The Poetry Pill

Year-End Top-Five (plus one)

2010-12-31T13:51:00.000-08:00

Little as the Pill believes in universal or non-contingent standards of “quality,” this list could not, in good conscience, bear the title “Best of 2010.” Instead, because I like top-five lists, here are my five favorite poetry reads of the past year, with little commentary because it’s hard to type while holding this champagne flute, and with a bonus because I liked six books enough to include here, and with best wishes to poets and their readers for the coming year.

Kathleen Graber, The Eternal City
Smart is so very, very cool.

Anne Carson, Nox
A rare case in which contents matched up to the promise of compelling packaging.

Paul Muldoon, Maggot
I've said before, and I'll say again, how good a poet I think Muldoon is.

Don Paterson, Rain
Renovation of formal conventions on every page.

Derek Walcott, White Egrets
The sonnet has rarely had it so good.

C.D. Wright, One with Others
Simply broke my heart.

Now go buy these up and read.

A Brief Tour of The Eternal City

2010-12-12T18:56:00.000-08:00

As promised, at long last, a few words about Kathleen Graber’s The Eternal City. The first few of which have to do not with the book itself but with the promising start it gives the re-launched Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. I’m pretty sure I’ve indicated before on this blog my opinion of Paul Muldoon (he’s the shit, Gentle Reader, seriously). As poetry editor of the New Yorker, he makes some choices I just don’t understand, but his choice in this instance – his first as series editor for Princeton – is solid.

Here are a few more words, again not yet about the book itself but about the period style exemplified by some of its poems. You are as familiar as I am with the currently, and for a couple of decades now, popular structure in which an anecdote narrated in first-person is juxtaposed to an event in the life of a figure with world-historical importance. Often the anecdote gets a strophe or verse paragraph, then the juxtaposed figure gets one, and then, in the last, the two are brought together, the relationship of the moments and the persons sometimes made explicit and sometimes left for the reader to understand. Graber’s “The Third Day” works pretty much this way: the speaker locks herself out of her apartment while preoccupied with some current political language and is reminded, as she chats with the neighbor who lends her a key, of St. Augustine’s thoughts on evil. Augustine’s own remembered experience is then recounted, along with his distillation from it of a definition of evil, and then, finally, Augustine is implicitly brought to bear on the speaker’s memories and present experience. As I read “The Third Day,” I recognized the formula, to be sure. This is, after all, a prominent period style. I also recognized, though, and this is part of what makes Graber’s book so impressive, that the fact of the formula does not in any way diminish the depth of insight or the persuasiveness of the portrayals (of the speaker, of the neighbor, of Augustine or a thoughtful reader’s relationship with his thought).

There’s a recipe for poems like this, but there’s a recipe behind my mother’s lasagna too, and I will eat a pan of that stuff any time I can. Because what makes a dish great is the way it at once conforms to and transcends the recipe, and where a lot of the run of this particular mill simply shapes a moment of self-expression, Graber’s poem is working out a problem whose importance lies well beyond the expressed self (which, in her poems, is a vehicle for the problem, rather than, as is so often the case elsewhere, a tenor riding the vehicle like a kid on a stolen moped):

What would we do without our fellows? Adam,
the Saint argues, took the apple even thought he knew
the serpent had deceived her, for he could not bear imagining
Eve lost in the wilderness alone. A small child is beating a tree
with a baseball bat trying to knock more ammunition loose,
& the prickly spheres, which horticulturalists call fruit,
dance & dangle – like the thurible the Monsignor swung
sometimes as mass.

I’m struck by the lamination in this passage of significances established earlier in the poem. The fruit of the tree in Eden and the fruit the kid knocks from the tree are both related to the fruit – unripe, inedible, worthless – Augustine remembers stealing. This is sin. But it’s also community, and as apt a metonym for it as the climatically dissatisfied neighbor lending a key to the apartment complex laundry room in which the speaker has locked her own. If the fruit sought as ammo is “like the thurible,” then it sanctifies the air through which it swings. Like language, sometimes.

Two sequences make up the bulk of this book’s contents, the long title sequence at the heart of the volume and a three-part sequence of “Poems for Walter Benjamin.” The “Eternal City” sequence is presided over by the spirit of Marcus Aurelius, whose meditations provide epigraphs for its twelve “books” and provide the framework through which the speaker works her difficulty with stuff. That last word’s chosen deliberately, Gentle Reader, for what’s juxtaposed to Aurelius’s stoic renunciations of worldly goods and trappings is the all-too-familiar difficulty many of us have letting go of anything. I am giving nothing away, so to speak, by calling your attention to the way the form of the sequence, in which each poem’s last line becomes the first of the next poem, performs precisely this difficulty. More than that, “Book Twelve,” which has confronted the speaker’s mother’s death (and her resignation before it, her act of letting go), ends with an echo of the first line of “Book One” (“From my mother’s sister, Peg, I failed to learn frugality”):

I have failed to learn frugality from a tin of salvaged buttons,
but learned instead collection: horn toggles, bright Bakelite
domes. Nearly countless, the year’s cast of soiled buttons,
as though each had been snipped from the cuff of a saint.

Detritus becomes relic through the manner in which we keep it. This sequence is a great demonstration of that manner, an enactment of the transformation of junk to heirloom.

It’s also, and this is part of what I like about the Benjamin poems, too, evidence that Graber’s not afraid to look like she knows things, that she’s read things. These are smart poems that don’t pretend to be less smart than they are (when did poetry become a place where knowledge, especially knowledge having to do with books, with language, had to be disowned?). Look at the way the intellect dances through experience, allusion, and argument in this passage from the second Benjamin poem, “The Telephone”:

For Benjamin, the technology is heroic.
For it has prevailed, he says, like those unfortunate infants of myth,
who, cast out into the shadowy wilderness of the back halls, surrounded

by bins of soiled linens & gas meters, emerge . . . a consolation for loneliness . . . the light of a last hope. The home’s benevolent king.
In a novel by George Konrád, a man attempts to explain to his daughter

why he has had so many lovers: when the clothes come off, he tells her,
everything is discovered. And, he goes on, it is, in the end, discovery
we want. Though wouldn’t even the most inventive among us find –

after so much disrobing – simply more of what we already know?
Shall I celebrate the counterpoint? The nearly infinite revelatory potential
of a bolt of heavy silk run through the fingers of the able seamstress

or the sensuous curves of the first desktop telephone . . .

We’re still in the land of detritus and relic (here, an Austrian telephone museum), of collection as transformation. But these are the problem with which the verbally manifest mind struggles. On one hand, the old phones are fragments like those Benjamin writes of in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” bits of wreckage that, if grasped, we can see “shot through with chips of messianic time.” And this particular technology has everything to do with connection (through the switchboard), with communication. On the other hand, another way we attempt connection, if not communication, is fraught with an estranging familiarity (that might be my best phrase for characterizing these poems), a quality Graber herself achieves as she slips, almost unnoticeably, from clothes coming off to discovery (as uncovering), from disrobing to revelation (the moving of the veil, like the shedding of the robe, or is it?), so that we at last see the sexiness of the old phone in a way that holds Benjamin in a sort of suspension and that suggests, against the character in Konrád, the real intimacy in what comes between us.

Why yes, I think I will have another Cosmopolitan

2010-11-15T18:44:00.000-08:00

You see, the thing is, the Pill has had trouble getting around to the prose he’s meant to write for this here review-type blog, the problem being not only that he’s producing a whole lot of other prose for other, less bloggy, purposes (though is he ever), but also that, while he’s been meaning to sit right down and compose a review of Kathleen Graber’s excellent The Eternal City (an intention he continues to hold because that book is good and you should all be told so in no uncertain terms), he just can’t quit going back to Donna Stonecipher.

“No,” I kept telling myself. “This here blog’s supposed to be about new stuff and that there Cosmopolitan book’s a good two years old.”

“But, Self,” it finally occurred to me to reply, “it’s my blog. It can have whatever I want on it.”

And, Gentle Reader, I want some prose about The Cosmopolitan.

This is not to say that I don’t want to write about the poems in Stonecipher’s earlier volumes, The Reservoir and Souvenir de Constantinople, but The Cosmopolitan’s prose poems are the texts that keep drawing me back – to reread, to think about, to copy out in my notebook (there is not much higher praise than that last, I think). Why? Well, because, G.R., they are smart and compelling and memorable. The book’s “Note to the Reader” links the poems to what Stonecipher calls her “generation’s relationship to quotation and collage,” and she name-checks Joseph Cornell along with inlaid furniture as analogies for these poems. The “Note” seems intended to account in this way for the quotations that appear in the poems, but it also suggests both the paratactic relationships among the sentences and numbered sections that make up the poems and the indirect eliciting of an emotional response through correlatives that might be objective but are also redolent of intimate symbolism.

Which is to say, well, here, look at these two consecutive sections of “Inlay 14 (Walter Benjamin)”:

4.
Oh yes, she liked the opera, she said, sure – but only the arias. What would life be like, we wondered under the Prussian-blue dome adorned with stars, with only the best parts left in – aria after aria? In 1874, the book said, a Danish mathematician proved that not all infinities are of equal size.

5.
The relics are safe in their gold reliquaries. The roses in the botanical drawings aren’t going anywhere, exposed and in the throes of cross-section like beauty submitting to the torture it does call forth of its own accord. Nor is the bee going to get very far, dead on the edge of the windowsill like a spent hedonist.

Set aside the “Prussian-blue” of the dome (not because it isn’t lovely, but just because it’s the most obviously Cornellian touch) and see how the carefully selected bits are juxtaposed. What, on the surface, does the proof of unequal infinities have to do with opera composed only of arias, life composed only of heights? Nothing. But each of these calls out from the other a sympathetic resonance. Intensity of experience or emotion feels as though it opens onto infinity; the stars in that dome represent massive fireballs whose distant light lasts effectively forever. At the same time, though, cue Cornell, the blue of the dome is perhaps the standout fragment in the section, and what it emphasizes is the inarticulable loveliness of the spaces between, spaces much vaster than the stars themselves, dwarfing both astronomical dwarves and giants. Not all infinities are of equal size.

Now look at the three examples of containment in the next section. They build, from precious objects in their cases to objects fixed in representation to the stillness of death (itself figured as the exhaustion of pleasure). The continuity within the section is discernible, but what’s it got to do with those infinities? Well, everything, we sense from the shimmer set off by their proximity. The infinity of death, the infinity of art, the infinity of holiness; all infinite, but unequal.

The whole poem works through these processes of association, indirect affinity, the occasional suggestion of narrative. It also (like the other poems, like the volume as a whole) sketches a city, traverses that space, invokes the spirit of the writer whose quotation is “inlaid” in the poem, and follows the titular “Cosmopolitan” through adventures of body, mind, and spirit.

I’ve been trying for months now to get over this book (another great one brought to you by the fine folks at Coffee House, by the way), to get on to newer and more current or more pressing things. I can’t. And it’s Donna Stonecipher’s fault.

Now That's What I'm Talking About

2010-10-18T17:22:00.000-07:00

So here I was all set to start a post about the exhaustion, enervation, etc., of the confessional tradition and a recommendation that poets declare a moratorium on use of the first-person singular pronoun, when over the transom drops Lisa Robertson’s new volume, R’s Boat. Gentle Reader, this book saves the first-person singular pronoun for contemporary lyric poetry. How, you ask? Why, I say, let me paraphrase T.S. Eliot’s characterization of the Tube commuters in the third part of "Burnt Norton": exhausted from exhaustion by exhaustion.

Which is to say that Robertson renders the “I” without any discernible confessional content by repeating it as the subject of sentence after sentence whose existence seems predicated less on a speaking self than on a sort of emanation from the rules of transformational grammar:

I’m talking about weird morphing catalogues and fugitive glances.
I could have been wrong.
I subsist by these glances.
I desire nothing humble or abridged.
I’m using the words of humans to say what I want to know.
I did not sigh.
I confined my thievery to perishable items.
I do not want to speak partially.
I loosened across landscape.
I doubt that I am original.
I’ve been lucky and I’m thankful.
I dreamt I lied.
I stole butter and I studied love.
(Face/)

Now, some of the interesting work here is done by the simple anaphora; repeating that diphthong over and over at the beginnings of lines makes it just another phoneme rather than the locus of identity or affect. But this is enhanced by the (mostly) paratactic relation among the lines/sentences; absent narrative or logical conjunctions, they could all be spoken by different speakers (the alternation of Roman and italic type suggests at last two), but the notion of “speakers” itself seems not quite right. Instead, the lines might simply show how sentences are formed of subjects and predicates. Our attention is shifted from expectations of confessional revelation or narrative resolution to an almost musical play of “themes” embedded in the predicates’ diction and the ghost of allusion. While the “fugitive glances” are picked up in “these glances,” most of the lines in either typeface lack this kind of linkage. Instead, we can focus on other ways the lines might connect. For example, the italicized sentences here tend towards negation and a lack of efficacy; the Roman lines emphasize positive agency. These themes are developed by the typographically marked “voices” throughout the poem (certain sentences recur from time to time, switching from Roman to italics and back), and, along with the background harmonies of sound repetition, they achieve a disembodied emotional intensity. Or not quite disembodied, because Robertson sneaks the heart in (“Here I make delicate reference to the Italian goddess Cardea who shuts what is open and opens what is shut”). Like the resolution in the tonic after a spirited spell of dissonance, the emotional tension satisfyingly climaxes when the voices synch up:

I made my way to London.
I made my way to London.

Robertson’s practice here reminds us that “text” comes from the craft of weaving. She shows the threads of certain sentences against a variety of other threads, so that small irregularities of weight or color are discernible, so that the different ways a thread can look are displayed and explored. The poem enacts emotion arising from language and the grammatical relation among parts of speech as much as it describes emotion arising from interpersonal drama and the frustration of desire, so when we get to “This is emotional truth. / I’m crying love me more.” our sympathy has been earned by not being asked for. “Such,” Robertson writes at the end of this poem, “is passivity. / I will not remember, only transcribe.” And that’s ambition enough.

Not all the poems in R’s Boat work in exactly the same way. All are longish (they run from six or seven to twelve or so pages), and all explore the construction of self and world in language. Some, though, perform reference and description, suggest narrative and action, more than others do. “A Cuff,” which originally appeared as a chapbook, achieves its effects of estrangement by mingling argumentative and descriptive registers. Here’s an early example of the latter:

The room runs to swags
And popular flower pornography
The house amplifies the trembling as if its inhabitants are lodged in an ear
To make something from what I am
From proximity, bitterness
Is just brutal
So I turned to syllables

The last three lines there put as effectively as it can be put the agony of the poem as expression of self and the ecstasy of the poem as experience of language. And here’s a nice bit of the argumentative:

If females lick
Language, death, economy
Cold sky with flat grey stormclouds
The seaport at sunset
Tubes of yellow light
This suture is a form of will
Furthermore the paradise is only ever indexical.

