JERRY HARP

A Life’s Work:
on Donald Justice’s Collected Poems

       On the morning of 6 August 2004, Donald Justice died in Iowa City, Iowa, less than a week before his 79th birthday, less than two weeks before the appearance of his Collected Poems. At just over 300 pages, Justice’s Collected comes in much shorter than the life’s work of many a poet, but it has long been evident that Justice’s relatively slender output is more than offset by the consistent quality of the poems. It is not that every poem is of a quality equal to every other, but rather that one can count on the poems never to fall below a very high standard of accomplishment. In this regard I tend to think of Justice alongside T. S. Eliot and Elizabeth Bishop, the former of whom is a clear influence. And like Bishop, Justice has been known as something of a poet’s poet—one whose reputation has tended to stand primarily with other practitioners of the art; however, Justice’s reputation seems to be widening, and the publication of the Collected Poems will no doubt help this process along.
       Justice was born in Miami, Florida, in 1925, when Miami was still a rather provincial city, though one with a real artistic life and some good libraries—not a bad place for a poet to grow up. He majored in musical composition at the University of Miami, from which he graduated in 1945, and where he would later put in two stints as an instructor. Many of Justice’s years in Miami included an association with the somewhat bohemian artistic community that existed in Coconut Grove. This loose affiliation of artists and writers included the itinerant, latter-day-romantic poet Robert Boardman Vaughn, in whose memory Justice wrote several poems ("Portrait with One Eye" in "Portraits of the Sixties," "In Memory of the Unknown Poet, Robert Boardman Vaughn," "Hell"); Larry Donovan, the poet and graphic artist for whose Dog Island and Other Florida Poems (Pineapple Press, 2003) Justice wrote an introduction; and Don Martin, for years a cartoonist at Mad Magazine. Justice did graduate work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (where he met his wife, Jean Ross, in a Chaucer course), Stanford (where he studied with Yvor Winters), and the University of Iowa (where he studied with John Berryman and Robert Lowell, and from which he received his Ph.D. in 1954). His Selected Poems (1979) won the Pulitzer Prize for 1980, and in 1991 he was co-winner, with Laura Riding, of the Bollingen Prize. For many years Justice taught at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop (with brief intervals at other institutions) and then at the University of Florida, from which he retired in 1992, the same year that he was elected a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He and Jean moved back to Iowa City in the early nineties.
     More than thirty years ago, Justice wrote about his own death in a poem entitled "Variations on a Text by Vallejo," which appeared in his third full-length collection, Departures (1973); here is the final strophe:
 
Donald Justice is dead. One Sunday the sun came out,
It shone on the bay, it shone on the white buildings,
The cars moved down the street slowly as always, so many,
Some with their headlights on in spite of the sun,
And after a while the diggers with their shovels
Walked back to the graveside through the sunlight,
And one of them put his blade into the earth
To lift a few clods of dirt, the black marl of Miami,
And scattered the dirt, and spat,
Turning away abruptly, out of respect.

Characteristic of Justice are the careful pacing and accruing of details, along with the memorable phrasing (e.g., "the black marl of Miami"). Characteristic also is the classic sense of restraint and the uncanny modulation of tone, achieved in part by the interaction with Vallejo’s text, in part by the focus not so much on the dead man or the mourners, but rather on the gravediggers, carrying out the work of their everyday lives, relatively detached from—albeit respectful of—the scene of mourning.
       This poem demonstrates something of Justice’s commitment to his aesthetic of depersonalization that, in a 1975 interview (see Platonic Scripts, 1984), he explicitly relates to the T. S. Eliot of "Tradition and the Individual Talent," where Eliot proclaims, "The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." One result of Justice’s commitment to this ideal is the distinctive way that he writes about personal, or seemingly personal, matters in a depersonalized manner. Or as he puts it in his book-length interview with Philip Hoy (Between the Lines, 2001), "I want to treat the personal stuff as impersonally as if I were making it all up." One of the great paradoxes of Justice’s writing is that this impersonal treatment of personal matter deepens the effect, and affect, of the poems.
       As demonstrated in "Variations on a Text by Vallejo," one of Justice’s depersonalizing moves is to interact with other texts. In his early poems, those which appear in The Summer Anniversaries (1960) and those gathered in the Collected under the title "From ‘Bad Dreams’ and Other Early Poems (1948-1962)," are informed by major voices of English-language poetry, with some touches of French, especially Baudelaire (see “Two Songs from Don Juan in Hell" and "The Metamorphoses of a Vampire"). Notable here is "The Wall," the sonnet that Justice wrote in response to one of Berryman’s class assignments. As Mark Jarman has noted (see "Happiness: The Aesthetics of Donald Justice," available on-line), this sonnet works as a summary version of Paradise Lost. Indeed, as far as I know, there is no other source for Eve’s dream—"She dreamed she saw the lion sharpen his claw," as Justice has it. While Paradise Lost, Book Five does not explicitly mention the detail about the lion sharpening his claw, such an action is certainly congruent with Death’s triumphant statement that "such a scent I draw / Of carnage, prey innumerable, and taste / The savor of death from all things there that live" (10. 267-9). By the end of Justice’s poem, as Adam and Eve leave Paradise, the hitherto commonplace angels become sublime: "As they advanced, the giant wings unfurled." In his succinct version, Justice brings Milton’s epic grandeur into the furnished room of the sonnet.
       In these early poems, Justice will even avail himself of old-fashioned devices that he somehow makes work:

