Stranger Passing

Brett's 2011 Favorites

2012-01-07T22:12:00.000-08:00

These lists are unapologetically subjective and don’t even follow their own rules. I *tried* to keep the film list to those from this past year, but I know some are a year or two late. A lot of films I saw in January are old news, so although they might have been on my top ten, I disregarded them as listworthy—The King’s Speech, The Kids Are All Right, The Fighter, etc. Same with some of the older films that really blew me away in the past twelve months—The Third Man, High Noon, Hud, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (the original version was unexpectedly fantastic). As for novels, I just picked my five favorites and didn’t worry about time period.

Favorite Five Novels:
5. The Family Fang – Kevin Wilson (If you liked The Royal Tenenbaums, this is a book for you.)
4. All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost – Lan Samantha Change (A book about two poets at a midwestern writing program and their teacher.)
3. Mating – Norman Rush
2. Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay – Michael Chabon
1. The Border Trilogy – Cormac McCarthy

Dishonorable Mention:
Winslow in Love- Kevin Canty (Another book about a poet. I found this one on a list from The Guardian on the ten best books about poets. It sucked.)

Favorite Memoir/Nonfiction:
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City - Nick Flynn
Townie – Andres Dubus III
The Adderall Diaries – Stephen Elliott

Favorite Short Story Collection:
Knockemstiff – Donald Ray Pollack (Tough call between this and Jesus' Son, but ultimately the stories in Knockemstiff stayed with me in a way the other didn't. Neither collection is for the faint of heart. Also, the film version of Jesus' Son was a disappointement.)
Almost No Memory - Lydia Davis (Refreshing. Lots of the stories only a page or two, so easy to read on the bus or between classes.)

Favorite Books of Poetry:
5. What Work Is – Philip Levine
4. The King – Rebecca Wolff
3. Poetry in America – Julia Spicher-Kasdorf
2. A Green Light – Matthew Rohrer
1. Mule – Shane McCrae

Dishonorable Mention:
Mortal Geography – Alexandra Teague

The number one book of poetry was easy for me. I couldn’t put Mule down.

Top Ten Films:
10. Submarine
9. Nowhere in Africa (German)
8. Another Year
7. Win Win
6. 50/50
5. The Tree of Life
4. Blue Valentine
3. Incendies
2. Drive
1. Never Let Me Go

Dishonorable Mention:
Paul (Rented it one boring night, not expecting much. Devoid of fun. Ten times worse than my lowest expectations.)

For 2012 I'd like to read a few graphic novels (I didn't read any last year, but A bought me one for Christmas), more non-memoir nonfiction (Politics, Food, Parenthood), and continue to try and fill in gaps as far as 20th century American poetry. I still haven't made any concrete resolutions for 2012, but before I do that, I need to make a to-do list for tomorrow.

Blowin' in the Wind

2012-01-03T21:07:00.000-08:00

In 2011 I watched 130 films and read 102 books. I’ve been recording what I read since January 1^st, 2011, but I didn’t start recording books on this blog until last April. You can click on the tab in the upper right hand corner if you're curious. Right now I’m watching A Fistful of Dollars because I can’t remember if I’ve seen it or not. Watching Clint Eastwood chew a cigar in his poncho, I’m starting to think I haven’t. When I was a kid I loved Westerns, though I don’t know how many Clint Eastwood films I saw. My favorite movies were The Cowboys and The Sons of Katie Elder (John Wayne), or movies about Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone and The Alamo, and later the Young Guns movies with Emilio Estevez and Kiefer Sutherland. I remember staying with a friend for a couple weeks and walking around collecting pop bottles until we had enough to turn them in for dimes at the grocery store and rent Young Guns II. At the time, I thought the classic rock soundtrack was awsome.

Here’s a poem I have up at Arsenic Lobster. It’s kind of a specialist’s poem until the last section. Shout-outs to Basil Bunting and Jack Spicer. I'm going to add another section for Marianne Moore and her imaginary gardens with real toads.

Last night I was watching Tiny Furniture on instant watch, and the main character said something like “Poems are like dreams—everyone likes telling their own, but doesn’t like hearing anyone else’s.” I had to laugh, because there’s some truth to that. Later, the same character confesses to a date that she hates foreign films, and I don't know if it was supposed to be endearing but I felt a little annoyed because a subtle pattern of anti-intellectualism was starting to develop. I should say the main character is pretty unlikable, so maybe it was supposed to strike me exactly like it did. Still, I wonder if the so-called pattern was conscious or not, and I think the truth is probably a mixture. I bet the director doesn’t go around saying she hates foreign films, but probably believes the words the character says. If that makes sense. By the way, Tiny Furniture is good, it reminded me of The Future except it was funnier and, in my opinion, more accessible. But not better.

Here’s a list of the books I read in December.

The last book on the December list, Manufacturing Consent, was helpful in thinking about how the mainstream media operates. I've always been curious, but never had more than a nebulous idea of why news corporations have more on their agenda than informing the American public. The authors, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, begin the book by talking about filters that every story has to go through before it reaches the public. For instance, the media doesn’t exist simply for the public good—it’s a profit making enterprise. Second, it’s too expensive for news corporations to have correspondents in every area of the world, so they rely on the U.S. government for a lot of updates and information. There are more “filters”: flak for instance (i.e., “how much flak will we receive from the public if we run this story”), but those first two are big. Information from the government that must generate a profit. That criteria certainly narrows down the sort of information we’ll hear, or the perspective news sources will take.

The book was written in 1988, so the information was dated, but I liked reading about events I wasn’t familiar with, such as the 1981 assassination attempt on the pope, or the murder of a Polish priest during the Solidarity movement. The book also made me think about the media’s coverage of the “Arab Spring”, particularly the coverage of Libya. I remember there was a week or two where this Libyan woman who was allegedly held captive and raped by soldiers was all over the news. On the one hand, yes, rape is terrible, and a crime, on the other hand, why was one isolated incident picked up and obsessed over as opposed to the other crimes being committed every day? Chomsky would say it was because the media considered that woman a “worthy” victim. The US opposed the Libyan regime, and that story was used to remind the US public that the regime was bad. After reading Legacy of Ashes, the history of the CIA, I also think the whole story could have been a CIA media campaign.

Also, I've been listening to a lot of Bob Dylan over the holidays, and I'm hearing the song "Blowin' in the Wind" differently than before. I used to think of it as a coming-of-age song, probably because of the first line, "How many roads must a man walk down/Before you call him a man," but recently it's struck me as a song about social justice, or a resignation to the fact that it'll never come. I read an article on the day the troops left Iraq that estimated 150,000 Iraqis have been killed during the course of the war, four out of five of them civilians. That's a shocking number of civilian deaths, and there's no way Americans would stand for any kind of sacrifice like that here. Anyway, I was thinking of that article and how we was Americans respond (or don't respond) to violence overseas when I heard the lines "How many times can a man turn his head/Pretending he just doesn't see," and also "How many deaths will it takes til' he knows/That too many people have died."

It's kind of ironc that as I'm transcribing Bob Dylan lyrics and waxing liberal about the war as Clint Eastwood is fondling his six-shooter, gazing out a tavern window and talking about how much money he can make from killing. Anyway. I was going to write an end-of-year round-up on my favorite movies, novels, and poetry selections from 2011, but I think I’ll wait a day or two. I keep stopping to glance up at the movie. One of Clint's old amigos is explaining the gang situation, which sounds complicated. Two gangs, Ramon of the Rojos is kind of the big dog, smugglers are running liquor and guns to America, there is money to be made, and the military is coming into town tomorrow. Now Clint is walking toward another bar, telling the coffin maker he passed to “Get three coffins ready,” so I better start watching. Brett's Best of the Year to follow shortly.

The Adventures of Augie March / Popular Birds of Poetry

2011-12-14T21:23:00.000-08:00

I’ve been reading so much these past few weeks that I worry I’m not giving myself time to process. I’m the kind of person who needs to let information settle. For instance, when I’m revising a poem or essay I often don’t have ideas for change until I’m in bed trying to sleep. But, maybe there’s something to be said for complete (temporary) reading immersion. I haven’t been running, or writing, or visiting friends, or really doing anything other than reading and fulfilling the basic responsibilities the end of the semester requires, such as finishing grading and meeting with students.

One of the books I recently finished is The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow. It’s another ambitious coming-of-age novel from the mid-twentieth century in the vein of You Can’t Go Home Again, but I think it’s far superior to anything by Thomas Wolfe. One of the ideas from The Adventures of Augie March is “Your character is your fate,” which is really interesting, and while it’s an easy concept to understand, the argument is really driven home over the course of the novel. I’ll be honest, when I initially read the jacket my drive to read the book was deflated because I felt that I had the whole story in two paragraphs. A kid from Chicago goes on a bunch of adventures, spends some time in Mexico, than returns home. The jacket even went so far as to interpret the novel, explaining that it illustrates "man's restless persuit of an elusive evening." Thanks, Penguin Publishing.

It was like a movie preview that shows a clip from every significant scene, so in two minutes you know everything that’s going to happen in the film and you’ve probably heard the funniest lines. BUT, one thing I know from reading and writing poetry is that what is said is often not as important as how something is said. The form and the message are inseperable. So I decided to trust in form, and begin reading.

When Augie is a kid growing up in Chicago he’s basically motivated by noble intentions, but he also has a dishonest streak if he feels he can get ahead with minimal risk. Augie skips school and steals from a department store, but he also loves his brothers and wants to take care of his mother. After a quarter lifetime of mishaps—spoiler alert—Augie ends of working for a black market business, doing quite well financially and with a clean conscience; because by the end of the novel, Augie has accepted who he is. His character is his destiny.

It’s unpopular, this idea that we can’t escape ourselves, but I think it’s true more often than not. Even radical transformation is often just external factors. For instance, I was just watching a documentary called Running the Sahara, about three guys who…you guessed it…run across the Sahara, from Senegal to Cairo, and the guy who’s spear-heading the expedition is kind of a control freak. In the beginning of the film he talks about how he used to be a coke addict, and how he lived on the streets for a while and basically ruined his life, but then there he is, leading his team across the desert. I imagine someone might say, “He changed his life,” but really that guy hasn’t changed, he’s just redirected himself. Same guy, new addiction, albeit one that’s healthier and more socially acceptable.

What makes Augie March better than You Can’t Go Home Again is that I was emotionally invested in Augie as a human being, and not just as a vehicle for Bellow’s ideas. That was my big problem with George Webber in You Can’t Go Home Again—he was never really a person, no one in that novel was. They were just puppets.

I was also thinking about how one of my professor’s told me that the form of the novel was ideal for showing the effects of society on the individual, and how that never really rang true for me until I started reading these fat twentieth century novels. Like I said, sometimes I'm slow on the uptake. Some of my favorite novels from this past year, such as Mating by Norman Rush, are perfect exampls of that paradigm, as is Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris. In that novel, the setting of a modern advertising agency is just as important as the individual chracters.