Proper nouns appear from time to time; cities and philosophers and artists are named. A couple of dates and times are given, though they only pretend to locate us in a world outside the text. Logical constructions give way to and then co-exist with details that might, but don't necessarily, point to a space beyond the page . And still, when Robertson writes “Now we run our fingers / Quick and innocuous / In the proper order and sequence and from the beginning,” I hear keyboards of both typewriting and musical kinds and sense, too, something (perhaps simply the lingering notion of reference) being tickled. The grammar of this sentence’s end -- “Because of my body / In the absence of a system / (It is both in ruins and still under construction)” – leaves it productively unclear whether the antecedent of the last line’s pronoun is “body” or “system.” Productively, because it’s good to be reminded, especially to be so hauntingly and musically and provocatively reminded, that even our bodies we know through codes and combinatorics. We come to our senses, or perhaps our senses come to us, through syntax.

Full Irish

2010-10-01T11:56:00.000-07:00

The Pill is back from two busy and pleasurable weeks in Ireland and glad to see that you’ve all entertained yourselves and each other in the comments. Truly glad, because it is, I think, a GOOD THING when people vigorously air their disagreements and debate issues of aesthetics, ethics, politics, etc. I especially value some of the substantial comments that take issue with my arguments and analyses; these will send me back to the poems to see whether, in the different light cast by the critiques, the poems themselves look different. For those comments, thank you. This is how the language game of critique is supposed to work, isn’t it? I report on the nature of my experience of the work. Your experience is like or not like mine and you say so and describe your own. Might mine be m isguided somehow? Maybe. So I test my experience against your account of yours. And so on. To forcefully articulate a position but to hold the position aware that it is not unassailable is, it seems to me, one of the prerequisites of evaluative criticism. I don’t assume that my judgment (that’s all criticism is) is infallible. This is not, of course, to guarantee that a strong counter-argument will persuade me, any more than I assume that my arguments will change anybody else’s mind. I’ve got some ideas of my own about irony and immanent evidence for tone and the renovation (as opposed to the mere repetition) of cliche, after all. I’m just glad we’re talking about this stuff, and at a pretty high volume (in both senses).

I’ve titled this post “Full Irish” in honor of the breakfast that bears this name, which, for the uninitiated, typically includes egg, bacon, sausage, mushrooms, beans, black and white puddings, whiskey, choice of Hansel or Gretel, grilled tomato, toast, tea, and Pepto Bismol. Herewith, some similarly smorgasbordish thoughts inspired by the trip.

In Dublin’s fair city, I took in some Joyce-related sights and was prompted to recall that moment in “The Dead” when Gabriel Conroy is accosted by Miss Ivors. “You’re G.C.,” she says, “outing” him as the author of a book review he published over his initials. This was a gratifying reminder that to publish a review over one’s initials is neither anonymous nor trollish, but is, in fact, simply adherence to a long-standing convention in reviewing, one dating back to the invention of the review in the new periodicals of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. And then, feeling peckish, your faithful correspondent lunched upon a Gorgonzola sandwich and retired to Davy Byrne’s for a one-eyed pint.

As I was driving westward a few days later, two texts kept repeating in my head. Each, in its way, recalls the Famine that devastated the island, and especially the less fertile western areas, in the 1840s. In “That the Science of Cartography Is Limited,” Eavan Boland frames an image of the Famine’s traumatic presence in Irish history with autobiographical intimacy:

When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.

Look down you said: this was once a famine road.

I looked down at the ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in

1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.

The juxtaposition of young lovers and the wound in the land works here, I think, because it’s in the service of exploring the ineffable. Our representational schemes simply don’t enable us to capture or render certain realities. While it’s not the poem’s primary focus, an important reality it registers is the way love is constructed in part by the shared witness of historical suffering (it’s a weird, but apt, kind of courting that the poem recounts but also subtly suggests tends to be missing from our accounts). In Lucky’s amazing speech in Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett literalizes and inverts Hegel’s master and slave relationship as if to ask what love’s got to do with it and to emphasize a starkly chilling and historically resonant memento mori:

. . . I resume the skull fading fading fading and concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons unknown in spite of the tennis on on the beard the flames the tears the stones so blue so calm alas alas on on the skull the skull the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the labors abandoned left unfinished graver still abode of stones in a word I resume alas alas abandoned unfinished the skull the skull in Connemara . . .

Wildly different, not least in their original languages, these passages share not only the Famine as a reference point but also evidence of rigorous thought about the ways that event’s significance figures in the presents of Ireland in the 1990s and Paris in the first postwar decade.

I’ve had good times in Galway in the past, standing in a crowded pub, sipping a pint, listening to a half-dozen musicians playing trad in the corner. What’s most impressive about some of those performances is that the musicians don’t seem to care whether anyone’s listening (and not everyone is). Their attention is on the music, and they seem to be moved by a sense of responsibility to it rather than to the pub full of people. They’ll test each other’s knowledge and, sometimes, the punters’ patience, with esoteric choices and unexpected juxtapositions. This time, though, the center of the city seemed like a sort of Disneyland Ireland, and it was packed with tourists whose guidebooks had clearly told them they should seek out music pubs for some good, old-fashioned craic, and the pubs had drawn musicians happy to turn their backs to the tradition and mug for the crowd. The tourists ate this stuff up, of course. Maybe the musicians went home and congratulated themselves on the way they ironically riffed on the tourists’ desires for accessibly happy or sappy songs performed in broad stage-Paddy stylings. I’d like to think so. But whether they did or not, the experience of watching and hearing them seem simply to perform accessibly happy and sappy songs in broad stage-Paddy stylings left this listener, who loves and values the carefully crafted, expertly innovated, real thing, disappointed.

Poets Per Capita

2010-09-23T13:51:00.000-07:00

Are there more poets per capita in Northern Ireland than in most other places? I'm not sure. But the density of quality poetry produced here is impressive, to say the least. Sure, there are the Ulster Renaissance types everybody knows: Heaney, Longley, Mahon, Muldoon, McGuckian. But also an older generation or two who ought to have a wider readership. John Hewitt, for instance, whose house I passed on the way from Dublin to Belfast today. Or Louis MacNeice, for whose "Snow" alone he ought to be more famous (and whose Autumn Journal is one of my favorite poems of the late 1930s). But MacNeice said awful things about Ireland, and I'm having a good time here, so instead I'll give you a sample of Ciaran Carson (whose middle name I would tell you if I knew it, but, alas, I do not), and since I'm about to go enjoy a pint at the Crown, here's a pub poem:

Last Orders

Squeeze the buzzer on the steel mesh gate like a trigger, but
It's someone else who has you in their sights. Click. It opens.
Like electronic
Russian roulette, since you never know for sure who's who, or what
You're walking into. I, for instance, could be anybody. Though I'm told
Taig's written on my face. See me, and would I trust appearances?

Inside, a sudden lull. The barman lolls his head at us. We order Harp --
Seems safe enough, everybody drinks it. As someone looks
daggers at us
From the Bushmills mirror, a penny drops: how simple it would
be for someone
Like ourselves to walk in and blow the whole place, and
ourselves, to Kingdom Come.

Worst. Book. Ever.

2010-09-10T18:34:00.000-07:00

The Pill is, as a rule, averse to superlatives. I have, when pressed, been heard to aver that Ardbeg is the best single malt Scotch whisky and that British Air is the worst airline on which to fly to or from London, but that’s about it. So it is with some hesitation that I tell you that Dorothea Lasky’s Black Life is the worst volume of poetry I have ever read, but tell you that I will. And Gentle Reader, I have read this.

It’s an ugly book, and I don’t just mean the awful and illegible cover, the bizarre trim size or the off-putting Quemadura typeface (though those are all bad enough). I mean the poems themselves.

I’ll get to the ugliness. But first I’ve got to admit to some simple confusion. Are these poems dramatic monologues, with speakers distinct from the poet? I kept hoping so, especially when I came upon a solecism like this (from “Fat”):

I have wandered for six days with no bread, drank lemon water
Went running.

This, my fellow lovers of the language, is incorrect tense usage; the sentence begins with the past participle form of the verb (“have wandered”) but slips, after the comma, to the simple past (keep the "have" in your head when you get to "drank" and you'll hear the problem). A deft and economical way of characterizing a speaker, suggesting sloppiness of thought through intentional sloppiness of language? A moment in which we are subtly invited to join the poet in her ironic distance from this linguistically slovenly speaker? Would that it were so. The same poem includes banal lines about writing poems:

I have written poems about the flesh of scientists
But nothing in their science speaks to me about my art.

Oh dear. But wait. It's worse. Examples abound. Here’s another, from “Ars Poetica”:

Yesterday my boyfriend called me, drunk again
And interspersed between ringing tears and clinginess
He screamed at me with a kind of bitterness
No other human being had before to my ears
And told me that I was no good.

Perhaps he meant her grammar, for the “interspersed” in the second line suggests that what we’ll find between the tears and, ahem, "clinginess" is a noun, not the verb phrase “He screamed.” Something, rather than some action, is interspersed between (or, better, among) other things.

Pedantry? OK. I’ll accept that. But Ezra Pound, who was woefully wrong about many things, was right, I think, when he wrote that poetry should be as well written as well-written prose, and these here Black Life poems are emphatically not.

What they are is chopped-up bad prose about how hard it is to be the poet (and these poems never, ever let the reader forget that they were written by a real, live poet):

I am a great woman, I have the wiles
That make the poet
But I am also gentle
And when I kiss a man I really mean it
Have you felt this too, upon my kisses
That I gave you in the nightsky
As your eyelashes hung over the moon?
Or were you too young to see it too,
My little feverish butterfly

Oh, the cheap cummingsy runtogetherness! Oh the sappy Chagallery! Oh the missing terminal punctuation! Oh, the humanity!

One is embarrassed for Lasky at a moment like this. Or like this here other one, from “Jakob”:

Readers, you read flat words
Inside here are many moments
In which I have screamed in pain
As the flames ate me.

One's critical response is reduced by such lines as these to the head-shaking repetition of "Oh dear." But, OK, these are just run-of-the-mill bad, the sort of awful self-obsessed, craftless crap that smears a thousand workshop tables in creative writing classrooms and MFA programs around the country (and soils, one admits, far more notebooks whose sophomore owners have the decency to keep them out of sight and, perhaps, when the writers come to cast mature eyes on their late-night, wine-fueled drivel, consign them to the cleansing flames). I got halfway through the book just irritated by the fact that this stuff got slapped between those ugly covers instead of being sanitarily flushed.

And then I read “Ever Read a Book Called Awe?”

[Gentle Reader, this humble blogger pauses now to ask you to recognize that, though the following might at first blush feel intemperate, great restraint in fact was brought to bear in the composition and revision of these sentences.]

It's bad enough that we're treated to the navel-gazing bout of self-absorption in which the poet asks if we've read her previous book, in which she goes on to describe, in a sickening faux-naif tone, the publication process, and that this wince-inducing anecdote is made somehow to stand for love as it's juxtaposed to "Some people I love / Don't love me." (Yeah, I threw up in my mouth a little there, too.) What transforms icky to full-on revolting is the next juxtaposition. Sometimes, you see, people love the speaker (I'm going to retain this persona/poet distinction, though there's precious little evidence to support it), and, as the poem has it, "That's good," and then the Big and Important Generalizations appear:

When you sit in a landscape of snow
And you're a bird, that's Awe
When you look over a big green field
And the dead soldiers like all around you, that's Love

And when you shift from your navel and your precious little undeserved career to the Capital-H History figured by those dead soldiers, whose vintage, by way of that "Awe," seems to be in the 2003-present category, that's stealing some unearned gravitas from the fatigue pockets of casualties like a camp follower grabbing wallets. And it's disgusting.

Bad poems, Gentle Reader, are bad enough. This book is worse. It's ugly.

Laugh Line Award?

2010-08-29T09:19:00.000-07:00

Clearly I misread. It can't be that the James Laughlin award has been given to the execrable Michael Dickman? The award named for the founder and lifelong director of New Directions, the press that brought real experimental and interesting poetry (and other stuff) to American audiences? Must have been the Laugh Line Award instead. You know, for poems stuffed with knowing moments when the poet looks up from the page and all the hipster kids in the crowd laugh loudly to show they got the joke. Longer post coming soon.

The Unbearable Being of Labels

2010-08-22T14:45:00.000-07:00

I like prose poems. Lots of different kinds of them, too, from Paris Spleen to Perelman. And I write what goes by various cutely alliterative names: flash fiction, short short stories (I prefer the assonantal quick fiction). The more I read and the more I write, the more I wonder whether the modifiers in these monikers are really necessary.

If a prose poem is a poem (and I know there are those who will argue that it's not), why can't we just call it a poem? And if a short short is a story (ditto), how about just "story"?

In the case of the latter, I've often invoked a track and field analogy: some stories are sprints, some middle distance races, and some are long, cross-country treks. Length is no real help in discussions of the prose poem (though there are p.p. sprints - the typical Eshelman or Matthea Harvey breaks the tape after a couple-hundred words - and longer distances - I'm looking at you, John Ashbery). But differentiating stories by their length is not the same as taxonomizing poems by length; even when we distinguish epic from lyric, length is only the most obvious (but perhaps not the most important) salient feature. No matter how long a poem is, as long as its right-hand margin is irregular, as long, that is, as it's broken into lines, we call it a poem. A prose poem, whether it's a single sentence or book-length, always has to wear its defensive-sounding adjective, as if admitting that it's somehow not a "real" poem (but if it listens to the blue fairy and the cricket and behaves itself for a long time, it might, someday, . . .).

Poem, it is worth remembering from time to time, is at least as much an indication of how we read a given text as of that text's essence or nature. Whether in lines or in paragraphs, if we read it with a special attention to language as a material out of which something is fashioned, if we're on the lookout for its self-referring, self-consuming characteristics, we're reading it as if it's a poem, and if we're doing that, we're making it, by the way we read it, a poem. Just a poem.

Give It Away, Give It Away, Give It Away Now

2010-08-13T12:33:00.000-07:00

As promised, thing two of the two things left on the Pill's mind a couple of posts ago. I mentioned there and I've mentioned before the shrinking poetry dollar, or the shriveling part of the discretionary spending pie chart served up for poetry by the reading public. Where one used to complain that only poets were reading poetry, the days when that was the complaint now seem to have been the good old days. Even poets, or poetasters, or would-be, ersatz, erstwhile, proleptic and otherwise possible poets aren't reading the stuff these days.

