The Difference Between Night and Day Yale Series of Younger Poets

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isbn号码:9780300022322

An old theory, by now a cliche, has it that artists are nobodies

when not practicing their art. Most often this is applied to actors.

The bright star on the stage becomes a drab blob the moment the

play is over, and starts to sparkle again the next evening when

the curtain rises.

Reading "The Difference between Night and Day" I m re-

minded of this theory, not because I suspect Ramke is a blob of

any sort, but because his poems are so honestly rooted in isola-

tion that they suggest a man with no way of reaching others ex-

cept through his writing. The gains are made and the losses

counted in isolation. When Ramke is writing he has no friends.

Isolation is a somewhat shopworn theme in modern poetry, but

when it is this deeply felt, this personal, it becomes new. New

because it functions dynamically in poems that are new and

unusual.

Not so unusual that no ancestors hover in the background.

One of Ramke s ancestors is Wallace Stevens, and like Stevens,

Ramke risks an apparent coldness. What happens around him

seems to run a poor second to his fantasy life, and in the early

parts of this book we often get a picture of one for whom caring

does not carry high priority and to whom escape from feeling is

essential to survival. Yet if I believed Ramke a cold poet I would

not have picked him to be the winner of the Yale Series of

Younger Poets. Ramke s coldness is not a lack of passion, but

the coldness of the void the imagination must inhabit to receive

the disparate events, both internal and external, the gradations

of response to those events, the mysteries of things those

"strange birds" that "call, hidden in the sky." What we feel is

the isolation he must feel to write the poems.

Paradoxically, and again like Stevens, one of Ramke s assets

is his generosity. A good poem is usually generous, but there are

degrees. Many poets stick to one small part of their natures be-