I bring this up because one of Augie’s obsessions is how everyone is trying to manipulate him, or make them a part of their own plans. People try to adopt him, or marry him, or make him their business partner, and for a long time Augie has no direction so he’s just kind of caught up in these currents and swept along. But after a while he’s uncomfortable, and he moves on to something new. At one point, Augie’s employer Einhorn identifies Augie as having a spirit of “opposition,” that is, a kind of rebellious nature that will only allow him to be a part of something for so long before he becomes restless and has to leave. It’s a powerful passage, so I'll reproduce it. Here’s what Einhorn says:

But wait. All of a sudden I catch on to something about you. You’ve got opposition in you. You don’t slide through everything. You just make it look so.
This was the first time that anyone had told me anything like the truth about myself. I felt it powerfully. That, as he said, I did have opposition in me, and great desire to offer resistance and to say “No!” which was as clear as could be, as definite a feeling as a pang of hunger. (126 in the Penguin Edition)

I love this passage, and how it defines a part of Augie’s spirit, but I should probably admit that I also related to it in some way. During those times when Augie bails out onlife he often stows away in his apartment and reads, and in those moments I occasionally flashed back to when I was an undergraduate RA for summer session classes, and was supposed to be working on a university maintenance crew. I would stay up all night reading Graham Greene, or Ernest Hemingway, or I would walk through the muggy evening to the Family Video and check out three VHS tapes for my little TV/VCR combo.

One night I watched The Great Escape, Born on the Fourth of July, and To Sir, With Love, and when I finished the dark outside my window was washing out into gray so I drove to the airport where I drank chocolate milk and smoked cigarettes until the sun rose. That was the summer I went wild for Paul Newman and read Frank O'Hara for the first time after pulling Meditations in an Emergency off the shelf and buying it because I liked the title. Needless to say, I didn’t make it to work that morning, or a lot of mornings that ended in a similar fashion, and this continued off and on for a month or so until my boss sent word through a friend that I was fired.

As for poetry, I read James Wright’s first volume, The Green Wall. It’s easy to see why W.H. Auden picked it to win the Yale Younger Poets Prize, with its careful rhythms and religious imagery, but honestly, I wasn’t crazy about it. It felt sort of postured to me, and almost every single poem recycles the same five words: bough is the worst, I wanted to gag after the 29th time I saw it, but Wright also OD’s on stars, dark, and tanagers, a species of bird that comes up every third poem.

Interestingly, this seems to have been the popular bird to name drop in the 70’s because Robert Hass writes about tanagers in Field Guide (also a Yale Younger Poets Prize winner, though not selected by Auden) as did Michael Ryan in In Winter. Before writing about tanagers, poets stuck to generic but majestic birds such as hawks and eagles, sometimes mentioning falcons or seagulls. And you know what the cool bird is in poetry these days? It’s the starling. Everyone has a poem about a starling. But, I don’t want to dog on the Wright’s, James or his son Franz, because I like them both, and I’m actually in the middle of reading Shall We Gather at the River right now.

Also, Michael Ryan’s In Winter is extremely depressing. It’s a whole book of poems about death and loneliness and separation, and how sex is this selfish battle against death and no one can tell us how to be alone, and on and on, but what’s really funny is that the first depressing poem in the collection is called “Poem at Thirty.” Poem at THIRTY? Holy jeez, Michael Ryan needs to CHILL OUT, it makes me shudder to think of what kind of poetry he was writing at fifty.

November Reading

2011-12-01T19:11:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I went with my wife, A, to her 7am ultrasound. She scheduled it early so we could both go. After a moment of the technician methodically gliding the handle around on her bare stomach, the dark screen was flooded with a silhouette of the baby that slid back and forth like mercury in a thermometer. When the technician paused, the yet un-fused vertebrae of the spine lit up electric white. The ribs, the four chambers of the heart, the stomach, the brain, the bones of the legs and arms—these also were illuminated in turn, star-bright and defined. A was far enough along that we could have found out the gender, but we’re going to wait until the birth.

Here’s a list of what I read in November.

A couple nights ago I was really tired, but instead of going to sleep I was going to try and push through a few chapters of The Adventures of Augie March. As I pulled myself off the bed—where I was gathering resolve—A told me I was being irresponsible with my reading this month, which I thought was really funny, and also made me feel like some kind of maverick, reading badass. Like my reading in November was real Top Gun material. You say The Adventures of Augie March can’t be read in three days? I did it in two. Or like I’m spending sleepless nights working on the cure for cancer or something. Nope! Just reading a lot! Poetry and fiction!

With grading, applying to schools, and trying to produce new work, it probably was a bit much, but I went on a King Library binge and couldn’t stay out of what I brought home. It’s interesting, looking back at the list, at what was the most enjoyable at the time I was reading as opposed to what I can’t quite shake at the end of the month. For instance, Poetry in America by Julia Spicher-Kasdorf (I grabbed it because of the ambitious title) was a fantastic read—something about Spicher-Kasdorf’s sensibility was uniquly intimate, and engaging, and perhaps also familiar—but now I keep thinking about Rachel Zucker’s Eating in the Underworld, which after reading, I didn’t even like as much as The Bad Wife Handbook. I guess the word for that is "haunting."

Jesus’ Son, a recommendation by my friend J, was good, and a lot like Knockemstiff. Profoundly, severely, disturbingly troubled narrators that surface in and out of the linked stories. Still, as unsettling as both those collections are, neither of them have lingered with me for days like Kazuo Ishiguro. Lord have mercy. When We Were Orphans, like the film version of Never Let Me Go, is absolutely devastating. Work by Ishiguro doesn’t make me want to start a book club, it makes me want to start a support group. Are you a reader traumatized by Ishiguro’s brutal and unrelenting vision of the human condition? Whiskey and commiseration each Wednesday night! It would probably be poorly attended because, as all readers of Ishiguro know—there is no help.

Mary Karr: Kind of Boring

2011-11-13T19:16:00.000-08:00

Can someone mount a defense of Mary Karr? I read an interview with her in The Paris Review a year or two ago, and ever since I’ve been meaning to read one of her books. They sounded controversial, and I was curious. So while wandering the library aisles last week I came across her name and pulled The Liar's Club and Viper Rum (a selection of poetry) off the shelf and into my shoulder bag. I hate—really hate—to quit reading a book once I begin, but The Liar's Club was making me crazy after the first twenty odd pages. It was a combination of boredom and constantly being pulled from the narrative while Mary Karr explained how clear a memory was, or how fuzzy a memory was, or who else could confirm a memory. The writing felt very self-conscious and defensive.

So, I’m not going to finish, although I'll still sample Viper Rum and see if Karr’s poetry strikes me as any more interesting. In part, I feel a professional obligation to at least read a poem or two so I can talk about it if students ever ask, or, more realistically, if it comes up at a fancy cocktail party and I need to hold forth while furrowing my brow and sipping from an old fashioned.

After I quit The Liar's Club, I started reading Then We Came to the End, a novel by Joshua Ferris, who I've never heard of (another random library grab), and so far it's satisfying the craving for fiction I developed last week. I also picked up The Adventures of Augie March, which I’m going to try and finish this month, although it’s a fat one. I read Henderson the Rain King several years ago and loved it.

My wife has an ipod touch that until recently I never used, but now I’ve started downloading apps, and when I read I keep the dictionary.com application open. It’s so awesome. For instance, in The Bad Wife Handbook Rachel Zucker has a line about a “duomo,” so I paused for a moment and looked it up. (It’s a cathedral in Italy.) Very helpful. In general, the poetry I've been reading this month has been amazing, and the prose mediocre. You'll have to wait to see the November list if you want specifics, although it's been a long time since I've reviewed a book on this blog, and those are the bread and butter of my random internet visitors (a.k.a. "cheaters").

Another week beginning, and I’m excited to revise some poems. Since my computer is on the fritz, I’ve had to email poems from my wife's computer, print them, then make revisions on paper, which is a pleasant method (mostly because it's new to me) but also a pain in the ass because then I have to plug in the revisions on a computer later. Actually, that's what I should be doing right now, but instead I'm going to put it on my to-do list for tomorrow, drink a glass of orange juice, and read some more of Then We Came to the End. Glug-glug-glug. Check you later.

It's Early Saturday Afternoon

2011-11-05T14:05:00.000-07:00

and the November sun is white on the asphalt outside my kitchen window, fractured in places with shadows of tree branches that slowly drift back and forth along the ground. So far, I’ve eaten breakfast with my wife and watched two episodes of Malcolm in the Middle. I don’t think I’m going to do much writing today, I spent this past week grading 66 essays and I’m on the verge of brain-dead.

Two poems accepted this month, and one journal asked for revisions on an essay, which was subsequently rejected after I sent the revisions. I knew it would be, the essay has issues I’m not quite sure how to fix, and my revisions were just paint and trim when walls needed tearing down.

One poem was accepted without reservation, the other acceptance came with a suggestion for revision, which really surprised me. I know prose editors sometimes ask for revisions, or provide commentary, but never for poetry. At least not in my limited experience. I have theories on why this happens. Poetry editors see more individual pieces than prose editors (a theory within a theory), and also, to suggest a change in a poem implies understanding, of either the poem or what the author is trying to accomplish, and I think many people are afraid they’ll miss something important about a poem, and a suggestion will reveal their stupidity. I don’t think that should be an issue, but I suspect it sometimes is.

Here’s what I read in October.

What this editor suggested for my poem was fairly drastic—a two page poem was cut down to…twelve lines, I think? I was happy to accept the changes, but I was also fascinated with them. I kept rereading my original version, than looking back at the suggested revision, trying to see it from the reader’s perspective.

Right now, I have a lot of poems that I like, but would like a whole lot more if the beginnings were a little more striking. So that will probably be my project for next week. Tweak some early lines, and get another batch of poems ready to send out into the world.

Friday Noir

2011-10-28T20:26:00.000-07:00

I started watching The Third Man last night, but didn't finish it until this evening. It’s one of those movies that I've been meaning to see for years, and once I finally do I can't believe I waited so long. So good. I would have finished it last night, and I should have since it’s only an hour and forty minutes, but I started getting nervous because I had to teach the next morning and I become miserly about my sleep when faced with the prospect of less than seven hours.

The Third Man is about an American, Holly Martins, who goes to Vienna expecting to see his friend, Harry Limes, but Holly arrives just in time for Harry’s funeral. As Holly starts investigating Harry’s death, he realizes that nothing is what it seems. Not Harry's death, or Harry himself, or the city of Vienna. Writing about it I'm reminded of Chinatown, which I just saw for the first time last week. Now that I think about it, it’s kind of strange how the city in each film—Vienna and Chinatown—is its own reality where normal rules don’t apply. Like in Chinatown, when everything went horribly awry at the end and the cop just says something to the effect of, What can you do? It’s Chinatown. My writing career reminds me of Chinatown.

Yesterday my wife picked me up at King Library, where I was working on an essay because my computer crashed. As I walked to the passenger side of the car, a gold SUV revved past like it was in a big hurry, and as we followed it down the drive it pulled over about twenty feet ahead, put on its emergency lights, and a well-dressed woman stepped out. I was really mad, because the SUV blew past approximately two feet from me, so I rolled down the window and pounded on the side of our car and yelled, “Hey—slow down!” I wanted to add, “You old bag,” but I was on campus where I work, and it seemed over the top. I could tell I startled said woman because she skipped into a faster walk when I banged on the side door, but she wasn't overly traumatized because as we rolled toward the road she peeked over her shoulder and pointed a sidewise middle finger at me before turning quickly away.

