Saturday, July 8, 1972 THE MICHIGAN DAILY Page Five POETRY Fre eing the AlIligzator4' SPEECH ACTS & HAPPEN- INGS, by Robert Vas Dias Bobbs-Merrill, $2.45, paper. OUR WORD: GUERRILLA POEMS FROM LATIN AMERICA, translated by Ed- ward Dorn and Gordon Brother- ston, Grossman & Cape Goliard, $2.95 paper. By LINDA SILVERMAN If there is a home for aging Burger Chef managers some- where in this land, Robert Vas Dias would be a good poet-in- residence there, for he thrives on Resilty in America. His latest 70-poem volume compels us to re-think the nature of car wash- es, AAA, Grade B Viking movies, electricians: But did she know?-whether or not she was in love?-whether or not she was really in love with a real electrician? I am impressed with the soft- ness of these poems, they are charming and refreshing, even unpretentious. But still, they lack the intensity a, poet should be able to trap in a. single line. Instead, they are like sculptures in spaghetti sauce. He is an anti-intellectual who can say, This poem goes well with ham & swiss on a hard roll with mustard & draft beer on a Saturday afternoon . . . or This is a genuine used poem last year's model poen shirt off someone's back poem. He is a poet with a sense of humor, who doesn't seem to have a sense of darkness or despair. He is too flip, too sane. I pay taxes, support highways, I've been had by ethical drug firms, I have ingested Giardia lanr- blia in western towns like unto a sewer, I have even followed directions. Jerome Rothenberg c 1 a i m s these are poems with "a high reality quotient." Whatever that means. When he tries to get serious (section on "Space Poems"), he loses the earthy density of the Americana reality poems. We get lines like: ... speak of strange middle America I see behind clouds smelling of burning alfalfa somewhere in Kansas: Nebraska: the moon: silos are million-year obelisks. Linking silos to obelisks strikes me as phony poetical-Kansas and Egypt are far-fetched sis- ters. He might as well have had Cleopatra's barge floating down the Kansas River. (He is netter off sticking to recycling, sub- way, or carwash poems.) Other experiments, his 15 "Siji of Situation" are imitations of Korean poetry; siji means "melody of the times" with a fixed prosody of 43-45 syllables. In the rush hour she holds several blue peacock feathers: I am trying to catch her eye enticed by competitors. Soon I shall dance and fan my many amazing eyes. Does Vas Dias mean to write poetry of the mundane? "I am the five pounds of garbage I dispose of . . ." would be a good line for a billboard, a. catchy phrase to read while traveling, an ad for Madison Avenue. It is alarming to find all the darkness left out of these poems (as in advertisements). Where are the odd folks, ghettos, strav- ing children, dope pushers, My Lai's, miners? Where is there any darkness? There is no sense of tension or struggle in most of the lines. The Object dominates and the "I" in the poem doesn't feel real, but plastic. The poetic outcomes seem formulaic and predeter- mined. They are not creations, but recreations. The outside, the veneer of Things is described, but the poet never really goes in, never pene- trates. It is like a two-week va- cation by Greyhound Bus or a postcard of the Grand Canyon. While these poems are an earthy relief from the heavy- weights ,they don't take us straight to the river, like Berry- man or Lowell or Plath. The intensity of personal vi- sion, hot engines, and wheels are restored in the gun-point poems of, by, and for a band of South American guerrillas. I don't want to see you in my entrails the day they cut me open in the countryside and leave my body undo r"the sun wrote Javier Heraud, a y o u n g Peruvian Who won anational poetry prize, and ended shot to death in the middle of the river Madre de Dios (Mother of God . As he put it, Look it isn't that I want to leave life back there- but I must follow a path that death is known to stalk. It is obvious he has closen the path. And that is the difference. Van Dias' path has been safe; that is what he chose. And be- cause of his choice, ne took us into the car washes, not the jungle, not the ghetto, not the war. Another poet, Otto Castillo, was shot to death after being tortured for four days: Let's take a walk Guatemala, I'm coming along . . . I'll die to give you life and your face will be on the bright horizon in every boll of the flowers born of my bones. I am aware of the heavy allitera- tion, even the old metaphor. But it is the love-for-country coming through this poem that makes it intense and alive. Che Guevara wrote clean, sim- ple poems threaded with tropical imagery of sun paths, the alli- gator: You said the sun would rise. Let's go along those unmapped paths to free the green alligtor you love. Egads! Zap! One ferocious meta- phor-a green alligator -'o stand for that whole unchainin of Cuba from its sugarmn daddys. When the heart is in the right place-not on objects, but on subjects (men are still working on surivival, remember'? - the metaphor/symbol gets infested with its passion and works (lit- erally, gives off energy. gene- rates passion to someone else. etc.). These guys talk"tough okay; note the pistol-packing verbs (sapped, hopping) in the follow- ing vs. Vas Dias (ingested, fol- lowed): Don't ever think our integrity can be sapped by those decorated fleas hopping with gifts we want their rifles, their bullets and a rock nothing else. This again was Che. No way could he have come near a Trip Tik; thatis the passive, indolent, American, decadent, affluent way. Che wrote his own, as every poet (not just revolutionary) must. Mr. Rothenberg and Mr. Vas Dias need to read a real reality CINEMA booksboo s poem; as Luis Nieto, a 62-year- old guerrilla, put it down: Now look at the men struck dead by the hired guns their parted lips seem still to be smiling at freedom Come now and see those poor men shot by twenty guns whose barrels looked on shocked and som- nambulent ... There they are their chests cool with the black