The Advocate

The Advocate seems to have finished celebrating its 100th birthday. During the last year, the magazine has published, in recognition of its advancing antiquity, a Centennial Anthology and a Centennial Issue, both glorying in the Advocate's illustrious alumni, and both--if only because of the literary notables collected on their pages--interesting reading. Unfortunately, the Advocate has been content to put out no regular issues during the festivities. With the May issue, the Advocate has overcome nostalgia to produce an ambitious and enjoyable collection of poems, stories, and essays.

The issue's cover proudly announces the publication of six early poems by Sylvia Plath; they indicate she was not always a good poet. While the early poems anticipate her later bleak preoccupation with madness and death, they fall far short of the technical virtuosity and the intensity of her later work. More intriguing than the poems are the essays which accompany them. Elizabeth Aldrich's analysis of "The Eye-Mote" (which appeared in Miss Plath's first volume, The Collossus) takes the poem apart and puts it back together in the finest style of New Criticism and, incidentally, gives a reasonably good perspective on Sylvia Plath's over-all artistic ambitions. In "The Documentary Sublime" Stuart Davis offers a total assessment of her intentions and accomplishments, presenting a critical outlook which might easily be extended to all modern poetry. Although the essay occasionally suffers from complex definitional considerations and a prose style which is a curious mixture of the colloquial and the erudite, it represents the kind of bold and wellreasoned exercise of judgment rarely found in undergraduate publications.

The most impressive poetry in the May Advocate is John Allman's. He has a highly functional sense of rhythm and meter which he combines with a capacity for descriptive precision. In "Cambridge Spring" he uses both skills to recreate the voice of a stunned narrator describing a sudden transition of feeling from understated calm to vivid panic:

The ambulance that carried you away you were spading your heart fell open I was playing with your boys what could we do with our fright the ambulance is taking us all the wrong way down the innerbelt hospitals traffic more parking lots.

Allman tends to write about emotional issues in immediate and concrete situations; William Mullen writes more abstractly, using specific description only to illustrate his direct statements. Mullen's metrical abilities and the absolute clarity of his narration enable him to write poetry about feelings which lie almost outside the capacities of a poetic medium:

My hope is to open the range of the senses To beyond the removals that thought makes. To the whole horizon, to the vastness of sunlight and circularity. I want a horizon centered, I want to stand, on a circular threshing floor, in a Peloponnesian plain. And deliver my senses there, for a permanent moment, to kind wind.

Not all of the issue's poets demonstrate the precision of intention and execution found in Allman and Mullen. Occasionally there is a passage like this:

Shipwreck and sea-wrack and sea-tangle Survive the dark magmas foundering Kelson and sextants relinquish a wrangle In souls from breached flesh combustions wring A subtlety alembicked and affined To ardent basalts.

Somewhere under all of that basaltic opacity and frentic word-accumulation something, presumably, is being expressed. The obscurity of the diction (an alembic is anything which distills or refines) and the ambiguity of the description reduce the poem to a mere order of words unified by consonant repetition and inarticulate verbal echoes.

The issue's several other poetic offerings are more satisfying. With humorous scholarliness, Ray Banerjee reflects on Neitzsche:

"Don't go to a woman without a whip," You had said something of the sort, Old Zarathrustra. Yet I have seen a photograph of Lou Salome With a whip in her hand, And you her horse in harness, Your Walrus moustaches erect with pleasure. Yes, a horse. You whipped a horse.

Rudy Graham tries to piece together the discursive and disturbed shreds of his past in a psychological landscape where

no one sight-sees the desert has no speed limits a stranger passes him in a hurry does not know the sand scattering through his fingers once made his home.

"Rider" by Jeffrey Doran--one of the issue's two stories--is the most engaging inclusion in the magazine. Set in a rickety and failing Catskill resort, it presents in elaborate and fascinating detail a complex situation between two friends, one of whom has come to tell the other that he "had stolen his forever-possible girl." Doran lets the story tell itself, relying almost entirely on dialogue which captures the private humor of a close friendship and gives remarkably clear sketches of both individuals.

The issue's other story--Thomas Fallaw's "Like A Photograph Inviting You"--is considerably less compelling. "Photograph" is a fine prose exercise, but Fallaw's emphasis on description and the frustrating fact that nothing ever really happens make the story almost impossible to finish reading.

The difficulties in "Photograph" and the success of "Rider" pretty well take in the range of fluctuations within the entire issue--from the well-written but dull to the lively and engaging. But the magazine's infrequent lapses don't even take up much space, and most of the issue is an energetic presentation of basically interesting material. All of which suggests that the Advocate, despite its austere celebration of the Centennial, has not succumbed to the boring impotence of senility.