thought
contained in the elastic of a breath. It probably bugs Williams now
(SHORT SENTENCES), but its a natural consequence, my own heightened
conversation, not cooler average daily talk short breath.
Mystical process (started exploring Buddhism in 1954) union of body & mind
Compare this statement with E. Pounds (and even W. C. Williams objectivist
phase) imagist credo union of the intellectual & the emotional.
The poem an experiment with Whitmans long line.
Part I: depended on the word who to keep the beat, a base to keep measure,
return to and take off again onto another streak of invention () I went on to
what my imagination believed true to Eternity [] and what my memory could
reconstitute of the data of celestial experience
Howl (1956)
Part II: the long line is used as a stanza form broken within into exclamatory units
punctuated by a base repetition, Moloch.
Part III: almost the same as Part I.

Thematically:
Part I, a lament for the lamb in America with instances of remarkable lamblike
youths; Part II names the monster of mental consciousness that preys on the lamb;
Part III a litany of affirmation of the Lamb in its glory []

Listening Recording of Howl.

Howl (1956)
rhetorical shock supported by the reiterated insistence that a generation of
Americans had been betrayed & psychically crippled
elemental language engulfed in deliberately intellectual phrasing (e.g. a vision
of ultimate cunt eluding the last gyzym of consciousness , solipsisms of johns)
or rhapsodic lyricism (sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the
sunset)
compulsive search for love confronting external, automatic activity: I saw the
best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...
Howl (1956)
revolutionary social and political criticism implied (Rosenthal p.93)
rejection of the established order
breakdown of respectable assumptions in the moral sphere involving generally
the whole range of expectation of what will make a meaningful, self-regulated
life
normal masculine pride and adult personality are abandoned because of the
terror created by a mad & brutal world
some people adjusted so well that they can not see how irrelevant their lives
are.

ALLEN GINSBERG & CONFESSIONAL POETRY
Public recitation and rhetoric are at cross- purposes with the
deeper aim of bringing very personal private concerns to the
surface.
Lowell and Plath: the latter aim embodies the issues of cultural
crisis in the crisis of the poets own life
Rhetorical extroverted poetry sharing with confessional writing its
hatred or pain at the damage wreaked by Moloch.
Piled - up details about his generation: many clues to Ginsbergs
private experiences; he is groping toward a fuller release of his real,
private demons (see Kaddish, 1961)
ALLEN GINSBERG & CONFESSIONAL POETRY
Kaddish and Other Poems 1958 - 1960 (1961),
dated 1959 by the author.
Full title is Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg 1894-1956.
formal elegy written as a tribute to his mother Naomi, who had been a communist
sympathizer during his boyhood; had died in a mental hospital in 1956.
The traditional kaddish is the Hebrew lament for the dead, which is at the same time a hymn of
praise to God.
Modeling his poem on the traditional form , Ginsberg divides it into a sequence of six parts called
Proem, Narrative, Hymmnn (so spelled to suggest the wailing incantation of the Hebrew
prayer.) , Lament, Litany, Fugue.
The story of Naomi Ginsbergs paranoia, degeneration and death told in detail.
ALLEN GINSBERG & CONFESSIONAL POETRY
Through Naomis story politics becomes a matter of life,
human predicament. At the same time it is a protest against the
repression of radical thought and organization in the USA after
the Second World War, associated with McCarthysm.
The virtual sealing off of any legitimacy for revolutionary debate
and organization, in the wake of a war that had already done
immense damage to private personality throughout the
Western world wrought even more psychic than political havoc.
effort to establish the human validity of a retroactively
outlawed type of experience
violence done by modern existence to the most vulnerable.

ALLEN GINSBERG (1926 1997)
The poets rebelliousness (homosexuality, use of drugs, rejection of
squeamishness) is a familiar motif of his generation
The barriers of fastidiousness once broken down, the sophisticated
intelligence must learn (with Whitman) entirely new perspectives of
human acceptance and value (see Rosenthal pp.105-106)
STRUCTURE & STYLE:
careless in diction, syntax, and rhythmic movement
deliberately having the quality of a series of memories noted down
in haste or snatched up out of the subconscious.
The influence of Whitman - reiterative style, parallelism

ALLEN GINSBERG (1926 1997)
this technique indicates a cumulative poetical movement suited
to Ginsbergs expanding ego psychology which results in an
enumerative style, the cataloging of a representative and
symbolical succession of images, conveying the sensation of
pantheistic unity and endless becoming.

This goes back to Hebraic roots, acknowledged by Ginsberg :
repeating and balancing ideas and sentences instead of
syllables or accents.

The reader is not supposed to look for a rational connection of
ideas. There is richness of imagery and density & spontaneity.


A Supermarket in California (1956)
Criticism of the prosperous Eisenhower era
Criticism of capitalist America as opposed to romantic / individualist /
inspired America of Walt Whitman; shopping for images
In the store, Ginsberg sees whole families of consumers, emblematic
of the capitalist societies that produced them: F. G. Lorca, Walt
Whitman
The theme of homosexuality openly asserted subverting middle
class ideals & norms.

