Poet, journalist, and crime novelist, Kenneth Fearing wrote poems filled with the jargon of advertising and radio broadcasts and tabloid headlines, sidewalk political oratory, and the pop tunes on the jukebox. Seeking out what he called "the new and complex harmonies . . . of a strange and still more complex age," he evoked the jitters of the Depression and the war years in a voice alternately sardonic and melancholy, and depicted a fragmenting urban world bombarded by restless desires and unnerving fears. But, in the ...
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Poet, journalist, and crime novelist, Kenneth Fearing wrote poems filled with the jargon of advertising and radio broadcasts and tabloid headlines, sidewalk political oratory, and the pop tunes on the jukebox. Seeking out what he called "the new and complex harmonies . . . of a strange and still more complex age," he evoked the jitters of the Depression and the war years in a voice alternately sardonic and melancholy, and depicted a fragmenting urban world bombarded by restless desires and unnerving fears. But, in the words of editor Robert Polito, "Fearing's poems carry no whiff of the curio or relic. If anything, his poems . . . insinuated an emerging media universe that poetry still only fitfully acknowledges." This new selection foregrounds the energy and originality of Fearing's prophetic poetry, with its constant formal experimenting and its singular note of warning: "We must be prepared for anything, anything, anything." As a chronicler of mass culture and its discontents, Fearing is a strangely solitary figure who cannot be ignored. About the American Poets Project Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today's most discerning poets and critics.
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Kenneth Fearing (1902 -- 1961) is probably best known for his 1946 noir novel "The Big Clock" and for its 1948 film adaptation starring Ray Milland. Fearing was a poet who wrote of the complexity, impersonality, and commercialization of life in New York City during the Depression and WW II. Fearing sometimes is called the "Chief Poet of the American Depression", but his poetry tends to be little read today. This book of Fearing's "Selected Poems" was published in 2004 by the American Poets Project of the Library of America and edited with and Introduction by Robert Polito, a poet and biographer who also edited a two-volume collection of Crime Novels from the 1930s -- 1950s for the Library of America.
The volume includes selections from each of Fearing's books of poetry, including "Angel Arms" (1929), "Poems" (1935), "Dead Reckoning" (1938), "Collected Poems" (1940), "Afternoon of a Pawnbroker" (1943), "Stranger at Coney Island" (1948) and "New and Selected Poems" (1956). Fearing's poetry shows a high degree of continuity; the stronger and more characteristic poems tend to be in the earlier volumes.
The immediate impression Fearing's poems made on me was that of a noir poet with the themes of loneliness, loss, alienation on the streets and in the office, and corruption expressed in film noir and in noir novels and stories. The writing has a sharp, hard-boiled feel with lengthy, rat-a-tat lines punctuated by slang, advertising slogans, graffiti, and the like. Fearing is a poet of the city with an ambivalent attitude to it. He is heavily critical of its commercialization and of its loneliness and violence of all kinds. The poetry may also have an implicit sense of renewal.
With their origins in the Depression, Fearing's poems have a strong economic component. He was part of a group of writers on the Left, and he was frequently associated with communism. The poems certainly talk about the crassness and materialism of business and American life as well as about the impact of poverty and hopelessness during the Depression years. The ideological component of the poems should not be over-emphasized, and Fearing himself declined to categorize his work in this way. The poems are better seen as works of imagination and vision and of the poet's reflections on what he saw in New York City streets.
Here is a sample of Fearing's poetry, the poem "Andy, Jerry, and Joe" from "Angel Arms".
"We were staring at the bottles in the restaurant window,
We could hear the autos go by.
We were looking at the women on the boulevard,
It was cold,
No one else knew about the things we knew.
We watched the crowd, there was a murder in the
papers, the wind blew hard, it was dark,
We didn't know what to do.
There was no place to go, and we had nothing to say,
We listened to the bells, and voices, and whistles, and
cars,
We moved on,
We weren't dull, or wise, or afraid,
We didn't feel tired, or restless, or happy, or sad.
There were a million stars, a million miles, a million
people, a million words,
A million laughs, a million years,
We knew a lot of things we could hardly understand,
There were liners at sea. and rows of houses, and
clouds in the sky, and songs in the halls,
We waited on the corner,
The lights were in the stores, there were women on
the streets, Jerry's father was dead.
We didn't know what we wanted and there was
nothing to say.
Andy had an auto and Joe had a girl."
I was reminded in reading Fearing of two other writers of his time who I have read and who are probably even more obscure today than is Fearing. The poet Horace Gregory was a close friend of Fearing's who also wrote poems about the down and out in New York streets in books such as "Chelsea Rooming House" and "Chorus for Survival" during the years Fearing was active. The novelist and essayist Edward Dahlberg championed Fearing's work and wrote an introduction to "Angel Arms" which is not included in this selection of Fearing's poems but which I would like to read.
In these days of pandemic and social and economic dislocation, Fearing's voice is worth hearing and remembering. The American Poets Project publishes small uniform volumes of American poets, revealing the high accomplishment of many American writers and the variety of their poetry. It is an outstanding series for thinking about the United States and its art. The poems of Kenneth Fearing are a worthy component of this series. The volume will interest those readers interested in Depression writings and readers who want to see Fearing within the broad range of American poetry.