decor of blood ... and may the everlasting volcanoes stand guard over their graves So no talk of tears now with closed hands and armed chests turn, and circle like lions because these dead turn within us. When another guerrilla asks "for a, sheet of Cuban tears/to cover our guerrilla bones," he is full of the pain, passion, and in- tensity of the Real. The meta- phor is created, not recycled. We are, after all, living and working in a network of beggars with skin peeling off their knees, flies, heat, not just orange groves and rain forests. I think the thing a poet can do is: (t) live in the Jungle himself; (2) hunt down the images/meta- phors/symbols/poems the tribe needs to survive despite the pain it causes; (3) work out the struggle on the written page without letting the paper have more reality than the alligator- out-there. Richard Schickel: Reviewing for 'Life' Richard Schickel, SECOND SIGHT: NOTES ON S O M E MOVIES 1965-1970. Simon & Schuster, $8.95. By TOM GREENWALD Since 1965, Richard Schickel has been reviewing movies for Life magazine; Second S i g h t: Notes on Some Movies 1965-1970 is a collection of his reviews. Af- ter reading his work, it is easy to see why he has done so well at Life. He seems the perfect re- Today's writers... Linda Silverman is a poet and a creative writing instruc- tor. Tom Greenwald teaches a course on contemporary film at York University in Toronto, viewer for middle America; he is modest, decent, industrious and does not employ any cumber- some ae. thetics which might raise the ire of his intended aud- ience. To be sure, Richard Schickel likes movies. Which means, he likes a lot of movies, many of ly unfair to compare his work to the superior work of o t h e r film critics. Renata Adler, who reviewed films for The New York Times, attempted to judge films according to their level of am- bition and it would, perhaps, be wise to judge the work of Rich- ard Schickel according to his le- vel of ambition. Schickel con- siders himself a movie reviewer and, as such, he is much better at his task than the Judith Crists and Rex Reeds of the world. He seems primarily concerned with American films, partly because of the audience he is writing for, partly because of his own inter- est and taste. He is an unabash- ed defender of the Hollywood motion picture industry though he is not blind to the shortcom- ings of the industry. He realizes that New York is not the centre of the universe and worries that the trendy trash that often com- es out of Hollywood is alienating potential moviegoers, people who do not have the wide range of films available to them that New Yorkers do. He is not anti- foreign film but he seldom seems as excited by a good foreign film as he does by a slick Hol- enthusiasm for the home grew u product. Schickel comes through as an immensely likeable human being. One gets the feeling that he is not as good at his trade as he would like to be and that this bothers him, as though, if he only had more time to think be- fore writing, he would be a bet- ter reviewer. At the end of many of his reviews. he has included re-evaluations of his opinions. He is not the least reticent about admitting that he misjudged cer- tain films or that given reviews were poorly written. His hon- esty about his own shortcomings is one of the most refreshing as- pects of the book. He is not a great writer by any means but he manages to invest his reviews with enough concrete detail to give the read- er some idea of what the movie is about without spoiling the. surprises which might be in st-re for a potential viewer. After reading Schickel, one does not have the feeling that one has al- ready seen the movie and this is a definite plus for a movie re- viewer. This present collection includes over eighty reviews, everything from Morgan to The ickel praises such obvious ,urk- eys as The Forbin Project and Planet of the Apes but he does recognize quality when he sees it in the films of Bunuel, Berg- man, Antonioni, et al. Schickel's opinions are not of the intrusive sort; the reader can take them or leave them alone according to his own taste. Unfortunately, good reviews by Richard Schick- el do not really mean very much, mainly because they are so common. But the careful read- er will have much less trouble adjusting to Schickel's peculiar- ities than, say, Paulene Kael's. Predictability in this case is a slight virtue. Schickel does have one habit that is extremely bothersome. In a weird sort of way, he seems fixated on youth culture movies. Wisely, he is anti-youth cult. Un- wisely, he devotes " an unneces- sary amount of energy and crit- ical bombardment in his attempt to discredit such films.. Why bother? Even the kids stay away from most of the movies sup- posedly designed just for them, so what exactly is Richard's problem. Curiously enough, Schickel's level of taste has not risen much above the adolescent ing reserved for the Hollywood genre movies which closely re- semble the films of his youth. Is he mad at the kids because they do not seem to want to go to the movies that he liked when he was their age? In hisnoe on the review of Wild in the Streets, he acknowledges that the major- ity of the younger generation are as stolid as ever but then goes on to say that "nihilists" is "pro- bably too dignified a term for a generation of hitch-hikers, drop- outs and pot-heads." And in his review of the Rolling Stones' film Gimme Shelter, he descends to the level of character assassi- nation. Discussing Mick Jagger, Schickel sounds like a hippie discussing Ed Muskie: inaccur- ate, petty, whiny, and just plain stupid. While Second Sight is hardly must reading for serious stu- dents of film, Schickel is a bet- ter than average reviewer with a fair to middling batting aver- age. It is difficult to get excited about this collection, one way or the cther. I almost have the feeling that Schickel, himself would agree. That is one reason why the man seems more inter- esting than the reviewer. But for inost people, that will probably