I happened to meet Michael Casey at the Adastra Press table during this year’s Massachusetts sponsored Salem Poetry Festival, May 6-8.
Shaded by Salem’s Peabody-Essex Museum on a gloriously hot and sunny day, he looked vaguely like an ex-boxer. I shyly gawked at the paperback books and also helped (the ones standing up were knocked over by the wind). I didn’t know who he was, but it turns out he stands precisely in the chronological middle of those awarded the Yale Younger Poets prize (1919 to present; Casey, 1972).
I purchased Casey’s book, Millrat, after I went to get some cash. When I returned, Casey was gone. I quote a couple of poems from Millrat here.
The poet Michael Casey belongs to the Golden age of the Prize, from the end of WW II to Watergate, when Wystan Auden, Dudley Fitts, and Stan Kunitz were the judges, and every other pick they made went on to a modicum of fame.
Robert Hass, in his 80s, picked by Kunitz the next year (73), is the oldest and most famous, now that Rich (50) Merwin, (51) and Ashbery (55) have moved on.
Contrast the Golden Age to the last 50 years—the Yale Younger Prize has not produced one subsequent poet of note. One of them, selected in 1999 by wilderness-loving Merwin (the only winner to become a judge) tragically disappeared in the wilderness in 2009.
Michael Casey, born in the beginning of the Yale Younger Golden Age, and one of its last winners, is a working-class poet from working-class Lowell, Massachusetts.
But don’t be confused. The manufacturing Lowell is not same the family of poets to which Robert Lowell belongs.
The Creative Writing Program Era and the Yale Younger Prize (the oldest annual literary contest in America) overlap.
In 1931, Yale Younger Judge William Alexander Percy—an aristocratic Southerner, and member of John Crowe Ransom’s Fugitive Circle—chose Paul Engle—-of Iowa Writers Workshop fame, for the distinguished prize.
Robert Lowell was the first famous poet to teach at the Iowa Workshop under Paul Engle.
Supporting Engle and echoing Pound (who wrote poetry textbooks in middle age) Ransom wrote essays in the 30s asking that “new writing” and “scientific” criticism—credentialed in the universities—replace the old order of professors “watering their gardens” of Keats or Shakespeare or Plato while “amateurs” in newspapers reviewed books by younger poets. Getting new poetry into the universities seemed to be the goal.
The Boston Brahmin Robert Lowell’s successful career chronologically matches the Golden Age of the Yale Younger. Robert Lowell is related to the 19th century poet and abolitionist, James Russel Lowell, not the Lowell of the industrial revolution and Massachusetts town—where Michael Casey was raised.
Ashbery famously won the Yale Younger in 1955, as Auden, the judge, demanded Ashbery’s manuscript be brought to him when it didn’t make it through the first rounds.
Lowell’s “raw and cooked” distinction doesn’t apply to Ashbery’s work, which is neither raw nor cooked; “cooked, but cooked very quickly,” perhaps?
At the Adastra press table, with the kindly editor Gary Metras presiding, I was discussing Yale Younger winners with my new friend, Michael Casey—again, a poet I wasn’t familiar with—and when Ashbery’s name came up, Casey was quickly and quietly dismissive.
I’ve always been smitten by the wide view. As I try to take in the Yale Younger Prize history as a whole, I’m almost tempted to say that Michael Casey is the only Yale Younger winner who wrote the kind of conversational, accessible poetry non-poets can appreciate.
Is it possible? Of all those winners, only one poet represents the “Raw” school of Modern Poetry, the one which is so well known?
And I just happened to run into this poet last week?
How to characterize, in a few words, the Yale Younger “poet” over its roughly 100 year lifespan?
Definitely a show-off. Self-conscious, garrulous, self-assured, semi-Romantic but straining after the anti-lyrical, in a self-consciously modernist, baroque, fussy, studied manner.
Here’s a sample. George Starbuck was a director of the Iowa Workshop in the 60s. This poem is from the book which won the Prize in 1959. Note the appallingly school-boy Romanticism and the location, which happens to be the neighborhood of Robert Lowell (Commonwealth and Marlborough).
“Technologies”
On Commonwealth, on Marlborough,
The gull beaks of magnolia
were straining upward
like the flocks harnessed by kings in storybooks
who lusted for the moon.
Six days we mooned into each other’s eyes
mythologies of doom and dawn,
naked to the Atlantic sun,
loving and loving, to and fro,
on Commonwealth, on Marlborough,
our whole half-hours.
And where our bloods crested
we saw the bruised red buds
tear loose the white impeded shapes of cries.
