MEZEY, Robert

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Nationality: American. Born: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 28 February 1935. Education: Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, 1951–53; University of Iowa, Iowa City, 1956–60, B.A. 1959; Stanford University, California (poetry fellow, 1961), 1960–61. Military Service: U.S. Army, 1953–55. Family: Married Olivia Simpson in 1963; two daughters and one son. Career: Worked as a probation officer, psychology technician, social worker, and copywriter; instructor, Western Reserve University, Cleveland, 1963–64, and Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1965–66; assistant professor, Fresno State University, California, 1967–68; associate professor, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, 1973–76; professor of English and poet-in-residence, Pomona College, Claremont, California, 1976–99. Awards: Lamont Poetry Selection award, 1960; Ingram Merrill Foundation fellowship, 1972, 1989; Guggenheim fellowship, 1977; American Academy award, 1983; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1986; P.E.N. poetry award, 1987, and Bassine Citation, 1988, both for Evening Wind. Address: Department of English, Pomona College, 140 West Sixth Street, Claremont, California 91711, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Berg Goodman Mezey, with others. Philadelphia, New Ventures Press, 1957.

The Wandering Jew. Mount Vernon, Iowa, Hillside Press, 1960.

The Lovemaker. Iowa City, Cummington Press, 1961.

White Blossoms. Iowa City, Cummington Press, 1965.

Favors. Privately printed, 1968.

The Book of Dying. Santa Cruz, California, Kayak, 1970.

The Door Standing Open: New and Selected Poems 1954–1969. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, and London, Oxford University Press, 1970.

Last Words: For John Lawrence Simpson, 1896–1969. West Branch, Iowa, Cummington Press, 1970.

Couplets. Kalamazoo, Michigan, Westigan Press, 1976.

Small Song. Grand Rapids, Michigan, Humble Hills Press, 1979.

Evening Wind. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press 1987.

Natural Selection. Edgewood, Kentucky, Robert Barth Press, 1997.

Joe Simpson. N.p., Stone Wall Press, 1998.

The Ballad of Charles Starkweather, with Donald Justice. N.p., Peich Press, 1999.

A Joyful Noise. N.p., Stone Wall Press, 1999.

Collected Poems. Fayetteville, Arkansas, University of Arkansas Press, 2000.

Other

Selected Translations. Kalamazoo, Michigan, Westigan Press, 1981.

Editor, with Stephen Berg, Naked Poetry: Recent American Poetry in Open Forms. Indianapolis, Bobbs Merrill, 1969; The New Naked Poetry, 1976.

Editor and translator, Poems from the Hebrew. New York, Crowell, 1973.

Editor, with Donald Justice, The Collected Poems of Henri Coulette. Fayetteville, Arkansas, University of Arkansas Press, 1990.

Editor, Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems. New York, Penguin, 1998.

Editor, The Poetry of E.A. Robinson. New York, Random House, 1999.

Translator, The Mercy of Sorrow, by Uri Zvi Greenberg. Philadelphia, Three People Press, 1965.

Translator, Tungsten, by César Vallejo. Syracuse, New York, Syracuse University Press, 1988.

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Critical Studies: By Ralph J. Mills, Jr., in American Poetry Review (Philadelphia), fall 1974; "The Dying of the Light: American Jewish Self-Portrayal in Henry Roth and Robert Mezey" by Noam Flinker, in The Jewish Self-Portrait in European and American Literature, edited by Hans-Jurgen Schrader, Elliott M. Simon, and Charlotte Wardi, Tubingen, Germany, Niemeyer, 1996.

Robert Mezey comments:

(1995) Pound said that poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music. That is one reason it is in its present state, for which he himself is not altogether blameless. Free verse, so called, has swept the field. Since there is so little competent metrical verse, what exactly is free verse free from? It has, merely by being inept and voluminous, obscured the norm, the only possible norm, and wanders around the field it has swept, stumbling and falling. There did not seem to be so much awful poetry thirty or forty years ago, when I was young; perhaps I was a less exacting reader. I suppose most poetry in every age is bad, but ours has grown so amateurishly bad, so aggressively or complacently bad, that it tends to drive out the good. The upshot of all our experiment is that we have found new ways to be bad, ways never seen before or even imagined. Well, all I can do at my age is to accept my limitations and try to write as well as I possibly can. That is a poet's only social and moral obligation. (Of course, as a person and citizen he has many.)

