.... continued.....
Now for an honest critique of Randell Jarrell's most recognized poem by the son of Oscar Williams!

Randell Jarrell
THE DEATH OF THE BALL TURRET GUNNER

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

The Ball Turret Gunner is a fine piece of poetry in its economical use of its imagery to convey an impression that is at once objective and subjective. Washing out the dead gunner from the turret implies an explosion dismembering the body. This poem has message also. The mother gives birth to the child who is then claimed by the State, by the society one is born into. The poem is also metaphor. Here is described being in a bomber, yet it is the State itself one is caught in, with the implication that the State, just like war, is only interested in that each citizen do a job, and not interested in that the person is also an individual deserving of respect after death, dying for the State.

Don't wash out my remains when I die of too much poetry!

The whole thing of the poem is like a lump of clay. Fashioned after a fashion to be something, but in fact turns out to be nothing. Like fashioned clay, the poem is no more than the words it is made with. The meaning of the poem turns on the wit, the construction of the metaphor. The experience does not lead to meaning.

So what? you say. Why does a poem have to be an experience of meaning? A poem only has to be an experience of something. A poem is an experience of a life event?

No. A poem is an experience of being a poem, whatever that means to anyone. Poetry's Manifesto - Poetry Is The Experience Of Poetry, And Not Life. This is the manifesto: A poem must be an experience of a poem.

That is all that is required now for poetry. And of course this is in itself a high standard. For most scribbling that the poets call their poetry are mostly experiences of surfeit of image and rhetoric, of confusion and chaos. And lastly, most poems that are not really poems are experiences of boredom. They simply don't make sense at any significant level.

At least Randell Jarrell's poem here is not of confusion or surfeit of metaphor and rhetoric. At least it can justify itself as an experience of a poem, whether it offers any meaning or insight to its reader or not. Or whether, even, it evokes a sentiment, which is the word to use for indicating feeling responses, a movement forward of ones whole being, that are only generated by sincere and transparent experiences of reading and listening to real poetry.

You can't write a poem about love, for instance. You can only love, and words will not describe what you feel as you make intimate contact with another. Yet in and with poetry you can experience love as it is experienced through sincere reading and accepting of a poem itself expressing love.

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments," says Shakespeare. "Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds. Oh No! It is a great bark that on the seas does go . . ." and so on!

The point is that in human love involving bodies, ones love expression does alter when it finds alteration in the love object. We are not talking about human love in Shakespeare's poetry love. In poetry love, Shakespeare make the statement, and it is a noble one, that love does not alter when it alteration finds.

Thus are we propelled then into the experience of "listened poetry," the world of "poetical reality." A true lover of poetry goes into poetical reality because he or she lives well there, loves her or his life there, as moments away from daily, outer life, but maybe closer to the soul's life.

One must realize that, just like with the true mystic, the true poetry writer and lover is not interested in poetry changing the reality of the world. As a poetry writer or lover, one is interested in only one thing. This is the play of words that creates in the listener a true sentiment, a true inner feeling not generated by outer reality events, but by a poetry event.

This magical-like experience is at heart very simple. Poetry does not have to have a carryover into life and life does not have to have a carryover into poetry. These are separate realities. These are separate worlds, and so easy is it to confuse the difference between the two.

Even in war poems from battle, soldiers one would think, as they probably thought, that the horrors of war were producing their poetry. It would be more the other way around in which the poet is already producing poetry, is already developing poetical reality, and then goes to war. Therefore in battle Wilfred Owen can say in a moving poem, "I am the enemy you killed, my friend." and we weep.

Yet we don't weep as soldiers in the battle field over a kill, theirs or one of their own pals. We weep as civilians comfortable somewhere with a bit of solitude on our hands.

We feel the sentiment of war but not the experience of war. The experience of war probably cannot be conveyed by the poetry of war. The poet does not create the war. The poet participates in war and creates poetry. It is natural to the poet to live a reality experience but to also be evoked to write into poetical reality a new sentiment, maybe similar to, but certainly not identical to the experience of a war event.

Wilfred Owen can go on killing, as required to do under war circumstances, but in his spare moments of solitude he can also go on being a poet. His war poems are not created to end war. Poets and poems do not end wars, just as they don't start wars. Wilfred Owen, whether he knew it or not in these words I use, was as a poet creating a poetical reality based on the play of words and what they evoke called poetry.

This is why in reading true war poems we can experience the sentiments evoked by war in real poets. We don't have to have been in hardened battle ourselves, surely to have a strong experience of war in poetical reality. Many soldiers in battle would not come close to reading a poem or understanding it, even if the poem was written by a battle-hardened soldier.

Only those who choose to enter poetical reality and live there part time can understand the sentiments evoked by effective poems that are poems because they allow the experience of poetry in experienced readers.

Certain readers say how much they enjoy reading Oscar Williams' Immortal Poems of the English Language when they go on air flights. If you have ever been on an air flight you know how much of a suspended and limited reality experience that it. The utmost concentration is put into airplanes flying safely, almost to the point of boredom. Driving a car has far more immediate dangers, such as driving inadvertently off the side of the road at high speed, because you fell asleep or something. Every moment in a car is used in staying alert to all the things that can go wrong in each moment of driving.

Yet for the plane passenger, some would rather take those eight to ten hours and basically spend their time in poetical reality, and so they take the best anthology of great poetry they can find and go there to dwell awhile. And why not? They are not flying the plane, are they? What is there to keep them in flying reality where almost everything but your toilet work is done for you?

Have we made the point clear? Such labor as we do here is to try and make very real the differences between everyday experiential reality and poetical reality.

Just remember, love between human beings is a feeling experience that is not the same as love sentiment expressed in poetry. When in poetry be in poetry. When in outer existence be in outer existence. Dare we say more?

Thus we can say that Randell Jarrell's poem, Turret Gunner, is not about war. It is about poetry. Does it work to bring you more into poetical reality, or does it leave you flat? Poetical reality for the experienced is a rather rich reality in itself. It is not easy to get there. But once you have arrived, it is not easy to leave.

I don't think that in my poetical reality I would want much Randell Jarrell poetry experiences there. Once you wash out the gun turret of his poetic waste you want something far more substantial and lasting. Randell Jarrell writes like someone who does not believe that his things will last.

No, like a teenage orgasm, most people's poetical instances are over in a minute, if they are that positive at all. But mostly most of his poems do not reach the status of poetry, having been written with wandering metaphors and misplaced conceits. The poetry lover cannot even find where to start, let alone where to go, on the Randell Jarrell poetry journey. The critic has not turned into poet after all. His promise as poet has been actualized only briefly too soon and too late.

Critics are a waste of time. Get to the poetry itself if you want to enter poetical reality and have fulfilling experiences there. Oscar Williams never acted as any poet's critic. He just loved poetry and spent the best of his life putting out the best of the poetry he loved.