I overstate, for polemical effect. But here's the thing: a whole lot of poetry books, chapbooks, mags, e-mags, zines, pamphlets, and broadsheets are being produced and marketed by presses large and small, corporate and academic, by indie and mini and micro and happy and sneezy and sleepy and doc. How much, this book-buying, mag-subscribing, screen-reading blogger wonders, is being sold (and, ipso fatso, bought)? Not enough of it, according to the frequent plaints and laments about the shrinking audience for poetry on the page (not the same as the audience for poetry in performance, which will require another post entirely). Which prompts the larger question: why are we bothering to sell the stuff anyway?

There was a time (1720 til 1890, say), and bliss was it in that dawn to be a poet (unless you were John Keats getting beaten up on the pages of the Edinburgh Review), when composers of verses could make an honest living by the sweat of their quills. Though, really, Grub Streeters still either required a wealthy patron or grunted and sweated under a weary weight of hack-work to keep themselves in cheap meat pies and sack. There followed that Golden Age when a strong dollar and inexpensive Euro-digs let some modernists live off their writing, but even then it was the rare poet who could get by without a wealthy spouse, the kindness of friends, a day job, or all of the above. It was, of course, the postwar proliferation of English departments (to soak up G.I. Bill undergraduates) and creative writing programs that provided the sinecures in which poets could secure the means of literary production.

The point of this potted history, and especially of its parentheses, asides, digressions, and qualifications, is that the stuff has never sold well enough to keep more than a small handful of poets in garrets, tallow candles, and patched hose, and the poets who lived most securely while producing some great stuff tended to have (non-literary, non-teaching) day jobs anyway. So if most poets aren't making their living by selling their poetry and are instead making their living by writing other stuff or teaching or selling insurance, if, that is, most poets are producing poems not because it is remunerative but because it is in other (very important) ways fulfilling, and if, as I think is the case, one of the most important of those modes of fulfilling is precisely antithetical to the notions of capitalist production and the forces of the market (poetry as play, as the park rather than the factory), then again I must ask: why bother trying to sell it?

About thirty years ago, the poet Roy Fisher said in an interview that if poets wanted people to read their stuff they should just give it away. And poetry as part of a gift economy makes much more sense than the efforts to make it compete in the marketplace. Giving it away has a long and glorious history (think of all those poets in Tottel's Miscellany and the Egerton Manuscript). OK, those were courtiers (but think of the day jobs Wyatt and Surrey and company held while they wrote all those sonnets and epistles, while they blamed not their lutes and reached out to "Mine Own John Poins"! Would we have to re-think tenure requirements for poets with academic appointments? Sure: poets could list the pamphlets and loose sheets they handed out, the lyrics and eclogues and epics they posted to the blogosphere and their colleagues would have to do what they've let the market do for them all these years and evaluate the stuff themselves.

Give Chance a Chance

2010-08-05T07:50:00.001-07:00

Two things from the last post that I want to follow up on in the next week or so: chance and the shrinking poetry-buying dollar. In the spirit of what follows, I flipped a coin to determine the order. So, here are some thoughts on not making shit up.

Maybe it’s all the Flarf and Conceptual stuff I’m reading (and reading about) these days, maybe it’s that I’ve been playing some composition-by-chance games with my students and on my own, but I find myself nostalgic for the good old aleatory poem. Whether a Cagean writing-through, an Oulipian cut-up, a MacLowesque diastic, or even a cool, refreshing Surrealist automatic writing exercise, it’s fun to take a chance on chance both as reader and as writer (if that last noun’s really the right one; I tend to say that poems I’ve produced through these games are ones I’ve made rather than written).

As reader: I’ve been enjoying re-reading Jackson MacLow lately. I picked up (by chance?) a couple of his books a year or two ago at a great used bookstore in my part of the world and they sat on my bookcase until, needing to choose some Susan Howe and Haryette Mullen poems to teach this fall, I saw them and flipped through. Wot larks! Gentle Reader, hie theee hence and read a little MacLow (there are a few poems here, for instance). To tempt you thither, “Call Me Ishmael”:

Circulation. And long long
Mind every
Interest Some how mind and every long

Coffin about little little
Money especially
I shore, having money about especially little

Cato a little little
Me extreme
I sail have me an extreme little

Cherish and left, left,
Myself extremest
It see hypos myself and extremest left,

City a land. Land.
Mouth; east,
Is spleen, hand mouth; an east, land.

But don’t stop there. Even with no French, you can find examples from Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poemes, a do-it-yourself assembly kit from which may be assembled 10-to-the-14th different sonnets. Bev Rowe has a good translation project going on these. Here’s one:

At five o’clock he rests in his marquise
and sleeves are wrapped round horns of buffalo
the chosen fruit is hued a bright cerise
who knows if sharks will feast on bummalo

The Papuan sucks his friend’s apophyses
your mind turns more and more to gloom and woe
going up to visit town is quite a wheeze
most people like to read the words they know

Milord has lisped from Malibar to Swat
you mix with that you’ll find you’ve had your lot
shame gives a colonel’s brow a greasy sheen

Those Latin states spin like a weathercock
one carts off debris marble from the block
but best is grilled black pudding with sardine

As a writer: I suggested some aleatory methods to my first-year poetry students as a way to help them get out of the prison-house of self-expression and to play the language game of poetry as a poetry of gaming with language. The results were mixed (they always are, I think, with these methods, though in that regard the poems produced are not all different from those produced by other means; there are a lot of bad poems in which every word was consciously and intentionally chosen, too). And, though I don’t write poems much, having long ago realized that I’m better at reading the stuff than at writing it, I gave some of the games a try myself.

That’s when things got weird.

The Pill, Gentle Reader, does not believe in magic, but at a certain point it began to feel as though the interplay of rule and found text was generating stuff that spoke to where I was and what I was thinking and feeling. To wit: I tried some varieties of writing through – using the letters of a name or phrase to select from an existing text a bunch of fragments that became lines. Sometimes I looked for words beginning with the letters of the phrase, sometimes words in which those letters simply appeared. I used the letters’ numeric values to choose page numbers on which to search, lines on the page at which to begin searching, and, sometimes, the number of words to include that fell on either side of the one in which the letter appeared. A couple of results from this kind of game played with Thoreau’s Cape Cod can be found in an essay of mine. But the real magic came when, over a Thanksgiving weekend during which I felt particularly low, I worked through Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy with the letters of a significant proper noun. I won’t hazard a comment on the quality of the product, but I will say that, for the first time, I felt what some writers who use such methods have talked about – something was guiding me to bits of language whose relevance to my situation was palpable. I’d read Burton with great pleasure before, but this time it was like the book was talking to me about me.

Here’s number 3, of 12:

They beget one another and tread in a ring.
If it takes root once, it ends in despair,
perturbation, misery. Torment
hinders concoction,
causes men to be red.
Conceive what it lists,
broken with reproach,
forsaking country and dear friends.

Mischances misaffect the body:
almost natural,
being barren,
some quarrel or grudge, some contention.

I know, I know. There’s an explanatory circularity here: feeling melancholy, one applies the source of the feeling to a text about the feeling and, voila, poems addressing the feeling emerge. But it felt like something more, and for that reason alone I’d recommend giving such games a shot.

Some (P)Arts of the Sonnet

2010-07-28T09:36:00.000-07:00

Every generation seems to need a new rehearsal of the sonnet’s history, a new compendium of exemplars, a new set of two-page commentaries. Our age, it seems, demanded its version and so we have, courtesy of Stephen Burt and David Mikics, The Art of the Sonnet.

Sigh.

I suppose it hurts no one to be reminded, again, of the sonnet’s origins in 13th-century Italy, of its importation into English verse by 16th-century diplomats and noblemen, of its enormous popularity among Elizabethan courtiers, its resurgence among the Romantics, and its position as a favorite occasion for experiment (or rabid resistance to experimentalism) among modern and contemporary poets. And yet another volume that takes us from “Whoso list to hount” through Sidney, Spenser, a couple of the best-known Shakespeares, Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Millay, Frost, and Heaney is as good a way as any for the small and shrinking poetry-buying public to spend their few discretionary dollars (though I'd much rather they bought new volumes by living poets, like this one or this here other one). The mini-essays on the sonnets here are fine. Burt is a prolific and deft book-reviewer and his skill is evident (disclosure: we were colleagues a few years ago). But I’ve never been quite sure of the purpose served by commentaries in volumes like this. If the book is for students, the commentaries perform some of the work students ought to do themselves as they play with the poems. If it’s for scholars, the commentaries add little to ongoing critical conversations (we'll read Roland Greene on post-Petrarchanism, thanks). And if the book is, as I suspect it will be, picked up mostly by the sort of well-off professional who would like to add a little literary knowledge as a mark of Bourdieuian distinction (the audience for recorded lectures on, say, music appreciation or classics in translation), the commentaries will too often stand in for, rather than lead into, the poems themselves (it is, after all, much easier to derive cocktail party tidbits from prose about a poem than from the poem itself).

The contents attempt historical comprehensiveness (not just the big three Renaissance sonneteers, but also Fulke Greville and George Gascoigne, not just the major Romantics but also the eccentric American, Jones Very, etc). Likewise, the later periods (the book tilts toward the recent) show at least an awareness of the desirability of aesthetic diversity (a Ted Berrigan sonnet here, a Tony Lopez sonnet there). But it’s precisely here that I find the book most irritating. Take the 30 sonnets included here published after 1960 (please). Among them appear sonnets by May Swenson, Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, Tony Harrison, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Amy Clampitt, John Hollander, Rosanna Warren, Rita Dove, and Alison Brackenbury. Sure, these poets offer certain kinds of diversity. Harrison fills the form with political dissatisfaction, Dove with racial consciousness. Lowell is caught amidst his long experiment with the blank verse sonnet as a journalistic form and Bishop halves the lengths of the lines from their usual pentameter. But these, and most of the others here, exemplify one or another version of the familiar form doing familiar things with fairly familiar themes. (By the way, while two of the great recent experimenters with the sonnet – Geoffrey Hill and Paul Muldoon – are present and accounted for, I find myself wishing, in one of those inescapable critical cavils, that they were represented by some of their more searching experiments; “Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings,” say, or “Quoof”).

Here’s the thing. There are more fun and interesting adventures in the sonnet since 1950 than are dreamt of in this book’s philosophy. The form was a favorite among writers on the political Left during the Fifties (not surprising, given the prominence of politics among the oft-treated themes in the form’s history). One might imagine, to give Harrison some company, an example from Walter Lowenfels’s Sonnets of Love and Liberty, or one of the tart, taut 14-line pokes at pop culture published by Eve Merriam. I’ve acknowledged the welcome presence of Berrigan and Lopez, but here, too, they might have been given a bit more sympathetic company in the form of a section from Lopez’s fellow Cambridge-schooler Drew Milne’s "Garden of Tears," say, or from Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets or Alice Notley’s 165 Meeting House Lane. Indeed, the really interesting riches among experimental sonneteers is something this volume would never lead you to suspect. Here’s half a dozen examples off the top of my head, in no particular order: Ken Edwards’s Eight + Six, Adrian Clarke’s 25 Sonnets, Sean Bonney’s Astrophil and Stella, Allen Fisher’s Apocalyptic Sonnets, Edwin Denby’s In Public, In Private, and Geraldine Monk’s “Ghosts.” (You can find some of these, or parts thereof, in The Reality Street Book of Sonnets.) And this is to say nothing of the great Oulipian games with the form; they’d have to be included in translation, but this didn’t stop Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo wandering leglessly in.

And this, I think, is what fuels my crankiness about another Wyatt-to-Walcott slog through the history of the sonnet. There are plenty of anthologies, with and without commentary, in which a student, a scholar, or a would-be sophisticate can find the familiar sonnets included here, from “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” to “Bluebeard,” and the exemplars better than those included here (Frost’s “Design,” for instance, instead of “Mowing”). Which leaves me, once more, wondering just what purpose is served by this partial (in both senses) survey.

Question Time

2010-07-06T14:24:00.000-07:00

Tooling around on Ron Silliman’s blog a couple weeks ago, the Pill discovered a bunch of new poets to check out. Familiar with (indeed, a fan of) Graham Foust, and on nodding acquaintance with poems by a couple of the others Silliman mentioned as exemplars of the “New Precision” (or is it “New Precisionism”?), here was a half dozen or so poets utterly new to me: Joseph Massey, Michael Heller, Donna Stonecipher, and others). It’s a great thing to be introduced to new work (or work unknown to one). But in the last week or so, as part of my work on a writing project, I’ve been having to reread some poems I know pretty well, and there’s no denying the rich pleasure of rereading (hell, according to Roland Barthes, it’s the only real reading).

Most of what I’ve been rereading is distant not only from the Newly Precise, but also from the varieties of poetic experiment typically catalogued on Silliman’s blog. Today, for example, it’s been R. S. Thomas’s “Welsh Landscape,” Seamus Heaney’s “Bruagh,” and Ted Hughes’s Moortown, while yesterday was David Dabydeen’s Turner, and last week was Douglas Dunn’s Elegies. More than that, even the twentieth-century poems I’ve been writing about I’ve been writing about in light of much older and still more familiar ones (the elegiac ones in light of Milton’s “Lycidas,” the others in light of Virgil, Marvell, and Jonson). But between my daily 300-500 words on the book-in-progress and the World Cup semi-final between Uruguay and the Netherlands, I stole an hour to reread something Sillimanesque, since it’d been a while since I’d reread that kind of thing.

Indeed, I reread something so Sillimanesque it was Silliman; driven by questions, it seemed a good idea to return to a poem composed entirely of interrogatives, Silliman’s “Sunset Debris.” I remember reading it something like twenty years ago, back when the New Sentence was really new, and being guided through it by a group of like-minded grad school friends but also by Marjorie Perloff’s discussion of the poem in Wittgenstein’s Ladder. A serious house on serious earth it was, at that time, a challenge to orthodoxies philosophical, poetic, and political, a darkly aggressive and demanding text the reading of which we would, as we did with various other 30-page chunks of difficulty (e.g. Stein’s “Patriarchal Poetry”) wear as a badge of avant-honor.

What a pleasant surprise, then, to reread the poem (it really is thirty pages, and it really is all questions) and discover how much fun it is. Here’s the beginning:

Can you feel it? Does it hurt? Is this too soft? Do you like it? Is this how you like it? Is it alright? Is he there? Is he breathing? Is it him? Is it near? Is it hard? Is it cold? Does it weigh much? Is it heavy? Do you have to carry it far? Are those hills? Is this where we get off? Which one are you? Are we there yet? Do we need to bring sweaters? Where is the border between blue and green? Has the mail come? Have you come yet?

See what I mean?

OK. On one hand, there really is something avant and aggressive in the insistent repetition of a specific syntactic form. As Silliman said about the poem in an interview, communication inherently involves power relationships (well, what he said was “To write is to fuck. To read is to be fucked.”), and the poem puts its reader in a position sort of like that of a hapless Prime Minister caught on the horns of a back-bench challenge before the House, or like one finds oneself in during a round of that old stand-by drinking game, Questions. Provoked by a wrong-footing question like “Which one are you,” it’s tough to resist answering (which forces you to drink) rather than replying with another question. Once you’re playing the game, you’ve got to submit to its rules.

