|
The poetry of Donald Justice, at least for his contemporaries, is wrapped in a cloak of reputation: his reputation as theorist and essayist, and most significantly, his reputation as a teacher. Associated with several writing programs, he is best known for his role in the development of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Also, Justice was a famously non-prolific poet, and that also plays a part in the perception of him as “poet and…” This is all likely to change over time. History will note his reputation as a teacher, but as those directly affected by him as students pass into that same history, the poetry is what will remain. And over time, lack of prolific output becomes less important, as a poet comes to be known primarily for a representative group of anthologized pieces. In fact, a smaller output may well mean that a larger percentage of the artist’s work is remembered. Robert Johnson wrote fewer than two dozen songs; fully a quarter of them are recognized as masterpieces. In the future, Donald Justice is likely to be remembered as a poet who gave his age a quiet but compelling insight into loss and distance, and who set a standard for craftsmanship, attention to detail, and subtleties of rhythm. Justice was born 12 August 1925, in Miami, Florida, and raised in the South: His father was a carpenter, and the lives of working men of his father’s generation became one of the recurring themes of his poetry, even though he is more associated with themes of art, music and aesthetics. He graduated from the University of Miami in 1945. Although he was always interested in writing poetry—his early letters include a group of poems sent to the Mississippi poet George Marion O'Donnell in 1943, asking for a critique—his original major in college was in musical composition, and he studied with composer Carl Ruggles, who encouraged his talent. Ultimately, however, he took his BA in English. from 1942 to 1945. He received an MA from the University of North Carolina in 1947, where he met his wife, the writer Jean Ross. He then headed north and west to Stanford University, where he studied for two years (1947-48), but was frustrated in his desire to be allowed to work with poet/critic and champion of formal verse Yvor Winters, though he did audit Winters’ classes. It’s interesting to speculate what the effect of a closer relationship with Winters, who believed in a highly focused—some say narrow and arbitrary—definition of perfection in poetry, might have had on the young Justice. In any case, he left Stanford and came to continue his studies at the University of Iowa, where he worked with Paul Engle, Robert Lowell and John Berryman, and earned his Ph.D in 1954. After a stay in Europe as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow, and short teaching stints at the University of Missouri/Columbia and Hamline University in St Paul, Minnesota, he returned to Iowa in 1957, first as a replacement for Paul Engle, who was on sabbatical leave, then after Engle’s return, as a full time faculty member. Justice remained at Iowa through 1966. For many, Justice came to personify the Iowa Workshop approach to the teaching of poetry, both by those criticized what they perceived as its timidity and rejection of bold innovation, and by those who appreciated his generous yet persistent urging to his students that they hold themselves to their highest standards. As his student and later colleague Marvin Bell said in a eulogy, “As a teacher, Don chose always to be on the side of the poem, defending it from half-baked attacks by students anxious to defend their own turf. While he had firm preferences in private, as a teacher Don defended all turfs. He had little use for poetic theory.” He taught at Syracuse University from 1963-70, at the University of California at Irvine from 1970-71, at Iowa again from 1971-82, and finally at the University of Florida in Gainesville from 1982 until his retirement in 1992. He also held visiting professorships at Princeton (1976) and the University of Virginia at Charlotte (1980). After his retirement, he returned to live in Iowa City. His first collection of poems, The Summer Anniversaries, published in 1960, was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets for 1959. Departures, published in 1973, was nominated for the National Book Award, and Selected Poems, published in 1979, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1980. Other collections included Night Light (1967), The Sunset Maker (1987), Collected Poems (2004) and several chapbooks from small presses. Justice edited the collected poems of two admired contemporaries, Weldon Kees (1960) and Henri Coulette (1990, with Robert Mezey). A Donald