K

Kenneth Fearing

ENNETH FEARING was born in Chicago in 1902 and was graduated from the University of Wisconsin. After graduation, he worked in many capacities; he became a salesman, a millhand, a newspaper reporter, and a free-lance writer. In 1939 he taught poetry technique at the League of American Writers.

His first book of poems, Angel Arms (1929), flashes before the reader a set of close-ups of the contemporary scene in which "hatred and pity are exactly mixed." Poems (1935) and Dead Reckoning (1938) mark a further advance in swiftly paced and provocative verse. Fearing is not unaware of the provocation. In an introduction to his Collected Poems (1940) he says: "The idea underlying my poetry, as well as anything I write, is that it must be exciting." Fearing knows what he is about; if it does nothing else, his poetry excites. Its fault is a selfimposed restriction of tone; Fearing has purposely discarded "the entire bag of conventions and codes usually associated with poetry." While this is commendable (if possible), it forces upon the poet a limitation even more severe than the traditional demands. Worse, it makes for a prescribed attitude and a sense of final flatness. To save his work from monotony, Fearing ranges widely for his material; charwomen, gangsters, presidents of the Browning Writing League, Harry from the warehouse, Myrtle from the Five and Dime, checkers at the morgue, couponclippers, high-diving queens, fifth columnists, big business executives, and crystal⚫ gazers are exposed against the modern setting. The idiom which Fearing uses is savagely appropriate: it is the glaring script of neon lights, the language of locked hotel rooms and casual death, the brusque statement of headlines, the jargon of advertising patter, the slang of the streets, chatter of pent-houses and hospitals, dialectics in the boiler-room, patois of mortgages and the movies. Fearing satirizes big business by his wry employment of metropolitan images and ironically twisted slogans. "Portrait" is a minor masterpiece of composite delineation; it is a bitter cartoon, but a broadly humorous and recognizable picture. "American Rhapsody (4)," far from comic, is as poignant as it is shrewd.

If this poetry does not achieve emphasis as poetry, it gains tension by its very pitch and tempo. Fearing is at his worst when he attempts the mystical-oracular; he loses himself and his reader in a blur of mumbled implications and vague, unfinished gestures. He is at his best in his characters and caricatures, in his ominous pictures of the depression, in the sense of spiritual estrangement, in the maladjusted terrors and the doomed suspense of a speeded-up civilization. The varied elements are brought to a climax in “Readings, Forecasts, Personal Guidance," a poem which combines vision and hard anguish. It is this blend of pathetic insight and tragedy which is characteristic of a poet who, even when he fails, never flinches.

Fearing has written in other mediums besides verse. The Hospital (1939), his first novel, draws on his own experiences as a hospital worker. Dagger of the Mind (1941) is a tale of murder which departed from the conventional mystery formula and caused a small but violent controversy.

PORTRAIT

The clear brown eyes, kindly and alert, with 12-20 vision, give confident regard to the passing world through R. K. Lampert & Company lenses framed in gold; His soul, however, is all his own;

Arndt Brothers necktie and hat (with feather) supply a touch of youth.

With his soul his own, he drives, drives, chats and drives,

The first and second bicuspids, lower right, replaced by bridge-work, while two incisors have porcelain crowns;

(Render unto Federal, state and city Caesar, but not unto time;

Render nothing unto time until Amalgamated Death serves final notice, in proper form;

The vault is ready;

The will has been drawn by Clagget, Clagget, Clagget & Brown;

The policies are adequate, Confidential's best, reimbursing for disability, partial or complete, with double indemnity should the end be a pure and simple accident)

Nothing unto time,

Nothing unto change, nothing unto fate,

Nothing unto you, and nothing unto me, or to any other known or unknown party or parties, living or deceased;

But Mercury shoes, with special arch supports, take much of the wear and tear;
On the course, a custombuilt driver corrects a tendency to slice;

Love's ravages have been repaired (it was a textbook case) by Drs. Schultz, Lightner,
Mannheim, and Goode,

While all of it is enclosed in excellent tweed, with Mr. Baumer's personal attention to the shoulders and the waist;

And all of it now roving, chatting amiably through space in a Plymouth 6,

With his soul (his own) at peace, soothed by Walter Lippmann, and sustained by Haig & Haig.

AMERICAN RHAPSODY (4)

First you bite your fingernails. And then you comb your hair again. And then you wait. And wait.

(They say, you know, that first you lie. And then you steal, they say. And then, they say, you kill.)

Then the doorbell rings. Then Peg drops in. And Bill. And Jane. And Doc. And first you talk, and smoke, and hear the news and have a drink. Then you walk down the stairs.