The first book I read by Graham Greene was The Heart of the Matter. I read it over the course of a day and finished it in the early hours of the morning, and when I set the book on the hardwood floor beside the mattress I remember the total surprise of the novel's emotional impact. It could have so easily been boring. But years later (I read the book in 2005) I still think back to Scobie and his secret life. I guess the book is a lot like The Third Man. Scobie died with most of his secrets hidden from even his wife, just like Holly Martins didn’t know anything about his friend Harry Lime. That seems to be a theme with Graham Greene. What do we really know about anyone?

The film dialogue is so snappy (and often funny), especially in the beginning when Holly Martins is this cocky son of a gun who's going to dig up the truth, before he realizes what a mess he's in, but what struck me about The Heart of the Matter was the unflinching honesty about human weakness. Some of my favorite passages:

pg. 71: Scobie said sharply, “Don’t talk nonsense, dear. We’d forgive most things if we knew the facts.”

pg. 71: …for the first time he realized the pain inevitable in any human relationship—pain suffered and pain inflicted. How foolish one was to be afraid of loneliness.

pg. 215: Human beings couldn’t be heroic all the time: those who surrendered everything—for God or love—must be allowed sometimes in thought to take back their surrender. So many had never committed the heroic act, however rashly. It was the act that counted.

Walking to King Library today after my office hours, I passed three women who looked and dressed much like the impatient SUV driver from yesterday. Each time I thought it was the culprit. But they all wore long trench coats, each of their faces were unnaturally tan, their short hair was feathered and gelled, and in the gray chill of a late October afternoon they all looked resolutely grim to the same degree, marching down the sidewalk, only glancing up once before our paths crossed, their faces never cracking to reveal even the most basic signs of acknowledgment, let alone recognition.

September Books Read

2011-10-07T09:40:00.000-07:00

Well, I didn't mean for this blog to devolve into an online reading journal, but for now, that's what it's become. Lots of reading and writing, little time for blogging. Next week I'll try and put something new up, but for now, here's what I read in September.

Hope everyone has been finding time to read and write, and that your weather is as beautiful as it's been here in southern Ohio.

August Reading

2011-09-02T12:37:00.000-07:00

The long weekend hath arrived, and I’m hoping to do some writing. Not much, though, because the majority of my energy will be invested in submitting work. I’ve been thinking about this off and on all day, as my current favorite poem (and I think my best work to date) clocks in at just over three pages, which I worry is too big a space commitment for journals. Perhaps I should focus on submitting that poem to online magazines.

Also: I updated my list of read books to include August.

And, as a special Friday bonus, here’s a picture I snapped of a library sign in Gloucester, Massachusetts earlier this month.

Sophie Robinson and The Unreasonable Heat

2011-08-31T18:31:00.000-07:00

Today I checked weather.com and felt an irrational surge of anger when I saw that the temperature could hit 97 degrees on Friday. Unreasonable!, I thought. Part of my frustration is that I enjoy walking to class in the morning, however, I do not enjoy arriving as a sweaty mess. Pit stains and a shiny nose as opposed to jeans and a peacoat. No thank you, sir!

Last night I attended a reading, the first of the fall semester, by a young (b. 1985) British poet named Sophie Robinson. It was the most interesting, engaging reading I’ve been to in a year. cris cheek’s introduction of Robinson was a piece of art in itself—it kept unraveling long after I thought it would end, part memoir, part political manifesto, all intertwined with a steady familiarizing of Robinson and her work with the crowd. All introductions should be so bold.

I ended up leaning against a bookcase the entire half-hour because there weren’t enough chairs, but it was worth it. Sophie Robinson, the author of one book, a, from Les Figues Press, and a chapbook, the lotion, was wonderful. She mentioned an affinity for Frank O’Hara and that showed in her work with the quick, charming details, but Robinson seemed to have more of an edge than O’Hara did, and her poetry never felt like a shallow reflection of O’Hara’s, which is how I sometimes think of Ange Mlinko. All glitter and city but no punch.

At times, Robinson seemed to have more of a narrative than O’Hara, and her images were really quirky and strange, not because they were so exotic or surreal, but in the way they were just one step shy of normalacy—I’m thinking of one poem where she said something about filling a bathtub with two inches of water and shivering in it all night. Gah! The image lingers.

I’m going to have to buy a book before I can say more, but below is a poem I found on her blog, which it looks like she rarely updates. (But there are more poems on it.)

preshus

Above all things I must remember to ART to wrap
My children up in blankets like pigs to the slaughter &
To keep my them my sausages in the fridge that’s where I
Like them best.

What is love but last year’s hate. What is hate but last
Year’s death or travelcard or cardigan or anything
Else you have to lose to drop off
The edge. Follow the river
Around drink whiskey
For the corpses.

At the sink I have been silly with myself in the past I
Will admit I have been careless -

Blackouts.

Tease me feed me neatly to your dogs. Do not let them
Gobble. Do not scratch yourself in public YOU
Are as noisy & ineffectual as a travel hairdryer,
ma noisette je te promets, do not sadden swallow
til you vomit or bust wide open but never never not
To ART or drink whiskey or play amongst the
Thighs of your favourite your only horse, stabled,
Skin-drunk and this is the year that matters or
You will rot.

Fast lines, crammed with details, and I love the way she forces syntax to bend across lines, like, Do not let them/Gobble. She's funny, and an interesting mix of contemporary and formal, capable of appealing to a wide range of crowds. Someone to follow.

Here's a video if you're interested. The reading at Miami was better, but I tried to find something more recent and, alas, could not. Someone should have recorded her last night, as well as cris's intro.

In other news, I googled “novels about poets” and found a list with said subject matter from The Guardian, and I read the first book on it, Winslow in Love by Kevin Canty. Winslow in Love SUX, and it’s annoyed me enough to want to write about it. Some people say if you don't like something it's not worth writing about, but I've never felt that. I find it entertaining, and I also, at times, consider it part of my contribution to culture. Someone working at The Guardian recommended a shitty book, which I ended up reading. Maybe I can save someone else a few hours. Cheers.

Shadows Are Lengthening

2011-08-11T16:50:00.000-07:00

and I’m sitting in my second story office with the window open, listening to the arguments of neighbor kids pour in with the slowly dimming afternoon light. When I was a child, I had a friend who lived at the local apartment complex several blocks up the street from my house, and going to spend the night there was like winning the lottery. There were always lots of other people walking around, and kids at the complex playground, and if my friend and I weren’t spying we were pressing our ears against the wall trying to hear the conversations in apartments beside us, or taking turns looking out the peephole. (Actually, all of that could probably be classified as "spying.") Strangers sharing a building really blew my mind. Looking back, it’s funny I used to be jealous of living at an apartment complex (not that I don’t enjoy it now—I do), but I suppose it was different than what I was used to—exotic, even. Same thing with riding a bus. At my school, you were a busser, a walker, or latchkey. I must have talked about the bus quite a bit, because my mother made an arrangement for the bus to pick me up at the corner when I was in kindergarten. It was thrilling. FYI, we lived about five minutes from the elementary school, but, the heart wants what the heart wants.

I wrote three new poems this week, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, just sat down with no ideas and started working, which I found to be liberating. Too often I have a backlog of ideas that start to feel like a chore by the time I finally get to them. Spent afternoons revising old poems and essays. It’s been a productive, rejuvenating week. I’m continuing to work on a manuscript that’s going to begin with a sequence of surrealist poems placed in northern Michigan, and I like how this week’s additions are turning out. I’m going to send them out to journals this fall, but here’s a fragment (about half of Monday’s poem, I don’t know if posting them on this blog would count as “publishing”) to give you an idea of what I’m up to:

Rabbit fat hissed and popped
in grease. The ghost of old motions

fed a log to the iron woodstove, two more sat
stroking arrowheads against flint

and one slipped, spliced a finger
but felt nothing

and continued sharpening ‘til blood
puddled like pancake batter
below his hand.

I imagined the footsteps of shadows
creaking against floorboards

through those darkened panes, the glass stares
of expressionless deer, the black bear head mounted

on the wall, his snarling maw, two paws cradling
the rusted arrow pulled from his ruined heart

like an old grievance.

Soon, the lanterns of my father and grandfather
would begin bobbing at the edge of swamp

and their faces, smeared black and green
would be lit as they waded through ferns

like the ghosts of drowned men emerging
from the hoarse whispers
of a returning tide.

Sections of it still very clumsy, and I'm worried the finished product won't hold up as a disparate poem outside the series. I haven't been doing many stand-alones lately, which is a problem since I want to submit new work to journals. Ah well. There are worse problems to have.

As for reading, this week I finished Matthew Zapruder’s Come On All You Ghosts, which I really liked, and Alexandra Teague’s Mortal Geography, which I thought was dull and often in poor taste. What would you rather write about? I know why I enjoyed Zapruder, but I’m still working through why Teague bothered me. I probably don't have time to write about either. Now I’m reading Alice Notley’s Culture of One and some nonfiction books. All enjoyable so far, and I’m 99.9% sure I’m going to add Culture of One to my developing essay on why the book of poetry is so important. It seems to be what I've been looking for.

If You Like Movies That Make You Pessimistic About Humanity

2011-08-01T21:58:00.000-07:00

I updated my July books read.

I've also been keeping track of every movie I've watched since January 1st, 2011. I definitely have collector/list-maker proclivities that I need to keep in check, but in this case my listing has helped me to see trends in my own reading/viewing tastes, as well as monitor how much time I’m devoting to each activity. One blemish in the movie-viewing list is that initially I wasn’t recording television series, which was a major oversight. Now I am.

Speaking of movies, Friday night I watched The Devil’s Double, a film about the man forced to be a body double for Saddam Hussein’s son, Uday Hussein. The acting was terrific, but the story was absolutely terrifying, the kind of stuff that will chill you all the way to the bone. I’m glad I saw it alone so I wasn’t trying to gauge the reaction of anyone else. After I left the theater I couldn’t shake it. Granted, it was almost two in the morning, I was tired from sleeping only five odd hours the night before, and I also drank a long island iced tea before the movie, but as I walked the busy streets back to my hotel I kept thinking about how easily power corrupts. Or, more accurately—maybe power doesn’t corrupt, it simply gives people the ability to act on their suppressed corruption. Obviously the [film] example of Uday Hussein is extreme, but even on that short walk men were looking over women, two guys were aggressively bumming cigarettes from a drunk lying at the edge of an alley, and for a few moments in that movie-influenced haze, exhausted and overwhelmed, nothing seemed innocent.

I become quite a moralist when I’m lacking sleep.

Not much writing, as in the creation of material ex nihlo—that should start this weekend—but I made some revisions to poems this afternoon that I’m really happy with. Strange how such a small accomplishment can make the entire day seem a success.

Ange Mlinko, Juliana Spahr, and Niagara Falls

2011-07-23T21:34:00.000-07:00

When was the last time you took a trip with your parents? Okay, most people probably stop in junior high, but when mine told me they were visiting the east coast—Boston, Maine, then NYC—I couldn’t resist a road trip. My parents are pretty fun, and the timing works out well since my wife is with her mother for the week. Everyone is happy, and now my wife and I can pine for one another and look forward to our joyful reunion.

I’ve found lots of time to read this past week (since I am officially finished painting for the summer) and finally read the last two poetry books from my June trip to King Library: Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You by Juliana Spahr, and Matinees by Ange Mlinko.

