Donald JusticeRezensionen

25. Collected Poems by Donald Justice
OPD: 2004
format: 281-page paperback
acquired: 2010 read: Feb 11 – Apr 9 time reading: 6:24, 1.4 mpp (note: I logged 29 reading sessions, most a little over ten minutes)
rating: 3
genre/style: 20th-century poetry theme: TBR
locations: a lot of Miami in the 1930’s and a lot somewhere and sometime else.
about the author: 1925-2004. American teacher of writing and poet, from Miami. He taught at several universities, including the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

I'm just not a very good poetry reader. I really wanted to like this. I love that David Justice is a major 20th-century poet out of depression era Miami - the time and place where my grandparents were struggling to start their adult lives. But I just never felt I linked into this. It had its moments, some very meaningful to me. He does a curious thing where he takes a source, sometimes classical, sometimes recent but maybe from another place or language, and writes his own kind of response. But everything in the response is American. Spanish, French, ancient Italian poetry are responded in terms of roadways, and suburbs. I like the idea of that. But much of this felt to me like not very much about very much. Seems likely I missed a lot, including the heart of this life's work. Justice put this collection together, with notes (and with help), but passed away before it was published.

2023
https://www.librarything.com/topic/348551#8115262

This paperback volume of the late Donald Justice's verse, from 1965, was a gift from my friend and peerless poetry aficionado Carl Anderson, and it is a treasure. Night Light is the kind of book that makes one despair of the current poetry "scene." It's nothing more complex than a collection of brief, fairly straightforward lyrics, but what lyrics they are and what a sensibility they express. They are finely honed, precisely balanced, often deeply poignant, without the slightest trace of sentimentality or histrionics. There is a perhaps faintly overinsistent echo of Stevens in Justice's prosody -- the flat diction, the unexpectedly metaphysical adjective -- but on the whole the book is like a case study in superior postwar high modernist verse.

Hot damn, what a fantastic collection of poetry.

The best of Justice seems to come at the beginning and the end of this collection. I wish I could describe what sets his good poems apart from his forgettable ones, but I simply can’t. What I can tell you is that it’s evident that Justice pays close attention to form. He seems to love working with repetition, and perhaps that is where the beauty of his poems really lie. Life is so repetitive, after all. It adds up to some sort of quiet meditation. The best come out appearing timeless and classic, and more often than not, melancholic and nostalgic.

One of my favorite poems is “Southern Gothic,” a poem that presents a confusion over the decay of the South and the vague memories of what should be there, but is not. Trellises are “too frail almost to bear/ The memory of a rose, much less a rose.” The ending sticks with me:

“No damask any more prevents the moon,
But it unravels, peeling from a wall,
Red roses within roses within roses.”

I don't generally read much poetry. And when I do it often baffles me, makes me feel stupid. But I wanted to at least try this book, Donald Justice's COLLECTED POEMS, because I had recently read and very much enjoyed a book of letters exchanged between Justice and his dear friend, fiction writer Richard Stern, more than fifty years ago, before either had become known - A CRITICAL FRIENDSHIP. Justice, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, probably became more famous than Stern, although as a long-time teacher of writing at the University of Chicago, Stern exerted a strong influence on many writers now more famous than he ever was.

So I wanted very much to like this book. And I did find myself charmed by certain pieces, mostly those from the last few volumes, when Justice allowed himself to range into more accessible free verse or prose poems. Because in his early years he tended to experiment with more difficult forms like 'sestinas' which are complex, nearly mathematical in nature, and - at least to me - not very reader friendly. But even in the early books I found poems I could relate to because of their subjects. One was "Sonnet to My Father," with its poignant closing line, "Yet while I live, you do not wholly die." Another was "Love's Stratagems," which brought to mind youthful back-seat fumblings with its lines:

"But these maneuverings to avoid / The touching of hands, / These shifts to keep the eyes employed / On objects more or less neutral / (As honor, for the time being, commands) / Will hardly prevent their downfall."

