Author: Rose Wolf
Publisher:
Published: 1999-11-01
Total Pages: 95
ISBN-13: 9780738806068
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I was born to the sound of nursery rhymes, and grew up in A Child's Garden of Verses. As a schoolboy, I learned the lines of Longfellow, Whittier, and Lowell, recited the ringing rhymes of Tennyson, elegiazed with Gray in a country churchyard, soared with Shakespeare. I knew that Milton and Dante were among the immortals; that Byron, Keats, and Shelley were literary giants; and that even present-day pygmies like James Whitcomb Riley or Robert W. Service were respected as versifiers finding favor with the general public. Soon came the inevitable encounters with Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Robert Frost and other exponents of the American tradition; Edna St. Vincent Millay, who didn't seem American at all; and maverick one-of-a-kind wunderkinder ranging from Oscar Wilde to Ezra Pound. But poesy, per se, was everywhere--not just in schools and libraries, but in newspapers and popular magazines. The art of the elocutionist consisted largely of poetry recitation, and popular performers frequently took to the vaudeville stage or the Chautauqua circuit with readings or song. There were poetry hours on radio, the bastion of pop culture. Poetry was alive and well and living in the twentieth century. Then came World War II, and there is no need to expatiate on what happened to the poetic form in its aftermath. To the majority of today's youth, poetry is something spewed out by a rap group. For real profundity and spiritual significance, of course, there's always Bob Dylan. And the rest is silence. Or almost silence. Poetry, like live theater, seems perpetually moribund: a constant loomer in Death's doorway, yet never venturing beyond the threshold. Poems are still being written, still being published, and, if one listens closely, one can hear the whisper of words rise again. It's a slow and painful convalescence, but a noticeable one--noticeable, and laudable. This felicitous phenomenon is due, in no small part, to the talents of a new generation of the creatively gifted: talents like Rose Wolf. In a way, her work breaks new ground, taking the form in a direction usually hitherto confined to the pioneering prose of Joyce and his emulators. Although a recognizable portion of her efforts constitutes homage or serious appreciation, she is not constrained to solemnity or self-pretension in her approach. Whim and whimsy abound, and in this lies her strength: the utter lack of verbal inhibition. To her, verse is the medium of perfect freedom, as her wordplay so aptly demonstrates. In her poetry, anything is permissible--she is definitely a no-holds bard. Her voice rises joyfully from these pages, with wit, witticism, and wisdom. Rose Wolf knows that fantasy leads us to the gates of reality; and, confronting those gates, her poetry provides us with the key. --Robert Bloch
