Poetic Justice: A Note on Donald Justice [by David Lehman]

        Donald Justice, who died on this day (August 6) in 2004, was the sort of poet other poets like the most. His life wasn’t flashy, full of messy divorces and scandalous breakdowns. He was not prolific. But what he wrote was consistently high in quality. He balanced the demands of traditional stanzas and forms (including the extravagant sestina and the rigorous villanelle) with the attractions of the American idiom. A deep romantic nostalgia, midway between sadness and tranquility, was his element. At the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where Justice taught for many years, his admiring students included Mark Strand, Charles Wright, and Jorie Graham. Strand did a pitch-perfect parody of the soulful Justice manner in a poem entitled “Nostalgia,” which concludes, “It is yesterday. It is still yesterday.”

          Justice wrote beautifully about growing up in his native Florida, where he studied music with the composer Carl Ruggles. In Justice’s Collected Poems, published by some cosmic coincidence in the month of his death, you can hear the piano keys, a haunting music. The elegy “On the Death of Friends in Childhood” is a good example of his laconic power and his predominant mood: “We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven, / Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell; / If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at twilight, /Forming a ring, perhaps, or joining hands / In games whose very names we have forgotten. / Come, memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.”

          It is “in the shadows” that many of Justice’s poems live or lurk. “The Tourist from Syracuse,” originally published in 1967, acquired a scary new currency after the attacks of September 11. It is the portrait of a man who could be a used-car salesman, a tourist from Syracuse, or a hired assassin, who is waiting – “like one who has missed his bus” – at the “corner at which you turn / To approach that place where now / You must not hope to arrive.”  

-- David Lehman (2004) 

Comments

[Emily Fragos]

I never studied with Donald Justice, but I love Charles Wright and I miss Mark Strand with all my heart. Thank you for this tribute.

[jim c]

Perfect.