Still, what really stands out for me in this poem now is its playfulness. Many of the moves among questions are non sequiturs, but often one question seems conditioned (or, better, our range of possible interpretive response seems conditioned) by the preceding one or by earlier ones. The first three quoted here establish a pattern that seems to refer to the physical, and the next three continue in that vein but with an added affective element. Taken together, that half-dozen questions invite erotic imaginings. Things might get sinister with “Is he there,” might go off in a different direction with “Is it near,” but when we get to “Is it hard,” or “Is this where we get off,” or “Have you come yet,” I think our reading is influenced by the opening questions. We can play with this in various ways – who is speaking these questions? What relationships can be imagined among the speakers? – but we’re going to be frustrated (not without pleasure, I think) if we try to impose a straightforward drama on the poem. Instead, it’s fun to follow the shift from a discourse of feeling to one we might characterize as topographical to the cliché of kids on a car trip to the intricate connection between perception and taxonomy, and so on, when all that these sentences really have in common (as if that weren’t either significant or enough) is that they’re all questions. Isn’t that cool? Cool enough for sweaters? Was Van Persie offside?

New Laureate

2010-07-01T12:55:00.000-07:00

The best reading of poetry requires deep and sustained attention, it demands a retreat from the noises that surround us and a quieting of the voices within us, and it rewards our concentration with a more finely tuned awareness of truths, an awareness that is affirmative even when the news is bad. Few poetries at once demand and reward this kind of careful listening as richly as does W.S. Merwin’s finest work. For over fifty years now, since his first book (A Mask for Janus) was chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series, Merwin has produced poetry that answers to and embodies the deepest difficulties inherent in language and life. He has also published volumes of translations (from, it seems, half the poets who have ever written in three-quarters of the world’s languages, including, most recently, Dante, the Gawain poet, and Follain), and four books of breathtaking prose. Now, this craftsman is the Poet Laureate of the U.S.

Much has been made of the stylistic shifts that have marked Merwin's career, that have, indeed, demarcated its eras. It is true that Merwin began by mastering the intricate and lapidary forms bequeathed him by the European lyric tradition and then, in the early and middle 1960s, published searing, stripped down, fragmentary poems that read like the eroded remains of lyric inscriptions. It is true that the early poems bear little resemblance to a poem like “Gift,” written twenty years later and including such lines as “I am nameless I am divided / I am invisible I am untouchable,” and that “Gift” is not much like the politically aggressive “Questions to Tourists Stopped By a Pineapple Field” published ten years later and that neither of these poems compares in philosophical density and wealth of historical detail to more recent poems like, say, “The Blind Seer of Ambon,” which is itself different from the thrilling autumnal auroras of The River Sound, which, if we really want to compare apples and oranges, cannot approach the epic sweep and episodic pathos of the brilliant book-length narrative poem on nineteenth-century Hawai’i, The Folding Cliffs.

At the same time, a rereading of this long and varied career yields surprising continuities. Merwin’s has always been a poetry crafted amidst and in the full awareness and acceptance of mortality. It is, as life is, a preparation for those last fires. Moreover, the apocalyptic scenarios of the early books continue in the later work, in, for example, the devastating representation of sandalwood logging and its associated natural and human destruction in The Folding Cliffs. Merwin’s passionate care for the natural environment and his passionate critique of human rapacity have energized his poems throughout his career. So have his convictions about injustice and what he has called “the shamelessness of men,” from 1967’s “The Asians Dying” to 2001’s “The Fence,” dedicated to Matthew Shepard.

More central and enduring even than these specific political energies, though, has been Merwin’s understanding that language is at once what enables and enacts those extinctions and injustices and what might help us to find other, better ways of being in the world. Indeed, Merwin’s famous abandonment of punctuation (about halfway through 1963’s The Moving Target – I like to date it, conveniently, to “The Crossroads of the World, Etc.”) can be read as one of his most powerful strategies for loosening the determining and debilitating hold syntax so often has upon us. His unpunctuated lines, whether the short, almost groaned lines of The Lice or the long and limber lines of Travels, involve us in repeated dramas of resolution, revision, and renewed meaning.

Don't take my word for it. Here is "December Among the Vanished," one of my favorites from The Lice:

The old snow gets up and moves taking its
Birds with it

The beasts hide in the knitted walls
From the winter that lipless man
Hinges echo but nothing opens

A silence before this one
Has left its broken huts facing the pastures
Through their stone roofs the snow
And the darkness walk down

In one of them I sit with a dead shepherd
And watch his lambs

And here is "Cold Spring Morning," from Merwin's 2008 volume, The Shadow of Sirius:

At times it has seemed that when
I first came here it was an old self
I recognized in the silent walls
and the river far below
but the self has no age
as I knew even then and had known
for longer than I could remember
as the sky has no sky
except itself this white morning in May
with fog hiding the barns
that are empty now and hiding the mossed
limbs of gnarled wlanut trees and the green
pastures unfurled along the slope
I know where they are and the birds
that are hidden in their own calls
in the cold morning
I was not born here I come and go

To parse these poems is to engage the rules for sense-making, to admit our own wrong-footedness, to rethink relationships (grammatical and otherwise), and to engage a mind that will shrink neither from conviction nor from complexity. To read Merwin is to become a better reader, and to share his cautious hope that better readers might be better people. This, I think, is perhaps the greatest wisdom we might hope for from a careful communion with the mind embodied in Merwin’s poems: an intertwined distrust of language as that which categorizes and prioritizes and, too often, dehumanizes, and as at the same time, also, always, that with which we might come more tentatively, tenderly, but fully to be human together.

World Cup Poetry

2010-06-19T15:29:00.000-07:00

All right, my fellow Americans. The Pill has had it with countrymen and countrywomen dissing what the world (rightly) calls football because it is, as they say, "boring." This is especially rich coming from a) fans of baseball (among whom I count myself), which might with more justice stand in the dock accused of the selfsame offense, and b) fans of things like symphonic or chamber music, avant-garde art, and, ahem, poetry.

Why do I number the latter among this company? Because, Gentle Reader, I have heard the philistines calling each to each when the Superior Genre celebrated on this lyriophilic blog is mentioned (I do not think that they will call to me), and the sound borne on the breeze from where they gather before American Idol is this: "bo-ring, bo-ring, bo-ring."

Here's the thing: "boring" is always code for something else (typically the bovine refusal to engage), and in this case (these cases -- what I'm saying of soccer I'm also saying of poetry) it's code for "I don't get it." And haven't we all, those of us who proselytize for soccer or for poetry (or both), confronted the dismissal of our beloved part of culture as boring by those who simply haven't yet learned the moves? Both matches and poems often offer easy surface pleasures, I think, and a moment spent absorbing those is fun enough all by itself. But both soccer games and sonnets open up in pleasurable and interesting ways when we spend the little time required to learn the basics, when we learn the pattern so that we can see the meaning in a deviation from it.

And what's true of poetry in general, I think, is true of particular kinds of poetry as well. Am I the only one who has heard from readers who claim to enjoy the genre that they simply can't get into, say, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, because, unlike the poems of Shakespeare or Keats or Mary Oliver or Spencer Reese, it's "boring"? Isn't this, though, simply a way of saying (as those who complain about a goalless match full of brilliant midfield play will say) "I don't get it and am unwilling to put any effort into trying to get it"? Any reason why we should listen to such people, to say nothing of making them directors of the NEA or having them edit anthologies for classroom use?

Review: Ross's Vinland

2010-05-26T08:15:00.000-07:00

The Pill is willing to admit – can see no shame in it – that he is probably influenced by the opinions of those whose opinions he respects. The whole reviewing racket, after all, is premised on the assumption that one’s opinions might influence someone, somewhere. More concerning to the Pill is the possibility that his opinions are unduly influenced by antagonism to those whose opinions he’s never cared for. Either way, one wants to think one’s mind is one’s own. So as I read a handful of newish books from Four Way, which I can do now that the semester is over, the grades are in, the cap and gown are hung back up until next May, I wonder whether I’d like Monica Youn’s Ignatz better without one of its blurbs (by a grad-school writing group buddy of the poet’s, though of course this, natch, is left unstated), and whether I’d like Jamie Ross’s Vinland less without its endorsement by Brigit Kelly (who judged the competition for the Four Way Books Intro Prize). Kelly is not only a poet gifted with the capacity to cast keen observations into the kind of precise language that etches enzyme pathways through the neural network; she is also a generous reader – in multiple senses: she devotes time during her own readings to the poems of other poets, she takes time to read with care and comment with encouragement, insight, and rigor on the efforts of graduate students who really shouldn’t bother her with such things (I was one such fortunate neophyte), and, it turns out, she gets right to the heart of a project like Ross’s.

Kelly’s citation (it deserves a better name than “blurb,” and is really something like a prose poem itself) repeats terms that, as well as any, give a sense of what Ross is up to in Vinland: dreams, visions, rhythms. A visual artist as well as a poet, Ross is concerned with perception and what warps it, with the representation of the perceived, the rendering of the real into the angles, curves, and intersections that might convey it to a second-hand perceiver. These concerns manifest themselves not only in the subjects of some of these poems (“El Niño,” or “Infinite Physics, Infinite Hand,” or “Flyer” or “Treehouse”), which are about painting or the view from one standpoint or another, but also, and more importantly, in Ross’s handling of language and those units – the word, the phrase, the line – that are poetry’s cognates for the painter’s color, modeling, and plane. Check out, for example, this stanza from the title poem:

I say it is rain, for the rooster. And the fog,
and the dispersion of the small. And I say
it is rain for the sound of despair. For
the clutched breath in a child’s dream
when the mare goes blind and licks
a wound. For the light I cannot reach. For
my father is building his boat.

Note the first line’s insistence on artifice; we don’t see rain, we see the saying that “it is rain.” And this is attached not to a cause (it’s cloudy) or to evidence (there are drops falling from the sky), but to a non sequitur in the form of an adverbial phrase. This is no more about rain than “The Red Wheel Barrow” is about a wheelbarrow. It is, instead, about “rain,” and the ways the word connects – through sound to “rooster,” through the discourse of climate to “fog,” through the family resemblance to other droplet-like things in “the dispersion of the small.” The third sentence then takes sonic resemblance to re-interprets it as affective resemblance. The next sentence elaborates despair through concrete emblems. The repeated “for the” structure establishes a pattern that is broken by the stanza’s concluding sentence, which uses a word that appears to be the same (“for”) in a different grammatical sense (here as a synonym for “because”). What I’m getting at is that Ross is using language here in a way that foregrounds the substance itself rather than the objects, relationships, attitudes, etc., that everyday language (and too much contemporary poetry) is supposed simply to reveal.

Sometimes, the poems work through perception to moments of fairly clear narrative or meditation. In “The Most Handsome Man in America,” the speaker reads a photograph first in terms of objects in space (“We see the bottom of a car, parked / at the top”), then in terms of familial history (the photograph depicts the speaker’s parents), and, finally, in terms of that history’s emotional and thematic significance. These are fine performances of a standard poetic progression. I find myself much more powerfully drawn, though, to the poems in which I’m much less sure about what’s going on, in which the important relationships are those established among phrases and images themselves rather than among those things toward which they are supposed to point. In “Coal Seam,” for instance:

I’m out, the night again. The field. New growth
over September. Some black straw. Some burnt wheat.
Strange sun in a glass-fire.

Olivia was here. No cuts she said, it was your sweater. You
never knew how leaves could smolder. Never broke a slag-heap

for timbers in this cabin. No one asks, weren’t they green –
I chinked them, who would care?

Is there a picture here, a narrative? Sure, and with some interpretive pressure and guess work both can be sketched. But I don’t think either the picture or the story is the locus of the poem’s power (and it’s got power). Instead, phrases are repeated in ways that call out a current of subterranean significance. “No cuts” recurs later, for example, and connects with “two / lines of blood,” itself the third in a series of figures, to lend a violence to what is being described (mining), that then slants the word “blade,” here referring to grass, in the semantic direction of knives or axes. The black straw and burnt wheat of the first lines, the glass-fire and smoldering leaves, similarly exert a linguistic gravitational pull on later words and phrases.

Throughout Vinland, Ross wonderfully plays language against itself, exploits the inherent multiplicity of meanings, through these painterly tricks of juxtaposition and patterned repetition. Dreams, visions, rhythms. Indeed.

Review: Animashaun's Gift

2010-04-23T19:03:00.000-07:00

The woman I used to live with used to receive, from time to time, gift boxes of fruit from Harry and David. These were among our favorite packages to sign for, and chief among the pleasures often waiting in the nest of packing straw would be, for me, the perfectly ripe pears. The gift of pears, in the title poem of Abayomi Animashaun’s first volume (The Giving of Pears, Black Lawrence Press, 2010) has the power to attract iguanas and angels, and, in the wake of death, to comfort maidens. Animashaun’s poems set out similarly to offer consolation and vision, to set these in the balance against violence and loss. Pears are easy to grow, but often difficult to ripen or to pick at the precise moment of perfect ripeness; the same might be said, and on the basis of this book should be said, of poems.

I like best the poems here that weave through a warped view of the quotidian the woof of striking language. In “The Tailor and His Strings,” for instance, Animashaun constructs a little fable of renewal (old men go to the village tailor for strings to tie around their chests, measured to fit “the diameter of each weakened heart,” and are rejuvenated by these figures for “music from youth”) with a linguistic plainness and precision that heightens the strangeness of the tale. And “The Visit” narrates a (literally and figuratively) chilling visit from Death that wrings from the speaker a shocking sacrifice in the name of filial pietism. Death warns: “Your father / Will lose his sight again. // It is not good for the dead / To suffer a second blindness.” The speaker must choose whether to save his father’s vision among the dead by giving up his own or that of his unborn son. The conclusion is quietly devastating:

In the dark world of the unborn,
My son, playing quietly by the sea,
Forgets the curved mechanism of light,
Inside a small fish.

Too often, though, the poems’ own vision is blurred by flat or imprecise language. In “Ancestors,” the pot in which meat cooks for soup, its aroma attracting the speaker’s dead grandfather, is “tittering on the stove,” the giggle as out of place in the soundscape of howling wind and the old songs of wandering spirits as it would be at a funeral. And when the speaker removes the meat from the pot, he “sever[s] it in two.” I’m sure the spirit of the grandfather is grateful for the sacrifice left for him along with a “bowl of cold water,” but the redundancy in the phrase at this climactic moment of the poem ruined my appetite. Elsewhere, I find some of the poems to be overly explicit in their drawing of morals. Does “History Lesson,” for example, need to juxtapose the intimate and the historical in precisely so overdetermined a way as this:

Did those leaders who went to Berlin
In 1885, when the sought to open a ‘dark continent’,
Did they know of my need to ravage your breasts
Holding you against the cold stove?

