Randall Jarrell was a poet, critic, and novelist. He famously wrote, “A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he [sic] is great.” He also feared he would be remembered as a poet only for “The Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner,” based on his experiences as a pilot instructor in World War 2. I hereby apologize to his shade for making it my selection this Sunday night (CW: implied gore):
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Jarrell felt compelled to add an explanation of the poem for his readers:
A ball turret was a Plexiglas sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24, and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine-guns and one man, a short small man. When this gunner tracked with his machine guns a fighter attacking his bomber from below, he revolved with the turret; hunched upside-down in his little sphere, he looked like the foetus in the womb. The fighters which attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells. The hose was a steam hose.
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Jarrell is probably best known today not as a poet but as a critic, whose judgements could be insightful and sometimes harsh, bordering on cruel. (Wikiquotes has some choice quotes.) He also worked as a translator and wrote children’s books.
- Poetry Foundation: A biography of and selected poems by Randall Jarrell.
- Internet Archive:
- Selected Poems, including The Woman at the Washington Zoo, by Randall Jarrell. The Internet Archive does not have a generally-available copy of The Complete Poems. This 1969 collection, with poems organized by theme, also includes a complete copy of The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Poems and Translations, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1961.
- No Other Book: Selected Essays, by Randall Jarrell, edited and with an introduction by Brad Leithauser. A good selection of Jarrell’s poetry criticism and other prose.
- Bookshop.org:
- The Complete Poems, by Randall Jarrell.
- Selected Poems, by Randall Jarrell, edited by William H. Pritchard. This is a more recent “selected poems” collection than the one on the Internet Archive.
- No Other Book: Selected Essays, by Randall Jarrell, edited and with an introduction by Brad Leithauser.
- Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy, by Randall Jarrell. I’m surprised that this 1954 satirical novel, set at a progressive women’s college, hasn’t been rediscovered and hailed as a lost classic of “anti-wokism.” It‘s alternately amusing and more than a tad misogynistic.