Page Two~ THE MICHIGAN DAIL) T i iocrlri« 'A ri l" 0 :1040 THEMIHIAN.A," ,.-A,.. A...:I0 n_ uesuay, rrprii 7, f vtDo i poetry and prose Creeping Pro fessionalism Shuts Gen eratlion "'Gap By RUSSELL A. FRASER, Department of English The quality of writing in the current issue of Generation seems to me unusually high for a student publication. No con- descension intended - one as- sumes -that genuinely realized stories and poems find their way into more prestigious (i.e., paying) magazines, and that the kind of writing one calls "promising" is reserved to purely ocal publications. Ther6 is, however, at least one story here that is thorough- ly professional in character. It is Lemuel Johnson's "Melon Flowers," an account of little business in Sierra Leone. The protagonists are mostly young English expatriates. At the edge of their circle is the self-im- portant native master of a boys' school in Freetown, and an American writer-teacher, ac- companied inevitably by his camera. The American figures in an act of violence. -Qne of the Englishwomen b. e c o m e s pregnant by a black student. Otherwise, not much of conse- quence happens; the resolution of the story is desultory. That, I take it,.is partly the point the author is attempting to enforce. He is, along the way, very fun- ny, horrifying, and absolutely persuasive in his handling of details. Conviction of a different kind -like that of an expressionist drama by Georg Kaiser - is achieved by Richard Keller Si- mon in his one-act play, For Old Time's Sake. The protagon- ist, a human vegetable, is kept alive for seven years in an oxy- gen tent, and tended by a vul- gar and brutal retainer (at whose expense a few too easy ironies are ventured). The read- ing of obituary notices, of tick- er-tape reports of the patient's investments, and of miscellan- eous scraps and tatters from his inconsiderable past, serves to fill up the time. To him enters an aged female acquaintance, who shuts off the oxygen and so makes an end of this am- biguous existence. But perhaps the patient is already incapable of life, or perhkaps he is imper- vious to death. Speculation is excited - Simon knows enough to keep it between the lines - on the nature of these capital- letter abstractions. It is dis- quieting and, better than that, it is amusing, Peter Brett's story, "Two Dimes," is engrossing line by line, but as a total effort, it fails to come off. The story has to do - exclusively, so far as I can see - with the bad luck of an aspiring artist. Having set up his easel at a street fair, he offers to do portraits in sepia for twenty dollars. The young girl who is his customer appar- ently (not very plausibly) as- sumes that only twenty cents is in question. Artist is distraught; subject's irate parent agrees to settle for ten dollars, and is re- buffed. The sour ending to this petty misadventure doesn't seem to signify (though I sus- pect that emblematic business is intended), or contribute to; or emranate from what has gone before. The artist is Negro - gratuitously, in terms of the data provided - whose color is insisted on, only, I think as a hook to catch the reader's at- tention. In "A Day Spent," Doug Fiero tells of the reactions of a young Northern male, a teacher and writer, to life in a Southern girls' school. The story begins with a glimpse of a squirrel, mired in mud near the door of the schoolhouse. It 3020 Wasitenaw - 434-1782 Wednesday-Saturday-Sunday ends with the hero smiling "weirdly (sic), bitterly." In be- tween is much unlocalized angst. I think one would feel more involvement were he to know what ails the hero, and why. The comment holds, of Jus- tin Vitiello's apparent prose- poem, "Off the Rack," in which the sense of generalized disgust is left unbalanced or unverified by any ascertainable correla- tive. SALES "Generation" sales, scheduled to begin today, have been post- poned in respect for the mem- ory of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Sales will begin, tomorrow and continue Thurs- day. Motive is also lacking in John Conron's evocative por- trait of a bereaved and inward- looking woman ("Dorothy"), alone and disintegrating in an old house. But the portrait is rendered from the outside, and so it is more convincing. What counts is not a rationalizing of the thing, but only the render- ing. The poetry in this collection eschews conventional form, or stiffening, and, so it is difficult to criticize straight ,off. Really to do a poet justice, one ought to read him often, to get his' idiom and to see whether his idiosyncrasies in meter and manner are something more than idiosyncrasies - in other words, whether they work, or function only as a blind. A witty "Late Letter from Mor- avia," by Thomasl Snapp, is written essentially in free or sprung pentameter. It seems legitimate, therefore, to ask why the author breaks up his lines, Dialogue is not in ques- tion (the distributing of one versa line among several speak- ers). A single voice is heard, but what it says is fragmented: I kept dust to a minimum. We were.almost Into port, and my broom was almost bald. I think the answer lies in a possibly pointless attempt to obscure formality, rather than to assert it. Snapp's "Distances" recalls Eliot's "Gerontion"; and has also anindigenous life: "Morning is lifting off New you." The 'best of these three poems, "MX Tower," is a fine summoning-up of a childhood experience, which speaks, to more than childhood. J. K. Snyder's "Homage" to a black garbageman attempts to go -. I think successfully"- the same sort of metaphorical progress, from a remembered ~ I ~ incident to its wider ramifica- tion. Thomas Nadar and Daniel Wire collaborate in a transla- tion from the German of Wolf- gang Borchert (d. 1947), whose work has not appeared pre- viously in this country. The sample given here is unexcep- tionable in sentiment (anti- war). In form, it is a melange of prose and free verse that reads mostly like prose: lines elongated or else broken off short to announce the poetic- - ness. Presumably the trarisla- tion is good; but whit emerges is only what you or I might think and say. 1 :15-3:15-5:15 f, c5 COLOR by Deluxe PANAVISION' Wednesday is LADIES' DAY! V, Poetry reading by DENISE LEVERTOV (whose husband, Mitchell Goodman, wag indcted with Dr. Spock and Rev. Coffin) Sponsored by SPU-RESIST Tues., April9 8:30 P.M. CANTERBURY HOUSE 330 Maynard fE INE ................._.._.. . , t 1 LAST 3 DAYS TO SEE ACADEMY A WARD FAVORITE "BEST FOREIGN FILM" "4ONE OF THE. YEAR'S 10 BEST FILMS!" 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