The strongest section of this volume is, perhaps, “The Other Testament,” in which Animashaun rewrites Biblical narratives with one eye toward the grittily demystifying vision familiar from, say, Bulgakov’s rewriting of the Passion in The Master and Margarita, and the other, maybe, on Christopher Okigbo’s “Distances” sequence. Even in these poems, though, I wish here were at once more circumspect and more craftsmanlike. Here, for comparison and your reading pleasure, are a couple of stanzas from that sequence’s third poem:

In the scattered line of pilgrims
bound for Shibboleth
in my hand the crucifix
the torn branch the censer

In the scattered line of pilgrims
from Dan to Beersheba
camphor iodine choloroform
either sting me in the bum

And here are a couple of stanzas from Animashaun’s “David”:

The old shepherd who brought the news
Said: he’s in the mountain, naked,
Armed with a sword and a catapult,
Raving about letting fly a stone,
Rocking a giant to the ground,

And stabbing him complete.
The old man, his head now buried
And sobbing uncontrollably, continued:
The man he murdered was no man at all,
But my boy of eleven, just learning to tend sheep.

Like Okigbo, Animashaun aggressively exposes a malignant hallucination deep in the scriptural tissues. But where the poet of a generation ago (Okigbo was killed in battle at Nsukka in 1967) draws power from implication and the economy of metonym, Animashaun spells out tragedy so that there’s little room left for the imagination. Where Okigbo weaves a subtle pattern of sonic repetition through his lines – the sibiliance of “scattered” continues through “Shibboleth,” “crucifix,” and “censer,” the short “a” of “scattered” is repeated in “hand,” “branch,” “Dan” and “camphor” – Animashaun relies on the shock of the situation to carry the lines (which leads, I think, to the reliance on the overcharged “raving,” on the adverbial modification of “uncontrollably,” and on the surface pathos of the concluding line.

I am aware of the danger of appearing to beat one poet of Nigerian descent with the work of one of the greatest English-language Nigerian poets, and it’s the rare first volume by any poet that’s going to stand up to comparison with Okigbo. It would be no more fair to put this book’s “Sunday Mornings at the Barber Shop” upside Derek Walcott’s visit to the Castries barbershop in Omeros, but comparison is one to clarify the shape and the stakes of a poetic project. Animashaun is laudably interested in big and important issues that get well beyond the self-obsession often on display in these days of the navel-directed poetic gaze. I look forward to his riper poems, to the work he produces when he trusts the subjects, their inherence in the objects and agents he examines, and the effects of language turned upon itself. Then, I think, the giving of poems might measure up to the power he here ascribes to the giving of pears.

On Prynne

2010-04-19T17:14:00.001-07:00

Via Ron Silliman's blog (look to the right), a link to a whole bunch of people closely reading the sublimely challenging poems of J.H. Prynne. I find myself captivated by some of the poems, especially the work from the 60s and 70s, but am hard-pressed to explain either the poems or my interest in them. There is something genuine, a searching intellectual project taking shape in the selection and juxtaposition of phrases, an excavation of value in an examination of the linguistic means in which we limn it. Check it out.

The Discrete Charm of Ke$a

2010-04-19T12:42:00.000-07:00

Or, really, of Paul Muldoon's erudite analysis of "Tik Tok."

Because the party don't start 'til he
walks in.

Review: Ursu's Poetic Prayer (or Prayerful Poems)

2010-04-17T09:41:00.000-07:00

It is a truth universally acknowledged that poetic language differs somehow from the stuff we use in ordinary daily conversation. The latter derives from early hominid needs to communicate (“Orf, look out for that mastodon!”) or coordinate (“Orf, look out for that mastodon!”), or, according to more recent theories, from early hominid social grooming practices (hence so much of our current conversation as either empty -- “How ya doin’?” -- or nitpicking). The former bears a whiff of incense or altar fire or the irruption of the divine into the mundane. So much depends, of course, on how one or another poet or theorist glosses the “somehow” in my first sentence, but that’s the topic of another post.

For Romanian poet Liliana Ursu, the analogy between poetry and prayer is sometimes a theme and sometimes a practice. In the best poems gathered in Lightwall, a new collection translated by Sean Cotter and brought to you in a beautifully designed volume by the fine folks at Zephyr Press, Ursu unites theme and practice, essaying the ineffable by weaving webs of image, allusion, and figurative language.

Ritual language is most obviously thematized in poems that either are about or that invoke “spiritual athletes” – saints, ascetics, and contemplatives. The results are mixed. In “Concerto for Vasile the Monk,” Ursu narrates herself listening to Beethoven’s “Imperial Concerto” (I’ve typically seen the Piano Concerto Number Five in E Major, Opus 73, referred to as the “Emperor Concerto”) and, as she works, communing with the composer, telling him the story of the monk, Vasile, who saved a Coptic brother from the Ottomans by hiding him and carrying him to safety in a burlap bag. Beethoven announces a re-titling of this concerto, from “Imperial” to “Concerto for Vasile the Monk.” The poem links composer, poet, and Coptic monk in resistance to the authorities represented by empires and Ottomans. It is Beethoven’s presence, his assistance, as the poet prepares to write that positions him for this episode “from the lives of the monks," and Vasile claims that the monk he carried to safety was as light as the quill with which the brother wrote. Nothing in the poem’s own language, though, indicates where this kind of power might lie in the action of the pen. A mystical moment from the Lives of the Monks on the Holy Mountain of Athos feels more earned in “From the Lives of the Birds,” whose stanzas catalogue the conditions of possibility for different birds’ songs (clearly a figure for the song that is poetry itself):

Canaries only sing when caged.
The sky is far off,
an enigmatic safe.

But if you cage the tomtit
-- the anonymous
the ignored –
it wraps its claws around its throat
and chokes to death.

This attention to the birds rather than to the figure of the poet rhymes nicely with the anecdote that closes the poem: an elder apprenticed to a monastery but prevented by his humility from becoming a monk, covers himself with crumbs on snowy days and feeds the birds from his hands and shoulders and face, eliciting their songs with this offering of himself.

I wish more of the poems in Lightwall followed the model of the Elder of Elisa and subordinated the poet to the poem. I’m not a fan of poems about being a poet (it takes a lot to rise above that topic’s inherent limitations and produce a “Sleep and Poetry” or “Circus Animals’ Desertion” ) and there are here, especially in the section called “One Hundred Days, One Hundred Nights in Lewisburg” (where Ursu was a visiting poet at Bucknell University), many such poems. The powers of ritual language just aren’t convincing in a poem about reading poems in a former church:

Here, in America, in another church, turned into a theater
I read poem after poem
as though I were building
a cross out of words
With great care
with unending motion
But with peace, too, in my soul
climbing humbly
the ladder of prayer
Until all the walls of the theater
fill with icons
and burning candles.

I’m not sure I can quite buy “humbly” in this scene of transformation, especially when the stanza I quote is juxtaposed to the story of Cosma, the monk, who built crosses in the wake of Ottoman destruction of churches in the Balkans. More crucially, though, is the absence in the poem’s own language of anything that hints at the transformative power the language narrates. There’s no music, no metaphoric magic, that enacts what the poem attempts to describe. (This might be a matter of translation; I don’t read Romanian and can’t say how much the original might sing in ways that don’t make it over the barrier into English.)

The better poems in this book, to my mind, are those whose claims for poetic power are implicit and performed rather than explicitly named. “Gingerbread with a Mirror and Sibiu,” for example, allegorizes city towers, mapping a surreal city and a moral universe at once. In this poem, Ursu’s imagery and juxtapositions, the unexpected turns of her lines and sentences, effect a new and renovating vision:

The person who builds the shadow before the house
gave us his rope knotted
once for each of time’s hearts
then asked us to forget him.
Just like the cellist who kissed my ear
He told me he could hear the sea inside its shell
‘A place unspoiled by noise and kisses may your ear be,’ my grandmother said
while she chopped parsley and let it shower
our family’s soup.

Other poems, like “Poem with Birch Gate” and “Letter to My Son, Mihnea-Dan,” turn that vision on the histories – recent and more distant – of the poet’s Balkan home (the section of the book is titled “Balkan Golgotha)” while a series of poems on and addressed to Ovid exemplify the strong bonds of sympathy and influence Ursu shares with important predecessors (not only the Roman poet exiled to Constanta on the Black Sea, but also Cavafy, Elytis, and others). While I’m not sure (the Pill’s expertise on this score is, alas, limited) whether she is, as Matthew Zapruder has called her, “one of Central Europe’s foremost living poets,” I certainly see the basis in these strongest among Ursu's new poems for the judgment of Tomaz Salamun (my own favorite living Central European poet) that she “makes the Black Sea again” and “expands the places of myth.”

I'm not gonna make that lame barbaric AWP joke

2010-04-12T18:18:00.000-07:00

The Pill is back from Denver, where this year’s AWP was held, and glad to be breathing once more the heavily oxygenated sea-level air of home.

It took a day there not only to acclimate to the thin air but also to get into the groove of the unheimlich. The uncanny, you know, is when something’s familiar but off. In this case, your correspondent, a long-time academic, noted the structural familiarity of the conference setting (I have measured out my life in partitioned hotel ballrooms) filled with content whose texture, taste, and odor were just different enough to bring about estrangement. E.g.: a panel on poets reading Keats, in which Stanley Plumly presented a smart, thoroughly researched paper on the form and structure of the odes (the Pill settles into the Spartan comfort of the straight-backed chair, set just too close for comfort to the rank in front of it, feeling right at home). Could still have been at home when Ann Townsend glossed “visionary” through the poet’s near-sightedness and medical education, but felt the shape of the room shift when one after another potentially suggestive connection or insight was tossed out but left undeveloped, so many intellectual larvae squirming on the thinly carpeted floor (along the with the unpronounced “ed” syllables that regularize Keats’s iambic verse). Ah, back in Kansas when David Baker took the podium and performed a deftly deconstructive analysis of Keats’s habit of correspondence and manner of corresponding (though the bright colors of Oz flashed through from time to time, as when Baker, abjuring the word “discourse” because it was too redolent of “our theory-soaked departments back home,” cast a weird aspersion over his own scrupulous reading).

“Theory,” it turns out, is a noxious substance in which many departments, critics, readers, and institutions are soaked, steeped, stewed, brined, or drowned. It was with something like alarm that I realized, at a panel on “Flarf and Conceptual Poetry” the next day, that I am equipped with those gills enabling one to breathe the stuff. I kept them out of sight. Well, except for the hour and a quarter of Flarfers duking it out against Conceptualists in “papers” that were really performances, and that included some of the best poetry – juxtaposition, lacuna, music – read in the panel sessions, from the opening gambit of K. Silem Mohammad, the moderator, who wondered whether Flarf (the intentionally bad) and Conceptual (the intentionally boring) might be “the poetry of our time because they are the poetry we deserve” to Vanessa Place’s lines “flarf still loves poetry; conceptualism loves poetry enough to put it out of its misery” and “the best flarf is virtuosic; the best conceptualism is failure.” I find myself confirmed by this stuff, both on the page and in the room, in my taste for modernist rather than postmodernist experiments, for surrealism, say, over and against dada. And, look, this stuff is indeed masturbatory. But let us remember, Gentle Reader, that masturbation is quite pleasurable, and, as play with the erotics of language, these performances are too. And don’t even get me started on the ethical gains possible in this Levinasian unsaying of the said . . .

But my gills are showing.

There is a lot of poetry to experience at the AWP, from readings by big names in big rooms to readings by groups of poets (western poets, alumni of various creative writing program poets, African Diasporic poets, this or that Press poets). What, then, to make of the fact that the poetry that most captured your humble correspondent, that, really, grabbed him by the lapels and shoved him up against the wall and demanded his lunch money, was read “offsite,” at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, by the winner of the Wick Poetry Center’s first book award, Edward Micus. Micus read from The Infirmary, and these are poems that needed to be written, that need to be read. The feet of Micus’s ladder are firmly planted in the foul rag and bone shop, but we’re not talking about unmediated cri du coeur. These poems are worked, and they gain intensity from the carefully constructed frames that enclose, the painstakingly built fires that energize, their already potent contents (war, illness, torture, suffering). I was scarred for a day or more (hell, I might still be) by Micus’s prose poem, “In a Room Somewhere in the North of Nicaragua,” and moved by the resigned humanity, couched in unexpected developments of the image of a soldier’s marijuana smoke, that concludes “Robertson”:

A hot shrapnel scrap
kissed his kneecap
sent him back to Burlington.

Jesus – what a war –
to leave him hanging here

back in the world
his brain uncured
still smoking in its skin.

The poetry on offer in Denver was not confined to the panels and readings. Indeed, the heart of the conference is the book fair, a fluorescent-lit warehouse of an exhibit hall (the Pill overheard someone say that s/he had overheard Poet Laureate Kay Ryan say the book fair was like a Costco for the small press world, and, you know, once PLKR puts an image like that in your head, it’s there to stay). It’s overwhelming and a little disheartening: so many poets writing so many poems and publishing them in so many finely produced books and smartly edited literary magazines (and, Reader o' Mine, there are so many finely produced books and smartly edited literary magazines) for so few readers. It feels like a closed loop, a universe whose contraction mirrors the expansion of the bigger one in which we’re all spinning entropically toward heat death.

The book fair is not only chock full of books, many of them looking pretty good on a quick flip-through (though many others look as though it were more important to the author that the book existed than that it might be a book someone would want to read). It’s also a Costco stocked to the rafters with metonyms for the contemporary po-biz. Item: MFA student poets in last year’s Brooklyn chic – porkpie hats topping off faux-thrift-store tweed over untucked old-skool striped business shirt – picking up skads of Xeroxed submission guidelines, deaf to the offers of half-price copies of the mags they hope to publish in or cut-rate copies of books published by the presses they hope will invest $20K to bring out their slim volume. You don’t gotta be Derrida and Lacan, you don’t gotta be Wimsatt and Beardsley, you don’t gotta be Brooks and Warren to explicate that text. It’s a bad sign in the system, a bad sign for the system, because where I worried a paragraph ago that nobody was reading these writers except each other, what becomes apparent after a few hours in the AWP book fair is that too many of them are not even reading each other.

Review: To grow tired of London is to grow tired of life

2010-04-04T08:52:00.000-07:00

Is it a problem that friends reviewing friends is business as usual in the po-biz? The Pill thinks it probably is. Nevertheless, here is a review of my friend Sara London’s new book, The Tyranny of Milk (Four Ways, 2010). At least I’m telling you this is a review of a friend’s book (I'm thanked in the acknowledgements, and I'm happy to admit to having encouraged the poet), which is more than you’ll often get elsewhere in this racket.

