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Popular Culture Review
of earth,” “the tidal weeping of man.” This is strong language, masculine yet
with a feminine lilt. It reminds me of Carl Sandburg—the marriage of imagist
with hog butcher that pervades the Chicago poet’s most astounding verse.
I could dignify my reaction by calling it aesthetic, but it is far more visceral
than that. Besides, anyone who talks about death, both accidental and the all too
inevitable, deserves better than to be distanced (and patronized) by discourse.
Talarico is a poet’s poet, but (like Bums, if not Brooks or Benet) he is also a
people’s poet. Speaking of which, the pedant in me wonders just what category
or genre this stuff belongs in , or to: is it Proustian (“my memory will be a single
flame”), or elegiac (like “Spoon River Anthology”), or an ode to nature, inspired
by evolutionary theory rather than (like Neihardt) by Sioux myths and
cosmology? After all, there are but two major sources of American poetry—one
stemming from Whitman, the other from Dickinson: one warm pantheist, the
other cold Calvinist, one joyous, the other morbid, one loud yes, the other a
quiet no, one in love with life, the other wholly disenchanted, one utterly thisworldly, the other stuck on the supernatural, one robust and (in every sense) gay,
the other genteel and (in every sense) closeted. Talarico doesn’t fit in any of
these either/ors; he resists false dichotomies, textbook simplicity. He is
inclusive, not exclusive; a monist, a pluralist, a hedgehog, a fox, and, in elegant
ecological uni-verse, life-affirming and life-denying, all at once.
I can’t think of anyone to whom he is indebted, or in whose name he writes,
or whose tradition he upholds, unless it be everyone. But there are some
parallels that are worth mentioning: Theodore Dreiser, for example. Dreiser isn’t
known for his poetry (and that’s a good thing), but throughout his work, even in
his Spencerian phase, he saw life as spectacle, not merely as struggle. Moreover,
he saw the unity of all life, even amid endless discord, misery, and failure.
Alone among our great writers, Dreiser was a keen student of biology, spending
summers at Woods Hole lab, and developing his own view of the relation
between “chemisms” and conduct, in love, art, politics, and big business. Dreiser
made biology into a religion, even as he rejected the gods of hypocritical piety,
whom Americans still worship as a thinly disguised substitute (or surrogate) for
mammon.
Dreiser came from a long line of naturalists—Stephen Crane among them—
who viewed nature as the enemy, but an enemy who couldn’t be conquered. So,
if you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. This mentality governed the group (Frank Norris,
Jack London, and even, for a time, Willa Cather), but Dreiser outgrew it,
without abandoning its premises. If in the 18th century Newton demanded the
muse, then in the 19lh, the muse demanded Darwin, as a consequence of the
cunning of reason whose very evolution Hegel foretold. This leaves us
romantics more enlightened, but without any candidates (classic or modem) for
the title of progenitor.
The search for Ur-Talarico (Homer at one end, Goethe or Tennyson at the
other) isn’t the easiest way to make a living, or find a dissertation topic. He’s in