Introduction

Earlier in this century, literary magazines would occasionally publish "work-in-progress" issues to show interesting new work, often (as in a famous instance by Joyce) experimental, while it was still in the making. The main purpose -- to put it another way -- was to present relatively self-contained portions of longer works whose overall structure and character were emerging but not yet finally determined. An obvious result of such issues was to give authors striking out in new directions a testing ground, and readers a glimpse of the future and a fresh sense of art as process. At its best it also provided young writers with models of genuinely exploratory artistry clearly distinct from the chic mediocrity favored by current fashion.

The foregoing paragraph, from our original announcement inviting poets to submit such work-in-progress, defines the impulse of this issue. It also, I think, reflects the actual character of art in the making. Many an author has published a
Complete Poems; none, to my knowledge, a
Completed Poems. Indeed any work, however glorious, is "complete" only in the sense that the artist -- at a certain point -- could for some reason carry the process no further.

The struggle to do so is intrinsically endless. The psyche's restless reverie, and the immense, teasing possibilities of form and language, are ceaseless pressures. They push beyond any one artist's -- even a Shakespeare's -- limits of energy and vision. The integrity of a work, rough-hewn as it may seem along the way, lies in its serious (I do not mean drearily sòlemn) engagement with the struggle. We have triumphant instances, though hardly "rough-hewn," of such engagement in the poems included here by Eugenio Montale, and in William Arrowsmith's sensitive translations of them.

The response to our invitation has been generous despite the brief time between first announcement and final deadline. Of course, certain contributions, and certain desirable balances (all things being, as they never are, equal) were impossible to arrange in so short a run. But the variety of modes and styles, and of perspectives advanced in the poets' introductory notes, strikingly reveals serious directions in our work.

Just about half the contributions are sequences in exploratory formation. They include Tess Gallagher's bitter
The Valentine Elegies; Brenda Hillman's very different, intricately subjective, yet equally elegiac group of
Death Tractates; and Thomas Kinsella's deep recovery -- here in terms of intimately private memory, although elsewhere in his work the attention can go sharply outward -- of the Irish people's literal past. The forays, too, into the darker side of modern urban and political and familial or love experience by certain New York poets (Mark Rudman, Rachel Hadas, David Rosenthal, Molly Peacock, Barry Wallenstein) carry personal confession beyond the purely personal level. The search for immediacy in their sequences resonates with unpolemical social criticism edged with existential despair or disgust. Many of the poems-in-progress by other poets that follow, whether single pieces or parts of sequences (for instance, some of those by the Americans James Schevill, William Heyen, Robert Dana, and Frederick Feirstein; the Irish poets John Montague, Eavan Boland, and Peter Sirr, and even the cooler -- yes, almost cheerful -- English poet Charles Tomlinson and the intense but well-tempered Anglo-Welsh-Jewish Dannie
Abse) parallel this development.

There is much play with traditional form on these pages. Thus, we are lucky to have two operatic libretti: one, by Charles Bernstein, satirical; the other, by Sally M. Gall (represented by its Sapphic translations and other lyrics only), in a Classical mode. Both are modern improvisations within the ancient partnering of poetry and music. And one of the sequences, Sam Hamill's
Mandala, represents half of the collaboration between a lyric poet and a painter. Another kind of poet-painter collaboration can be seen in Anne Whitehouse's exquisite series on paintings in the Fogg Museum.

At one extreme within our modern tradition, Peter Redgrove's mixture of prose and verse and Stephen Berg's experiments with prose "song" carry forward the riskiest sort of effort to expand the formal opportunities of what may still be called poetry. At the other extreme, Jon Stallworthy's Tennysonian echoes adapted to a tragic modern story and Theodore Weiss's reenactment of
Paradise Lost from an un-Miltonic standpoint are, however unalike, quietly daring efforts of a quite different kind. Somewhere in between are Galway Kinnell's "pastoral" musings. For prosodic play in a more lighthearted vein, see the poems of William Harmon.

We include also two suggestive sets of notebook entries, one by Louis Simpson and another by Philip Booth, that mix verse and prose passages and are charged, as it were, with poems waiting either to be born or to mature. Along with these, we print part of an interview with Donald Hall by George Meyers, Jr., useful as a description of essential poetic process and as an introduction to the poems of his developing new sequence. Finally, I should mention the fictional passages given us by Abigail Stone. Their sardonic float is less narrative in structure than it is lyrical.

The work collected here is indicative of where much of our best poetry now stands: its capacity for expressing "life immense in passion, pulse and power," its often playful formal eclecticism, its painful concern over what is happening to our lives: in short, its utterly self-contradictory desolation and boisterous zest, both in affect and in artistic morale.