37:1 Winter 1990

RONALD JOHNSON

Six, Alas!

The 80s were not CR’s strongest decade, but as our selections here show, these ten years include several successes: two issues on “In/Re/Novative Fiction,” provocative essays in an issue on “Poetry and Politics,” and more than a few strong poems.

Michael Donaghy was on staff in the early 80s; the conditions he describes applies to the late 80s as well:

The management and staffing were very unsettled, the university’s support—both financial and moral—was dwindling, and the magazine’s production schedule seriously stretched the idea of ‘quarterly.

The Review bid a resolute adieu to the relative neglect it suffered in the late 80s with Winter 1990’s “Special Issue on Neglected Poets,” for which nine poets wrote essays on writers that readers have been deprived from (to use a distinction Jim Powell makes). Editor Elizabeth Arnold’s introduction remains a vivid document:

Not so long ago, it was poets, not academics, who set the poetic canon. Seeking models for the practice of their craft, they came to value certain poets and poems over others, building a canon that reflected the needs of the practicing poet rather than, say, those of college sophomores or neo-colonial literary theorists. [...] The purpose of this issue is to begin to bring the poet-critic’s voice back into the canon-making process. [...] [P]oems will continue to be written, and the poets who write them will keep making up their own minds about what’s important. Readers of poetry deserve to hear what they think.

The issue includes—among others—essays by Jim Powell on Basil Bunting and Mina Loy, Turner Cassity on Martial, Janet Lewis on Maurine Smith, Jared Carter on Hesiod, and Lisa M. Steinman on Josephine Miles.

Here is Ronald Johnson’s essay on Edith Sitwell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bowen, Stevie Smith, and Lorine Neidecker. “Ron wrote precious little criticism,” Johnson’s literary executor Peter O’Leary told us. “I'm surprised he even wrote this one!” He continued:

His prose voice was a kind of parlor-room oracle of wit & sage advice. And surprisingly practical – surprising, because RJ didn’t live an especially practical life. In “Hurrah for Euphony,” his essay of advice for young poets (part of which was first published in CR), he states, “Unless you are a precocious genius like Rimbaud, it takes about ten years’ work (as to become a doctor) to find your mature, unmistakable voice,” counsel as wise as it is realistic.

“Six, Alas!” resonates with the same kind of voice, providing glimpses of RJ’s aesthetic, and articulations of the kinds of things all of us do when we read poetry – judge it, compare it, use it as the standard for thinking about the art. And proclaim its greatness. Written fifteen years ago, it’s interesting to see what has happened to the six women writers he addresses: four of the six remain as eccentric or neglected today as they were when he wrote. Millay has been republished in a couple of fancy selections since; her work, because of its precocity, will always endure in the literary imagination. Only Niedecker, curiously, has seen a surge of new interest. Which gives hope that something similar will happen with Johnson’s work.

[ES, 2006]

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