|
|
American
poet William Wantling (1933-74) led a life of extremes. Much of his poetry
reflects this. Born in Peoria, Illinois (a town which would come to represent
the kind of conformism that Wantling detested), he was a soldier in the
Korean War, became a heroin addict on his return to civilian life, and spent
almost six years in San Quentin prison for forgery and possession of
narcotics. It was in prison that Wantling began to write. His early poetry
already reflected a need to transcend immediate circumstances as well as to
confront them. Take his poem 'The Awakening', for example, dated December
1962 in my autographed copy of the collection of the same name, and first
published in a limited edition of 200 by Turret Books in 1967, and which
serves as the opening
piece for In the Enemy Camp:
I found the bee as it fumbled
about the ground
Its leg mangled, its wing torn,
its sting
gone
I picked it up, marvelled at
its insistence
to
continue on, despite the dumb brute
thing
that had occurred
I considered, remembered the
fatal struggle
the
agony on the face of wounded friends
and the
same dumb drive to continue
I became angry at the unfair
conflict suffered
by will
and organism
I became just, I became
unreasoned, I became
extravagant
I observed the bee, there,
lying in my palm
I looked and I commanded in a
harsh and angry shout Ð
STOP THAT!
Then it ceased to struggle, and
somehow suddenly
became
marvellously whole, and it arose
and it
flew away
I stared, I was appalled, I was
overwhelmed
with
responsibility, and I knew not where to begin.
When Wantling was released from prison in 1963, he took advantage of the G.I.
Bill to become a university student. He went on to be awarded a BA and MA in
English Literature. At the same time, his poems began to appear in magazines
on both sides of the Atlantic. His work was featured in Penguin Modern
Poets 12,
alongside that of Alan Jackson and Jeff Nuttall. Critics such as Edward
Lucie-Smith, Walter Lowenfels and Cyril Connolly supported his work, while
Christopher Logue selected Wantling's collection The Awakening as his recommended
book of the year for The Times Literary Supplement in 1967. Upon
obtaining his MA, Wantling became a university lecturer, and to all accounts
was an excellent teacher. Nevertheless, he still had to fight an ongoing
battle with alcohol and drugs, and experienced periods when he just could not
write at all. He died of heart failure in May 1974 at the age of 40.
Since his death, his work has on the whole been ignored. As John Osborne
points out in his introduction to In the Enemy Camp, 'Wantling has more
than enough masterpieces to mean that his reputation ought to be assured. Yet
all his individual collections have long fallen out of print. He is excluded
from every one of the standard anthologies of modern America poetry'. One can
only speculate as to why this is: opprobrium regarding some of his subject
matter (e.g. hard drugs, prison, petty crime, prostitution), or the fact that
his total output was relatively small (though no smaller than that of many
other poets who have entered the canon of English literature and whose
reputation rests on a handful of poems), or the inconsistent quality of his
poetry (a point I shall return to). In any case, the publication of this
Selected Poems 1964-74 by Michael Curran's Tangerine Press makes a good start at
redressing the balance.
I have mentioned the 'extreme' subject matter of some of Wantling's poetry.
One of his chief concerns, however, is to explore the very nature of poetry
itself and to ask how language can make art out of experience while still in
some sense remaining true to it. This is tackled directly in 'Poetry', where
Wantling admits that he can 'fit words / together to give people pleasure //
and even sometimes take their / breath away', but that 'it always / somehow
turns out kind of phoney'. He then goes on to describe a fight in a prison
yard, which results in one prisoner dying from stab wounds. What 'could
consonance or assonance [...] do with something like that?' Some might
immediately judge Wantling's question to be na•ve. However, as Edward
Lucie-Smith pointed out in his introduction to the Rapp & Whiting
publication of The Awakening (1968), the prisoner 'dies with the bright
froth of lung-blood on his lips. His breath has been taken away from him as
well, and one of the problems which he leaves behind him when he dies is how
to turn the event into art without violating its essential ugliness'. In this poem, Wantling attempts to do
so with techniques such as use of prison jargon, vivid and stark imagery, the
use of harsh-sounding monosyllabic words ending in 't', and a 'breathless series of
enjambments' (Osborne; italics mine).