And when our whitest hopes
tore at the wind with wings,
it seemed only a loony dream we dreamed.
Such heavy machination of cars and motels
confronted love
on Commonwealth, on Marlborough.
They do the tricks with rockets now,
with methodologies of steel, with industry,
or not at all, but so, sweet love, do these white trees
that dare play out their lunacies for all they are,
for all they know,
on Commonwealth, on Marlborough.
The next year Alan Dugan, who settled in Massachusetts, won the prize (same judge, Dudley Fitts, born in Boston, attended Harvard) with a volume simply entitled Poems, which also won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. Dugan won the prize in his late 30s. Starbuck had been 28. Dugan crushed it—many would agree his was the best Yale Younger book.
Michael Casey’s publisher bio mentions he read Dugan’s Poems while stationed in Vietnam.
Dugan is not plain-speaking, however. He’s no Michael Casey. Dugan belongs to the Yale Younger School, for better or for worse.
Here’s a poem by Michael Casey, who won no major prizes besides the Yale Younger:
“getting so”
it’s getting so
you can’t drive a car
on the streets these days
without having some asshole
run inta ya car
denting it all over
or like
in my case
driving along the highway
and having
a guard rail jump out in front of the car
those fuckers are fast
Perhaps the most important thing to ask about a poem (and this truly makes a poem enjoyable and accessible to non-poets) is:
Does it have a beginning, a middle and an end?
The George Starbuck poem does not—its details could unfold in any order.
A popular and famous poem like “The Raven” does—an effect is wrought by an intruder. There’s a clear beginning, middle, and end.
Dante wrote a whole book (Vita Nuova) dividing his poems into parts. The trope goes back to Aristotle.
Casey’s poem has a beginning: complaining about other drivers hitting one’s car.
A middle: the shift to the poet as the driver
And the end: “and having/a guard rail jump out in front of the car/those fuckers are fast”
This singular characteristic of a poem (having a beginning, middle, and end) has nothing to do with form, style, or content—notice it unites two very different poets—the 19th century poet Edgar Allan Poe and the 20th century poet, Michael Casey.
The foreword to Alan Dugan’s Poems Seven, New And Complete Poetry is by Carl Phillips, a Yale Younger judge from 2011 to 2020. Phillips studied with Dugan and his introduction to his mentor’s “Complete Poetry” makes a case for poetry which doesn’t need a beginning, a middle, or an end—because the poet’s brutal, plain, honest, non-transcendent existence is everything. A rather odd piece of writing, Carl Phillips on Alan Dugan. The Eternal Present of the Modern Poem. Here is how it begins:
“The first time I ever heard Dugan read was in 1989, and it was also the first time I’d ever read my poetry in public—at the old Fire House in Wellfleet, where Dugan and all of us in his Castle Hill poetry workshop read together at the end of the summer. Dugan read a poem whose first lines are these: “After your first poetry reading/I shook hands with you/and got a hard-on. Thank you.” Six weeks earlier, I’d have been shocked. But by then, I’d learned already that—as a poet and as a teacher—Dugan was nothing if not direct: exactingly, and often disarmingly so.”
***
“Dugan’s commitment to truth and his refusal to adorn or shroud that truth in distracting ornament have been his most important lessons for me, even as they continue to be a necessary presence in contemporary American poetry.”
***
Of course it’s easy to say one stands for the “truth” against “ornament” (even if somewhat problematic when speaking of art) but I can’t help but observe that it’s precisely when we “adorn or shroud” that we create the conditions for poetry which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. (The “shrouding” of the truth could take place in the beginning, or it could take place at the end.)
Phillips, again:
“So much of poetry handles the world in one of two ways: there’s the flee-in-the-face-of-conundrum approach, known as ‘transcendent;’ and there’s the construct-your-own-alternative-world approach—I believe it too calls itself transcendent. Dugan works differently. As he says in ‘Against a Sickness: To the Female Double Principle God,’ ‘My visions/are not causal but final:/there’s no place to go/but on.’ For Dugan, existential angst is irrelevant—it’s all existence, nothing to hope for beyond, so no reason to rush toward that beyond, and no reason to despair as to what will happen later, because nothing will. His is a queerly, bracingly sobering sense of reality—in the spirit of Lucretius…”
***
“But if Lucretian, than also Whitmanian, a sheer revelry in the high and low, squalor and joy: sure, Dugan frequently starts at and responds to such classical forebears as Virgil, Heraclitus, Tyrtaeus, and Plutarch—but we also come up against Dynaflo, the reduction of Orpheus and Rilke to mere prigs, and the chance to understand the idea of God by becoming God, essentially, via masturbation, about which Dugan says (in ‘For Masturbation’) ‘THIS IS THE WAY IT IS, and if/it is a “terrible disgrace”/it is as I must will.” In the world we’ve come to know as Dugan’s Edge, all is flux, everything comes with its disorienting but finally illuminating flipside; the very wind that sweeps a lover’s hair has known the foul smell of the dead on a distant battlefield; a little girl’s response to being stripped for rape is a simple, comic exclamation of ‘Wow.'”
