Word: poem
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...Nash's poem is very ambitious. A long and complicated work, it is the biography of a painting combining nature, the painter, onlookers, and the canvas itself as it develops. As the story of a painting within a poem, one might call Nash's work the autobiography of a poem...
...synthesis of such a diversity of subjective and objective elements, however, is only partially successful. The rhythm and consistently gaunt imagery give the poem a great amount of tonal unity, but there is little development toward the identity of the artist with his environment that the last stanza professes him to have achieved. Granted the painter may have felt this identity, but it is still up to the poem to help the reader partake of the process. But it's too static and remains as a whole nebulous and gray. Despite its other virtues, there is little light and color...
Kenneth Rexroth's poem should have been left out of TIME, Dec. 2. You would have improved that issue by devoting more space to the sport of football...
...just love that snow job article about the poets and jazzmen in San Francisco but don't dig the poem about the "bright-headed bird...
Both stories, as with so much undergraduate, or for that matter graduate (i.e., New Yorker) writing today, depend heavily on understatement, although Nash's understatement, paradoxically, is often prolix. The supreme achievement, however, is Arthur Freeman's poem "Whew": in a satire of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl", he has managed to get the muse of the Beat Generation for once to understate herself. This is no mean accomplishment...