"Renewing Poetry's License: Two Voices of Wit and Vision"

BOOKS 4G oet A HISTORY OF THE RIVER By James Applewhite. Louisiana State University Press. 49 pages. SlS.9S cloth. $8.9S paper. C By Fred Chappell Louisiana State Universify Press. S2 pages. S15.95 cloth. SB.95 paper. P BY STEVEN B. KATZ oetry is often thought of as useless fluff. But, as Maya • Angelou demonstrated at President Clinton's inaugura­ tion, it can still speak to us. Where else can emotions be explored honestly and openly, and in a way that moves us to a different level of social consciousness? Certainly not in advertising, where emotions sell prod­ ucts. Certainly not in science, where emotions are excluded from knowledge. Fred Chappell and James Applewhite have their lovely lyrical moments, but one comes away from their new collec­ tions struck by their biting soci�I vision as well. Chappell critiques a society of hypocrites, poseurs, people like you and me and him. Applewhite laments the loss of personal relations in an Eastern North Carolina overtaken by technology. This is a distinguished pair of writers, and the issuing of these slender new volumes a happy coincidence. Chappell, a professor of English and UNC- • 25, 1993 1cense Two voices of wit and vision Greensboro, has won the Bollingen Prize in Poetry. James Applewhite, a professor of English at Duke University, won the 1992 Jean Stein Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Yet, although paired by profession, by fact of geography and by publisher, these poets are actually quite different. And nowhere is this more apparent than in "C" and "A History of the River." Chappell writes in a transparent and direct style, exploiting the emotions in common speech honed into short rhyming verse. Applewhite is more opaque and indirect, exploring emotion through a richly textured poetic language that is allowed to sprawl somewhat with­ in the meter. "C" consists almost entirely of witty epigrammatic verse. It has few complex images and metaphors to interpret; the language is simple and direct. Consider "Liberal": "Faced with the problem of Original Sin, / He applies Science for a sure vaccine." For inspiration, Chappell turns to the ancient Roman poet Martial, who devel­ oped the poetic epigram and used it to criticize the decadence of his society. In several poems, Chappell "imitates" and borrows from Martial and other poets. "C" is the Roman numeral for the hun­ dred short poems in this collection; it is THE NEWS & OBSERVER SUNDAY, APRIL Applewhite is a Hesiod, the fincient Greek poet. Like Hesiod, Applewhite extols the vanishing virtues associated with farming: frugality, hard work, also the first letter of the author's last prudence. For Applewhite, as for Hesiod, name. The satire is Chappell's; the soci­ ours is not the age of gold, silver, bronze, ety is ours. or heroes, but of iron. If Martial says that "My page smells of In this new collection, Applewhite man," Chappell's also smells of man writes meditative poems that explore the and women, journalists, academics, tele­ vangelists, hypocrites, architects, editors, . nature of memory, and the memory of nature, in the fann country of Eastern literary critics, novelists, poets, and North Carolina as it is caught in the politicians, including this Senator famil­ gears of �ech110logical and social trans­ iar to us all: formation. This is "Horsepower": "A vast EL PERFECTO precision extended its language to small-town /garages, stations where Senator No sets up as referee gasoline and fan belts were sold. / The Of everything we think and read and moral rectitude of fathers became see. measurements by I micrometers to the His justification for such stiff decreeing ten-thousandth of an inch." Is being born a perfect human being Each of Applewhite's poems is descrip­ without a jot of blemish, taint or flaw, tive, detailed, and as carefully crafted as The Dixie embodiment of Moral Law, the farm implements he is fascinated by. Quite fit and eager to pursue the Unlike Chappell, he employs a technical quarrel vocabulary and much image, metaphor, With God Whose handiwork he finds simile and adjective to furrow into a immoral. lifestyle covered over. Sometimes the Some of these poems may seem incon­ poems are a little dense. But most are as sequential. As Chappell admits in the rugged and beautiful as the hard red clay first poem, "Some of these epigrams / of North Carolina. Shall have seen better days, and some In both collections, we get a glimpse are hit-or-miss." But the brevity, wit and of our comic and broken selves in a beauty of most is refreshing. And language that redeems them. because of the deft sequencing of these short sharp poems, the collection builds Steven B. Katz is an assistant in crescendo to form an impression of a professor of English at NCSU. His longer poem. poems recently appeared in Southern If Chappell is a modern-day Martial, Poetry Review and Pembroke Magazine.