It’s hard for an outsider to
know just whom Charles Tomlinson might be. On the one
hand, he’s the British poet who edited the Selected
Poems of William Carlos Williams, the author of the extraordinary American Scenes*, and someone whom the likes of
On the other hand, there is
this writer of crabbed occasional verse, technically adequate but unambitious
to the point of pathology, whose poetry these days is most likely to appear in
the United States in the militantly reactionary – both politically &
aesthetically – journal, The New Criterion,
alongside the likes of Roger Shattuck, John Haines, William Logan and (another
author who should know better) Guy Davenport.
Reading Tomlinson’s Selected Poems, as
I have been doing for over a year now, is ultimately one of the more
disappointing engagements with a poet’s lifework I can recall. Outside of the
poems from American Scenes, especially
the section of that book that carries that for its own title, there is very
little in the Selected that warrants
the effort from any perspective beyond, say, an anthropological reading, as if
to answer the question why. Tomlinson,
the Americanist, the modernist &
internationalist, appears to have been the aberration – a random pulse in what
otherwise has been a flatline performance stretching
over nearly 50 years.
This is not to say that
there are not some other poems worth reading here, but rather that those that
do repay the effort, especially among the later works, such as “Writing on
Sand,” “The Tax Inspector” or “Far Point,” invariably suggest a return to the
flat, direct pseudo-imagist mode of American
Scenes. For one thing, Tomlinson’s ear seems to desert him the instant any
line gets to eight syllables – simply excising the works that use longer lines
(nearly half of the Selected) would
have yielded a far stronger book. But even then one would still have to
confront & deal with the crushing sense of the occasional. If ever there
were a poet of tourism, of the weekend & of the summer holiday from
teaching, Tomlinson is it.
It’s curious & sad
ultimately. Reading the Selected is
literally to watch a man who had some glimmer of
talent waste his life. Born in 1927, Tomlinson is part of the same age cohort
as the core of the New American poetry – Ginsberg, Creeley, Ashbery, Eigner all
were born at virtually the same moment. With his interest in &, to some
degree, ear for American poetry, Tomlinson might have been the person who could
have bridged the great gap between the alternative tradition in American
literature & the very similar chasm in British letters that puts Bunting, Finlay, Mac Diarmid & David
Jones off to one side, while pretending that dullards like Ted Hughes represent
anything more than the death of empire. Had someone, anyone, been able to
construct that bridge in the 1960s, younger writers, like Raworth & Prynne,
might have received the treatment their work warranted. As it is, British poets
with any life in them have had to struggle in circumstances with far fewer
resources available to them than their counterparts over here.
I started Tomlinson’s Selected with great hopes. Now at least
I feel I have an answer as to why he didn’t – couldn’t
or wouldn’t – create that bridge when he had a chance. As it is, I do think
that this is a book that younger poets should read, not as literature but as a
cautionary tale: this could happen to you.
* Having
even the most well-intentioned British poet edit Williams’ Selected, rather than, say, Creeley or Ginsberg or Blackburn or
whomever of all the dozens of American acolytes WCW had within that same
generation as Tomlinson, is a notably curious choice, given the vehemence of
Williams’ own antipathy toward a view of American literature as a tributary of
what