No house of Atreus ours, too humble surely,
The family tree a simple chinaberry
Such as springs up in Georgia in a season.
("Tales from a Family Album")

Trailing its traditional associations, there is a kind of grandness in such an inversion as "No house of Atreus ours"—especially given the reference to the family of Agamemnon and Menelaus—the tone modulated by the identification of the family tree as a "chinaberry," comically off-rhyming with "surely." It is as if Justice pulls off the trick of a grand gesture while undercutting the trick by showing how it works, like a magician revealing secrets even as he performs the stage magic. The result is another paradoxical deepening of effect. There is something marvelous about the revelation that the old grand world comes down to the everyday world of the present moment:

Grandeur, it seems,
Comes down to this in the end--
A street of shops
With white shutters
Open for business…
("After a Phrase Abandoned by Wallace Stevens")

Justice restores the world for the reader, at least for this reader, not so much by making it strange as by making it nuanced.
       Justice’s complex dialogue with tradition continues in his next two books, Night Light (1967) and Departures (1973), but the scope of the dialogue widens to include figures from a variety of traditions: Chekhov, Lorca, Guillevec, the Hungarian poet Atilla József, and as already mentioned the Peruvian poet César Vallejo. The influence of romance-language poetry shows in Justice’s experiments with syllabics ("The Thin Man," "At a Rehearsal of ‘Uncle Vanya,’" "Memo from the Desk of X"). In Departures Justice’s experiments also include the "chance methods" poems that he wrote after meeting John Cage. These methods involve writing words of various parts of speech on index cards and then dealing them out, thus creating a variety of sentences for possible use in poems. In one of these chance methods poems, "The Success," a kind of depersonalization—that of finding oneself at a distance from one’s own life—comes to the fore as subject matter: "Someone is living his life here, someone / Is turning back sheets meant to receive his body." Someone wiser than I has said that alienation is not necessarily a bad thing since humans need both proximity and distance to know anything at all; thus, self-knowledge demands both proximity to and distance from oneself. And by the end of the poem just quoted, there is a moment of recognition, that of the laughter that the character ascends to.
       If there is anxiety in all of this influence, it is one that Justice ascends to. More than any contemporary poet that I can think of, Justice has made the position of belatedness in a rich tradition, one in which the gods have already walked the earth and the great poems have already been written, an enabling condition of his writing. Thus, what gods still exist among us are the "Peevish, discredited gods" of "The Grandfathers" because "The opera of the gods is finished" ("Homage to the Memory of Wallace Stevens"), and "Closed are the grand boulevards" ("Sonatina in Green"). But there is after all a kind of splendor in writing well about the workaday world where the gods once dwelled. Such a task calls for restraint and even a kind of literary asceticism, one that indulges in the "rich refusals" of "The Thin Man," and can assert that a poem "has been most beautiful in its erasures" ("Poem"). Justice always seemed to know what erasures to indulge.
       After the publication of Departures, Justice mentioned in an interview that he was interested in returning to experiments with traditional forms. These experiments show up in the new poems gathered in the Selected Poems of 1979, and then more fully in The Sunset Maker (1987) and the hitherto uncollected poems that occupy the latter pages of the Collected, which ends with a stanza form that, as far as I know, Justice invented himself—see also "Nostalgia of the Lakefronts," "Sadness," and "Sonya Sits at the Piano, Practicing." This stanza consists of six lines. With some variations it employs repetition rather than rhyme, with the end word of the fourth line repeating that of the second, and the end word of the sixth line repeating that of the fifth. As for the measure, Justice has said that he was counting syllables, trying to get the lines to approximate a given length rather than adhering to a strict count. The final poem of the book, "There is a Gold Light in Certain Old Paintings," is composed of three such stanzas, each of which focuses on a different art form: a painting, the poetic myth of Orpheus, and Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya. The final stanza echoes Sonia’s speech to Voynitsky at the end of Uncle Vanya:
The world is very dusty, uncle. Let us work.

One day the sickness shall pass from the earth for good.
The orchard will bloom; someone will play the guitar.
Our work will be seen as strong and clean and good.
And all that we suffered through having existed
Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed.

The stanza invokes an intricate mixture of remembrance and forgetting, a process raised to an art form in "Sonatina in Yellow": "Think of the past. Think of forgetting the past. / It was an exercise requiring further practice." This intricate art characterizes many of Justice’s poems, a work that reassures by its rich refusal to turn away from the dusty world.

 

JERRY HARP writes frequently for Pleiades. He is also the author of Creature (Salt, 2003) and Gatherings (Ashland Poetry Press, 2004). He is working on a book-length study of the work of Donald Justice.