My summer reading has been rather sporadic, which has made for some really interesting and unintentional juxtapositions, and this week was one of those instances. Ange Mlinko’s style reminds me of a hipster Frank O’Hara; there’s a lot of speed in her lyrics, and she has a great eye for glittery details. I wish I hadn’t returned both books to the library because I find myself wanting to look some things up and talk more about them and now I’ve gone and shot myself in the foot. But, if you’ll let me misquote, there’s a poem that begins with lines that are something like 2 pieces of chocolate for breakfast/is that enough to get me through work? and I thought that segment was just about the closest a poet can come to mimicking someone else’s style. I enjoyed Matinees; the speedy, stream-of-consciousness, city bling kept me interested, but it’s hard to do what O’Hara did as well as he did. (I once claimed otherwise. If you heard me make this claim, let me retract it. I was wrong. While his style is easily imitated, that doesn’t make it interesting, or lovely, or graceful, or emotionally touching: O’Hara’s work is all of these things.)

For one thing, O’Hara wasn’t just charming and self-reflexive; there was genuine surprise to his poems. Part of the reason they’re so pleasurable (and I'm thinking mostly of Lunch Poems) is because they end up so far from where they began. With Mlinko, that extra surprise wasn’t always there—the poems just kind of ended. I was also reading a post on HTMLGIANT a day or two ago (see links to the right) where the author tries to classify a substrain of poetry they call “lazy apartment poetry” and while I don’t think Mlinko falls in this category of mindless introspection and writing about anything she sees, however insignificant, I do think she finds her city life more interesting than I did. With O’Hara, that wasn’t a problem. There was real charm and humor to him that was evident in his poems. But, I’m going to stop because this is starting to sound nitpicky and I don’t mean to be. I liked Matinees. But the style the book was written in makes it difficult not to compare it to O’Hara.

Comparing Matinees to FY—A—ILY is much easier, because the books were so different. Matinees is like a paginated manifestation of ADHD, and FY—A—ILY is so methodical and meditative. I began the second book unsure of what to expect, and initially, I was a little disappointed. FY—A—ILY is organized into six long poems, and the first one, “localism or t/here” was not my favorite. But “things” was really wonderful, as was “gathering: palolo stream,” and everything that came after. I think part of my early disappointment was because I thought I had the book pinned down, assuming that Spahr was disguising simplicity as profundity, and it annoyed me. But in “things” it was easier for me to see how persistent and sincere the book is, and how Spahr is really digging at the foundation of big, important ideas, including how we communicate with each other. As I write, I’m struck by the similarities that could be drawn between her book and Stein’s Tender Buttons. Both are relentless in their pursuit to make something new through the medium of language. With Stein, that subject was language itself, but a certain kind of repetition was applied in both cases.

Spahr’s sections on “da kine” were particularly striking, and I love when she breaks the regimented structure of her thought process to reflect on her own confusion. She’ll pause and write about how she herself is confused, and how she wants to convey something to the reader. There’s a great spot where she’s juxtaposed two metaphors and finally she confesses that she doesn’t know why comparing those two metaphors bring her closer to the truth of what she’s trying to say, although she knows they do. I felt a strange kinship with her at that moment.

Everything I’m writing right now is incredibly sloppy, but it’s late, I’m typing by the light of my computer at a Holiday Inn Express outside Boston, and I’m worried that if I don’t get some thoughts down about these two books I’m going to lose them. I should not have taken these back to the library yet! I brought some other books along with me I’m excited to read, working on Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem right now, and I’ll probably start reading Brett Foster’s The Garbage Eater tomorrow, because it’s fun to read poetry in the city.

As for the title of this post, we stopped at Niagara Falls on the way here, and all I can say is that if David Foster Wallace had written A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again II, this destination would have been the perfect fit. Seeing the falls was cool, but the carnival that has assembled around them (think wax museums, ripley’s, and a lot of fried food) was disheartening.

Still Reading The Border Trilogy

2011-07-18T09:58:00.000-07:00

Still reading McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. All the Pretty Horses is addicting, especially John Grady’s sojourn after leaving the Mexican prison, first to find Alejandra, and then his long journey home. Rawlins' departure is really heartbreaking—how he hated Blevins then can’t get over how Blevins was walked behind a copse of trees and shot. There’s something broken in Rawlins after the whole ordeal, and McCarthy handles it perfectly when he has Rawlins buying a bus ticket home, and choosing a seat away from the window where he can’t see John—it’s such a disjoint to the wild, youthful ride south on horseback. Also, loved the passage before John finds Alejandra, where he’s watching some kids bathe and play in an irrigation ditch, and he shares his lunch with them and ends up sharing his whole story. John’s normally so taciturn, but he spills everything to these kids, then listens to their advice on how to win Alejandra back. Great, great, great.

Been thinking about the movie adaptation, and while I liked it (though it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it), now that I’m almost finished with the book I think Billy Bob Thornton missed a lot of opportunities. He should have used younger actors, since John Grady and Rawlins are only 16 and 17, respectively, and it should have been a lot grittier. I’m thinking about the Coen brothers adaptation of No Country for Old Men, and John Hillcoat’s fantastic film version of The Road—while both movies took liberties with the novels (Charlize Theron in The Road), they were pitch perfect with the tone.

Writing and reading continue to move in seasons, and I’m trying to make these next few days a season of writing. I spent the last four odd days painting the trim on a cottage in Michigan, and that took up most of my time. It also tested my fear of heights again, with ladders, scaffolding, and a lift. Here’s me painting the rear peak:

I got used to the height, but what really gave me the chills was when the lift rocked with the motion of me scraping old paint. I kept telling myself I needed to trust in the ingenuity of what smarter men than I had built, and I also realized that “Don’t look down” is not a cliché. Really. It’s better not to look down. Made me think some about fear—I realized I could keep looking down, spitting and watching the spit hit the stone below, imagining my body flailing through the air, or I could ignore the suppressed panic and try to move my roller along the trim. I wasn't overcoming diddly, I just tried to stop thinking. I never knew I was afraid of heights, and I’ve been wondering where it came from, or if everyone is naturally afraid to be up high, except some people make themselves get over it and do what they have to. Maybe people who like heights are the exception? I don’t know. But, like my extension ladder ladder, I got used to the lift by the end of the weekend. Like a frog in boiling water or a body dangling from a noose.

About to start working on my manuscript, again at Barnes & Noble, using a copy of The Southern Review to prop up my computer so it doesn't overheat (I think the fan is broke). I’m now making my chapbook-in-progress The Withering Season the second of three sections for my book, and reworking the first section with poems influenced by fantasy and magical realism. Yeats meets One Hundred Years of Solitude meets Terry Brooks. I’m slowly coming to realize I’ll never be anything but a narrative poet, so I may as well stop fighting it and start coming up with more interesting narratives.

One Last Bundle: The Beginning of the End of Summer Reading

2011-07-10T14:47:00.000-07:00

I’ve been working through the catalog of Cormac McCarthy. So far I’ve read The Road, No Country for Old Men, Blood Meridian, and a few days ago I started The Border Triology—All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain. The Border Trilogy is the beginning of what I imagine will be the end of my summer pleasure reading. After I finish it, it’s down to the four books I picked up at King Library this hot Sunday afternoon. So, what have I chosen to spend my precious final month reading? When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro, Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You by Juliana Spahr, Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion, and Matinees by Ange Mlinko.

I’m hoping Mlinko will last until the beginning of my road trip east, because poetry is great for trips—lots of easy stopping points. As for Spahr, I’m sort of reading her to see what the buzz is about. I’ve been reading her blog, swoonrocket (check the links on the bottom right, I’ve been adding some) and it’s funny how bare and minimalist it is. Juliana Spahr wants to have a blog, but the aethetics show that Juliana Spahr does not care about her blog. C'mon, JS, at least give us a profile pic!

As for The Border Trilogy, it’s wonderful so far, addicting in the way that Blood Meridian was, but more relatable, tangible. The Judge always made things really weird. He reminds me of the dragon at the beginning of The Road.

I always forget how poetic McCarthy is, as I read the beginning of All the Pretty Horses I was reminded of something a teacher once told my class: “Repetition is a staple of poetry.” It’s also a staple of Cormac McCarthy. Here’s the first paragraph:

The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass and twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door. He took off his hat and came slowly forward. The floorboards creaked under his boots. In his black suit he stood in the dark glass where the lilies leaned so palely from their waisted cutglass vase. Along the cold hallway behind him hung the portraits of forbears only dimly known to him all framed in glass and dimly lit above the narrow wainscotting. He looked down at the guttered candlestub. He pressed his thumbprint in the warm wax pooled on the oak veneer. Lastly, he looked at the face so caved and drawn among the folds of funeral cloth, the yellowed mustache, the eyelids paper thin. That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping.

Isn't the end great? It's like the paragraph skims from narration to John Grady Cole's thoughts. And there’s so much repetition in this initial section, of all different kinds. Repetition of words, of phrases, of images, and of sentence structure. I kept thinking about this how this would look with line breaks.

Another thing about McCarthy is his commas. A lot of writers—and I’m terrible about this—really abuse the comma, inserting one every time they want a slight pause. CM avoids them, even in his dialogue, which is a riot. He doesn’t use quotations marks either, so every now and then there’s a disjoint when I think I’m reading dialogue but it turns out to be narration, and sometimes I lose track of who's talking and have to reread. I loved this early exchange between John Grady Cole and his father, after the boy’s grandfather has died:

She’s gone to San Antonio, the boy said.
Don’t call her she.
Mama.
I know it.
They drank their coffee.
What do you aim to do?
About what?
About anything.
She can go where she wants to.
The boy watched him. You aint got no business smokin them things, he said.
His father pursed his lips and drummed his fingers on the table and looked up. When I come around askin you what I’m supposed to do you’ll know you’re big enough to tell me, he said.
Yessir.
You need any money?
No.
He watched the boy. You’ll be all right, he said.

Well, back to reading instead of blogging about reading.

A Saturday Afternoon at Barnes & Noble

2011-07-02T10:35:00.000-07:00

I updated my June books read. July should be a more ample harvest, since I will have finished painting all of the balconies at the apartment complex by the end of next week, and plan on using the extra time to revise my chapbook, The Withering Season, read, and visit friends before fall semester starts. I’m also taking a week road trip around the east coast this month, spending time in Boston, Bar Harbour Maine, and NYC. Confession: I’m hitching a ride with my parents. I'm trying to think of some things to do on the trip, such as write a poem every day, loosely inspired by location, or try to run at each place. A jog through Arcadia National Park, Central Park, along the water at Gloucester...

A little exhausted from painting and running this past week, so much so that I decided to forego writing this afternoon, something I’ve been looking forward to for the past couple days. I was going to revise a couple of recent poems, and now I’m just going to sit in Barnes & Noble, catch up on other people’s blogs, and read. I have Borges' Labyrinth, which hooked me when I started it last night, and I also have a copy of Tina Fey’s Bossypants, which I took from the shelf but don’t plan on buying. I’ve never done this before in a bookstore, and it’s kind of fun. What isn't fun is the Mediterranean chicken flatbrad I ordered to enjoy with my book, it tasted like shiz. It was basically a thin pita filled with grey paste, the kind of goo you might see being fed to people in a movie about clones being raised to donate organs to their rich doppelgangers. Except I bet my grey paste wasn’t healthy. It would make for a facility full of fat, unhappy clones.

