Nothing Doing

A tremendously gifted person, Cid Corman wrote scores of poems, translations, plays, and critcism, and produced Origin, one of the most innovative magazines of its time. Cid lived with his wife Shizumi in a small house on the outskirts of Kyoto for most of 50 years and poets visiting Japan would inevitably find their way to his doorstep to share his legendary hospitality. Cid's existence was one that I would call "splendid isolation." Kyoto was Cid's Walden. The post office was Cid's link to some of America and Europe's best writers and thinkers--including Noam Chomsky and Hannah Arendt. Year after year Cid continued to do "the work" as he called it--rising at six or seven and wrapping up at about noon, with another writing session sometimes later in the evening. For decades Cid did this, honing his poetry until it implied worlds in a very few lines. There are many spendid examples of this kind of writing in Nothing Doing. "Say it straight and say it plainly," was a kind of motto for Cid as he continued to develop and exercise his ear and his eye. However, I believe that Cid began to run into trouble in the middle 1990's when he felt that his mastery of words allowed him to make direct statements tricked out in the form of poetry. Cid, in my opinion, forgot the very basics that he had learned from his friend William Carlos Williams and that had allowed him to write the fine poetry that we see in such volumes as livingdying, and other of his books: in poetry we show instead of tell. Nothing Doing features many poems that simply, and bluntly, state Cid's "philosophy," and these poems are the weakest in the book and the ones I like the least. Still, this book is good to have on the shelf. One amazing poem to Shizumi contains the arc and sweep of a lifetime in the span of seven lines and its virtuosity alone is worth the price of purchase.

Cid Corman has written thousands of poems. He first came into his own in the 1950s, and through his magazine "Origin," defined one of the great Modernists streams woven from the Black Mountain poets and the Objectivists. His subjects--insights into human frailty, feeling, and thought--make poetry prized for its restrained and subtle musics, its gentle yet piercing wit, and its honesty. I can think of only a few other poets whose work will outlive our contemporary biases to rest among the masterpieces of our time. In "Nothing Doing" Corman selects poems from the 1980s and 90s. He proves, once again, that small poems, though of seemingly small moments, can fill with momentous implication.Writing of such quantity is bound to fall flat every now and again, and very very occasionally Corman's poems do. Emerson once said that "a metre-making argument . . . makes a poem--a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing." The intelligent interiors of Corman's poems breathe wide. "Nothing Doing" contains tender elegies to love, family, and friends, as well as others of ethical, almost Confucian reserve, inhabited by a lithe and Zen-like happiness. ...