And there was the immediately recognizable rhythm and rhyme of the old nursery rhyme, "This Little Piggy" in the ineffably sad "Counting the Mad" -

"This one was put in a jacket, / This one was sent home, / This one was given bread and meat / But would eat none, / And this one cried No No No No / All day long."

And in "An Elegy Is Preparing Itself," a coffin, a shroud and a headstone enter into the piece. An affecting mini-portrait of the jobless men and the wandering armies of the unemployed from the thirties is offered in "Cinema and Ballad of the Great Depression."

Justice pays tribute to remembered music and dancing teachers in poems like "Mrs. Snow" (a dandruffy old woman in her kitsch-crowded apartment), "The Piano Teachers: A Memoir of the Thirties" and "Dance Lessons of the Thirties."

Equally poignant and indescribably sad is "A Chapter in the Life of Mr. Kehoe, Fisherman" with its sounds on a dock "Of bare feet dancing, / Which is Mr. Kehoe, / Lindying solo, / Whirling, dipping, / In his long skirt / That swells and billows, / Turquoise and pink, / Mr. Kehoe in sequins, / Face tilted moonward, / Eyes half-shut, dreaming."

If I had to pick favorites here, one would be "Ralph: A Love Story" a prose poem about a movie projectionist from an era "when stars did not have names" who flees a romantic entanglement only to die alone, still remembering "images in the dark, shifting and flashing ..." The other would most definitely be "On an Anniversary," beginning with, "Thirty years and more gone by / In the blinking of an eye, / And you are still the same / As when first you took my name."

So yes, there are some pieces here which I did find accessible and affecting. I only wish there had been more. When I am asked if I have favorite poets, my standard answers are usually Frost, Raymond Carver, and the later poems of Donald Hall. And now, perhaps, at least some of the poetry of Donald Justice. Recommended for poetry enthusiasts and students of poetry.½

A book about writers, particularly writers who are not widely known, is always going to be a rather hard sell in the publishing world. So you know that a writer or editor who undertakes putting such a book together is doing it as an act of love - for good writing and good writers. Elizabeth Murphy, as editor of the correspondence between poet Donald Justice and his friend, fiction writer Richard Stern, has accomplished such a labor of love in a superlative and admirable fashion. A CRITICAL FRIENDSHIP was a pleasure to read. A few years ago I read Lyle Larsen's fascinating critical study of the wary friendship between a young Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein (Stein and Hemingway: The Story of a Turbulent Friendship). Well Murphy's book is just as good. But while pretty much anyone who reads knows who Hemingway and Stein are, unfortunately the same is not true of Justice and Stern.

I knew of Richard Stern through only one of his novels, which is probably his best known and most successful, Other Men's Daughters (Triquarterly Books), a book I read shortly after college back in the early 70s, and a couple more times since. And while I was making my way through Murphy's book, I also read one more, A Father's Words, which should have been equally well-known, but is not. The thing is, Stern is a very accomplished and wonderful writer, but like so many other equally talented authors, he never got the readership he deserved. But he was enormously respected within the literary community of writers as a "writers' writer" - a tag that is often the kiss of death commercially. Why is that, I wonder?

Donald Justice? Well, to the general reader his name may not mean a lot, since, commercially at least, poetry has always been the poor relation to fiction. But in the course of a writing career that spanned more than fifty years Justice won numerous prestigious awards and honors, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1980. He received grants from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. His collections were finalists for the National Book Award several times. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003. In the last years of his life he was also offered the Poet Laureateship of the U.S., an honor he had to decline because of poor health.

