Street Meeting

by Stanley Romaine Hopper

Professor Rudolph Årnheim, in an extremely useful and cogent essay entitled, “Psychological Notes on the Poetical Process, [from Poets at Work, essays based on the modern poetry collection at the Lockwood Memorial Library, University of Buffalo, by Rudolph Arnheim, W. H. Auden, Karl Shapiro, and Donald Stauffer, with an Introduction by Charles D. Abbott, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948], makes a number of highly relevant observations. I should like to note two or three of these.

There is, first of all, the movement from the “practical” (what we have called … the concrete or raw data of the poem’s content) to the “poetical” — a necessary shift from “objective correctness” to a “subjective truth” which is essential to the poetic experience. This desirable and decisive shift he illustrates from the work-sheets of a poem by Stephen Spender. The “practical” starting point of the poem is apparent in its first version:

What is the use now of meeting and speaking:
Always when we meet I think of another meeting
Always when we speak I think of another speaking….

As the work on the poem progresses this version is made over into the following:

Oh what is the use now of our meeting and speaking
Since every meeting is thinking of another meeting
Since all my speaking is groping for another speaking.

In the first version the practical facts of physical meeting and speaking on the one hand, and the psychological reflections arising from the meeting on the other, are stressed: while what is poetically significant is not disclosed. Also the persons involved are foremost, by way of the pronounts we and I. But in the second version the two kinds of happening — the physical and the psychological — are fused: what is poetically crucial is that which is contained in the paradox, or in the point of overlap, or identity, between the two contradictory happenings. By subordinating the persons to the deeper meaning of the events, and by fusing the contradictory elements in the language of the second form, the “poetical” meaning of the encounter is made to emerge. The time relationships of the first version are transformed into the following equation:

meeting = thinking of another meeting
speaking = groping for another speaking.

In the poem entitled “Street Meeting,” by [Lewis] Turco, we see the same struggle taking place between the physical event of meeting, with its “practical” data, and the psychological effects of this meeting in the mind of the poet:

I saw him on the street.
His flesh was heavy.
For years we had not met:
Time takes its levy,
Returning ounce for hour.
But the eyes I'd known
Had stayed the same though flesh constricted bone.

His eyes owned all the past —
I saw it staring,
Bewildered, not at rest,
Still full of daring,
But fettered now by the hoar
Of revolving clocks:
A hurt, unlikely witch within its stocks.

I watched the troubled look
His face reflected
And knew he'd pick my lock
Had time defected.
But each of us could hear
Wary sentries call
And answer in the long, resounding hall.

We spoke in platitudes,
Each of us helpless,
The victims of our moods
And of our losses:
The present was the heir
Of our common past.
The future would inherit all at last.

Here the poet does not attempt so immediate and summary a fusion between the two. He shuttles from the one to the other throughout the first four stanzas, expanding and increasing the detail of each part, and retaining the dramatic presence of the persons. But this means that the paradox must reach its fusion in the concluding stanza, and must, as in a drama, effect a reconciliation of the opposites. Fortunately, the concluding stanza is the best in the poem, and the concluding line achieves both the paradox and the dramatic reconciliation:

We parted. Each of us
Had fanned an ember.
We'd shared another loss
And would remember.
But time was still for hire:
He walked off alone.
When next we meet our prisons will have grown.

This denouement is satisfactory (it satisfies). The emotion which the elements in conflict have set ajar are purged. The particulars are transcended and the “poetic” or subjective significance of the event comes clear.

From the "Foreword" by Stanley Romaine Hopper to Riverside Poetry 3, edited by Marianne Moore, Howard Nemerov, and Alan Swallow, New York: Twayne, 1958. The poem was first collected in First Poems (Golden Quill Press, 1960, out-of-print) and included in Fearful Pleasures: The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, Scottsdale: Star Cloud Press, © Lewis Turco 2004.