In other media news: I watched Temple Grandin last night, and MAN was it so good. Claire Danes was fantastic. You should watch it. Your parents will like it as well, so watch it with them.

The Poem in Context of the Book

2011-06-24T13:10:00.000-07:00

I’ve been avoiding writing an essay about how reading a poem changes when it’s in the context of its book of origin, in part because I’m mustering the will to do the necessary research, and also because I’m not sure exactly what I’m writing about. Right now, I’m thinking the essay would be a two-part study, beginning with the different forms books of poetry take, followed by a section on how the possibilities of what an author can do with a poem is opened up by a book—i.e., the author can teach readers how to read their work, and can develop their own images and metaphors imbued with their own personal meanings. Think of Wallace Stevens with Harmonium, and the weird way he uses colors like blue and green, and the significance portals take on. I write a little bit in an older post on Chelsey Minnis about how she does something similar in Poemland.

The second section will likely have a tangent on how a poem changes when removed from its book context. I have lots of examples of this, but the one I’ve been obsessing over lately is “The Second Coming”, by W.B. Yeats. Before this week, I’d only read the poem in anthologies, and while I’d always loved it, I had only thought of it in a general end-of-times, quasi-biblical context. Do you know where the poem appears in Yeats 1921 book Michael Robartes and the Dancer? After “Easter, 1916,” and “Sixteen Dead Men,” and “On a Political Prisoner,” and “The Leaders of the Crowd.” Read in this context, “The Second Coming” becomes a poem of political desperation, short years after an Irish uprising was quelled and its leaders were executed for treason—Surely some revelation is at hand;/ Surely the Second Coming is at hand!

Readers smarter than I would have deduced the political undertones of "The Second Coming" from an anthology if it gave the year, and especially if they knew of Yeats’ nationalism, but even so Yeats meant the poem to bookend some strongly political poetry. The poem is so much more powerful and immediate in the context of the book, where Yeats’ purposeful arrangement highlights the struggle for an independent Ireland. It also fits into another of Yeats’ traits—mythologizing the ordinary. That wouldn't fit in my essay, but I thought I'd mention it.

A better example, I think, is W.C. Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Removing this poem from its context and putting it in an anthology should be a crime. Everyone knows this abused fragment, but here it is again:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Now, from this poem, students are supposed to understand that Williams was espousing an idea that can be summarized as “no ideas but in things?” Ridiculous. When this poem is taught in a class, it serves one primary purpose: it’s a soapbox for a teacher to talk about Imagism. Realistically, anything students should be exposed to concerning Williams—his American Idiom, his peculiar line breaks—can be better shown in other poems, such as “This Is Just To Say.” Teaching “The Red Wheelbarrow” can be useful, and it can be done much better with minimal, minimal effort by simply exposing students to a longer section of Spring & All, the book “The Red Wheelbarrow” is taken from. Using the poem this way not only allows students to really see Williams play with form as he mixes prose and poetry, and writes in fragments, it also allows them to read Williams explaining his ideas about Imagism for themselves, instead of feeling like idiots because they can’t get the history of modernism from four couplets like their brilliant teacher.

Obviously, the degree to which a poem suffers when removed from the context of the book varies in each case. With Wallace Stevens, not bad. “The Emperor of Ice Cream” is pretty easily comprehended, although I think reading it along with “The Snow Man,” and the rest of Harmonium really drives Stevens ideas home, and lets the reader enjoy them much more, because they've learned to read Stevens. With Yeats, I think we’re losing a bit more. Author intention is certainly not everything, but Yeats meant his poems to rely on one another, so a lot of raw information is lost when reading them as individual entities. With Williams and “The Red Wheelbarrow,” well, like I said, I think it’s a travesty. And this kind of thing happens with lots of poems. I mentioned in my last post that I think the goal of education should be exposure rather than specialization, but in this case, I think students aren't being exposed to how important books are.

I'm not saying don't read anthologies, or use them in class; I'm saying is it too much to ask that students read one entire book along with the anthology in a high school or undergrad creative writing course. Maybe Lowell's Life Studies, or Ariel, or Spring & All? It's been my experience that students enjoy being pushed in constructive ways, and exposed to new material. And discussing how a book shapes reader interpretation of poems, and author intent, could be an important part of student devolopment as they begin to persue authors that interest them and learn to shape their own poems into manuscripts.

Since this is such a broad topic, I’m trying to find a way to focus it, and I’m thinking that selecting well-known books from various time periods might allow me to make a cohesive argument. Yeats, Stevens, and Williams could even be a good starting point, and I want to incorporate my ideas on Minnis, whose use of the book works in some relation to Stevens, I think. She really kind of creates her own funny little world. I’m not sure I’ll need to address books that are structured narratives, or long poems, such as Yeats’ The Wanderings of Oisin, or Seth Abramson’s The Suburban Ecstasies, or even in-betweeners, like Catie Rosemurgy’s The Stranger Manual or Ilya Kaminsky’s Dancing in Odessa. But, obviously my choice on what contemporary books to write about will be important, so I may choose two or more. Something mainstream, as well as something experimental, since I like to read both, and the idea applies to all of poetry. This might be an August project.

Pleasure Vs. Pretense

2011-06-21T19:10:00.000-07:00

Lately I’ve been feeling a peculiar yearning to watch the Truffaut film Jules and Jim, and a number of nights have passed with me thinking about queuing it up on Netflix instant watch, only to pass on it for something else, but the insistent tug I feel towards watching Jules and Jim has me thinking about why I watch what I watch, why I read what I read. If I had to locate my ambitions somewhere along a spectrum, the two poles would be this: Pleasure and Pretense. I think a spectrum is more honest than a dichotomy since almost everything has layers and complications.

That being said, if I was to concoct a media scenario that would be closest to the PLEASURE end of the spectrum, I would have to go back a number of years to my Junior High era when I was reading the Robert Jordan books for the first time. In those days, I would retreat to my room after school, lock the door, and then proceed to drink Mountain Dew, eat Bagel Bites, and read until I fell asleep. These binges would usually last three days or so, periods of epic indulgence that would leave me seeing pages turning after I had passed out on The Great Hunt still thinking that I was reading about Rand al’Thor whooping some Forsaken ass. To be honest, I don’t think that kind of pleasure is possible for me anymore. It has something to do with being older, and having read too many similar things, and also with being more grounded in reality than I used to be. I’m not sure I have the ability to completely lose myself in a novel anymore—when I was reading Voices from the Moon, by Andres Dubus, and Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay, by Michael Chabon, I certainly wasn’t paying attention to the passing of time, but neither was I imagining myself in the world of the novel, and I didn’t leave those novels with the drug addicts craving for more. They were good books, great books, but they were still books of which I have now read many.

I kind of killed two birds with one paragraph there, because the most recent “pleasure” experience I’ve had with reading was Chabon. I need to backtrack because I’m making myself sound like a world-weary academic when really, Kavalier & Klay was devastating at times—I had to set the book down and recover at times—as well as inspiring. It was an emotional experience rather than intellectual, but I never felt the unadulterated greed for more that I felt when I was thirteen As for other media, I just finished season two of Breaking Bad. It was great. I couldn’t stop. Now, supposing time isn’t a factor, why should I watch Jules and Jim instead of diving right in to Breaking Bad season three?

I’ve said before, and I still believe, that with literature pleasure needs to be the driving engine—but pleasure must evolve. Thank god I’m not a twenty-seven year old with yellow teeth and a hankering for microwave snacks putting down my Orson Scott Card novel (I don’t know what’s cool in the fantasy world anymore) only to play with myself while watching HBO’s Game of Thrones. In the beginning, my definition of media pleasure was entertainment, escape, comfort. Fantasy novels, action movies, and a strange Junior High period when I kept replaying the songs “What if God Was One of Us” and “Sonny Came Home” on a mixtape I made by recording radio songs. Now, those qualities of comfort and escape can sometimes leave me restless. And pursuing media mindlessly becomes problematic.

I’ve had conversations circling these ideas with my composition students, and there always seems to be a resolute core who want to vehemently defend the idea that they watch movies purely for pleasure—Saving Private Ryan is a title that came up, which I liked because it was an easy one. Why would they enjoy watching men shot and killed storming Normandy, men screaming in pain, and a plot based around every brother in a family being killed? Well, okay, they don’t enjoy that, but it gives insight into what the battle might have been like. They like history. They had relatives in the war. It has great acting. The cinematography is amazing. And suddenly there’s this Oh, moment, when they realize they’re defending my point of view. Historical perspective. Appreciation of art and craft. A simple, profound exercise in human empathy. So sometimes, it’s simply a matter of articulation. My students weren’t watching purely for pleasure, they just didn’t know it, or if they did, they didn't want to say it. Because it’s pretentious to watch a movie for reasons other than entertainment (unless it's a documentary) right? I’ll come back to that. Something like The Hangover is a bit more difficult, because I do think there comes a point where rationalization runs out of gas, and you have to ask yourself why you’re laughing about a character who loses his grandmother’s holocaust ring, or why meth-heads having sex with their friend’s corpse in a ditch is hilarious. (Confession: I laughed really hard at that part. Sometimes my sense of humor lags behind my ideals).

I find lots of pleasure in art and media, so recalling traces of it in literature and film is easy. It’s more difficult for me to envision a scenario that I would equate with myself being a purely prentious bastard, because I’m still foraging ahead toward that end of the spectrum in my life. I think sometimes—often?—pretension is another word for aspiration, or ambition. Example: a while back, I started listening to a lot of folk music—Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie—and now I really enjoy it. It was a natural extension of my love for country musicians like Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, and it’s fun to listen to while I drive. It makes me feel sort of like a vagabond. More recently, I realized that there was a whole universe of blues I might like but didn’t know anything about, so I bought an album by Son House, and some Lead Belly, and at first I had to make myself listen to it as opposed to, say, Bruce Springsteen, but now I’m glad I did. It’s opened a door to an overwhelming amount of music I can’t wait to explore. Next week, I’m going to check out some classical music from the library and listen to it while I paint balconies. I’ve never listened to it on my own, and while some people would consider this pretentious, ultimately, I’m curious about it, and I’ve learned to enjoy stretching my boundaries of taste. So while it may not bring immediate gratification, hey, it might, and if not, I’ll have learned something new.

Part of this goes back to how people define pretentious— I think it’s commonly used as a pejorative for people who are doing something for reasons other than pleasure, or for people who are actively trying to separate themselves from the madding crowd. People who don’t own televisions are pretentious. People who eat vegan are pretentious. People who pronounce foreign words with the appropriate dialect are pretentious sons of bitches! That’s the kind of social attitude I sometimes feel is floating around, and I think a lot of it simply insecurity, or people feeling threatened. What makes someone pretentious, in my book, is mien. I don’t think listening to classical music while I work because I’m curious, and want to learn more about it, is pretentious. But listening for twenty minutes and then bringing up my life-altering experience every day is. This blog post might be pretentious, because I’m fixating on something that I haven’t done. And I just used the word mien instead of attitude!

The poet Rebecca Wolff, founder of Fence Magazine, recently gave an interview about genre, and in a really short section of it she says this about poetry (I’ll bold the section I like): I tend to think that the “documentary poetics” mode is kind of a new genre—Fence has not necessarily been a host for it but we have participated in it, most notably in Jena Osman’s recent, deep and excellent The Network, and we think it’s interesting if not always productive of pleasure for the reader in the sense of “Oh, I fucking love poetry because it makes me feel so hot in the brain area.” More like “I love poetry because it can be so smart and elegant and makes me feel like thinking more.”