Is it a problem that friends blurb friends’ books? Oh yes, Gentle Reader, it is indeed. (I should say that I don’t know whether the blurbers of this book are friends of the poet.) But where we often think of the blurb problem in terms of nepotism or mutual back-scratching, it seems to me that the problem is just as frequently a matter of misrepresentation. And here, I think, on the back cover of London’s book, I’m provoked to wonder whether the poems are well served by the blurbs. Terrance Hayes emphasizes the poems’ verisimilitude, writing that London “recollects, recovers, recounts,” and characterizing her work as “clear-eyed utterance” (we’ll leave to one side the distinctly mixed character of that metaphor). This downplays the way London’s poems effect estrangement through her games with language and line. Cleopatra Mathis is closer to the mark; she captures the defamiliarization in the poems – “odd subjects are adroitly turned in the light of the familiar, while the common and ordinary are rendered strange.” This suggests, though, the surreal meeting of umbrella and sewing machine on dissecting table, that is to say a matter of content or topical strangeness, where what London really gets the weirdness from is the turn of a phrase, typically around the bend of a line.

I’m getting all cranky about the blurbs because they threaten to blur the real achievement of vision and voice in this book. Or maybe it’s just that they don’t quite articulate what I really admire about these poems: the bait-and-switch game they play with confessional conventions, and the way that game replaces the prurient interest in intimate revelations with the purposeful satisfactions of linguistic and prosodic play. To put it another way: while these poems might seem to be about the plight of a bed-wetter, say, or the sting of a mother’s tongue, or the tensions within a marriage, they are more properly seen as about how these things are filtered through, or, better, constructed in language. The vision is the voice, and these poems press the point that we see as we speak.

London's mechanics of estrangement are worth dwelling on a little. She sometimes achieves her effects by taking up the point of view of the naïve child or outsider, as when, in “Terra Incognita: As Butch Thunder Hawk Tells It,” she narrates a Lewis and Clark party member’s nose-blowing from the perspective of perplexed Lakota, or when, in “Tell Me,” a cultural alien sketches the mysteries of love and loss. In these poems, and in others whose speakers are not so distinctly estranged or estranging, London also exploits the inherent weirdness imposed by line-breaks in a loose counted verse (three or four words per line):

In my country
you might over-
hear the story
of the woman
with eleven children,
who never once
achieved orgasm
(“Tell Me”)

“But what
I remember most
are the polished
solid arms
of a dark chair
I was told
to sit quietly in,
the blond eyes
open
in the cold wood
(“First Wake”).

Elsewhere, London brings linguistic compression and indirection to bear, transforming embarrassment and awkwardness into the strange riches of insight. Here is “Mother,” one of twelve sections in a long poem entitled “Wetter”:

When she pinched
the plastic-headed
Safeway safeties,
pinning me into
lipoids of lemon
terry, she
sometimes pricked
her thumb,
sometimes
my thigh
fast with
blood toward
some destiny
of desert or sea.
No, I said, diapers
are not for me.

Notice the suspensions wrought by line-breaks (to what are those plastic heads attached?). Notice the foregrounding of sound by the densely packed alliteration both intralinear (“lipoids of lemon”) and interlinear (“thumb . . . thigh”), and assonance (“sometimes,” “thigh”), and, especially, combinations of sound repetition (“Safeway safeties”). Notice the quick shift from the literal blood of a pinprick to a figurative blood attached to destiny, the shift from the most intimately domestic space of a diapering to the symbolic vastness of desert and sea. Now, we can see this as a poem about the social difficulties of incontinence, or we can, as I think we should, see it as a poem about the transformations and control enabled by verbal craft and attention. The concluding utterance (the disavowal of diapers) is earned by the demonstration of continence that leads up to it.

When I got my copy of this book, I flipped through first of all looking for a poem I heard Sara London read some time ago. I have to confess that the poem stuck in my head partly for reasons that had little to do with it; I was sitting, at that reading, beside a woman with whom I was falling in love, and as I listened to the poem I couldn’t help noticing the way this woman was methodically unraveling the sleeve of her ragged hoodie. These two things had been joined in my head for years, and I figured, all that time, this was just a matter of simultaneity and the strange salience details take on in the context of a crush. What a revelation it was, then, to see that maybe they’d been intertwined for reasons having to do with the poem itself, or with its epigraph, for “The Odds” begins with a quotation from Cato: “There are [those] that fayneth it to hange / by an heere or twynned threde.” The poem is an eloquent apostrophe to a dead squirrel and a meditation (here’s where the title comes in) on the odds of missing the grasp in the midst of our play, our “lunging for love.” The odds, it turns out, are pretty good. Or bad, depending on how you look at it. The poem is also a fit metonym for the book as a whole, an exemplary instance of London’s own play (“A snapping branch this noon / snagged my skyward glance”), the vision synthesized by a voice modulated, channeled, engineered even, to provide something like, as the speaker in “Bad Manners” imagines, “a shadow lyric // sounding on the far side / of our carefully cantilevered love.”

Regarding Ai

2010-03-24T07:52:00.001-07:00

Ai, author of Cruelty, Killing Floor, Sin, Fate, and other collections, died Sunday at the age of 62.

I first came across her work in a seminar on contemporary American poetry. The poems were shocking. A couple lines in and you were inhabiting the consciousness of a suicide, a masturbator, a serial killer, a child-beating parent, a kid (in “The Kid”) who calmly, almost sweetly, murders his family. I'm haunted to this day by "The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981," in which, after disposing of the body of the boy he's just murdered, the speaker sits down to a nice cup of cocoa:

After the last sweet mouthful of chocolate
burns its way down my throat,
I open the library book,
the one on mythology,
and begin to read.
Saturn, it says, devours his children.
Yes, it's true, I know it.
An ordinary man, though, a man like me
eats and is full.
Only God is never satisfied.

At public readings and on recordings, Ai read in an exaggerated chant, an aural iambic that elongated almost every second syllable and that, with the scenes she set, the characters she created, created intense estrangement effects.

We spent a lot of time in that seminar on the fact of Ai’s complicated ancestry (her father was Japanese and her mother was of African American and Native American descent), though as I reread the poems now I’m not sure why. The poems are not about the poet’s ancestry, not, really, about the poet herself, at least in the immediate ways we’ve come, during the long reign of first-person, free-verse autobiographism in American poetry, to expect. The real fascination in these poems is with power – the power of the desired over the one who desires, of the one who is willing to undertake violence over those who hesitate, of our compulsions over our compassion.

Sin is especially interested in power, and perhaps the dominant sin in the book is the pride that drives such speakers as the Kennedys, Joseph McCarthy, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. For this reason, among others, it stands out for me as a favorite among Ai’s seven collections.

Here’s the thing, though. There’s been, and there will continue to be, a lot of ink and bytes thrown around about the voices of outsiders and the politics of outrage in Ai’s work (partly because there will be a lot of talk, as in that seminar, about who she was, and partly because there will be a lot of talk about her activism around Native American identity), and while these are not insignificant aspects of the life or the poems, the focus on them will mean a lot of readers miss what might be the real point of Ai's work. “I feel,” Ai has been recorded as saying, “that the dramatic monologue was the form in which I was born to write and I love it as passionately, or perhaps more passionately, than I have ever loved a man.”

The dramatic monologue. Remember that fusty old thing, relic of Victorianism, first envied then dissed and dismissed by Pound in his experiments with personae, reduced in our time to a couple of Browning poems in anthologies? Ah, but Ai, along with Frank Bidart, renovated that generic furniture in ways that not only brought the monologue back to life but also showed how interesting we’d forgotten it to be. Both Bidart and Ai built their poems around some sick speakers, but do you remember what Browning’s characters get up to?! (Hint: the speaker in "Porphyria's Lover" strangles his beloved with her hair and then enjoys a cozy moment recumbent besider her on the couch.)

Like Browning, Bidart and Ai offer characters in extremis. But also like Browning, and maybe more important for poetry and poetics than the sick and the criminal who inhabit the poems, they use these outsider consciousnesses to say something about poetry itself. I can't read "Porphyria's Lover" without seeing it as calling our attention to the necrophilia inherent in a certain ambition for literary immortality (the ambition we see at the end of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 -- "So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.") by literalizing its metaphors (I'll make the living woman into something that will be lasting and unchanging). There is, in Ai's best poems, a similarly searching critique of creative ambition, an examination of the ethics of doing things with words. Here she is on "Immortality":

I dreamed I was digging a grave
that kept filling with water.
The next day, you died.
I dressed you in a wool skirt
and jacket,
because you were always cold
and I had promised to do tha much for you.
Then I took a potato to eat, went outside,
and started to dig.

It goes on, and gets even creepier, and that's right, I think, for a poem about how the breath of the living is captured and stilled in the interest of defeating sluttish time, achieving stasis over mutability. And this is why it seems to me such a loss, this week's silencing of a voice that kept changing and kept breathing change.

A Plea to the Moaners

2010-03-06T11:47:00.000-08:00

The Pill goes to a lot of poetry readings. This is a fact about which one feels some ambivalence. On the one hand, it’s sometimes interesting to hear how a poet vocalizes the verbiage on the page (“interesting,” itself is a quality about which one feels some ambivalence; look out, gentle readers, for a post soon about the sing-song delivery? in which every line? ends on an upward inflection?), and it can be fun to see how a poet has changed since that jacket photo (or to see that clearly a model was hired for the jacket photo). On the other hand, sometimes a poet’s reading wrecks a poem, or the patter between poems drains the enlivening mystery from a poem.

And then there are the moaners.

You’ve heard them if you’ve gone to many readings at all. The poet (all too often with a rising inflection? or a heightened . . . breathiness . . . during . . . the . . . exaggerated . . . pauses . . . between . . . words) delivers an image, a metaphor, a turn of phrase that either really or, in the flawed judgment of both poet and audience, is striking, and a few in attendance “hmmm” with approval or almost erotic satisfaction. (It’s not that the Pill is never similarly moved; the sound I’m describing is like the one that involuntarily escapes me when, after a couple of meatless months, I bite into, say, an Arthur Bryant’s sliced beef sandwich.)

I once spent some time unscientifically surveying the moany terrain, trying to determine during readings which, whether, and why. Alas, this loose cartesianism, this unsystematic empirical study, produced no conclusive findings, and what can you expect when the phenomenon occurred not only among the couple thousand at one of Gwendolyn Brooks’s last readings or the hundreds at one of Stanley Kunitz’s – at that one, your correspondent felt as if surrounded by a flock of cooing doves, indeed felt this so strongly that he checked his shoulders afterwards for dabs of bird shit – and also among the dozens enduring (too many with pleasure, at which the Pill despaired) Marie Howe or Spencer Reese or a Dickman.

One hesitates to ascribe motives to the moaners, and one assumes there are in fact a multiplicity thereof. Some, surely, moan out of authentic emotional experience. Others, perhaps, assume the position of respondents in a sort of amen corner (“Preach it, brother!”) and see it as their duty to take up an antiphonal role, confirming the poet in his or her sense of being filled by the spirit. Many, though, I am convinced, are simply conducting their own performance, letting those around them know that yes, they had the proper emotional experience (like the guy who laughs at the just smile-worthy joke so everybody knows he gets it).

To each, regardless of a given moaner’s etiology, the Pill politely asks “Can you please f*cking stop that?!” I promise on behalf of those of us enjoying the silence at the ends of lines and phrases (whether because the silence lets us absorb the power of what precedes it or because we’re just glad the poet stopped) that we will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you get it. I promise the poets are sufficiently confident in the movement of the muse within their words that they’ll get by without your cooing confirmation. And if you’re simply moved involuntarily, I’m working on a patentable nose plug that will convert the moaning exhalation into just enough electricity to administer a mild shock so we can condition you to keep it to yourself.

Listen to the silence, people, please. Let it ring on.

Review: Assuming Bill Berkson

2010-03-03T14:39:00.000-08:00

All right, people: the Pill is pissed. Off. Where have you all been hiding Bill Berkson for all these years and why the hell didn’t anybody tell me about this guy? I mean, he’s published 18 collections of poetry since 1961 (the first through the Tibor de Nagy Gallery), as well as collaborations with the likes of Joe Brainard (among other artists) and Anne Waldman and Bernadette Mayer (among other poets), plus writings on and editions of works by and about Frank O’Hara.

OK. So maybe the oversight was mine. It ain’t like the man was hiding. Still, though, all you poetry pals of mine: why did you bogart the Berkson?!

Thanks to Coffeehouse Press, however, the secret’s out and I’m glad, at last, to meet this poet through the poems he’s been producing since the late 1950s.

That gets it kind of wrong, though, because Berkson’s poems, like the best poems in the humble opinion of this ever so ‘umble blog, are much less about Bill Berkson than they are about how language determines our perceptions. Our perceptions of Bill Berkson, sure, but also, and more importantly (not just to me but also, I think, on the basis of these poems, to Berkson), of everything else.

But that’s not quite right, either, because it’s not just language in all its languageyness (which is, of course, a very good thing for poems to emphasize, and even enact), but also language in, on, around, interacting with the physical space of the page. Not for nothing did Berkson collaborate with a collagist and detourneur like Brainard and spend attention on an artistically inclined poet like O’Hara (who engaged in his own collaborations with visual artists – e.g. the wonderful Stones series of lithographs he produced with Larry Rivers).

In a fairly early poem like “Still Earth,” for example, Berkson uses the space of the page (intralinear space, interlinear space, setting strophes off to one side or another rather than stacking everything out from the left-hand margin) in ways reminiscent of the Mina Loy of "Songs to Joannes," isolating bits and pieces of language not only to emphasize their lexical meanings but also to call attention to their look and sound. And in "Four Great Songs," we get upside-down lines so that, on first reading anyway, we encounter the unpronounceable and incomprehensible so that all the lines present is their appearance.

Given all that, though, I still find myself preferring here the poems in complete sentences, even when the relationship between subject and predicate is not immediately sensible. Or sensical. “What would the new fork bring me?” he asks in “Saturday Afternoon, “and why / are porticos assuming sulfur?” I’m not sure what either of these questions “means,” and while I could go on for a while about substitution along the syntagmatic axis (couldn't we all?), I’d rather just enjoy the way each twists, and by twisting renews, simple (or not so simple) words and concepts. The carrying of food on a fork, seen as “bringing,” so that the fork has agency, estranges eating, and the assumption of the capacity of assumption for architectural elements, and of the capacity for being assumed to a suggestive element like sulfur makes sitting on my porch and sensing the aromas carried there by the breeze suddenly rich and strange.

Let's say every poet publishes, from time to time, an ars poetica. Berkson's early stuff might be encapsulated in "History" (or these lines therefrom): "Trying to understand what it is actually like / on a balcony with one's hat off / though distinguishing between actual despair / and trickery / a certain passivity of habit . . . // History itches." Indeed. With their non sequitirs, strange adjectives (especially strangely adjectival forms of nouns -- "arsenical"), suggestions of narrative without narrative development or clear reference, these poems are up to both the attempt to understand what it's like and the attempt to inhabit the sentient subjectivity of that capitalized abstraction in its attempt (like Benjamin's version of Klee's angel) to understand.

