The Time Is Now: a review of Becoming Poetry: Poets and Their Methods by Jay Rogoff

Becoming Poetry: Poets and Their Methods

The Time Is Now, a review of Becoming Poetry: Poets and Their Methods by Jay Rogoff. LSU Press. Baton Rouge, LA. 2023. $29.95 paper.

Jay Rogoff’s new book of critical essays, is clear, precise, original, and invigorating. In an age where free verse is alive and well, it tells readers what they need to hear: prosody matters. An awareness of prosody is essential for an appreciation of an art that comes in at the eye and is heard and felt. Nothing exists alone, in a vacuum. If a person loves a thing, it’s natural that they evaluate; this is as true for the arts as it is for sports. Prosody is key to such evaluation, key to appreciation. It’s only natural for an astute reader to wonder, who is better, A or B, and if B is better, how, in what ways is B better? Or, how do A and B differ? A knowledge of prosody is a must for credible answers. Rogoff doesn’t purport to have “all the answers.” But he makes readers think. The joke about the student and the professor—“Think, think—but it hurts to think—I know” lurks in the background. While Rogoff has an academic background, he writes as a critic, as one who is both a poet and a critic. His ideas are rigorous, his topics diverse, and his pleasure abiding.

In his introduction Jay Rogoff mentions “a mind thinking, a body feeling.” Feeling embodies his ideas as they move through a polemic. His introduction is itself the first essay. In it he says, “Poetry…in imagining a human presence…creates an illusion of felt life through the devices and strategies available to the poet, an illusion that in turn creates responses in the reader.” As with the poet, so with the critic. Neither writes in a vacuum. Throughout the book Rogoff references critics such as I.A. Richards, M.L. Rosenthal, and Cleanth Brooks. A whole essay is devoted to Helen Vendler’s work on Shakespeare’s sonnets. In it Rogoff measures her ideas to those of her predecessors. Post introduction, in the first essay, “Certain Slants” Rogoff, the poet-critic, discusses Emily Dickinson in conjunction with several of his own poems, noting subtle similarities, also subtle similarities within her poems. His analysis of two poems in particular “When I was small a Woman died” and “I started Early—Took my Dog” show clearly, precisely what makes Dickinson great. He contributes significantly to the critical canon of Emily Dickinson.

Rogoff’s topics are poets, and they are a diverse lot. In his introduction he states:

“If we value Shakespeare, Donne, Keats, and Ginsberg as poets, our admiration stems from their ingenuity in controlling form, language, sound, rhythm, image, and figurative devices in order to create an imagined universe that we recognize as uniquely theirs, yet one that also, necessarily, appears to participate in the larger world we all share.”

He discusses the sonnet sequences of Mary Jo Salter and Paul Muldoon, Pound’s influence on Williams in Patterson, Renaissance paintings in the poems of Andrew Hudgins, and technique in the poems of Philip Booth, Jane Cooper, W.D. Snodgrass, Mary Oliver, Daniel Hoffman, David Wojahn, and others who exemplify diversity in style and subject matter, all along supporting ideas with exacting examples. “Credentials” is an essay on the selected poems of Rachel Hadas, Eamon Grennan, and Karl Shapiro. Shapiro’s “A Cut Flower” has a backdrop of war in Europe and Asia. The following lines serve well to support the poem’s focus on “the essential pathos of life.”

Rogoff’s pleasure is derived from paying attention to sight, sense, and sound. While most of the book consists of essays, one exception is “On Writing the Sonnet Sequence Danses Macabres: An Interview with Stephanie Silva.” Rogoff talks about advantages the sonnet affords him, and how in the sequence one sonnet “talks” to another. Death, the common denominator, calls “people from all walks of life.” Rogoff mentions influences, from poets Berryman and Hecht to a skeleton making a phone call in a Betty Boop cartoon. He talks about the fun he had in writing the sonnets, reflected in such word play as “Dead Astaire,” (for the dancer Fred Astaire).

To paraphrase the English critic Walter Pater, all the arts aspire towards music. The last two essays in Becoming Poetry home in on what poetry is. Poems are not songs. Though both are sound-oriented, we experience them differently. Rogoff explains why and shows how. He explains how poetry is similar to and different from theater, and how hearing a poet on a recording differs from hearing a poet live, reading to a live audience. His ideas convey the vitality that makes poetry essential. His book contributes to the canon of critical thought, and deserves recognition, and most of all to be read.