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Robert Mezey is a metaphysical poet not because like Donne he ransacks Scholastic philosophy for images but because like Hamlet and all true metaphysicians he is given to asking unanswerable questions about himself and the world. He is not, however, a "philosophical" poet. A great weight of passion accumulates behind his studied reserve, and what finally emerges over the dam is intensely felt, tightly controlled poetry.

Early in his career Mezey came under the influence of the formalist critic and poet Yvor Winters, and Mezey's book The Lovemaker betrays this influence clearly. Of Winters and his own subsequent development he writes wryly in a note appended to a group of his poems in Naked Poetry, an anthology of American poems in open forms edited by himself and Stephen Berg,

When I was quite young I came under unhealthy influences—Yvor Winters, for example, and America, and my mother, though not in that order. Yvor Winters was easy to exorcise; all I had to do was meet him. My mother and America are another story and why tell it in prose?

Once in Iowa City a friend said, "Why do you write in think so. It is possible I'm not a poet at all. But I am a man, a Piscean, and unhappy, and therefore I make up poems.

Mezey is a poet all right and an important one, but there is no doubt that a kind of passionate melancholy underlies most of his poetry. Yeats said, "Out of our quarrel with the world we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." Mezey is never rhetorical, but his quarrel really seems to be with the nature of things. He avoids the Hardyesque rhetoric against the universe through the adroit use of images that supply objective correlatives for his own moods. In "There," for example, microcosm (the poet) and macrocosm (the world) seem to fuse:

It is deep summer. Far out
at sea the young squalls darken
and roll, plunging northward,
threatening everything. I see
the Atlantic moving in slow
contemplative fury
against the rocks, the frozen
headlands, and the towns sunk deep
in a blind northern light. Here,
far inland, in the mountains
of Mexico, it is raining
hard, battering the soft mouths
of flowers. I am sullen, dumb,
ungovernable. I taste myself
and I taste those winds, uprisings
of salt and ice, of great trees
brought down, of houses and cries
lost in the storm; and what breaks
on that black shore breaks in me.

The tone here is perhaps more Byronic than usual in his poems, where urban images have their place along with natural ones. But the poem does show quite clearly his strategy for making turbid and passionate feelings objective through the use of corresponding images from the natural world.

Mezey thinks of himself as having abandoned traditional meter and rhyme. His and Berg's anthology is exclusively concerned with poems in what he calls "open form." Yet as one reads over the poem just quoted, one becomes aware that a great measure of the force of the poem is owing to the tightly controlled rhythms employed. No line in the poem contains more than four stresses or fewer than three, a close approach to "regular" meter, yet these fluctuations in line length do much to suggest the fluctuating pressures of the storm and the sea. One senses, too, that such powerful rhythmic control had to be exerted to keep the poem from exploding all over the page, and the control over raw emotion manifests itself mainly through the poet's handling of rhythm.

Mezey obviously values clarity in a writer. Three things, I think, account for the unfailing clarity of these passionate poems. Two have already been mentioned—sharp, clear images, many of which turn out to be objective correlatives, and rhythmic control—and the third is frequent, unobtrusive, but effective employment of articulatory symbolism—the forced miming by the organs of speech of the very action or object being described. To illustrate, I quote from another of his poems about autumn, "Touch It." This is the second stanza:

Past the thinning orchard the fields
are on fire. A mountain of smoke
climbs the desolate wind, and at its roots
fire is eating dead grass with many small teeth.

The very shaping of the words in the final line here enforces upon the reader a sort of chewing action. Again, in "There"—"it is raining / hard, battering the soft mouths / of flowers"—simply shaping the words pantomimes the effect the words describe.

These three factors, and perhaps many more that have escaped me, but at least these three, make possible the shaping of raw emotion in Mezey's poems toward the extraordinary clarity they achieve.

—E.L. Mayo