POET'S CHOICE

By Mary Karr
Sunday, September 28, 2008; BW12

While I can't claim that Syracuse University, where I teach, is an artistic vortex à la Paris in the 1920s, I can brag that for 50 years astonishing poets have traipsed up its snowy hill for classes in the English department housed in a gray stone building that was once filmed as the Addams Family house. In the 1960s, Delmore Schwartz (the youngest bard to take the Bollingen Prize) mentored young Lou Reed, whose band (the Velvet Underground) subsequently revolutionized rock. Pulitzers went to former professors Stephen Dunn, Donald Justice and W.D. Snodgrass, the latter of whom poked fun at his role in academia: "I haven't read one book about/A book or memorized one plot./Or found a mind I did not doubt./I learned one date. And then forgot." Hayden Carruth memorialized the school's short-story genius Raymond Carver in "Ray."

There's no agreed-upon Syracuse "school." But all these luminaries -- however different in sensibility and style -- move me without verbal frou frou or puffed up pyrotechnics. In "What Goes On," Dunn describes a marriage coming apart, then, after the wife's illness, repairing itself:

After the affair and the moving out,

after the destructive revivifying passion,

we watched her life quiet

into a new one, her lover more and more

on its periphery. She spent many nights

alone, happy for the narcosis

of the television. When she got cancer

she kept it to herself until she couldn't

keep it from anyone. The chemo debilitated

and saved her, and one day

her husband asked her to come back --

his wife, who after all had only fallen

in love as anyone might

who hadn't been in love in a while --

and he held her, so different now,

so thin, her hair just partially

grown back. He held her like a new woman

and what she felt

felt almost as good as love had,

and each of them called it love

because precision didn't matter anymore.

And we who'd been part of it,

often rejoicing with one

and consoling the other,

we who had seen her truly alive

and then merely alive,

what could we do but revise

our phone book, our hearts,

offer a little toast to what goes on.

This story of a wife's betrayal and her husband's fidelity unto death stings me with the awareness that small, unnoticed nobility endures in our midst.

W.D. Snodgrass's "April Inventory" is from "Heart's Needle." Copyright 1959 by William Snodgrass. Reprinted with permission of Knopf. Stephen Dunn's "What Goes On" is from "Different Hours: Poems." Copyright 2000 by Stephen Dunn. Reprinted with permission of Norton.

Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently " Sinners Welcome. "