Justice Reader (1992) included poetry, short stories, a memoir, and a collection of critical essays; Oblvion (1998) contained more criticism, and miscellaneous prose pieces. He wrote the libretti for Edward Miller’s opera The Young God - A Vaudeville (1969) and Edwin London’s opera The Death of Lincoln (1976). He was awarded the Inez Boulton Prize by Poetry magazine in 1960, a Ford Foundation fellowship in 1964-65, National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1967, 1973,1980 and 1989, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976-77, the Harriet Monroe Award from the University of Chicago in 1984, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1988, the Bollingen Prize for poetry in 1991, and the Lannen Literary Award for Poetry in 1996. In 1997, he was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He died 6 August 2004, after a long illness, which had rendered him unable to accept the position of Poet Laureate of the United States for 2004. “Great Leo roared at my birth,” Justice began “The Summer Anniversaries,” which was to become the title poem for his first collection. But that ironic glance at grandiosity, with its allusion to Hotspur’s dismissal of Owen Glendower’s bombast in Henry IV Part I, proved to be a dodgy issue for Justice, and the entire stanza was omitted from the poem as included in New and Selected Poems. In that collection, the poem begins with what had been the second stanza. The speaker is ten years old, and the ironic self-aggrandizement is more painful: “I was wheeled superb in a chair/Past vacant lots in bloom/…In secret proud of the scar/dividing me from life…” But in his final book, Collected Poems, the stanza is restored—perhaps, as many would theorize, because it was simply too good to be left out, but more likely because Justice heard some nuanced variation on his theme that left a vacancy with its absence, in spite of his famous credo that all the best revision was cutting out extraneous material. In this public instance of major revision, we get a sense of what he meant when he told an interviewer for the Iowa Review “I have a sort of Platonic notion that somewhere exists ideally the poem I’m trying to write, if only I can find it.” Justice gently mocked his own sparse output and endless revision toward the ideal in “The Thin Man” (from Night Light): “I indulge myself/In rich refusals./Nothing suffices./I hone myself to/This edge. Asleep, I/Am a horizon.” Justice’s work abounds in the fixing of moments in the treacherous pages of time. “The Poet at Seven” flying a paper airplane and spinning around in circles, leaving the reader to find the hint of the nascent poet in the little boy. “The Summer Anniversaries” takes a young man from birth (or invalid ten-year-old) through seventeen, twenty and thirty. One of his best known poems, “Men at Forty” (from Night Light) begins “Men at forty/Learn to close slowly/The doors to rooms they will not be/Coming back to.” In The Sunset Maker, “Tremayne,” the alter ego of his late years, “…as usual, misquotes/Recalling adolescence and old trees/In whose shade he once memorized that verse…” Time, fixed and fleeing, is of concern to Justice outside of his autobiographical verse, as well. In “On the Death of Friends in Childhood” he imagines dead friends “…in the deserted schoolyard at twilight;/Forming a ring, perhaps, or joining hands/In games whose very names we have forgotten…” (from The Summer Anniversaries). He stops time in the reconstructed past, in “Young Girls Growing Up (1911)” to re-create a long past courtship ritual which captures timeless longing, and in the remembered past, occasionally sociopolitical (“Cinema and Ballad of the Great Depression”) but more often aesthetic and personal, as in the series of tributes to his first piano teachers (all the above from The Sunset Maker). Music played a recurring role in the poetry of the one-time student of composition, although he himself rejected this notion. He told Dana Gioia, in an interview, “I can't think of any effect at all [of the study of music on his poetry]. None…I don't happen to think that poetry is—or can be—very ‘musical.’ It's a figure of speech, basically. My God, how I've heard the term misused and abused! That may be how the study of music affected me—to make me less tolerant of the kind of nonsense uttered on this score. Some even go so far as to speak of the melody of poetry. But the fact is that poetry has no melody, which involves pitch…’Musical’ when applied to poetry seems to mean approximately what ‘poetic’ means when applied to music.” Nevertheless, critics and readers have felt the forms of music in his poetry, in his poems structured around themes and variations, and in his “Sonatina in Green” and “Sonatina in Yellow.” With characteristic understatement, Justice chose to title these poems after a musical form considered to be technically less demanding than the sonata. Musicians, composers, teachers of music, and overheard strains of music all occur prominently in his work. Known as brilliant technician, Justice showed his command of received forms most frequently in his early poems. The Summer Anniversaries is a virtuoso display of forms, particularly the sestina. “A Dream Sestina” recalls Dante: “I woke by first light in a wood/Right in the shadow of a hill/And saw about me in a circle/Many I knew, the dear faces/Of some I recognized as friends./I knew that I had lost my way.” At the same time, in its repetition of words, it creates a strange but compelling echo of Dante’s terza rima, as well as his circles of hell. “Sestina on Six Words by Weldon Kees” pays tribute to a poet whose work in the form deeply influenced the young Justice. Of “Here in Katmandu,” the modest poet took credit in an interview for technical innovation: “All the sestinas that had been written in English before, all I had read, anyway, were in iambic pentamenter, or at least what I would call a casual pentameter…But I consciously shortened the lines; I varied the length of the lines. Nowadays anyone may do that. The Katmandu sestina has a small place in the history of the form, I think.” The six end words in the “Kees” sestina are “others/voyage/silence/away/burden/harm”—hardly distinctive enough, some would say, to warrant acknowledgment. But acknowledgments were always an important issue for Justice. His poem titles are full of them: the Kees poem, “Last Days of Prospero,: “After a Phrase Abandoned by Wallace Stevens,” “Variations on a Text by Vallejo.” His later collections, from Departures on, end with “Notes” in which Justice discloses the most minute of debts to others. In his later work, he moved further in the direction of free verse, but always carefully modulated, and always with what has been called “the ghost of meter.” In Departures, particularly, he worked with experimental forms, most notably the poems which took their genesis from the chance dealing out of “vocabulary” and “syntax” cards, a concept he said occurred to him after playing poker with John Cage. But the formal verse was always there, and in The Sunset Maker, he returned in several poems to rhyme and meter, and to received forms, including the pantoum and villanelle. Because of Justice’s close identification with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his formal brilliance, and his rejection of ego, even in his autobiographical poems (in a telling revision, the line “How fashionably sad my early poems are!” in Night Light becomes “How fashionably sad those early poems are!” in New and Selected Poems, and the revision remains in Collected Poems) made Justice something of a lightning rod for criticism in certain circles. His poetry has been criticized as lacking vitality, afflicted with weary passivity, focusing on trivialities, concerned only with literature and not very interesting literature at that. But for others, Justice himself was the Platonic ideal he spoke of aspiring to. Critic David Yezzi described Justice’s poems as “compos[ing] a body of work that, though inimitable, younger writers would do well to study for its fluent musicality and gently blooming, almost ineffable melancholy.” Others have similarly cited his work for both iuimitability and suitability for imitation. His former student Charles Wright, in an article on Donald Justice, put it this way: “Poets are like restaurants--as soon as they are successful, they are imitated. Really good poets are like really good restaurants--they are inimitable, though one is continually nourished there. “ Further Reading. Selected Primary Sources: Justice, Donald, The Summer Anniversaries (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University, 1960); ---, Night Light (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University, 1960); ---, Departures (New York: Atheneum, 1973); ---, The Sunset Maker (New York: Atheneum, 1987); New and Selected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995); ---, ---, A Donald Justice Reader (Hanover, NH: Middlebury College Press, 1991); ---, Collected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004). Selected Secondary Sources: Gioia, Dana, Interview (American Poetry Review 25:1 [Jan/Feb 1996]: 37-46); Interview (Iowa Review 11:2-3 [Spring-Summer 1980]: 1-21); Yezzi, David. “The Memory of Donald Justice” (New Criterion 23:3 [Nov 2004]: 21-25); Wright, Charles, “Homage to the Thin Man” (Southern Review 30:4 [Autumn 1994]: 741-4). |