This struck me because it takes a certain amount of courage—okay, not much, but some—to admit to enjoying something for reasons other than pleasure, especially for a poet about poetry. Intelligence. Craft. It shouldn’t be pretentious to love something for those reasons as opposed to not wanting to think for two hours while watching Salt, or Transformers III, or reading the latest Clive Cussler.

This kind of hedges on another aspect of why I continue to survey the media swamp—David Denby’s perfect phrase—I’m a teacher, and I feel that accumulating a reservoir of knowledge is part of my responsibility. I don’t need to have the answers all the time, but I do want an informed opinion, an examined life and philosophy—and as a teacher in the humanities, I want to understand as much about art, and how art affects the way we live, as I possibly can.

I’m starting to sound like a nerdy ascetic, so I’ll just restate that the reasons I turn to media besides the thoughtless pleasures—intellectual stimulation, perspective, history, art, appreciation of craft, human empathy, mental health, and on and on and on—these are just other reasons. I've read some Clive Cussler. I saw the first two Transformers. I’m not against escapism, and forgetting about the world for a while, and pleasure for pleasure’s sake. That’s a function of art, and a damn important one. I said in the beginning that pleasure should be the driving engine, and it's true. But, besides my initial argument that pleasure must evolve, I also believe in balance. Too much escapism and comfort is a rut. There is no change, no mental or spiritual growth, qualities which I think are important. Media can be a catalyst that keeps us curious.

I could list a dozen mediocre films I’ve made myself watch because they’re classics, or because I was curious about the hype behind a director, or because I wanted to know what 60’s French films were like, but I could list scores more that I learned to love. How did I wait so long to see On the Waterfront? It’s spellbinding. Why did I think the original Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner would be cliché, when it floored me? Why did I think I wouldn't like Mafioso? It’s hilarious. If I had followed my immediate impulses at the time, and watched Wonder Boys again, or episodes of The Office, I would have missed out on memorable experiences.

So, before I order Breaking Bad season three from the library, I’ll probably watch Jules and Jim, though I’m not sure what it’s about. A love triangle? Why do I have hazy ideas of cross-dressing? I don't know, but I’m going to find out.

The Poem-as-Person, Or: I Hope I Don't Turn Budding Creative Writers Into Judgmental Bastards

2011-06-14T18:36:00.000-07:00

I have a recurring fantasy where I walk into a new creative writing class one minute late—or, maybe I’m guest speaking at a friend’s so I don’t have to deal with any repercussions if my experiment horribly fails—and I pick out a student in the room, and without saying a word I begin jotting down details I notice about the student on the blackboard. Tall. Scruffy. Wears a scarf. There are no judgments, only observations. The class is enraptured. This is what they came to college for—to be surprised, to be kept on their toes, to be engaged—could this be such an experience? After a moment, with all eyes on me, I ask the student a few questions. How old is he? He says, after a moment’s hesitation, 20. I write 20 on the board. Where is he from? Cleveland. I write Cleveland on the board. What writers first inspired him? After a moment’s thought, he answers, and I start a new category—Influences—and beneath it I write Kerouac, Bukowski, Hemingway, and out of left field, Jane Austen, because this student will not be fit into a box. But, after a moment, I start a new category, once again ignoring my subject. I write Cautious. Wary. Wry sense of humor. Curious. After a moment, while the class struggles to connect the list of observations, to see the point of the exercise, I turn to them and say, “This is another way of talking about poetry.” And I bring up a copy of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Arrival at Santos” on the document camera, or Kim Addonizio’s “Tell Me,” or William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just To Say”—any poem with a remarkable voice—and we start talking about the poem.

All that to say, I’ve been thinking about a new paradigm for discussing specific poems, and more importantly, a poet’s body of work, called (for lack of something more clever) poem-as-person. In part, this stems from my experience with students (and by that I mean anyone who studies poetry, not simply those enrolled in a class) who seem to have scant idea how to approach a poem or talk about a poem, let alone a body of work, and also because I think there’s a dominant paradigm at large in the poetry world—poem-as-riddle, or poem-as-message—that needs to be replaced. Several teachers I know personally or through their essays and blogs spend a significant amount of time attempting to overwhelm the paradigm of poem-as-riddle by encouraging students to talk about what they notice in a poem, what formal work the poem is doing (poem-as-machine is a metaphor that is sometimes used towards this end, which has its own dangers but is not as antithetical to poem-as-person as one might think) and by explaining that finding the “point” of a poem isn’t the goal of reading poetry. Often, I get the feeling that the message is received but rarely embraced to the extent that the student believes, instinctively and without thought, that there doesn’t need to be a point, or holy ultimate message to a poem, something we take for granted with songs—no one I know ever says, “What’s the point of that song,” or “What message is that song trying to send?” We like songs because they bring us pleasure. That’s the foundation, and everything after is scholarship and introspection. But part of the reason poem-as-riddle continues to linger is because all these strategies I just mentioned—talking about the poem as a machine, how the formal aspects of the poem contribute to our understanding and reception of the poem—only blur the edges of the metaphor of poem-as-riddle, when it needs to be erased, or superseded. Unless the poem is a riddle, I suppose.

I am aware that there are major pitfalls with the idea I’m tentatively espousing, dangers every bit as relevant as the possible benefits, but let me explain a bit more before I address them. Poem-as-person works just how it sounds. Talk about the poem like it's a person, and since most people are natural gossips, this should not be difficult. What kind of speech does the person/poem use? Are they formal? Colloquial? Perhaps their speech is antiquated? What effect does this have? Do they use a lot of obscenities? Why? Is it natural or forced, are they showing off, making a point? Perhaps they seem self-conscious? Mystical? Oblique? Melodramatic? When we’re talking to someone, or eavesdropping, we unconsciously understand that the way people represent themselves through speech means something—signifies something—about them, whether it’s what they want to represent or not, or whether it means what we think or not. It’s something that no one needs to be taught. There are dangers to this metaphor—nasty ones—and I’ll address the easy one here. In order to study a poem in this manner, it’s important to understand that—as with people—the sum of the observer’s judgments is not the gestalt of the poem. People, like poems, are bottomless wells. That’s exciting to a curious mind.

It’s important to note that the metaphor of poem-as-person is not limited simply to speech, because a poem is more than simply a collection of words, and this too is a concept that is often new to students. A poem has a body. It’s an object. The shape of the poem on the page, the length of the lines, where the lines are broken, the font—these things are just as important as what particular words are being used. The shape of a poem on the page is primarily what makes the first impression, not the words. I’m often immensely attracted to poems before I’ve read a single word. I like uniform stanzas, poems full of dropped lines, italics, lines that still begin with capital letters regardless of punctuation, lines that refuse to end in commas, and lots and lots of other things. Likewise, if I see bolded words, or a word spelled vertically, it's enough to make me gag. (Kidding. But I would never bold a word.) The language of the poem might be the most banal, energy sucking piece of doggerel in any language, but if the shape is beautiful, then I’ll give it a chance. This is why we sometimes hate attractive people—they can get away with more.

Here’s what I think of this metaphor when I’m being optimistic: it’s infinitely expandable, in the sense that any correlation drawn between person and poem should expand knowledge (or at least perspective) of the poem, and I also think it has the potential to help students understand not only disparate poems, but entire bodies of work. Lessons learned about Elizabeth Bishop in “Arrival at Santos” will ring true through much—though not all—of her poetry. And the same for Chelsey Minnis, And Adam Zagajewski. And John Ashbery. Learning to identify not themes, but traits, and characteristics, and putting together the personality of a poet—their “voice”—will allow students to intimately understand poets in a way they did not have the ability to before. Poets (usually) want people to get to know them, but they’re dealing with a readership that has a learned social disorder. New readers of poetry ignore facial queues. They don’t distinguish voice intonations. And they forget everything they’ve learned about the poet the next time they read them, a complex that I think stems from an education that rarely requires students to read more than one poem by an author, unless it’s Shakespeare. Few educators, if any, are assigning Ariel, or Spring and All, or The Panther and the Lash, and while I’m not saying that’s a problem with the educational system—I think its job is exposure rather than specialization—it’s obviously shaping the way people approach poetry. There’s no continuity, or accumulation of knowledge.

So how can the risks be minimized? While discussing this metaphor, I would ask students if it’s possible to know everything about a person from one conversation. Maybe I would pick on my tall, Bukowski loving friend again, who I suppose at this point I’ll assign the name Warren. Is it possible to know everything about Warren from one conversation? Is there some end-all of Warren, some platonic version of him to know? Of course, the idea is ridiculous. Even after years of conversations with Warren, I still wouldn’t know everything about him. Warren doesn’t know everything about himself, and look, I just stretched the metaphor—poems don’t know everything about themselves either. All kinds of unconscious jettison leaks into them. But as I talked with Warren more (listened more?)—e.g., as I read more of a poet—my sense of who he was, and what drove him, his loves and his fears, his obsessions—these things would rise to the surface. Yes, when I’m being optimistic, I think this metaphor might help inspire students to get to know poets they like better, to actively engage a poet’s body of writing.

The fat, obvious problem—my fear—is that I’m transferring the problems of stereotyping and racism and bigotry from the world of people to poems. (Okay, I'm flattering myself--it's there already. But I don't want to add to it.) How would my exercise look, for instance, if I walked into that class and wrote down: Hispanic, or Fat, or Nervous Tic? Why would I do that? What assumptions would I be making based on those observations? Is the Hispanic student going to be writing love poems? Is a white student going to be writing about growing up disillusioned in suburban America? Maybe, maybe not. No way of knowing. So the trick is knowing what information is relevant, as well as knowing when to take information into account but not make assumptions about it. Because—and this is ridiculous to write, but I’ve gone this far, so why not—being male or female does shape us as writers. I’m not sure how, but it does. Maybe sometimes it doesn’t. It’s interesting that the university naturally groups people together by nationality or gender or any number of other commonalities in literature courses—African American Lit, The Jewish Diaspora, Chicano Lit. While those classes don’t make assumptions, they do draw correlations between commonalities. This, though, is more a commentary on age (as in 19th Century, or 20th, etc) or society/social forces, not inherent proclivities of a person from a certain region.

Some of this is obvious information, but I think it’s important to spell out and discuss, especially with students, and especially if I’m thinking about pulling my little teaching tool out in class. (That sounds strangely perverted, but I’m going to leave it.) I also realize there’s a lot of overlap with ideas already in use. Poem-as-person is similar to talking about “voice,” which I think is more commonly used with fiction, but only talking about voice leaves so much unexplored, especially in poetry when the body of the poem is so incredibly important.

