{"id":6093,"date":"2016-02-12T00:41:08","date_gmt":"2016-02-11T23:41:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6093"},"modified":"2016-06-28T10:51:59","modified_gmt":"2016-06-28T09:51:59","slug":"william-wantling-in-the-enemy-camp-selected-poems-1964-1974-tangerine-press-12-reviewed-by-doug-field","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6093","title":{"rendered":"William Wantling, In the Enemy Camp: Selected Poems 1964 -1974<\/em> (Tangerine Press) \u00a312.00, reviewed by Doug Field"},"content":{"rendered":"

William Wantling, In the Enemy Camp: Selected Poems 1964-1974 <\/em>(Introduction by John Osborne,\u00a0Foreword by Thurston Moore).<\/p>\n

\u201cI can make good word music and rhyme,\u201d declares the narrator of William Wantling\u2019s \u201cPoetry,\u201d \u201cand even sometimes take their breath away\u2014but it always somehow turns out kind of phoney.\u201d A veteran of the Korean War, a criminal and junky, Wantling\u2019s poetry was forged in the crucible of San Quentin Prison where he fled to escape the paralyzing conformity of his Midwest home-town of Peoria, Illinois, described in the title poem as an \u201cenemy camp.\u201d The collected poems, which include elegies to fellow outsiders, among them Billie Holiday, Lenny Bruce, and Lester Young\u2014do their best to conceal their author\u2019s careful craft and literary eclecticism, echoed by Wantling\u2019s deployment of poetic forms, among them syllabics, sonnet, sestina and haiku. Many of the poems reflect on the authenticity and relevance of writing verse: \u201cPoetry,\u201d set in San Quentin Prison, ends with the stabbing of a prisoner (\u201cthe blood that came to his\/ lips was a bright pink, lung blood\u201d) and concludes with the lines \u201cwhat could consonance and assonance or \/ even rhyme do with something like that?\u201d<\/p>\n

Wantling\u2019s poems are littered with references to heroin, the Korean War, San Quentin Prison, hard drinking, LSD, cocaine and mescaline but there are also allusions to T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett and Hemingway. As John Osborne points out in a trenchant introduction to this collection, the title \u201cThings Exactly as They Are\u201d \u201ccomes from Wallace Stevens\u2019s long poem \u2018The Man with the Blue Guitar,\u2019 itself inspired by Picasso\u2019s painting The Old Guitarist.\u201d While there is a temptation to read Wantling\u2019s sinewy poems biographically, they are strewn with a coterie of narrators, some of whom confess to murder and others who revel in theft and heroin addiction:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

High, once I ate 3 scoops of ice-cream<\/p>\n

High it was the greatest<\/p>\n

Greater than the Eiffel Tower<\/p>\n

Greater than warm sex, sleepy<\/p>\n

Early on a morning<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In \u201cEssay on Being 35,\u201d the narrator chronicles his crippling depression (\u201cIf I could snap out of this funk\/ I’d have enough energy to kill myself\u201d) in a language that is startlingly detached: \u201cI taught my wife to masturbate\/ so I could sleep more\/ or at least lay there\/ & stare at the wall\/ She cries while she does it.\u201d<\/p>\n

A number of the poems brim with wry, dark humour, including \u201cA metaphysical promise from one who is quite angry that all dreams soon become nightmares:\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I’ll kill you, God<\/p>\n

First chance I get<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And \u201cA short treatise on love and perversion with psychoanalytic overtones\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

My father slept<\/p>\n

My mother wept<\/p>\n

and I became the horned goat between them<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nearly a quarter of the collected poems are Haiku, a form that Wantling respects and embellishes:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to say goodbye<\/p>\n

but I think it\u2019s being said<\/p>\n

for me<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Here, as elsewhere, Wantling\u2019s casual mastery of technique hoodwinks the reader. Many of the poems employ rhyme and half-rhyme but Wantling\u2019s attention to form is hidden in the dark intimacy of his verse. Longer poems, including \u201cDirge in Spring,\u201d a meditation on the accidental killing of a young blind hare, frequently ask the reader to consider how violence affects the perpetrator, a theme echoed in poems about the Korean War where Wantling explores how soldiers are ravaged by the horrors of war in which they participate. Indeed, as Osborne rightly notes, Wantling\u2019s \u201cplace as the preeminent American poet of the Korean War has yet to be properly recognized.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wantling\u2019s long stints in prison and his Midwestern background kept him out of the Beat circles, although he published in a number of little magazines, among them Jeff Nuttall’s My Own Mag<\/em>, also appearing alongside Nuttall and Alan Jackson in the Penguin Modern Poets 12 (1968) . For a while, it seemed that Wantling would make it: his collection The Awakening<\/em> was Christopher Logue\u2019s recommended book of the year in a 1967 issue of the Times Literary Supplement<\/em>, but his death in 1974, aged forty, put paid to any chances of a Bukowski-like resurrection, a writer with whom he is compared.\u00a0 Wantling, as Osborne notes in the introduction \u201cis excluded from every one of the standard anthologies of modern American poetry.\u201d This handsomely produced volume brings Wantling out of the shadows that he inhabited and back to the fringes of poetry where he belongs. These are poems written in darkness by a writer who stared at the sun.
\n 
\nDoug Field<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

William Wantling, In the Enemy Camp: Selected Poems 1964-1974 (Introduction by John Osborne,\u00a0Foreword by Thurston Moore). \u201cI can make good word music and rhyme,\u201d declares the narrator of William Wantling\u2019s \u201cPoetry,\u201d \u201cand even sometimes take their breath away\u2014but it always somehow turns out kind of phoney.\u201d A veteran of the Korean War, a criminal and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nWilliam Wantling, In the Enemy Camp: Selected Poems 1964 -1974 (Tangerine Press) \u00a312.00, reviewed by Doug Field - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=6093\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"William Wantling, In the Enemy Camp: Selected Poems 1964 -1974 (Tangerine Press) \u00a312.00, reviewed by Doug Field - 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