David Melnick’s “Hasty Fields” reminds me of how image schema can set up large areas of connotation within a given work of poetry. The poem, on the face of it, seems relatively abstract, including (and somewhat early for this) elements of found language focused on the materiality of the language itself. Yet I read this as palpably a portrait of New York City, 1968. My rationale for this is the one concrete reference in the poem – Andrew Cordier / simpleton – and how it turns or evokes aspects of other, more abstract tones hidden within other words. Thus, by the poem’s end, the “brawning arms” allude back to the “mantle / broken,” conceivably even a rare sports reference for Melnick – it may be the only one in his entire oeuvre – to Mickey Mantle, the Yankee center fielder who retired that year.

Cordier was a career diplomat, an American who was a founding executive of the United Nations (and who served as an informal or backchannel emissary for the JFK administration to UN officials & perhaps others) who had gone on to become the dean for the School for International Affairs at Columbia University, a program that was a flashpoint for anti-war efforts in the 1960s, targeted by SDS as an instance of Defense Department money on college campuses (and very possibly a conduit into careers in the CIA). The 1968 student protests at Columbia were among the most prominent in the country that year, leading (for example) to one sit-in where Life magazine took a two-page photo spread of a student sitting at Columbia University President Grayson Kirk’s desk, feet up, with (if I remember correctly) one of Kirk’s cigars. That student was poet David Shapiro, one of Melnick’s friends in New York. In any event, Kirk resigned soon thereafter and was replaced on an interim basis by . . . Andrew Cordier, who held the job for two years. SDS leader Mark Rudd once characterized Cordier as an “imperialist joke” & the term “simpleton” here reflects that rhetoric.

A name on this order stains every other word of the poem, much of which appears to be a veiled discussion of the downsides of privilege. Today the phrase has become opaque, but in its time, Cordier’s presence here tilted everything. The New York it conveys sets up how, for example we will read a more open & neutral reference to British royalty a page later. These schema set up how the other terms in the poem are perceived. Thus, for example, the allusion to Mickey Mantle is (at best) a pun, a secondary connotation pushed forward with a wink, tho that echo would appear to be its function in the poem as such.

I’m not proposing, for example, that one should read this (or any) Melnick poem with the same sort of exegetical excavation methods Hugh Kenner brought to the work of Pound & Joyce, because that clearly is not where Melnick is going with the poem. But, rather, how in a field of otherwise abstract language certain interpretations are privileged, foregrounded, over others. Thus, “hasty fields,” the phrase, means what? The image I carry with me is of student-police confrontations on the claustrophobic quad at Columbia. One side of an alternative life circa 1968, against which the rich kid junky Warhol-hanger on is another very different mode of rebellion.