Donald Justice, “Men At Forty”
Dear sweet god. This is a poem that renders an entire genre of novels unnecessary. What the hell is it that every meditation-on-middle-age is saying, if not this?
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, somethingThat is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense
Cynthia Ozick once said, “The demands I make on a sentence are the same demands I would make on a line of poetry.” Donald Justice, a notoriously non-prolific poet, reminds us that the opposite can also hold–that just as novels can have poetic effects, poems can have novelistic depths and implications.
This is not just autobiographical; it is omnibiographical. Read this thin, bladelike piece of verse out loud. See if you can’t imagine Updike and Roth and Bellow listening, their hands falling from their keyboards, their own voices drowned by the immensity of those crickets.
2 responses
Mr. Roberts–
I don’t know why you’re gushing about a drab couple of lines that are completely lacking in fire and that never would have made it into Wallace Stevens’ masterpiece “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” which, incidentally, has the line “If men at forty will be painting lakes…” Justice’s lines are just doodles, mere notes towards a possible poem, while Stevens wrote what is one of the pinnacles of the poetic art. We live at a time when some of the most pathetic drivel is passed off as poetry, and when you react to the drivel as if it were immortal verse, then all you do is perpetuate the problem.
Dear Mister Enginst,
Drivel? Really, drivel? And I’m [quote], “perpetuating a problem” by liking a poem I like, and not one YOU like?
Perhaps you misread the heading. The subject being, let me note: “The Last Poem I Loved”. Not: “Some Poem I Wanna Be A Dickwad About”.
Love,
Jason
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