Phew.

But then there's a poem like "East End," which captures pure and straightforward heartache like no other poem I've recently read (the very idea of a nearest consolation is rendered accurately in all its unhelpfulness):

Sometimes I think it's here too,
which is to say the joy your dress
drags in with it.
To go from that to the nearest consolation
is enough to tear my soul apart.
So stay.
The mystery has been proven.

Berkson's forms and rhetorics change over the ensuing decades. The poems get shorter for a while in the 60s, more prose poems show up in the late 70s, more dedications and epigraphs in the 90s. His preoccupations remain consistent, but not in a way that would suggest any Mirandized arrest of development, artistic or philsophical. Instead, a layered richness characterizes many of the later poems, a sense of familiar reference behind the witty, slip-slidy wordplay. I love the punning fun in, say, two poems titled "Parts of the Body" from the mid-70s, poems that shift the terrain of the blazon from the body of an individual person to what might be the embodiment in language and culture of what Eliot called the "mind of Europe." Berkson quotes a couple of prose sentences about Scriabin at one point, shortly thereafter renovates the cliche of aging ("over the hill") by imagining what we imagine we'll see when we get there, across the page glosses the gall bladder with the fact that deer have none, figures the "Phenomenology of Perception" in the bubbles that form in spit, quotes Tommy Edwards's "All in the Game," but rescues the pop song's falling tear from worthlessness by capturing its cleanness and clarity, and on and on.

And in the most recent poems, that itch of History, that attempt to get at what it's really like, that drive to renew language and perception by renovating the cliches into which we fall like ditches full of shit, all are directed at the violence done to our ways of speaking and seeing under the recent and current debased forms of our culture and politics. We live, "Without Penalty" suggests, during a time when "Traffic School becomes the ruling / Paradigm of higher learning," "Careening en route / To regime change, permanent and without end."

And given that, it's impossible to read a poem titled "Rendition," which explicitly complains about the song played at Willem de Kooning's funeral ("Aida -- fucking Aida," the angels mutter), without hearing in both the title and the narrative of bait and switch, subjects bagged and secretly sent off to black sites where they will endure torture to keep our freedoms safe.

Gamechangers, Dritten Stück

2010-02-23T17:37:00.000-08:00

Don’t take my word for it on this one (and I know I’m teasing here for the eventual post about why I think L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry is a game worth playing and how it changed the broader poetry game in fun and interesting ways). Just go here.

Review: Duhamel's Bankruptcy

2010-02-17T12:37:00.000-08:00

There are, I suppose, reviewers who like going all Francis Jeffrey on poets and their poems, but I’m not one of them. This scrupulous blog, however, is dedicated to the impartial – or explicitly and admittedly partial but, one hopes, not unfair – reviewing of whatever volumes make it, by whatever means, over the digital transom. So it is not with pleasure that I am saying here that Denise Duhamel’s Ka-ching! (Pitt Poetry Series, 2009; exclamation point in title) is terrible, but that is indeed what I am saying.

I’d like to say that I dislike this book because, like so many others I dislike, its poems are simply autobiography rendered in chopped prose without the tension of formal conventions, without attention to language in its languageyness (self-reference and simultaneous multiple meanings and sound over sense and materiality, for example). I can’t, though, because Duhamel does a lot of things here that, at least when they’re done well, I like. She writes prose poems, for example, and she writes some sestinas, and she sometimes plays precisely with these characteristics of language. This makes things a little tougher. Only a little, though, because the way Duhamel handles the prose poem, the sestina, and the self-referential and material aspects of language is so simple and cheap that the poems are drained of the energy that comes from any sort of challenge to the reader.

The book’s themes are money and chance (two things I think poets might profitably [ahem] explore more often), and the volume opens with “Play Money,” a sequence of prose poems titled in which each successive poem is titled with a higher dollar amount. I say “prose poems” because the book is labeled “Poetry” on the back cover and is published by the Pitt Poetry Series, but there’s nothing about these pieces that foregrounds language-as-language or that warps or estranges the narrated reality as good prose poems do. I might call them very short stories (the kind of thing you can find here), but even that seems to grant them a little more literary status than their structures (straightforwardly anecdotal, with maybe a clunky O. Henry twist) or characters (caricatures) merit. They’re really memoirettes about pretty typical money-related experiences (a heroic penny-pinching CEO pinches a penny, a deadbeat roommate steals and cheats, our hapless heroine doesn’t get a job). That last one is representative in its reliance upon cliché at every level:

I had resisted going to the MLA conference, a meat market for fresh English PhDs who were stiff in their new or borrowed suits, vying like dreary Miss Americas for tenure track lines. The judges were the gray-haired full professors, crinkled, withered – five o’clock shadows on the men, orthopedic shoes on the women. They yawned through candidate presentations and had long lunches paid for by their institutions. But I really wanted the job and going to MLA showed I was serious.

One wishes some of the desire to be taken seriously had led to the invention of fresher images and phrases. “Meat market”? Really? Job interview as beauty pageant? Nobody’s thought of that one before. Boy, she nails the gray eminences of the literary professoriate, though, right down to their metonymic shadows and shoes. Am I motivated to complain about this one because, well, some of my best friends are gray-haired full professors (some, indeed, both “crinkled” and “withered”!)? Probably. But only because my experience of that world does not resemble the clichés with which Duhamel attempts to capture it. (Now, if she'd written about black skirts, black leather jackets, and black-and-white kaffiyeh . . .)

What I find more annoying even than such an “I resemble that remark” moment is the way the poem (“$700,000”), like several others in the book, commits the cardinal sin of complaining in poems about how hard it is to be a poet. Now, I know that poems often include moments of such self-reference (Keats’s fears that he might cease to be, for example, are largely vocational), but there’s a world of difference between the worry that one’s early death is going to prevent him from filling books with all that’s in his head and resentment over how one couldn’t land the tenured sinecure that would have underwritten a poetic career. An analogy, if I might be permitted such a trope: the former is like this, while the latter is like this here.

And even when the poems about poetry and being a poet aren’t complaints, and even when they take the refreshingly estranging form of something like a sestina, they fall flat by taking a simple joke too far and, like your uncle at the wedding after too much champagne, explaining the punch line. Here, exhibits A and B:

from “Delta Flight 659”

I’m writing this on a plane, Sean Penn,
with my black Pilot Razor ballpoint pen.
Ever since 9/11, I’m a nervous flyer. I leave my Pentium
Processor in Florida so TSA can’t x-ray my stanzas, penetrate
my persona. Maybe this should be in iambic pentameter,
rather than this mock sestina, each line ending in a Penn

variant.

And from “I Dreamed I Wrote This Sestina Wearing My Maidenform Bra” (Gentle Reader, nostalgic as you might be for the ads on which it riffs, you and I only wish I were bullshitting you about that title)

In the thirties, A-cup breasts were called nubbins,
B cups snubbins,
C cups droopers, and D cups super droopers.
In the fifties, a bullet bra could make a bombshell
Of most women. Pointy torpedo cups
had every Hollywood starlet hooked.

OK. Credit where it’s due. All the “pen”s took some coming up with, and there’s a pun embedded in the brand name of the speaker’s pen in the first excerpt, and the play of figurative and literal language in the fourth line of the second excerpt refreshes the dead metaphor of “bombshell.” But the “pen”s seem suited more to a parlor game (or a drinking game) than to a poem about the relationship of poetry to politics, and the last line gives away the gimmick with five stanzas still to get through. And one can only wish the poet dreamed of writing in ways that might more effectively delight and instruct.

I mean lift and separate.

But the book is not without some more successful poems, and it’s not surprising that these are the poems in which the poet writes about things other than the poems she’s writing, turns her attention to persons other than her poem-writing self. “Basically,” for instance, separates children into two kinds (the ones who torture and the ones who rescue) and lifts each up in turn to understand how “all children are exhausted by the cruelties / of the world and fight sleep because there is still / so much to do.” Which reminds me just how tired I am right now, tired of the “torture” one feels compelled to undertake (so many infelicities to point out) in order to “rescue” readers from the unconscionable puffery that soils the back cover of this paperback I’m going to put down, now that I’m done putting it down.

Gamechangers, Part Deux

2010-02-11T14:55:00.000-08:00

A few posts ago, I promised you a Top Five list (with Honorable Mentions!), and though that post included only two main entries, a Top Five list, Gentle Reader, is what you have every right to expect and a Top Five list is what you shall receive. Herewith, then, further entries in the list of Gamechanger Volumes in Twentieth-Century Poetry. A recap: we’re sticking to 1925-1975 for this list (between the release of the Ezra Pound Cantos concept album -- you know, the one with the cool cover and a couple of great hits but also some drum solos and noodling keyboard bits you could, in retrospect, do without – and the release of Dolomite, starring Rudy Ray Moore); and we’re looking for volumes that a chock-full of great poems which, individually but especially when taken together, articulate a new direction for poetry, especially a direction subsequent poets have followed. And so, without further throat-clearing:

Number Three: John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Close readers of this here melopoeic blog might recall that the original terminus of the period to be covered by this list was 1974, but I have since realized that while the Watergate scandal and the resignation of Richard Nixon formed my political consciousness in profound ways, to link this Top Five list to an event in American political history would be like, well, it would be like an English department linking its distribution requirement to something like the passage of the First Reform Bill in 1832. But I also realized that sticking to that earlier date would require me to nominate Ashbery’s 1956 volume, Some Trees. Now, I was sorely tempted by that possibility. The earlier book’s not only got some fantastic poems in it (“The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers,” “A Long Novel,” “Le livre est sur la table”), and it not only has cool prose poems like “The Young Son,” but it also has the benefit of what must have been the freshness of a lilac-soaked May afternoon amidst the monuments of Late Modernism and the well-wrought urns of post-Modernist formalism that littered the literary landscape at the time of its appearance.

But I’m plumping for Self-Portrait. Look, it boasts a bunch of poems that show up on numerous critics’ best-of lists: “Forties Flick,” “Scheherezade,” “Hop o’ My Thumb,” “Märchenbilder,” and the title poem. More than that, though, it adds to the Surrealist play and generally Frenchy feel (you know, like when you see the human arm torch-holders along the wall of the Beast’s palace in Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bete) of the earlier poems a range of cultural reference that stretches from Parmigianino (whose painting inspires the title poem) to Van Camp’s Pork and Beans (or a sign for same, which shows up in “Grand Galop” along with the only high-littrachah puke sound I’ve ever run across: “Puaagh. Vomit. Puaaaaagh. More vomit”).

But wait, there’s more. There is, in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” a seriously playful meditation on the duties of representation and the responsibilities of evading them, an ars poetica at least partially encapsulated by these lines:

We see only postures of the dream,
Riders of the motion that swings the face
Into view under evening skies, with no
False disarray as proof of authenticity.
But it is life englobed.

Am I wrong to read a not-so-subtle kick at Confessionalism in the penultimate line-and-a-half there? And am I not right that the last line quoted is the shit?

This somber blog will, in the near future, offer its own meditation on play in poetry and why those alliteratively conjoined terms are GOOD THINGS, but Ashbery was there first, was present, we might even say, at something like the creation of a poetics dedicated to the proposition that a Magrittean atmosphere, a Cornellesque knack for juxtaposition (Ashbery is also, it turns out, a hell of a collagist), and a healthy appetite for the strange within the familiar are perhaps more interesting than our individual psyches’ struggles laid out in self-portraits in institutional glassless mirrors.

But you know what? I’d put this book on my list for this stanza, which concludes “As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat”:

The night sheen takes over. A moon of cistercian pallor
Has climbed to the center of heaven, installed,
Finally involved with the business of darkness.
And a sigh heaves from all the small things on earth,
The books, the papers, the old garters and union-suit buttons
Kept in a white cardboard box somewhere, and all the lower
Versions of cities flattened under the equalizing night.
The summer demands and takes away too much,
But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.

Kind of like this book.

Review: Gizzi's Deep Deadpan

2010-02-07T12:18:00.000-08:00

Michael Gizzi, New Depths of Deadpan (Burning Deck, 2009)

As promised in the last installment of this adventurous blog, a review of a slim volume by a real live living poet currently, perhaps right this very minute, writing poems. The back cover copy consists entirely of questions, the first of which glosses the collection’s title and provides as good a key to these poems as any: “Should the two archetypal masks that represent Comedy and Tragedy pass through each other (imagine a total eclipse), might not their overlapping intersection be an expression of deadpan?” The poems, which tend not to pose questions but, instead, to juxtapose declarations, wear just such an expression, playing with the multiple meanings and opposed affects that cohabit words and phrases in ways that at once grin and grimace.

Take “About Face.” Please. The title combines military command and modifying phrase, the imperative to reverse direction and the invitation to consider the visage. This sets two stages on which the poem acts out. First, we get reversals: “No sooner am I out the door than I want to be home reading.” And second, though the seriality I’m suggesting betrays the simultaneity the poem actually performs, we get reflection on, via reflections in, pre-fabricated chunks of language, as when the speaker compares his face to a “full-grown narcissus” (flower and flower’s namesake), says he cut off his nose (not to spite his face but to identify himself) and professes his love for “being busted in the mirror.” There’s a resulting insight from all that the poem narrates: “Then someone opens an eye in my head. Murmur of subtitles.”
The pun linking vision and subjectivity (eye/I, captain) is a Romantic truism, but the adverb that opens this last line links it to (self-)reflection in the complex mirror of cliché, and the closing sentence reels the life of one’s own mind in a language suddenly foreign, one for which we require the helpful trot of translation.

But see, I’ve done this thing that writing about poems like Gizzi’s often does. I’ve made it sound patently un-fun. These poems, though, are fun, and funny. Like this here cautionary example a friend and collaborator sent, making clear the importance of knowing where strings of words come from. Sometimes punnily funny, though by this I don’t mean to demean as we often do when pointing out a pun. Every line in “Cloistered in an Oyster,” for example, riffs on the reality of mollusk life as it’s embedded in phrases like “mother of pearl” and “oyster bed,” in words like “shuck” and “clammy,” but leaves the leer of Tragedy just visible behind its Comic lightness. And still more fun are the poems, like “Raging Balls” or “Attention Deficit Flypaper,” where things get a little blue (another word whose connotations combine the limning of loss and the gladdening of glands), that come admirably clean about the masturbatory character of this linguistic play (though with the strong sense that both masturbation and play get bad reps by not being taken nearly seriously enough). Check out the latter of those two poems in its entirety:

The Italian matriculates with the usher under the chapel.
Masturbation covers a small portion of the audacity of lust.
Like an aphrodisiac in daycare, he cut his eyes on onions.
Some days he wants to cry, but antidepressants won’t let him.

