THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 22, 1995 TAG: 9501240497
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 91 lines
I was on the phone to Jimmy Carter the other day.<
Along with 14 other reporters from newspapers all over the country.
We were engaged in a 45-minute teleconference call to the 39th president of the United States, who was promoting his new book Always a Reckoning and Other Poems (Times Books, 130 pp., $18), which also happens to be his first volume of verse.
Carter was in New York City, where he had just choked up while reading one of his poems about his wife, Rosalynn, on ``Live with Regis and Kathie Lee.''
With shyness gone and hair caressed with gray,
her smile still makes the birds forget to sing
and me to hear their song.
The reporters, employed by publications ranging from The Miami Herald to The Deseret News of Salt Lake City, dutifully called an 800 number at a prearranged time and repeated a secret confirmation code. Then they parked on the wire like birds forgetting to sing for 15 minutes, listening to a recorded medley of country-western crossovers, followed by a formal introduction of the poet as ``family man, humanitarian and peacemaker.''
After a injunction to refrain from inquiring about anything but the book, we each got to ask a question.
Mine was: Why poetry?
In that unmistakable, measured, somnolent drawl, Carter said it was ``kind of a challenge.'' He said it was ``enjoyable.'' He said it was a ``self-revelation.''
``I hope it will let people know about my life and beliefs and philosophy,'' the 70-year-old former chief executive said.
Carter noted he had already received a number of letters from people who had read his poetry and cried.
The reporters were, without exception, respectful, but I don't think any of them actually broke down. It's hard to know for sure. I myself came close to tears when the guy from the Chicago Sun-Times asked Carter if he was going for the Nobel Prize in literature.
Carter allowed as how the possibility was remote.
It is.
I'd rate Always a Reckoning like this: Carter's verse is not as good as former Sen. Eugene McCarthy's, but it is not as bad as actor Jimmy Stewart's.
The illustrations by the author's 16-year-old granddaughter, Sarah Elizabeth Chuldenko, are precocious.
I am reminded of the fellow who observed that it was not remarkable that the dog walked on his hind legs poorly. What was remarkable was that he did it at all. That is where we are with Always a Reckoning.
The press kit makes much of the fact that Carter ``joins John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln as one of only three president poets in U.S. history.''
I can't quote a stanza from either of his antecedents, but here's one of Carter's:
The woman took the feeble Tom
and smothered him with care.
He never would tell anyone
what happened over there.
The stature of Adams and Lincoln has not been seriously threatened. Nor has Carter's, actually. He has written, simply, about what he knows - his wife, his mother, his dog; fishing, peanuts, politics.
He comes off as a decent fellow - no radical views here, no meanness, no rage - and that may be the point. Roughhouse writer Norman Mailer once unabashedly identified his own work as ``advertisements for myself,'' and indeed the overtly earnest, preachy, sensitive Southerner of Always a Reckoning still seems to be running for something. Senior American sage?
``It's a way of opening new contacts with people that I wouldn't otherwise have had,'' he told me in the teleconference call.
So Times Books publishes a (whopping, for poetry) 75,000-copy first printing and is already out with a second.
But the poems drift in and out of meter and rhyme (he pairs ``hard debate'' with ``adequate,'' ``impressed'' with ``at last''). They lapse into greeting-card sentimentality. They play it formally and stylistically safe.
Now when I seek efficient words
to say what I believe is true
or have a dream I want to share
the vagueness is still there.
Now I'm crying.
Would these verses have seen print if the author's name had been Fred Mertz?
I don't think so.
- MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
RICK DIAMOND
by CNB