Oblivion: On Writers & Writing

The recipient of several major awards (Bollingen, Pulitzer) and fellowships (Lannon etc.), poet Justice is highly regarded for his mastery of formal verse and as a mentor to younger poets. Much of the pleasure of these essays, dating from 1954 to the late 1990s, lies in their illumination of small but just truths that refuse to take anything for granted. His observations are often surprising but apt, as when he notes that ""the music of music and the music of poetry are entirely different.... [T]he music of poetry must be understood as no more than a metaphor struck off in the heat of wishful thought."" His chief concern is not so much what poems mean as how they are made. Justice knows that poetry is artifice: poems do not spring into being through magic but are constructed through hard, loving effort. In the title essay he emphasizes that dedication to art does not necessarily bring public success or private satisfaction; he writes touchingly about Weldon Kees, Henri Coulette and Robert Boardman Vaughn, three poets whose careers and reputations fell into oblivion but whom Justice regards as ""true artists nonetheless."" The degrees of oblivion, he writes, to which certain writers ""have been consigned are no more proportionate to the real value of their work than the fame of some others is to the value of theirs."" Some of the writing feels random and occasional; not all of these pieces are as fully fleshed out as one might wish. That said, it is valuable to have the mature judgments of this poet's poet. (July)