Inventions of Necessity, Jonathan Greene's 18th book, is a Selected Poems. I've followed his writing at a distance for a long time: Robert Kelly was an important influence for each of us in the 1960s & as I wandered off in my own particular direction in the years since, so did Greene, coming to a poetry that is unique in his (& my) generation.

 

Greene can be said to write a post-projectivist poem of quiet urgency. Indeed, the adjectives that appear on the book's back cover — "low-keyed," "calm," meditative" — are not inaccurate. But more than any other poet coming, as he has, out of the New American tradition, Greene writes a poem of narrative & expository completeness. Thus, for example, "The Match":

 

They box, they wrestle,

they call each other names

under their breath —

 

how else could it be

that two men would embrace

before such a multitude.

 

Greene's poems are flawless. And while one might expect that a volume that allots just 77 pages to the work of 30 years would be forced to focus almost exclusively on Greene's very best poems, it is evident everywhere in this volume that perfection & closure are important values for him. Which in turn makes me realize how unusual Greene is in this regard, at least among "our kind" of poets.

 

It's not that Greene is a closet School of Quietude type lurking among the post-avant set. Instead, he virtually alone among the progressive poets born in the 1940s has seen a need for this approach to completion. In some ways, this makes him — although Greene's poetry is more narrative & figural — the closest thing we might have to a "natural" descendant of the poetry of that other high-finish isolato, William Bronk. Greene lacks Bronk's grimness, but shares with Bronk some sense of the poem's responsibility. It's not the same philosophy, but rather an agreement that the poem is finally a philosophic endeavor.

 

But what it's been making me wonder the most about this morning is why so few post-avant poets share Greene's compulsion for closure. It is one of the School of Quietude's enduring complaints about post-avant poetry in general that the poems, to their eyes, look "like drafts," poorly crafted precisely because they reject closure. &, indeed, there is almost no poem here that, say, Robert Kelly might have written, just because Kelly's poems, even at their most brief, leave room for the open-ended, angular & indeterminate.

 

So Greene's uniqueness lies not, at least not importantly, in the New York boy having gone off to make a life in Kentucky, although that also was certain to set him apart from his peers, but in his vision for the poem. One might quarrel with Greene's need for completeness, but he makes the case convincingly that, for him at least, this necessity is absolute.