Twenty Questions

J.D. McClatchy is that rare essayist who is concerned both with the intellect and with the emotions. The essays gathered in Twenty Questions are erudite and engaging inquiries into his life, poetry in general, and the work of poets both ignored and renowned. McClatchy's attention is democratic, as likely to scoop up a quote for his commonplace book (excerpted here) from Coco Chanel as Gertrude Stein, Alfred Hitchcock as W.H. Auden. Equal attention is given to the lives and work of Jean Garrigue and Stephen Sondheim as to those of Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill. McClatchy somehow manages to address the oeuvre of Seamus Heaney in under seven pages and not seem to give short shrift. His writing is as direct as poems can be oblique, avoiding altogether any hint of academic jargon or critical posturing.

McClatchy weaves his way through these poets' lives and work, showing repeatedly the idiosyncratic balance between the private and the public, the straightforward and the hidden. These dichotomies are apparent more than anywhere in the life and work of Emily Dickinson. "Her life remains a puzzle," McClatchy says, "at once demurely conventional and powerfully estranged. And her poems remain a mystery, plain as a daisy and as cryptic as any heart." Though little attention is given to the current boom in poetry's popularity, one can't help but wonder if it might dilute McClatchy's definition of poetry as needing "secrets" and "disguises." "In a time when one is asked to admire a string-tied bundle of old newspapers at the Whitney Biennial," he says, "why shouldn't one take every heartcry-in-jagged-lines as a poem?" --Jane Steinberg