Confessional Poetry Robert Lowell
Label first applied, disapprovingly, to Robert Lowellls Life Studies (1959)
a collection of autobiographical prose and poetry
confessional -violated the norms of decorum for subject matter (impresonality / indirectness), specific
for WASP middle class postwar art
Overall aim of his poetry: to locate personal experience, stray events, into epic history
History & personal experience apocalyptic overtones
Studied poetry with John Crowe Ransom came into contact with New Criticism and, briefly, the
Fugitive movement (southern agrarians opposed to what they perceived as northern corrupting
industrialism)
Conversion to Roman Catholicism (he was a Protestant), 1940; opposition to American policies in World
War II, and later on Vietnam
Interested in psychoanalysis as a mode of address to postwar existential misery
Note: Other New Critics in America - I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot, R. P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, Allen
Tate.

Confessional Poetry Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959) - often cited as the most
sustained attempt to develop a confessional mode and a 'turning
point' in postwar poetry (Halliwell 72)
Exploration of Lowell's family relationships
Begins his 'Life Studies' sequence with the line: 'I won't go with you. I want to
stay with Grandpa!
E.g. Lowell recalls his Uncle Devereux Winslow dying of Hogdkin's disease at
age twenty-nine. He provides direct expressions of his uncle's dress ('his
trousers were solid cream from the top of the bottle') as a child would to hide
his fears ( cowered in terror'), conflicting impulses which are brought together
when the poem describes his hands: 'warm, then cool, on the piles / of earth
and lime, a black pile and a white pile ' as his uncle blends 'to the one colour'
in death. (Halliwell 73)
Martin Halliwell, American Culture in the 1950s. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University
Press, 2007.

Confessional Poetry
Main New Criticism tenets:
valid interpretations had to avoid the Intentional Fallacy (searching for
presumed intentions of the author) and the Affective Fallacy (crediting
emotional effects produced in the reader)
In order to arrive at correct or universal meanings the reader has to
approach the poem as an ahistorical, self-enclosed / - sufficient system,
an object made of language : a vebal icon (W.C.Wimsatt )
late 1950s - 1960s: reaction against what was perceived as high modernist
/ new criticism formalism
Search for ways to reintroduce both Intention and Affect in the
discussion of poetic value.


Confessional Poetry
Most outspoken the Beats
Confessional poetry - not overtly political, but it participated in the
protest against Impersonality as a poetical value by reinstating an
insistently autobiographical first person.



Confessional Poetry
Common features / conditions of the confessional poets:
had developed close personal affiliations: Lowell - the teacher and mentor of Snodgrass, Sexton,
and Plath; all these poets knew each others work.
psychological breakdowns and treatment, following rather early marriages / conformity with middle class
standards in force
Interest in Freudian psychonalysis
Their poetry - investigation into middle class social institutions (e.g. marriage / family dominated
postwar American culture)
Poetry in the first person: historical events & personal experiences.
Common Stylistic Features
Confessionalist characteristics:
poems in the first-person voice with little apparent distance between the
speaker and the poet;
emotional in tone
autobiographical in content
narrative in structure.
Personal reflections no longer took the form of the distanced idiom
characteristic of both modernism and New Criticism. (Beach 174)

Skunk Hour -- Robert Lowell

(For Elizabeth Bishop)
Nautilus Island's hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son's a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village;
she's in her dotage.

Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria's century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.

The season's ill--
we've lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet's filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler's bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he'd rather marry.


One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind's not right.

A car radio bleats,
"Love, O careless Love. . . ." I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody's here--

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air--
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage
pail.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

1959
Skunk Hour (1959)
Often cited as the quintessential poem of the confessional
movement
Lowell began the poem in August 1957 while he was visiting the
costal town of Castine, Maine; as he remembers it, Lowell was struck
by having nothing to write, of having, at least, no language
He abandoned his previous formalist style with this poem; the model
Elizabeth Bishops The Armadillo
He decided to write a poem in short stanzas with drafting
description. (Beach 156)
Skunk Hour (1959)
The poem comprises eight six-line stanzas of variable meter and
rhyme scheme
The first four stanza: the decay of the town; the second four the
poets personal ordeal, the dark night of the soul from which he is
saved by the appearance of a family of skunks.
The first half of the poem:
Caricature of the town and its inhabitants: the lady who prefers to live in the
Victorian age; the summer millionaire who seemed to leap out of an L. L.
Bean / catalogue, a.o.
The moral and social fabric of the town decayed: the seasons ill
The town analogous for the poets state of mind.



Skunk Hour (1959)
The second part of the poem:
The illness of the season turns into the poets ill-spirit / My minds not right
Comparison of his state of mind with the love cars (compared to boats sailing
on the ocean): the love cars lie hull to hull
The encounters of the lovers seemed perverted and morbid, particularly by the
location of the car park in relation to the towns cemetery
The city is transformed into a skull ; a popular love song is associated with
Miltons Paradise Lost I myself am Hell
The popular love song contains a reference to death also: Now you see what
careless love will do Make you kill yourself and your sweetheart too
The cemetery shelves on the town- ambiguous meaning:
= sloping / inclining
= building on the town interlocking fates of the living and the dead.


Skunk Hour (1959)
The appearance of the skunks turn from despair to a humorous
tone
The poet makes the attempt at connecting with otherness, here
embodied by prereflective natural order.
The skunks a comical sight; not concerned with moral / religious /
artistic existence
A partial restitution of meaning: devoid of social / civic (symbolized
by the Main Street) or religious implications (the view of the
Trinitarian Church)
As the identification of man & skunk = partial; no salvation in sight.
(Beach 157)