INTRODUCTION TO THE AWAKENING

Misfortune and madness are now in danger of being considered the essential stock-in-trade of the contemporary poet. Few people would be more anxious to escape from this kind of stereotype than William Wantling. Yet few poets raise the issue of the extremes of experience more vividly and painfully than he does.

   To explain why this is so, I must let him speak for himself. Here is a paragraph from a letter which I recently received from him, in response to a request for a brief biography: ‘Born Nov. 7, 1933, typical American Awful Midwestern town (Peoria, Illinois). Graduated High School age 16. Enlisted US Marine Corps age seventeen. Volunteered for combat duty and sent to Korea War Nov. 1952.  Was youngest Marine Sgt. In combat (eighteen) during winter campaign ’52-’53. Honourable Discharge Feb. 1955. Bought ’53 MG and drove immediately to Southern Calif. Had prior experience w/ Morphine in Korean field hospital due to burns, probably was basically addictive personality and became addicted to heroin in California 1955. First wife (married 1956) addicted also. Imprisoned for forgery and narcotics Feb. ’58. Paroled Aug. 60. Violated in four months. Returned to San Quentin and finally discharged as a “poor parole risk” in Sept. 1963. Married present wife, Ruthie, April ’64. Have two stepsons, Ruthie’s, ages seven and ten. (First wife divorced me while I was in prison). Which reminds me, before San Quentin myself and first wife took numerous cures for narcotic addiction, Camarillo State Hospital, Los Angeles. Have been in Veterans’ and State Hospitals for psychic disturbances several times since discharge from San Quentin. Have had numerous jobs since age sixteen, restaurant, factory, technical writer, construction, surveyor, warehouseman, etc., ad nauseam. Typical poet-writer’s story.’

   This, then, is the background against which the poems must be read, and it includes the fact that Wantling can refer to his experiences as ‘typical’.

   And here is one reason why I find many of the poems in this book so impressive. Things are accepted – and not passively, but actively. They are seen and faced for what they are. It is clear that Wantling often feels a burning rage with the world, but he seldom allows this rage to become narrowly personal. He suffers for others as well as for himself. And this generosity of spirit is accompanied by a scrupulous search for truth to feeling. The poem entitled ‘Poetry’ is to be regarded as his credo. This contrasts a shocking reality with the art that ‘even sometimes takes [your] breath away.’ Many people will hasten to condemn such a contrast as sentimental and naïve. But see how cunningly the trap is baited for them! For ‘Poetry’ is about a man who is stabbed in a prison exercise-yard, and who dies with the bright froth of lung-blood on his lips. His breath has been taken away from him as well, and one of the problems which he leaves behind him when he dies is how to turn the event into art without violating its essential ugliness.

   A striking thing about the poem I’ve cited is the fact that it is so powerful considered simply as a piece of observation. And this is a symptom of another quality: Wantling is very involved with his material, yet often extraordinarily detached. The little poem ‘Initiation’ fascinates me by the subtlety with which the tone is manipulated. In a few lines it sums up a whole relationship between a man and a woman, and at the same time establishes a moral viewpoint, without ever, even for a moment, lapsing from one particular kind of colloquial diction. The easy, musing way in which it is done draws the reader inexorably into the situation which is being created.

   Wantling’s detachment is especially valuable because many of the situations he is dealing with are so new – there is no precedent in poetry for them. Wilfred Owen’s savage condemnation of modern war doesn’t, for instance, necessarily prepare us for the situation which we are shown in ‘Pusan Liberty’. Here despair itself is despaired of.

   Indeed, it’s one of the curiosities of Wantling’s work that it tries to confront the harsh realities of urban America without losing touch with the transcendental. The cry at the end of ‘For the Peyote Goddess’ is one of the mottoes of the book:

Let a man listen to his dream

so he may hear the story of all

men and let him say as he did

when he was a child: This is

true; it does not matter what

they tell me.

The same attitude towards the world is embodied and acted out in the title poem, ‘The Awakening’. It seems to me something peculiarly American. Here in Britain we have a society which is less competitive, with built-in checks and safeguards which protect the individual while at the same time depriving him of some of his freedom. Consequently, we do not like to have either the violent or the miraculous thrust upon us with such vehemence, and we are made nervous by the poet’s reckless self-exposure, not only to our own gaze, but to experience.

   The kind of America Wantling has inhabited frightens even Americans – with good cause. There is a savagery here which may rise up at any moment; the inhabitant of this world feels a violence within himself which responds to the violence without. Even Wantling’s nature poetry is dark and harsh. The hare runs before the ploughman, trying to protect her young:

His plow a high scream

in her ear, the doe runs on.

It is not rare

for such to be ripped

from the lair of life.

And the man?

But the question on which the poem finishes is still the expression of a concern which goes beyond the darkness of immediate events, towards a concern with man’s fate. In this sense the comparison I made with Wilfred Owen has a different sort of relevance. Wantling is a ‘war poet’ in much the same way that Owen and Rosenberg were war poets. He is a man trying to find a viable way of living among events which often seem intolerable; trying, indeed, to preserve the dignity which is proper to human beings in an environment which is dehumanised.

Reproduced with kind permission. Copyright @ Edward Lucie-Smith, 1967