I was reading a thick volume of poetry, magnetic in effect but exhausting in its expressive grandiosity. Halfway through, exhausted, I needed a break. I wanted to read something altogether different. Serendipitously, my hand fell on Anne Porter’s An Altogether Different Language. Porter was the widow of the painter Fairfield Porter, and this, her first book, published at the age of 83, came endorsed by the luminaries of the New York School’s first generation—Ashbery, Guest, Koch—along with Amy Clampitt, and a heartfelt foreword by David Shapiro. (Her second and last book was a 2006 Collected.) Perfect choice: Porter, though she heard “a vagrant mischievous poetry / Living wild in the streets through generations of children,” was the opposite of an expressionist, a poet whose art aimed toward equanimity. She wrote with the frankness of a folk artist painting each item in her picture straight-on, unperturbed by the awkwardness with which they all combine into something like a composition. Like many a folk artist, Porter subscribed to beliefs, certainties that few modernists have felt able to profess. Hers is mainly devotional poetry—an assertion of faith. (It probably took a good quantity of religion to put up with the peculiar character of her husband, who is not explicitly mentioned in these poems.) But despite the sometimes almost eerie beauty of Porter’s language, its ground base of belief can be hard for this nonbeliever to bear. Why is it that I can enter so enthusiastically into the poetry of George Herbert, Thomas Traherne, or Henry Vaughan while a similar outlook rather alienates me from a twentieth century poet? I’m willing to imagine it’s on account of some bias of mine, but I suspect that religion itself has changed, become more abstract, more willed, slipped further from the concrete reality that Porter’s poetry registers at its best—her observant awareness of this-worldly things, like
the rising sun
Resting on the ground like a boulder
In the thicket back of the school,
A single great ember
About the height of a man.
One of the things that makes that passage so lovely is the humdrum ordinariness of its location: “the thicket back of the school.” Her sense of the grandeur of what she’s observed is confident enough that she needn’t inflate it to more-than-human scale or conceal its banal setting. I don’t doubt that for Porter, this might have been a glimpse of the transcendent nor do I begrudge her that. But for me, it’s perfect as just the sunrise it is. And when I read that
The horse chestnut trees
Keep their own festival
Whose calendar is hidden
In the depths of the sun
—I can hear the voice of a perfect pagan.
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Anne Porter, An Altogether Different Language: Poems 1934-1994 (1994), was published by Zoland Books, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is out of print.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.