Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004-2006 by Adrienne Rich. Norton, 2007. 112 pages.

April was National Poetry Month, when America celebrates poetry and poets through its libraries, bookstores, readings, and special events.The Fine Arts Theater in Asheville honored Poet Charles Olson (1910-1970) by showing “Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place.” Directed by Henry Ferrini and Ken Riaf, “Polis Is This” focuses on the poet’s edgy relationship with Gloucester, Mass., the fishing community to which Olson had felt ties since his boyhood. The audience, even the couple at the back of the theater who spent more time looking at each other than at the screen, gave the film a warm reception at its conclusion. Ferrini, a poet himself and a native of Gloucester, was present and answered questions from the audience about Olson and the hour-long documentary.

Olson, a large, shambling man — he stood 6’7” — claimed to derive his love of language from the letters found in his father’s postal sack. After studying at Harvard and then working during the Second World War in Washington, D.C., he spent the rest of his life eking out a living at different jobs and producing his verse. In terms of Western North Carolina, Olson is best known for his association with Black Mountain College, home of experimental writing, painting, and music from 1933 to its closing in 1957.

Olson is today acclaimed as one of the first poets of postmodernism, and though his work presents difficulties in terms of easy comprehension, his themes quickly become clear: he is a lover of place, an advocate of clear-sightedness — “What do you truly see?” — and a believer that the past exists in the present if we have the eyes and patience with which to see it. In addition to encouraging scores of poets and writers of his own day in their work — he was a prolific letter-writer and an inspirational teacher — Olson continues to inspire poets and readers today, particularly in his stress on loving the ‘polis,’ the place to which we bind our lives, and on the associated issues of the environment, growth, and change that accompany such a love. “Bemoan the loss — another house is gone,” Olson wrote to his own local newspaper, heart-broken over Gloucester’s wrecking ball approach to its past.

Hints of these themes, together with an interest in free and incantatory verse, is Adrienne Rich’s Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004-2006 (ISBN 978-0-393-06565-7, 2007, $23.95). In her “Rereading the Dead Lecturer,” she writes “... let sound be sense,” an idea also advocated by Olson and other free-verse poets in championing the sound of the written word upon a page. Rich goes on to write: “And the past? Overthrow of systems, forms/ could not overthrow the past/ nor our/ neglect of consequences./ Nor that cold will we misnamed./There were consequences. A world/repeating everywhere: the obliterations.”

Here Rich seems to say that both our ignorance, willed or unwilled, of the past does not in any way diminish the burdens of that past. Her line “Nor that cold will we misnamed” with its double negative, odd syntax, and rough verb usage is not entirely clear, though the words clearly reflect the poet’s apprehension regarding our blindness to history. This apprehension then becomes more comprehensible in the poet’s concern with repeated “obliterations,” which set within the context of the poem as a whole could refer to obliteration wrought by a bulldozer or by ideas and meanings that demand always to be new, always to be accepted in place of the old.

Not all readers, of course, enjoy difficult verse. Those seeking a more eclectic collection of poems with which to celebrate the remains of National Poetry Month would surely find much to celebrate in reading Now and Then: The Poet’s Choice Column, 1997-2000 ((ISBN 978-1-59376-146-2, 2007, $26). Here Robert Hass, who served as Poet Laureate of the United States and who is currently chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, has collected his columns from “Poet’s Choice” in the Washington Post.

Though nearly all these poems are also written in free verse, and are for the most part from the 20th century, the pieces offered by Hass comprehend a wide range of style and difficulty (Readers baffled by the poetry of Olson or Rich take note: Hass writes of an Adrienne Rich poem which he includes here that “I don’t completely understand the poem that follows; I get the outline of it”).

In addition to its wide range of poetry, what makes Now and Then a particular pleasure are the columns accompanying each poem. In these short essays Hass manages to give us a glimpse into the poet’s life, an indication of why the poem works, and its connection to our present lives. He is a fine guide, unprepossessing, with a gift for a calm wit and a clear love for his vocation.

In Now and Then’s “Epilogue,” Hass discusses the poet Ezra Pound and presents a poem of spring, Canto 39, which contains Old English and Latin, references to names and places of antiquity, and mention of Roman wedding ceremonies. The poem ends with these lovely lines: “Dark shoulders have stirred the lightening/A girl’s arms have nested the fire,/Not I but the handmaid kindled/Cantat sic nupta/I have eaten the flame.”

In his exploration of Pound, Hass has reference to that poet’s good friend, T.S. Eliot, and to his Four Quartets, whose lines below perhaps offer as fitting a reason as any both for reading poetry and for trying to comprehend even difficult verse:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive when we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning...

Good reading, all!