This is Carl Phillips, future Yale Younger Poet judge, speaking about his mentor Alan Dugan, Yale Younger Winner, in 2001.
Wow, indeed.
I’m sure the reasoning goes something like this: honestly accept the disgraceful and the grotesque—and then the deluded, fake, ‘transcendent’ is not necessary. If you don’t have the courage to embrace the unclean, any attempted ‘transcendence’ in your poetry merely indicates your lack of courage.
I get it. But I’m not ready to embrace this, and never mind on moral grounds, but because it feels simplistic. I sense it leads to poetry which is ‘too knowing’ and has no ‘beginning, middle, and end.’ The Dugan mind says, “I see all the shit. You can’t fool me.” The Dugan mind sees everything at once, the horror and the beauty, and in its genius refuses to discriminate—it finally sees everything as a whole, and this advantage is finally a disadvantage, when it comes to producing an aesthetic product. (If not a disadvantage when it comes to being human—but that’s for another discussion)
Perspective is everything in art, and perspective requires transcendence, if only as a ‘working-through,’ a movement from beginning to middle to end. This is what makes us vulnerable, hopeless, and yet hopeful (and perhaps humorous) human beings.
Look at the nuance in this Michael Casey poem; as simple as this poem is, it is cunningly simple—it has action, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end; and it nicely and clearly says what it doesn’t say. To me, this poem has ‘real life’ genius, as opposed to the towering, lonely genius of an Alan Dugan:
“resignation”
they don’t like my work here
I’m quittin
a friend of mine his father
owns a gas station
I can get a job there
pumpin gas
while I’m lookin
for something better
hey Walter catch this I’ll say
and throw a hook at him
when he throws it back
I’ll say
don’t you throw nothin at me
fuck this place
I’m leavin
Just as in the first Casey poem we looked at, where the ‘bad driver’ becomes the poet, the ‘bad work situation’ becomes the poet, who, ironically, will not leave, since Walter is his doppelganger. The poem has created ‘real life’ openings, precisely because of its honest transcendence. The poem has parts, which make sense, parts which have a real sequence, despite the poem’s apparent simplicity.
The George Starbuck poem I quoted is much closer to the Yale Younger Poet poem in its one-hundred year history, an important aspect of American contemporary poetry. Starbuck’s sensitive poem has no real beginning, middle, and end. It is too busy showing off, in a self-consciously modern-yet-romantic manner.
I do think Michael Casey is an exception—and deserves another look.
I’ll close by quoting Alan Dugan’s first poem from his 1960 Yale Younger winning book, startling in how much it encompasses, but notice how its “knowing” is all “one” in the “gravy” of the poet’s (brilliant) mind. It is a remarkable poem. It is hard to escape its sorrow. It represents something stunning in the modern canon. But there’s no Walter. Walter had to be sacrificed on the altar of those nameless “butchers” who “have washed up and left.”
“This Morning Here”
This is this morning: all
the evils and glories of last night
are gone are except for their
effects: the great world wars
I and II, the great marriage
of Edward the VII or VIII
to Wallis Warfield Simpson and
the rockets numbered like the Popes
have incandesced in flight
or broken on the moon: now
the new day with its famous
This is this morning: all
the evils and glories of last night
are gone are except for their
effects: the great world wars
I and II, the great marriage
of Edward the VII or VIII
to Wallis Warfield Simpson and
the rockets numbered like the Popes
have incandesced in flight
or broken on the moon: now
the new day with its famous
beauties to be seized at once
has started and the clerks
have swept the sidewalks
to the curb, the glass doors
are open, and the first
customers walk up and down
the supermarket alleys of their eyes
to Muzak. Every item has
been cut out of its nature,
wrapped disguised as something
else, and sold clean by fractions.
Who can multiply and conquer
by the Roman numbers? Lacking
the Arab frenzy of the zero, they
have obsolesced: the butchers
have washed up and left
after having killed and dressed
the bodies of the lambs all night,
and those who never have seen blood awake
can drink it browned
and call the past an unrepeatable mistake
because this circus of their present is all gravy.
Salem, MA 5/11/2023