Between Angels: Stephen Dunn

2011-06-06T19:37:00.000-07:00

Today I finished Stephen’s Dunn’s 1989 poetry collection Between Angels while sitting beside a wall of windows that opened onto a street in Perrysburg, Ohio. After the final poem, “Walking the Marshland,” I closed the plastic-wrapped back cover, rested the book on my thigh, and looked out at the cars piling up at the traffic light. When the light turned, and the line began rolling forward, one woman flicking a cigarette onto the asphalt before reaching down to shift her weathered pick-up into gear, I saw two men about to cross paths while walking their dogs. As they passed, the two dogs began barking violently enough that that their heads jerked back and forth until each man jerked at his respective leash, and without so much as glancing at the other, pulled the dogs firmly apart. As the man facing me walked past, his golden retriever glancing anxiously backward, I saw he had an idle smile on his face, and I couldn’t tell if it was embarrassment at the dog’s lack of obedience, or pride in its spirit, or if he was simply a man whose lips pinched upward throughout an afternoon walk, while the sky clogged with dark clouds and spouts of rain drifted over the city in waves. And after a moment of watching the clouds swell above buildings like space expanding, I realized that all I wanted to do was watch whatever passed before my vision outside the window, be it traffic or birds or the funnel clouds that have been forming all over Ohio this week, because I was recovering from the experience of being immersed in poetry for the past two odd hours, and I was once again acclimating myself to the normal halts and strides of life.

I could break that thought down a bit more. How the ceasuras and line breaks of poetry start to resemble reality, and how after reading for a prolonged period life itself seems to have an almost, almost discernable narrative. But, suffice to say, when I started Between Angels this afternoon, I was not in this state of near-transcendence. Actually, I was sort of disgusted. Let me backtrack, and reveal a glimmer of my less attractive side.

There’s a certain genus of poetry I’ve come to dislike, and it’s not exactly a school or a movement so much as a bundle of traits that together, manage to siphon off any energy or inspiration I have, and make me generally not want to read or write so much as an email. Here’s how I would characterize the poetry that has this effect on me—the images and ideas are nebulous, the line breaks are arbitrary, and the language has no pressure or focus. Separating Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek into five word lines would make better poetry. Still, my prejudice against this type of poetry—if poetry that crumples the soul like a ball of aluminum foil is a type—is not purely aesthetic, though that certainly plays a part. I also think poetry that trades in pleasant sounding vagaries is disingenuous, too lazy for real attempts at interesting language, or honesty, as well as subconsciously (I hope) pandering.

That entire last paragraph all to say that I initially thought I had stumbled into a mire of said nebulous poetry when I began reading Between Angels. I was wrong—I now love this book—but look at the last lines of the first poem, “The Guardian Angel” and I can show you where my wild assumptions budded:

Even his lamentations are unheard,
though now
in for the long haul, trying to live

beyond despair, he believes, he needs
to believe
everything he does takes root, hums

beneath the surfaces of the world.

The shape of this poem on the page immensely appeals to me, and I think the line breaks are, for the most part, interesting—the way the word needs is poignantly emphasized, how the word hums hangs mysteriously above the white space of the page, so close to sound we can almost hear it before dropping into the last line, which punctuates the three line stanzas that have come before. All this is very nice, but as far as the content of what I had just read, I thought, “Oh, shit. And I really wanted to like Stephen Dunn.” (I had read any essay by him in the Georgia Review several years ago about sound and sense in poetry that made me think he was a poet I could get along with.) Because what’s humming beneath the surfaces of the world? Oh, you’ve forgotten? It’s everything the angel does! He believes—he needs to believe! it’s humming. Beneath the surfaces of the world. Bzzz…It’s a well-crafted but generic ending that could have been written by anyone, and probably has been, though I think simply substituting something more specific than the world would have helped.

So, one poem in, and I was already preparing for a full descent into the maudlin, waiting for Dunn to write about recognizing god in his labradoodle or how desire is like a fog or young sunshine or fill in the blank yourself with lexicons like bone, mouth, memory, or any poem in Apology for Want by Mary Jo Bang. But it never came, and as I continued reading I gradually relaxed, and instead of dreading the ending of poems I started to see the way humor interfuses Dunn’s serious view of the world, and how he attempts to live joyfully in a life plagued by sorrow. Several of the poems address the ubiquitous cruelties that spot the papers and news, from a girl tortured to death in front of her father in Argentina to a terrorist, and these are good poems, unflinching poems, and I like the way Dunn addresses them as unavoidable areas of human existence rather than simply fodder for writing, or an exercise in empathy. Consider the poem “Sadness”, for instance, where Dunn writes:

I told my artist friends who courted it
not to suffer
on purpose, not to fall in love
with sadness
because it would naturally be theirs
without assistance.

This is a graceful passage, with perfectly paced lines that add to the gestalt of the poem after each break, and it also shows how Dunn neither looks for, nor turns from, the problem of pain, acknowledging how sad stories accumulate with age while also warning artists away from obsession with it. He should have made this a personal email to Kim Addonizio. Kidding!

One poem that I stopped to reread several times, “Urgencies,” showcases the lighter side of Dunn, and also demonstrates his ability to quicken suburban moments into something profound and meaningful. It begins with Dunn waking on a rainy Saturday and getting out of bed, but he keeps thinking about his still sleeping wife, and he wants her awake as well, and he ends the poem by writing:

I wanted my wife
down here, I wanted her in some usual

place doing some usual things.
What I had to say to her
was so insignificant only she would understand.

I sat down to eat. The rain picked up.
A man could die
just like that. Or begin to slide.

I started to clank the dishes,
make some noise.

So much is happening even in these few lines—the intimacy between the narrator and his wife, his kind of endearing selfishness and obsession, and the insidious thoughts of mortality while making breakfast…to me, this is a fantastic poem. In the interest of full disclosure, I will also say I’m working for a painter this summer in northern Ohio, while far to the south, my wife is finishing teaching for the year and commuting up on the weekends, so this poem definitely overlapped with my personal experience. But, I think that’s part of the reason we love poetry. In times of heartbreak and rejection, we turn to sad poems, poems that speak to us. In times of joy, we respond to poems of lyric praise. I remember enjoying the poem “To A Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing,” by Yeats, but it didn’t stand out to me until rejections were piling up, and my work felt worthless, and then I developed a minor obsession with it. The lines Bred to a harder thing/Than Triumph echoed in my head while I walked to the bus stop, before I taught for the day, while I eavesdropped on other conversations in my office, and strangely enough, they gave me comfort. I’m not sure why. Schadenfreude?

So how do I reconcile my distaste at the beginning on the book with my slow conversion? I think it has to do with respect. By the end of Between Angels, I trusted Stephen Dunn, in his ability to illuminate ordinary moments and his direct gaze into the mystery of sorrow, which is why, in retrospect, I can overlook the ending of “Guardian Angel”, which I spent the first part of this essay bitching about, and a few other endings like it. Perhaps Dunn felt he had earned a short flight into romantic fancy. Maybe it’s simply a matter of taste. I don’t know. But when he ends “Walking the Marshland” with a reminder to Praise refuge…praise whatever you can, I know the parting words of Stephen Dunn, now written over twenty years ago, can’t be dismissed as unearned epiphany, or poetic rhetoric—instead, it’s one last desperate appeal, in a whole book of them, to live in a world where beauty is inseparable from sadness as joyfully as we can.

I Updated My Books Read

2011-06-02T19:19:00.000-07:00

I think I'll record the books I read each month, at least for the next year. If you're interested, now or in the future, click on the BOOKS READ tab in the upper right corner. Or, here's a link.

I've started writing an essay about the Stephen Dunn book I read, Between Angels, so I'll finish that and post it later this week.

Conquistador of Lucas County Libraries

2011-05-25T17:29:00.000-07:00

Love set you going like a fat gold watch! I can’t get that line out of my head, and every time it pops in, it's almost immediately followed by a line from the poem “Design” by Robert Frost, I found a dimpled spider, fat and white. The first line, by Sylvia Plath, is like a song I can’t forget, and the Frost line is right behind it like an off-kilter echo. Both have the word "fat," both get us thinking about chubby babies, and both poems have something a little bit nasty about them. Possibly more than a little bit, although the full cheer of Plath's "Morning Song" isn't obvious until weighted by the rest of the book. (Okay, the lines, I'm no more your mother/ Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow/ Effacement at the wind's hand is obviously not jocular. ) Any undergraduates who found this blog by googling “free robert frost essays” or “sylvia plath love set you going”, etc etc, there could be an interesting paper there comparing the two poems. But, enough about that. I am continuing to resist the compulsion to write about Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, mostly because I feel like I’m in a season of consumption right now—lots of reading (Mating, Online Articles/Poems) and music—and I want to keep my focus there until at least the end of the week. If I still want to write about Ariel post Memorial Day, I’ll give in, but maybe something more interesting will come along. FOR INSTANCE, June will mark the beginning of my sojourn through The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, so tune in for that in a couple of weeks, if you're interested. I like to take on more ambitious projects in the summer, and while I wanted to read his entire cannon, tracking down each individual work became a real pain. At least the collected version I have organizes the poems chronologically.

I finished my job painting the wood strips outside the apartment complex, and just in time, because some wicked storms have beset the Bowling Green/Toledo area. I’m going to start painting the apartment porches next, but since exterior painting was impossible today, I went to ravage another public library.

My new card gives me access to any library in Lucas County, so while perusing their website, I saw the Maumee branch was a Carnegie Foundation library (Andrew Carnegie was a philanthropist who donated 10,000 dollars to many libraries across the country. Maumee's was founded in 1918) so I decided to check it out. I wanted to walk around and take a picture or two, since I’m not sure I’ve ever been to a Carnegie library (I’m sure I have and wasn’t conscious of it), but there was a deluge of rain as well as a tornado watch, so I just went inside.

It was larger than the Waterville branch. It was nice. I went right to the CD section like a greedy little pig and starting flipping through the albums.

I’ve started to worry I should model more tact, or culture, or something other than avarice when I go into a new library, instead of acting like a logger stumbling upon a virgin plot of rainforest. I tried to contain (conceal) my greed today by pausing to gaze at the display of new fiction and non-fiction before flipping through the entire music collection. I look through the entire catalog album by album, removing the ones I know I want and mentally marking possible second choices. I think part of my discomfort stems from the fact that I know I have an addictive personality, and I’m a collector. I have to make a conscious effort to control my proclivities, hence no longer playing Words with Friends. (I’m still not sure where those four days went after I downloaded that app.) But, now that I’m painting, I do listen to all of the music I borrow, rather than just storing it on my hard drive like some kind of scrooge. Also, I’m working on making two badass mixes, one for my wife, and one for a friend who will be undertaking a long drive while moving to a different state

Speaking of music, I saw Damien Jurado last night at Frankie’s Inner City in Toledo, and he was good (As expected but no better, except for his final number, when he ran the songs “Sheets” and “Ohio” together in a medley, which enraptured everyone at the bar), but the local band that opened for him, Frank and Jessie, were really energetic and all around fun to watch. Kind of a southern rock sound? except instead of being from the south, they’re from Toledo. I may try and buy an album by them this summer.

I will also say that the Maumee library had one of the better selections of contemporary poetry I’ve seen outside of a university library. I checked out collections by Anthony Hecht (The Darkness and the Light), Margaret Atwood (Morning in the Burned House), Franz Wright (God’s Silence), and Stephen Dunn (Between Angels), who I’ve been meaning to explore ever since I read an essay by him in the Georgia Review about the intertwining of sound and sense in poetry, id est, if a poet is going to try and say something, or get a message across (sense), they have a responsibility to say it as beautifully or interestingly as possible (sound). I think he has a point. Otherwise, write prose, and don’t make us read your cruddy line breaks.

