It’s not fair to think of our dead as “The Dead,” a demographic category that erases all distinctions but absence. My brother (d. 2024) and Jane Greer, the North Dakota poet who died this week, would have had little in common in life. Ken had no use for poetry and he framed paintings and photographs for a living. He was an artist manqué and I knew him all his life. Jane I knew only recently from her poems and the emails we exchanged. Each was a notable individual, distinct, not a statistic, worthy of memory. Memory salvages both from oblivion. In some of us, the elegiac impulse is powerful. By my count, the Summer issue of New Verse Review 2.3 contains at least ten poems memorializing or addressed to those who have died. Here is Victoria Moul’s “I.m. Andrew, October 2024”:  “Cozen me then, my restive Lord: The candles in the church blow out After only an hour or more. I have forgotten now which saint Was in which niche and in what stand I set my candle, when I paid A few coins, not quite the allotted price, Or even whom I named Sidelong while wondering too Whether the man who knelt Across from me was married; how We might afford that flat; or if I should buy leeks or aubergine. Attention is So short and slight a thing, a flame Snuffed as soon as lit, but all the same Someone, I think, heard the name I named.”   Moul adds a footnote: “This poem is in memory of Andrew Hurley, who died in Paris on 11th October 2024. Andrew’s encyclopaedic knowledge of, and unrelenting enthusiasm for French poetry are much missed by all who knew him.” She speaks for me: “the name I named.” John Talbot contributes “Epitaph of Menophilos” to New Verse Review:   “Such days as were my lot I passed in joy Buoyed in the quickening flux of poetry. Bacchus was never very far away, Or Aphrodite either. As to friends: Not one of them can tell of an offense I ever did them. I am Menophilos, A son of Asia, till I left to settle Far from home in the sundown hills of Italy. Here I held my ground, and now am held Among the dead. I never did grow old.”   Together, Moul and Talbot edited C. H. Sisson Reconsidered (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Here is Sisson’s “The Absence” (God Bless Karl Marx!, Carcanet, 1987):   “How can it be that you are gone from me, Everyone in the world? Yet it is so, The distance grows and yet I do not move. Is it I streaming away and, if so, where? And how do I travel from all equally Yet not recede from where I stand pat In the daily house or in the daily garden Or where I travel on the motor-way? Good-bye, good-bye all, I call out. The answer that comes back is always fainter; In the end those to whom one cannot speak Cannot be heard, and that is my condition. Soon there will be only wind and waves, Trees talking among themselves, a chuchotement, I there as dust, and if I do not reach The outer shell of the world, still I may Enter into the substance of a leaf.”   Chuchotement: French for “whisper.”

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In its Summer 1965 issue, the editors of The American Scholar asked forty-two writers and critics the following question: “To what book published in the past ten years do you find yourself going back--or thinking back--most often?” I take the question personally because I turned thirteen that year and was already discovering contemporary literature, especially American fiction. If it’s possible to characterize the general sense of most of the responses, I would call them trendy, topical, pre-approved, fashion-conscious and largely, after sixty years, ephemeral. A similar pattern would be seen today. John Barth is honest and audaciously self-serving, naming his own early novels but graciously citing Pale Fire and Jorge Luis Borges’ stories (two of my own unsolicited votes from that era). Anthony Burgess likewise names Nabokov’s novel.  Too many responses are ridiculous – E.B. White’s essays, for instance, and Joseph Heller’s cartoon-novel, Catch-22. Some are merely boring – two votes for John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society. Teilhard de Chardin gets two votes. I’m reminded of the late D.G. Myers’ ten-year rule – not reviewing books until at least a decade has passed after publication. Otherwise, we risk errant idiocy.   Not all the responses are silly. Poet William Meredith names Auden’s prose collection The Dyer’s Hand. Walter Allen picks The Less Deceived (1955) by Philip Larkin, a rare choice endorsed by the subsequent six decades. Allen writes:   “[I]t is poetry of a remarkably pure kind, rooted in the actual and the unexceptional, although the unexceptional in this sense is very rare in poetry. I can think of no poet since Hardy in whom there is a more resolute honesty, a stronger determination to be himself, warts and all; and in a number of poems in The Less Deceived--in ‘Church Going’ most clearly perhaps--Larkin seems to me not inferior to Hardy.”

“True teachers are called into being by the contradictions generated by civilization,” the poet Gary Snyder reflected in his reckoning with the real work of life. “We need them.” We have always needed them because we need each other, because we have always been each other’s teachers. Ever since one human being watched another rub wood and flint into fire, we have taught each other how to use our hands and how to use our minds, how to wield our tools at the world and our theories of living at the predicament of being alive. Social learning — this jungle… read article