Living Is What I Wanted: Last Poems
David Ignatow
publisher: Boa Editions
isbn: 1880238780
price: $12.50
Ignatow, who died in 1997 at the age of 83, lead a distinguished if uncontroversial career as a man of letters, having been poet-in-residence at the University of Kentucky and Vassar, a professor at Columbia University and poetry editor for The Nation, not to mention having won several awards including the Bollingen and two Gugghenheims, fine work for a man who started in his father's bookbinding business in depression-era Brooklyn.
As the title to this posthumous volume suggests, Ignatow was engaged in a philosophical search in his last years for the meaning of "living" in a time when death was immanent, and the reader discovers some curious answers in these often understated, at times sparely elegant, but always accessible poems.
The tone is almost from beyond the grave itself, as the surety of death -- these are no vague paranoias, presentiments, or vain strivings for immortality -- give voice to the poems with a startling confidence:
Patient we wait
so that
once dead
we'll know perhaps just who we were,
with others thinking back on us.
[12]
The first poem, "Along with our illusion," states the theme even more bluntly: "The irony is that without death / there could be no life." [10]
Sometimes the poems risk indulgence, as if the poet -- perhaps with an ear to the simplicity of William Carlos Williams, whose tone he occasionally adopts, or Robert Creeley, whom he suggests with his Elizabethan echoings -- didn't have the time to give the poems the craft one would think they deserved, and as a result, reading the poems straight through creates a fair monotony of tone and a dissatisfaction with their individual forms.
As he didn't make this selection himself -- written in 1996, the year before the his death, the poems were edited by Virginia Terris, Jeanette Hopkins and his daughter, poet Yaedi Ignatow -- and as he was no doubt depressed more than elated by his rendevous with history, this is not surprising.
The thought of death seems to have subtracted from him any sense that life itself was what defined one, as if life and death traded places and it was the distinctive moment of death, which was raging with substance, that contained elements of the "positive" -- the bright side of the yin and yang, not the dark.
As he asks himself: "Was I born and raised / without a life of my own?" [44] and, later, more violently:
Ways to die: by slashing your throat, cutting your wrists
hanging the body by the neck, stabbing, shooting, choking, car
crashing, drowning yourself. There are many more, but don't bother, being busy otherwise.
One more is to be a poet.
[70]
It seemed the bookends of birth and death were subsuming the book, and yet the poet is still capable of praise, and finds pleasure in knowing more about his place in the universe, as the short but fine "Make of me its purpose," with its internal rhymes providing a baroque lilt, states:
Let the sun be the creative one
and make of me its purpose
of which I know nothing
except its aging me
as if I knew that being creative
is its aim, that is,
if the sun knows, if at all.
[48]
Ignatow finds the "creative" lacking in both death and life, but gives it some exercise in what was, for him in the closing poem "Circling the silence", the paradox of poetry:
I write to awaken silence,
to acknowledge I have nothing to say,
and it is satisfying
as if having written the poem.
[76]
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