But getting back to the letters in this book, I found them, for the most part, to be an absolutely fascinating look at the early, struggling days of two writers who became friends when barely out of their teens and remained good friends for the rest of their lives. (Justice died in 2004, Stern in 2013.) Justice's letters come from Miami (his hometown), California (at Stanford), North Carolina (his wife Jean's home state and where they both attended college), Missouri, and Iowa City (where both men earned their Ph.D.'s). Stern's come from New York, Indiana, Europe and Chicago. Stern taught at the University of Chicago for over forty years (a job that Justice turned down). Justice, on the other hand, bounced from place to place, ever curious about other places, taking teaching jobs at Princeton, UC Irvine, Syracuse, the University of Virginia, the University of Florida at Gainesville, and, of course, Iowa. The letters, dating from the late forties to the early sixties, focus mainly on what the two men are writing at the time, and sometimes on what they are reading too, as well as current films and literary trends and gossip. Justice is perhaps the 'snarkier' of the two, with occasional snide comments such as one about the "corn" poetry that mutual friend Paul Engle was writing, or the "crap" that the Partisan Review was printing - this at a time when he was still trying desperately to get his own work published. Justice includes in many of his letters to Stern pieces of poetry he is currently working on, and asks for input and suggestions. Because of these inclusions, we see early versions of poems later published, an interesting look at the creative process.

One odd thing about Justice's letters is that he was always talking about the stories, or novels or "novelettes" he was planning or trying to write. (In fact he published very little fiction, but two of his short stories were included in O. Henry Prize Stories annuals.) Stern, likewise, began by trying to write poetry, but apparently decided early on that fiction was his forte - all the better for us.

My method of reading A CRITICAL FRIENDSHIP differed quite markedly from my normal reading in that I was forced to keep two bookmarks - one in the text and one in the endnotes. Because Murphy was super conscientious about explaining every obscure reference in the letters, and I was glad she was, because letters written more that fifty years ago can indeed contain many mysterious things to modern readers. In particular there are many, many writers and academics mentioned herein who have long since been forgotten. But there are also many who have not: Robert Lowell, Saul Bellow, Randall Jarrell, Allen Tate, Vance Bourjaily, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, John Crowe Ransom, Thomas Rogers, R.V. Cassill, Norman MacLean and Peter Taylor, to name a few.

Besides the numerous literary references and name-dropping, I also loved the letters' descriptions of graduate school life in Iowa City, with all the usual student poverty, worries about being drafted, junky cars, shabby apartments and furniture, and BYO student parties. Except for the draft worries (I'd already done my hitch), I could relate - been there, done that. Paul Engle, who was, I believe, the first director of the Iowa Writer's Workshop at the time, is mentioned in this example from Justice -

"Paul Engle and his wife have a farmhouse about thirty miles out at which they hold their wild parties, and though they installed plumbing, it soon broke down, so they erected an immense stone privy some yards from the house with room for twelve seats, toward which the guests must plunge through Iowa's sleet and hail to enjoy the unpartitioned conviviality of relief."

Justice's letters vastly outnumber Stern's in this collection, a disparity I found a bit disappointing. I was pleased, however, to find a few letters included that were written by Jean Ross Justice, Don's wife. I only recently read both of her collections of stories (Family Feeling (Prairie Lights Books) and The End of a Good Party and Other Stories), and they are both excellent. Jean came from a semi-famous family of North Carolina writers. Her two brothers, Fred and James, both wrote fiction, and her sister, Eleanor Ross Taylor (wife of Peter Taylor) was a well-regarded poet.

One of the books Justice was reading in 1955 was poet HART CRANE'S LETTERS. He called it a "very moving book. It's having a curious effect on me ... I don't know how to describe it."

That almost sums up how I feel about Elizabeth Murphy's book which gathers together all these long ago letters from two important twentieth century writers. I don't really know how to describe it. But its effect on me will linger, I suspect, for a long time. It is a meticulously edited and researched piece of scholarship that is at the same time an immensely enjoyable read. Highly recommended for literary scholars and all booklovers of eclectic tastes. Bravo, Ms. Murphy!½

Not great to say the very least.