The Suburban Ecstasies: Seth Abramson

The Suburban Ecstasies is impressive as a series of discrete poems which form a book-length narrative about the life of a character named Gideon. The fusion of the spiritual and the mundane that begins with the title continues throughout the book, permeating the volume with an air of magical realism, and in this, as well as in the way Abramson delights in lists and odd details, he resembles Ilya Kaminsky, who also blends the religious and the everyday in long narratives. One mistake Abramson makes that Kaminsky does not, is that he feels the young poet’s urge to place himself in the ranks of established writers—The Suburban Ecstasies utilizes a number of symbols and myths from Greek, Roman and Biblical traditions, which provides little in the way of meaning, and he also references American poets like Robert Frost and Emily Dickenson. I imagine mostly hollow allusions such as these will be dropped in the future, it seems that using them is a rite of passage like writing a long pastoral poem was for English poets in the 17th century. Name-drop Orpheus, or get off the boat, contemporary lyric poets!

And Abramson is a lyric poet-- right from the beginning he claims the authority of a maker, or creator—Abramson is comfortable in the role of poet-as-prophet. “This is the scene,” begins the first poem “Gideon Gets Central Air,” words strongly in the tradition of “It is as if,” or “I imagine,” and in the second poem, “Say the Boy,” Abramson is still summoning his world into being, proclaiming, “Say the boy/has sprouted two stag horns overnight,” and going on to repeat the mantra of “say” six more times.

Another of Abramson’s tricks is his lists, which gives the poems speed while allowing Abramson to delve into worldplay, and follow some imaginative tangents. They often resemble this one from “Gideon Gets Central Air”:

What else? Yes,
this too—
a highway—
a berth for all that comes after,
the State Welcome Center
and the Jewish delicatessen with its windows
of Bristol glass;
its roof, bluish tin, all electrical tape
and insulated wiring

The lists never felt indulgent to me, rather, they worked well to communicate the lyric “ecstasy” of the writing, while celebrating the physical. Abramson’s form rarely deviates from the running dropped lines, sometimes separating into a few stanzas, but he never writes in a recognizable form such as couplets or quatrains, as he’s done before in journals. His form, which feels loose in terms of speed, is actually composed of tightly controlled individual lines, and is conducive to Abramson’s listing—and because he’ll drop lines, the very short ones don’t visually stick out like sore thumbs. The poem makes a fairly regular block shape that keeps the eye travelling downward at a rapid pace.

I’m going on and on about the lists, mostly because they’re in almost every single poem, but another of Abramson’s strengths are his remarkable images, some of which are only possible because of the extended narrative. The discrete poem, without the cheapness of the sudden (and tiresomely expected) “epiphany,” can’t deliver the sort of power some of Abramson’s generate. Abramson gives himself time to build, and the lines carry the reader into some striking, unexpected visuals, such as this one from “Say the Boy” (the boy has grown stag horns at this point):

Say the boy
is no longer a boy at all, now fracturing light
with a loll of his head,
now weary of his own majesty,
now bowing his branches
whenever fearful, or curious, or falling in love.

The image of the antlers “fracturing light” immediately summons to mind both a picture of the boy in motion, under the weight of his antlers, as well as light being blocked out by the antlers, and conveys something sad, and perhaps slightly nostalgic. Hopefully I’m not treating this image as a sort of Rorschach for myself—I think the nostalgia comes into play with the knowledge that the boy (that any boy) will only be a boy for a short time, and the last line foreshadows powerful emotion to come.

Abramson is at his best when he’s keeping his poems in the realm of the surreal, there was some disjoint in the sections “Return to the Ordinary,” and “Trials,” where a number of the poems began to contain sub-titles which appear to be headlines from newspaper articles, such as “[III] Arrest of Gideon’s Father (“…Man Arrested Under Animal Cruelty Statute…”)” and “[IV] Gideon Unemployed (“Black Monday for Ford Workers”)”. Although the tone and format is mostly unchanged, the shift in subject matter feels forced, as if Abramson crammed material he wanted to write about in a place where it didn’t belong. I think Abramson attempted to justify the shift with the section title (Return to the Ordinary), but that wasn't enough for me. The poems contained within these sections are still lyrically engaging, but I wonder if they would have been better served outside this volume, perhaps in a chapbook, where Abramson wouldn't have to veil them under the auspices of his Gideon narrative.

All said, The Suburban Ecstasies is an intoxicating volume, and I can see it birthing a number of copy-cat poets who will be enamored by the form, much like people were imitating Eliot after The Wasteland was released. Whether that happens or not, Abramson gained at least one reader.