Autobiographies

Corn ( Incarnation ) writes fluent, civilized, unfailingly well-versed verse. The major feature of his latest collection is ``1992,'' a long poem in 20 sections, all but the last of which juxtapose an autobiographical reminiscence of American travel--often seen in the light of some fledgling or faltering love affair--with a sketch of an imagined stranger whose life and the author's might then have intersected, but did not. This poem, Corn suggests, is made in the spirit of a Calder mobile. It meditates on the unpredictable interplay of self and others--people, places, lives, possibilities--and also has something to do with the exploratory, erratically democratic character of American experience in this, the 500th year since Columbus's arrival in the Americas. How is the obscure burden of the past reflected in the present? Who are we? In considering such questions, Corn's poem is certainly ambitious, but also calculating. His imagined strangers prove for the most part unmemorable American types, and the poem's formal open-endedness can degenerate into gimmickry: the final section is composed of short entries like class notes that catch us up on the characters but break off in mid-sentence. Finally, for all Corn's concern for the limits of identity, there is an unmistakable tone of self-satisfaction in much of what he writes. (Dec.)