It is Wantling's attention to technique (as well as his concern with the
transcendent) which distinguishes him from the better-known Charles Bukowski,
with whom he is sometimes associated. Wantling can use rhyme and half-rhyme
so skilfully that you don't notice he is using them unless you pay particular
attention. Take 'Dirge in Spring', for example, a poem about the
unintentional destruction of a hare's young, 'blind from new birth':
Crouched in the lair
soft, without will,
they dream. The doe runs
fast over field, turns
before the plow, urging
the man to take her dare.
He is blind to her.
Without concern
or rancor, he rips the soft
dream.
His plow a high scream
in her ear, the doe runs
on.
In this poem, Wantling concludes by going beyond his concern for the hare to
ask about the man who is driving the plough. What responsibility, if any,
does he have? This is a question which the poet leaves us with, challenging
us to think for ourselves.
In much of his poetry, Wantling expresses an existential commitment to
exploring humankind's possibilities of freedom and choice when they find
themselves in situations over which they have little control or where there
is great pressure on them to conform, as in this brief poem, 'Letter from
Kickapoo (pop. 250)':
I'm
hiding out
from the heat here
this time
they want me
for Living without
Believing
for Working without
Slavery
Playing without Patterns
and Loving without Misery
please don't give me
away?
There is, then, at the heart of Wantling's poetry a continual search for
authenticity. However, as John Osborne makes evident in his introduction,
Wantling uses all kinds of literary artifices along the way. To be sure, the
poems can be brutally direct in their descriptions; Wantling does not pull
his punches. However, they are also full of literary references. To give just
one example, the following four-line poem takes its title 'Things Exactly as
They Are' from Wallace Stevens' long poem 'The Man with the Blue Guitar'
(which in turn, of course, was inspired by a Picasso painting):
Things exactly as they
are
Are Paradise
But it's always so quiet
When the crickets die
Osborne in his introduction gives many other examples of Wantling's
references to other texts,
including the use of found texts, stating that some of Wantling's poems amount to no less
than evidence of a 'literary kleptomania'. He goes on: 'elements of humour,
allusion, irony, collage and ventriloquism [...] frustrate lazy conflations of
author and protagonist: Wantling constructs the poems; the poems construct
their narrators'. Yet they are often presented in seemingly casual, almost
throwaway language, as in the poem 'Lemonade 2c' below. In reality,
Wantling redrafted and kept
honing his work until he found the effect he desired. Anyone who writes will
know the skill and craftsmanship required to produce a poem as simple, yet as
powerful as this:
Kathy was my
first customer
naturally, I
turned her on
free
she put her
cool hand in
mine
led me to her
dark & sweaty
cellar
kissed me
Lord, how our
lips trembled
how bitter-sweet
& cool
that lemonade
It is true, however, that there are one or two weaker poems in this
selection. Occasionally, Wantling's poetry can descend into a banal melodrama
of the self, for example:
Today I forgot how to cry
Every day, in every way
I'm getting flatter and
flatter
HELP
(from 'Essay on Being 35')
Well, yes, most of us go through moments like this, but perhaps this is one
poem that should have stayed amongst Wantling's notebooks. At the same time,
there are a few poems of Wantling's that I think should have made it into
this selection, for example 'Rune for the Disenchanted', 'Initiation', 'For
the Peyote Goddess', 'For a Girl Who doesn't Like her Name', or the
extraordinarily powerful 'At the Market Place' (readers who are interested
can find these poems, along with others, in Shadowtrain. With that gripe out
of the way, In the Enemy Camp remains a brilliant gathering of poems. It
deserves a wide audience. If only more people actually knew of Wantling's
poetry, I am sure more would buy it.
Before I forget, I should add that In the Enemy Camp is beautifully
produced (for editor Michael Curran, the look and feel of a book is
everything), and that as well as John Osborne's insightful introduction,
there is an interesting foreword by musician Thurston Moore, who draws
connections between Wantling's poetry and punk rock. Perhaps it is best here
to leave the last word with the poet himself:
Sweetest of what I leave
behind
is the flesh of a girl,
after that
a dawn sky empty save for
the
Morning Star
but also an icy beer, a
midsummer after-
noon, someone to laugh
with me
© Ian Seed, 2015
|