David Ignatow: Selected Poems

by David Ignatow

David Selected Poems

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1975

About the author

David Ignatow was an American poet. He was born in Brooklyn on February 7, 1914, and spent most of his life in the New York City area. He died on November 17, 1997, at his home in East Hampton, New York. His papers are held at University of California, San Diego.

Early in his career he worked in a butcher shop. He also helped out in a bindery in Brooklyn, New York, which he later owned and managed. During the Great Depression in the 1930s, he sought employment with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as a journalist. His father helped him with the funding to produce his first book, Poems, in 1948. Although the volume was well received, he had to continue working various jobs and find time in between to pursue writing. These jobs included work as a messenger, hospital admitting clerk, vegetable market night clerk, and paper salesman. After committing wholly to poetry, Ignatow worked as an editor of American Poetry Review, Analytic, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Chelsea Magazine, and as poetry editor of The Nation.

He taught at the New School for Social Research, the University of Kentucky, the University of Kansas, Vassar College, York College, City University of New York, New York University, and Columbia University. He was president of the Poetry Society of America from 1980 to 1984 and poet-in-residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association in 1987.

Ignatow's many honors include a Bollingen Prize, two Guggenheim fellowships, the John Steinbeck Award, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters award "for a lifetime of creative effort." He received the Shelley Memorial Award (1966), the Frost Medal (1992), and the William Carlos Williams Award (1997) of the Poetry Society of America.

David Ignatow is remembered as a poet who wrote popular verse about the common man and the issues encountered in daily life. In all, he wrote or edited more than twenty-five books. Direct statement and clarity were two of Ignatow's primary objectives in crafting a poem. Fidelity to the details and issues of daily life in Ignatow's poetry won him a reputation for being "the most autobiographical of writers." Ignatow once told Contemporary Authors: "My avocation is to stay alive; my vocation is to write about it; my motivation embraces both intentions, and my viewpoint is gained from a study and activity in both ambitions.

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the afterward, Robert Bly—who is better at arranging and then commenting on other poets’ work than anyone I know—remarks that Ignatow has “an unusual openness to the consciousness of the collective.” This observation is brilliant, and extraordinarily helpful for an understanding of Ignatow’s work, but it is misleading too, especially if you think of “the collective” as an underground museum crowded with archetypes: the Great Mother, the Maiden, the Crone, the Wiseman, the Trickster, etc.

No. Better you should think of “the collective” as “the stuff that collects,’ the residue of all the human fear and desire left over in the city, after the work, and the eating, and the sex, and the dreaming is over and done. Ignatow is the guy who sticks in his rubber tube and siphons until his brain is full, just enough for a poem. And then his brain—a unique organ created expressly for the purpose—turns “the collective” into stuff like this:

I SEE A TRUCK

I see a truck moving down a parade,
people getting up after to follow,
dragging a leg. On a corner
a cop stands idly swinging his club,
the sidewalk jammed with mothers
and baby carriages. No one screams
or speaks. From the tail end
of the truck a priest and a rabbi intone
their prayers, a jazz band bringing up
the rear, surrounded by dancers and lovers.
A bell rings and a paymaster drives through,
his wagon filled with pay envelopes
he hands out, even to those lying dead
or fornicating on the ground.
It is a holiday called
“Working for a Living.”


AND THAT NIGHT

A photo is taken of the family
enjoying the sunshine
from behind in your flat
as you sit reading the papers
and clobbers you. You never
find out why or who, you just
lean back and die.
The sunshine is gone too,
the photograph gets into the news.
You bring up a family in three small rooms,
this crazy man comes along
to finish it off.


THE BAGEL

I stopped to pick up the bagel
rolling away in the wind,
annoyed with myself
for having dropped it
as if it were a portent.
Faster and faster it rolled,
with me running after it,
bent low, gritting my teeth,
and I found myself doubled over
and rolling down the street
head over heels, one complete somersault
after another, like a bagel
and strangely happy with myself.

[Tom Romig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bracing, bizarre, and often obscure. And distinctly original, so much so that you'll never mistake him for any other poet. Most effective for me were the poems about our often impersonal world, about souls crushed by isolation and anonymity. In those poems he engages the wild and irrational--perhaps better, prerational--aspects of humanity. Some poets are edgy, while Ignatow resides on the other side of any edges. Many of Robert Bly's notes on the poems are insightful, though they too can bend towards obscurity.