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Fearing’s New Poems

Dead Reckoning by Kenneth Fearing. Random House

The New Masses. February 1939, 27–28. Also in Philosophy of Literary Form

“The alarm that shatters sleep, at least, is real” . . . Before you have finished one stanza in a poem by Kenneth Fearing, you have felt the trend of it stimulus, and have set yourself to the proper mode of expectation and response. I know of no poet who can swing you into his stride with greater promptness. Taking as his characters the stock situation of modern history’s problem play, he offers us a slogan-laden “science of last things,” in imagery found among the piles of the metropolis. Confronted by all the alloys, substitutes, and canned goods that are offered us by the priesthood of business, the catch phrases of salesmanship and commercialized solace, Fearing has put the utilitarian slogans to a use beyond utility, as he rhythmically sorrows, with their help, assigning them to an interpretative function in his poems that they lack in their “state of nature.”

By his method, you may peer beyond some trivial advertisement to discern despair, migration, even “Amalgamated Death” (since the poet, after a secular fashion, is given to carrying out the churchman’s injunction: “Thou shalt live a dying life”). The handwriting in a letter becomes the handwriting on the wall; and I feel sure that, with his expressive resources, he could readily transmogrify a pat salutation like “Dear Sir” into a prognosis of the vast collapse of Western culture.

Perhaps the quickest way to characterize his book is by a paragraph of cullings, one from each poem, that convey the quality of the poet’s burden: “shadows that stop for a moment and then hurry past the windows” . . . “the phone put down upon the day’s last call” . . . “until then I travel by dead reckoning and you will take your bearings from the stars” . . . “it is late, it is cold, it is still, it is dark” . . . “fill in the coupon” . . . “how the moon still weaves upon the ground, through the leaves, so much silence and so much peace” . . . “Lunch With the Sole Survivor” . . . “is it the very same face seen so often in the mirror” . . . “not until we’ve counted the squares on the wallpaper” . . . “on the bedroom floor with a stranger’s bullet through the middle of his heart, clutching at a railroad table of trains to the South” . . . “It is posted in the clubrooms” . . . “a privileged ghost returned, as usual, to haunt yourself?” . . . “CAST IN THE ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE” . . . “tomorrow, yes, tomorrow” . . . “soothed by Walter Lippmann and sustained by Haig & Haig” . . . “if now there is nothing” . . . “the empty bottle again, and the shattered glass” . . . “as armies march and cities burn” . . . “ask the stones, so often walked” . . . “the natives can take to caves in the hills, said the British MP” . . . “wages: DEATH” . . . “Take a Letter” . . . “with the wind still rattling the windows” . . . “why do you lay aside the book in the middle of the chapter to rise and walk to the window and stare into the street” . . . “Dance of Mirrors” . . . “this house where the suicide lived” . . . “something that we can use, like a telephone number” . . . “Wait, listen.”

There is a risk here, in the “statistical” quality of the perspective by which the poet sizes up the “thousand noble answers to a thousand empty questions, by a patriot who needs the dough.” There is such limitation of subject matter as may come of taking the whole world as one’s theme. All people look like ants, when seen from the top of the a skyscraper—and the poet’s generalized approach often seems like the temptation of a high place. Connected with this is an over-reliance upon accumulation and repetition, traits that derive also from his disposition to establish a very marked pattern, which he expands as a theme with variations. Hence, for my part, the items I liked best were “Pantomime” (“She sleeps, lips round, see how at rest” . . . ), a poem of tenderness and meditation that is very moving, and the opening “Memo” (“Is there still any shadow there, on the rainwet window of the coffeepot” . . . )—where the generalized plaint is introduced in less head-on fashion. “Devil’s Dream” (a kind of “There but for the grace of God goes our author” theme) is another poignant accomplishment, by reason of a more personal note. The author’s rhetoric of attack ranges from the slap to a tearing of the hair (with perhaps his “En Route” among the most successful of the generalized statement); and all his lines bear convincing testimony—in speech swift and clear—of estrangement in a world awry, where many are asked to face the emptiness of failure in order that a few may face the emptiness of success.

Literature

We ask only to leave the entire matter vague—to say that a work may be popular and good, popular and bad, unpopular and good, unpopular and bad. It may be widely read and ineffectual, widely read and influential, little read and ineffectual, little read and influential.

—Counter-Statement (91)