Gizzi does a lot just with sound here (suggesting a connection between matriculation and masturbation, for example), but the real fun, it seems to me, is in the various ways we can read a phrase like “Like an aphrodisiac in daycare.” Similar to such a substance in its infancy? As if such a substance were distributed to a gathering of infants? And the choice we make here determines the simile’s modification of the main clause. The first way might suggest that he, in a kind of erotically related infancy, instead of cutting teeth cuts (that is, develops) his eyes on the tear-inducing fumes of onions, while the second suggests that “he” is hamstrung by an incapacity to act on urges chemically induced (or, as the last line tells us, inhibited).

I’m having fun playing with these lines, but there’s no reason why I should have all of it. There are plenty of copies of New Depths of Deadpan to go around. Go get your own, and see what you can make of “Clouds Nine” (mild insult to Rumi-quoting New Agers?) or “Hours Dismembered” (Herrick and Marvell mashed up with Damien Hirst?), or “Night-Blooming Gramophone” (in just what way do “Rats know what good sex is”?). And then tell me in the comments section.

A Funny Thing Not Happening in the Forum

2010-02-03T11:03:00.000-08:00

Check out, if you’re interested in that kind of thing, the latest issue of Bookforum (FEB/MAR 2010), but don’t expect to find reviews of new English-language poetry therein cuz there aren’t any. Oh, there are brief items on forthcoming volumes (two, to be exact) in the “Pub Dates” department (page 4). By brief, I mean 116 words (I counted; it didn’t take long, and this includes title, publisher, author and translator names) on Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Rising of the Ashes (due out in February) and 97 words (including the ampersand in Farrar, Straus, & Giroux and another in a quote from “The Ballad of the Girly Man”) on Charles Bernstein’s All the Whiskey in Heaven, due out in March.

Really, Bookforum? This is it? A couple hundred words devoted to new poetry out of 45 pages. An entry on the selected poems volume by one of the most interesting and important experimental poets in the country that’s about the same length as one on the new volume of Catherine Millet’s who-gives-a-f*ck memoir (Jealousy: The Other Life of Catherine M)?!

OK. I’m exaggerating. There’s one full-page review devoted to the work of a poet: Eric Ormsby on three books by Mahmoud Darwish. This is good stuff, both the poetry (Darwish is amazing) and the review (Ormbsy is able, sometimes eloquent), but could no volume, perhaps a slim one consisting of newly produced poems, by a living poet be found that might merit a thousand words or so? You might start by looking here (scroll down past the stuff about Salinger, RIP).

The problem ain't confined to this here latest issue either. The last one (DEC/JAN) included one review (a short one tucked into the round-up corral at the end of the issue) of a poetry book (an interesting but unrepresentative one: Brandon Downing's Lake Antiquity: Poems 1996-2008) a book of collages with found-text poems). That issue, though, at least boasts a very smart piece on September 11 novels by my pal and idol, Laura Frost.

And the problem ain’t just Bookforum, Gentle Reader. I’ll be updating you soon on the first month of the new year’s coverage of new poetry (hell, of poetry at all) in the NYT Book Review, the New Yorker, and a couple other among the last remaining outlets that pay any attention to books in our benighted republic, but you can guess what I’ll be saying. What space does go to poetry tends to go to big collecteds or selecteds, often by dead poets. Important as these books are, reviews of them do precious little to cultivate a readership for the ink-stained (or maybe carpel-tunnelled) wretches currently producing the stuff. Guess you’ll have to watch this space for such reviews (coming soon).

P.S. This humble blogger’s heart leapt up – OK, fidgeted in anticipation of irritation – at the sight of Adam Kirsch’s name on the issue’s cover (be on the lookout for this ambitious blog’s take on all that’s wrong with Kirsch as poetry critic – it might be a long, even a multi-part, post), but, alas, his review was devoted to Thomas Mallon’s new book of and on letters. I tell you, it’s a sad issue of a magazine on books that disappoints me by not even including a poetry review by Adam Kirsch. Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Ubi Sunt

2010-01-29T08:51:00.000-08:00

Whither Poetry Snark?

I, too, dislike it.

But.

Gamechangers

2010-01-27T11:29:00.000-08:00

Prepping for class today, I reread Helen Vendler’s account of meeting Seamus Heaney and first hearing the poems of North. Vendler calls that book one of those rare volumes (like Prufrock, Harmonium, and North of Boston) that profoundly influenced the course of poetry in the 20th century. It’s not that I disagree, either about North – there are reasons why I teach Heaney’s poems pretty regularly – or about the Eliot, Stevens, and Frost books to which she compares it – I teach those guys all the time too – but it struck me that Vendler’s list, aside from North, stops around 1923. So I started wondering what books I’d add. In the spirit of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, which slim volumes (not already named) might make up the Top Five Poetic Gamechangers of the Century?

We’re looking, if Vendler’s list is a guide, for books whose poems not only strike us with particular power but also bring some alteration of form or rhetoric to bear on the specific character of their historical moment, for books whose poems not only strike us individually but also add up to a coherent and forceful whole. A couple of Yeats volumes come quickly to mind, though two (Wild Swans at Coole [1919] and Michael Robartes and the Dancer [1921]) are even earlier than the other modernist books above. And very recent stuff has not yet had a chance to exert any influence or demonstrate its staying power. So, for now, I’ll focus on the half-century between 1924 and 1975. Even here there’s an embarrassment of poetic riches, even if we set aside Pound’s 1925 Draft of XVI Cantos (great opening, vitally important middle, and strong ending, but some less crucial stuff scattered throughout) and, for fun, allow no repeat Eliot, Frost, Heaney, or Stevens. Which Bishop volume does one choose? Which Larkin? Do you go with an early, small-press Prynne or one of the more recent, Bloodaxe volumes? I’ll spread my list over a couple of posts, and I’ll take the cowardly judge’s dodge and name some Honorable Mentions to swell the list and accommodate more of my choices.

Sylvia Plath, Ariel (1965)
OK, some of this book’s influence might seem to be malign (see any of the hordes of poets who’ve taken from Plath an ambition to load every rift with emotional ore but who’ve left behind the formal mastery with which Plath actually at once achieves and transcends her strong emotional effects), and we’ll probably, at some point, have to have the conversation about which Ariel we’re talking about, given the alterations and emendations scholars have pointed out in the decades since the volume’s publication. Still, though, from the updated dramatic monologues of “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” to the contained energy of the bee poems, Plath crafts from her enviable formal control crucibles in which to mold the molten resentments recognizable to women not only in the 1960s when she wrote the poems but also to generations since take profound and powerful shape.

Honorable Mention: Robert Lowell, Life Studies
It’s no insult to Plath to say that Ariel is unimaginable without the example of Lowell’s book, which precedes it by a couple of years and which also makes the poet’s self an emotionally fraught exemplum not only for feeling individuals but also for the pressures those “tranquilized Fifties” exerted on them.

Michael Harper, Dear John, Dear Coltrane (1970)
A tough call here over which makes the list and which is honorably mentioned, but the visceral power channeled through jazz rhythms and idioms just packs more punch to the contemporary ear than Hughes’s blues poems (great as they are). Or is it that the personal pain in Harper’s elegies for his newborn son, especially when articulated to the racial division and violence of the 1960s, lift the book to a higher level of power and potential influence? I think I’d maybe listened once to twice to Coltrane’s A Love Supreme before I read this book, but I went out and bought it and put it on constant repeat after I read it (which meant, really, listening to one half over and over because, um, this was back in the days of LPs; I can still hear the arm lifting the needle from the end of the record and swinging it back, then the hiss of the groove before the first sounds of the first movement sang out again). If you can get hold of the recording Harper did with Essex Hemphill on cello, do it. But even if you can’t, just read a poem like “Deathwatch” or “We Assume” out loud. Does America need a killing? I’d like to think not, but at the end of the poem, when Harper intones that refrain, it’s hard not to agree. And it’s cold compensation that “Survivors will be human,” but a compensation that’s earned by the poem’s clear-eyed confrontation with both personal grief and political grimness.

Honorable Mention: Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues(1926) According to Hughes, when he was reading poems from this book in a Harlem church, the pastor passed him a note telling him to stop reading the blues from his pulpit. It’s hard to recover the sense of violence against decorous norms that Hughes perpetrated in his early blues poems, and hard to remember until you reread them both the power and the political charge the poems bear. If it’s been a while, or if you’ve only read the Hughes poems typically anthologized, this one’s worth checking out.)

Next time: Ashbery? And Howe!

2010-01-24T11:38:00.000-08:00

Reviewing the Reviews: Toibin on Gunn in NYRB

If you didn’t catch it, check out Colm Toibin’s review of the new Selected Poems of Thom Gunn, edited by August Kleinzahler. I’ve got my problems with the Kleinzahler’s selection (too little of the early work, which often – though not, I have to say, by Kleinzahler in his introduction – gets written off as the tight-assed verse of a young poet from austere, post-imperial Britain, and too much of early seventies stuff, which seems for some readers to stand for the loose, acid-fueled authenticity of a wild man who’s come to accept his penchant for Harleys and black leather), and so would cavil a little over Toibin’s approval of same, but the review’s great. Toibin’s clear and perceptive. More than that, he really gets Gunn. This can be most clearly seen when he turns to exemplary lines and stanzas; he notes, for example, the “mixture of sexual desire and lovely, ambiguous menace” in Gunn’s wonderful “Tamer and Hawk.” But his broader characterization of Gunn’s work, both in individual moments (the Movement-ish verse of the first three books, the experimental work of the Moly period, the elegiac Man with Night Sweats) and in the arc of the career as a whole (as when he illustrates the continuities across the career through five poems chosen for attention by critics in At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn, another book under review in the essay) are also persuasive.

It might be, though, that the comments I most appreciate in Toibin’s review are those that get not at the variety of Gunn’s work but at the catholicity of the poet’s taste. Toibin sets up as the poles between which Gunn moved over the course of his career the antithetical Bay Area figures of critic Yvor Winters and poet Robert Duncan, and he concludes with a comment about how Gunn, especially in a notebook comment about how poetry could “be one’s life at the fullest,” would have met with the approval of both.
He quotes with approval Gunn’s response to an interview question about the impressive span of his poetic affinities: “I’m not surprised . . . that I have sympathies with such a broad range of poetry: I’m surprised that everybody doesn’t.” This attitude is of a piece, I think, with that other uncommon facet of Gunn’s poetics: his resistance to the notion of poetic uniqueness, to the idea that poets should cultivate idiosyncratic and immediately recognizable individual voices. If, like Gunn, more poets made the work about language and its ways of mediating, shaping, warping, breaking and otherwise verbing experience, intellection, and feeling (rather than about their own experience, thoughts, and emotions), the art might recover the widespread strength Gunn himself saw in the work of the Elizabethans. That might be a good thing.

Review: Carl Phillips's Latest

2010-01-21T08:46:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, I wrote that Carl Phillips is the best writer of unrhymed tercets in the contemporary American poetry scene. I also said that wasn’t faint praise. I’ll stand by both of those assertions now, on the basis of “The River in Motion and Stillness,” in Phillips’s latest volume (FSG 2009). Also on display here is Phillips’s penchant for long sentences broken over lines and caesurae:

As if with the satisfaction of a near-impossible task
brought finally, and with no little struggling, to absolute
accomplishment, he lifts his ruined face up from beside

the other’s face, just as ruined, despite the sun being at that
angle that makes what ordinarily gets taken for flaw
very briefly what it also is: a loveliness, and something

strange, original . . .

The ellipses are in the poem, and, like the self-interrupting course of the sentence, they suggest the unending character of the experiences and perceptions Phillips recounts. Part of what makes Phillips so rewarding to read is precisely this tension between interruption and continuity, a tension held not only by the suspensions of sense over those syntactic and stanzaic breaks but also by the interplay of sounds. Listen to the simultaneous variety and insistence of “a” sounds in that sentence, the short “a” of “As,” “satisfaction,” “task,” “and,” “absolute,” continuing through the second stanza even as Phillips shifs to the long vowel of “face” (twice) and “taken,” “angle” and “strange.” There’s a similar alternation or interweaving of sibilants and fricatives, the hissing whisper of the lines providing a sinuous soundtrack over the modifying and qualifying phrases. The lines and their music perform what the poem’s title promises, motion and stillness.

Most of the poems in Speak Low are not in unrhymed tercets, but there are plenty of other elements that link the book to the poet’s previous nine (nine!) collections. Phillips was trained as a classicist, and this volume, like his other books, refers often to classical myths, histories, and texts (“Late Empire,” “The Plains of Troy,” “The Centaur,” “Fair Is Whatever the Gods Call Fair,” “Reciprocity”). These references suggest analogies between the violent emotions and actions of the old world and life and love today, but it’s hard to tell which is the tenor and which the vehicle, which of these we’re being led to understand in light of the other. “Happiness” meditates on the tears not of Achilles but of his horses at the death of Patroclus and imagines the beasts “hovering around their disbelief . . . as a bee will hover, // fooled at first, over freshly spilled semen,” the shift from past to present tense (and the context of the volume’s other poems on lovers and their discontents) locating the simile in today. The comparison’s ostensible aim is to illuminate those horses, but it’s contemporary weepers we really learn something about, just as in “Naming the Stars” Helen in the Iliad says something applicable not only (and not, for the poem’s purposes, chiefly) to the role of defilement in Homer’s world but also to the part it plays in ours.

Defilement; there’s another continuity with Phillips’s earlier work. This poet, more than any other living poet I can think of (and in company with such immortals as Catullus, Shakespeare, and Thom Gunn), forcibly holds our faces to the violence inherent in what we call (to make ourselves feel better? more human(e)?) love.
There is pain in these poems, there is torture, and these are inextricable from, are, maybe, constitutive of, desire. The speaker of “Now in Our Most Ordinary Voices” characterizes himself with references to sentences he’s “spouted” (“To know is to live flayed and Ambition / means turning the flesh repeatedly back – toward the whip”), as if to distance himself from these statements, but “Late Empire” and “Early Dreamer” and half a dozen other poems here seem still to proffer without apology similar sentiments.

So that it’s a relief, not because I doubt or disagree with Phillips’s intrication of love and torture (quite the contrary), and not because there is no pleasure in the pain he so tautly strings across the poems’ staves (there’s plenty of that), but because even after an enthralling storm, a compelling thriller, or a strenuously orgasmic bout of sexual combat the mind and heart and body seek rest and quiet, a return to equilibrium, to come to the book’s penultimate poem, “Husk,” which turns the volume down and reels the lines back in (“a wordlessness prevailing the way / a wind prevails”) and resigns itself, allowing us to resign ourselves in turn, with its concluding line: “So what, that we’re falling?” Falling, and fallenness too, have rarely fared as well as they do in Phillips’s classical handling, his careful hands.