And you dine, then, and go to a show after that, perhaps, and after that a night spot, and after that come home again, and climb the stairs again, and again go to bed.

But first Peg argues, and Doc replies. First you dance the same dance and you drink the same drink you always drank before.

And the piano builds a roof of notes above the world.

And the trumpet weaves a dome of music through space. And the drum makes a ceiling over space and time and night.

And then the table-wit. And then the check. Then home again to bed.

But first, the stairs.

And do you now, baby, as you climb the stairs, do you still feel as you felt back there?

Do you feel again as you felt this morning? And the night before? And then the night before that?

(They say, you know, that first you hear voices. And then you have visions, they say. Then, they say, you kick and scream and rave.)

Or do you feel: What is one more night in a lifetime of nights?

What is one more death, or friendship, or divorce out of two, or three? Or four? Or five?

One more face among so many, many faces, one more life among so many million lives?

But first, baby, as you climb and count the stairs (and they total the same) did you, sometime or somewhere, have a different idea?

Is this, baby, what you were born to feel, and do, and be?

READINGS, FORECASTS, PERSONAL GUIDANCE

It is not-I swear it by every fiery omen to be seen these nights in every quarter of the heavens, I affirm it by all the monstrous portents of the earth and of the seaIt is not that my belief in the true and mystic science is shaken, nor that I have lost faith in the magic of the cards, or in the augury of dreams, or in the great and good divinity of the stars.

No, I know still whose science fits the promise to the inquirer's need, invariably, for a change: Mine. My science foretells the wished-for journey, the business adjustment, the handsome stranger. (Each of these is considered a decided change.)

And I know whose skill weighs matrimony, risks a flyer in steel or wheat against the vagaries of the moon.

(Planet of dreams, of mothers and of children, goddess of sailors and of all adventurers, forgive the liberty. But a man must eat.) My skill,

Mine, and the cunning and the patience. (Two dollars for the horoscope in brief and five for a twelve months' forecast in detail.)

No, it is this: The wonders that I have seen with my own eyes.

It is this: That still these people know, as I do not, that what has never been on earth before may still well come to pass,

That always, always there are new and brighter things beneath the sun,

That surely, in bargain basements or in walk-up flats, it must be so that still from time to time they hear wild angel voices speak.

It is this: That I have known them for what they are,

Seen thievery written plainly in their planets, found greed and murder and worse in their birth dates and their numbers, guilt etched in every line of every palm;

But still a light burns through the eyes they turn to me, a need more moving than the damned and dirty dollars (which I must take) that form the pattern of their larger hopes and deeper fears.

And it comes to this: That always I feel another hand, not mine, has drawn and turned the card to find some incredible ace,

Always another word I did not write appears in the spirit parchment prepared by me,

Always another face I do not know shows in the dream, the crystal globe, or the flame.

And finally, this: Corrupt, in a world bankrupt and corrupt, what have I got to do with these miracles?

If they want miracles, let them consult someone else.

Would they, in extremity, ask them of a physician? Or expect them, in desperation, of an attorney? Or of a priest? Or of a poet?

Nevertheless, a man must eat.

Mrs. Raeburn is expected at five. She will communicate with a number of friends and relatives long deceased.

M

Marya Zaturenska

ARYA ZATURENSKA was born in September, 1902, in Kiev, Russia. Her father came here after the Russo-Japanese War but had difficulty bringing over his wife and two children. The child Marya was eight years old when she came to the United States, and conditions were such that at thirteen she had to leave school and find work. Since she had no training of any kind, she had to accept all sorts of odd jobs in factories and department stores. Starting to write poetry in her early teens, she attended night high school, secured several scholarships, attended the University of Wisconsin, and qualified as a librarian. In 1925 she married the poet Horace Gregory.

Marya Zaturenska's earliest verse was readily accepted by the magazines, but the poet's critical instinct prevented exploitation as an infant prodigy. Her insights, fresh and vivid, are apparent in Threshold and Hearth (1934). Fluid though this writing is, it is never facile; it moves with a power which is highly imaginative but always restrained. The restraint, is so characteristic that it misled the critics. Even when Cold Morning Sky (1937) won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry the reviewers spoke of her precisions as "detached," "abstract," and "removed from the immediate world." In spite of its distinction, her work was so little known that her name was not even listed in the 1940 edition of Millett's comprehensive Contemporary American Authors.

The Listening Landscape (1941) is the very best of her verse, richest in feeling, ripest in expression. In common with the preceding volumes it is deceptive in its smoothness; beneath the calm exterior there is a prevailing and penetrative glow. Here the quick communication and sure craft go hand in hand. "Interview in