Okay, the lightning is flashing outside, so I’m going to post this and unplug my trusty Toshiba. Four years and going strong, not bad for a five hundred dollar laptop.

A Morning at the Public Library

2011-05-18T10:11:00.000-07:00

I'm not much of a painter this week because of the rain that has been consistently falling since Saturday, although this morning it's more of a light misting that starts and stops almost imperceptibly. Psychologically, the misting is worse than a steady downpour because I'm compulsively glancing out the window and glass front door of the Waterville Public Library thinking Should I drive to the apartment complex and start painting? It helps that the windows in here are tinted, so when I look outside the sky is the color of rotting banana peels, id est, dark brown with swatches of green and yellow. Still, although this will be the third consecutive day I've been rained out, I continue to valiantly rise in the gray morning, pull on my white, Sherwin Williams painter pants, and drive fifteen minutes to the apartment parking lot where I sit, sipping coffee, watching the sky, and looking suspicious because I'm unshaven and loitering in an old van with a cracked windshield while children wait for their school bus. My unshaven countenance is cool when I'm teaching or at a poetry reading, not cool when I'm trying to get a library card from a "temporary address" as I explained it to the librarian, skulking around apartment complexes, or around non-familial children. (“I’m not from around here” is another phrase I wish I hadn’t used with the librarian. Am I a drifter from a western? I was being awkward because the librarian seemed, to me, to be bellowing, and I was compensating by being brief and mumbling.)

I appreciate libraries because they offer a sense of community I think many facets of our society lack. The draw, ostensibly, is free books, although now the desired service has drastically shifted to free internet, DVD's, and CD's. But whatever the attraction, people are forced to go out into public, abandoning their back porches and netflix, and interact. Coffee shops do this, in a way, and so do churches, although it’s easy to hide in a congregation, and lots of people go only out of obligation, which makes it a little different. One reason I think many students look back on their time at the university with such nostalgia is because it was the greatest sense of community they will ever have. Family is different, immediate and extended, because it's too sequestered, because it's an obligation, and because at some point, choice is removed from the equation. At the university, people are constantly interacting with others—from roommates to professors—and that is a good thing. Local friendships are established and flourish. Outside a close circle of friends, there are lots of people you meet and interact with from those who live in your dorm, to people you see regularly at classes and parties, to professors and staff. I love the university and what it stands for (more than simply community, obviously, though that is an essential aspect), and am wary of online courses. Online courses have their place, but they seem more goal/product oriented, whereas four years at a university is a process of growth and maturation. Some things cannot be learned alone.

The Waterville Library is where I've been going to write when the weather could leave drip marks on my paint or cause it to run off onto the siding. Currently, like yesterday afternoon, a CD with crickets and the occasional bullfrog are playing over the sound system. It's very relaxing, a kind of white noise over the patron one table away actively attempting to rack sputum from his lungs and the woman asking, Do you have mystery novels? It's much more enjoyable than the instrumental paean to Beatle's songs, which I’m nervous will start playing next—some of the songs are unbelievably repetitive without lyrics. The Waterville Library has a great music catalogue, much better than Oxford's, and yesterday, after I successfully obtained my new card, I checked out Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, the new Grace Potter and The Nocturnals, an old Nick Cave and Andrew Bird (Noble Beast...can't remember the Nick Cave), and Led Zepplin's How the West Was Won. I've never really listened to an LZ album, and thought I might be missing out.

I haven't checked out any books yet, because I brought too many as it is from Oxford, though I would like to read The Hunger Games trilogy this summer. I've heard good things. I just finished Sylvia Plath's Ariel (yes, for the first time), which surprised me in a lot of ways, and which I would like to sit down and write about. I sometimes wonder if there's any value in my bloggings (like musings) on classics (besides to undergraduates--re: cheaters--who need to write an essay on Robert Frost) like Ariel, or if they just make me look pompous, but, like someone whose name I forget once said, How do I know what I think until I say it? There are many situations where that aphorism would get me into trouble, but as far as sorting out literature, I think it's appropriate, and yet another reason why the university classroom is important. We hear what other people have to say, and whether we agree with it or not, we begin to reconcile it with our own perspective. Often, I think, this process is unconscious.

One last thing—now I’m thinking about how other people fulfill their innate desire for community, and I’m thinking about bars. Fiscally, bars make little sense. You’re paying for something that costs perhaps six times as much as it would at a grocery store. I suppose there’s an argument to be made for selection, especially for those who like mixed drinks, but for beer and wine drinkers, and eventually mixed drink drinkers, it’s crazy. But we don’t go to bars to save money. We go to see other people, share a few words, listen to some music, and stare at the corner TV with a few other lonely souls. I have more to say on similarities between bars and churches and universities, but that'll do for today.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Extension Ladder

2011-05-07T14:54:00.000-07:00

I’ve been living in Bowling Green, Ohio for about a week now, and will be here the rest of the summer sub-contracting for a painter. Writers lead transient lives, or at least, my wife and I do, following degrees or money from Indiana to Alaska, to Kentucky, to Africa, to southern Ohio,with lots of detours along the way. The last two days I’ve been painting long wooden strips on the exterior of an apartment complex. It’s one of the best jobs I’ve ever had, besides teaching. I set my own hours, work alone, and listen to lots of albums straight through, a luxury I could previously afford only on long drives. But, on my first day of work, I did not think the job was so wonderful. Actually, I thought I might have to quit.

One of the strips I’m painting rises up into the peak of the roof, which is a solid ten feet above the second story windows, and the first time I had to climb the extension ladder to paint the tip I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown. Here’s a picture I’m slightly embarrassed to show, since the center peak doesn’t look high at all:

When I started telling people I was going to be painting for the summer, they all asked the same question—you’re not afraid of heights, are you? Haha. To be honest, yes, I am terribly afraid of heights, but I really hadn’t pictured any ladders in my job future. So I just told everyone, including my future employer—nope! Once or twice I said, only falling from them! which I thought was pretty funny and clever in a 1950’s cocktail party kind of way.

On that first day, I climbed halfway up the ladder, one rung past where the ladder extends until it sagged like a rubber bridge, than I paused, clinging to the ladder and pressing my body against it like a baby animal clinging to its mother, before hanging my paint bucket from a rung and gingerly climbing right back down. Luckily, I work alone, so no one was there watching my little spectacle. Like I said, from the ground the peak didn’t look so high, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of helplessness on the ladder, and the fact that if the ladder did, by freak accident, collapse, there would be nothing I could do to prevent my fall.

After a few minutes, I convinced myself to climb back up and hang the paint bucket two rungs higher. This job was accomplished one pain-stakingly slow rung at a time, and by the time the paint bucket was elevated, my knees started shaking uncontrollably, and I returned to the freshly mowed lawn. At this point, I seriously considered phoning the job in...calling my boss, saying I couldn't do it, etc, etc. But on my third attempt I made it all the way to the top, and told myself that if I could paint the peak, I wouldn’t have to climb that high again until I started the other side of the building. And the job got done.

I didn’t think I would ever be able to climb the ladder without picturing the ladder separating at the extension and me cracking my head on the concrete ledge before waking to a life of paralysis, but by the end of the day, I was actually enjoying myself. I still couldn’t stop picturing my body tumbling through the air with paint spilling all over my face and into my mouth gaping in shock, and I kept thinking of a line from the Conrad Hilberry poem, “Storm Window,” about a man installing a storm window on a ladder, where he writes: For years, he has feared falling./ At last, he falls. That was my unpleasant mantra.

The second day was when I stopped worrying. Painting a section, climbing down, moving the ladder a few feet, then climbing back up—nothing to it. I was outside working alone, listening to music on a day warm enough to paint in a T-shirt. It was like that scene in The Shawshank Redemption where Andy and the crew are tarring a roof with a bucket of beer, and it’s obviously the best day they’ve had in a while. (To be clear: I’ve had lots of other good days.) I listened to Kings of Leon Come Around Sundown, Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, as well as Greetings from Asbury Park, The Wild, The Innocent, and The E Street Shuffle and Born to Run, before ending with Bob Seger’s Stranger in Town and Night Moves.

Yes, time to read and write has been reduced, but I’m trying to fit in about two hours before I go to sleep. Today I’m finishing Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which is beautiful and devastating, and reminds me a lot of my own boyhood obsessions and the way dreams unfold. It’s inspired the book of poems I’m continuing to shape, revise, and add to. And last summer I wrote one of my favorite pieces while at work (a chapbook), thirty odd pages composed a few lines at a time from a farmer’s market, so maybe I’ll start bringing a pad of paper to work and see what happens when I start following after a few lines.

The Stranger Manual: Catie Rosemurgy

2011-04-27T22:25:00.000-07:00

The Stranger Manual would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic, and the book’s reoccurring character, Miss Peach, might be eccentric, or whimsical, if she didn’t seem so terribly isolated. Through the cartoonishly self-pitying Miss Peach, Rosemurgy interrogates everything—from the body to the mythical town of Gold River—to the point of alienation. The book isn’t a strange manual, it’s a guide to systematically making the world strange. And it’s disconcertingly good at it.

Rosemurgy’s obsession with the body—its lyrical connotations, how it represents the self to others, how it marks and scars—can be seen in the book’s first poems, but it doesn’t necessarily stand out as unique from the work other poets are doing until “The Wondering Class,” where individual parts of the body becomes ciphers into the landscape of Miss Peach:
I think the stomach means we cannot love one another properly.

I think the stomach is our one true eye.

I think the stomach is an ingredient.

I think the fingers mean we are too small inside on another.

I think the fingers mean our roots become bone and we lurch away
with a new agenda.

I think the eyelash means we can float to the ground like snow.

Even in this short selection it’s possible to see what I mean about Rosemurgy defamiliarizing her most basic spheres of existance—here, the body is casually dissected and held up for the frank appraisal of Miss Peach. In part, I think this focus on the corporeal stems from the fact that Miss Peach does not trust the body, especially her own. Organs, she knows, will succumb to disease. Sex hints at violence, against self or others, and the stomach, as we are continually reminded, always hungers. In an earlier poem, “Neighbor: Miss Peach’s Body Didn’t Turn Out Right,” Rosemurgy begins by writing:

But whose did? She’s crumpled where she’s supposed to be unfolded,
something bad written on a piece of paper. Her walking
is a devolution that hunches and shrinks everyone

as she moved up the tree-lined street. I’m on my porch waving to neighbors and having one of those honeyed afternoons when I don’t know who I am.

I know everything else, though, and it’s ringing in my head. Then there she is
in a pool on my front steps, laughing, asking about lunch, as if the bones
of at least four different animals weren’t loose inside her, scurrying this way and that.
Someone needs to find her a place to live, a hidey hole we can cram food in
and get away quickly…

This passage—which reminds me of John Berryman’s Henry, who is sometimes the narrator and sometimes the subject of The Dream Songs—isn’t one of my favorites, but I think it’s a great link in the book’s longer narrative. It highlights the narrative thread of the physical body as unreliable, and more specifically, it focuses on the insatiable appetite of Miss Peach, which is a unique aspect of the book, and one of the main character’s most important characteristics alongside her desire to be understood and loved, which is the drive behind her methodical examination of the world. I also like this passage because it suggests that while we as readers are immersed in the narrative of Miss Peach, she may not be the only one hyper-aware of how the body and society shape us. Miss Peach's neighbor is having, "one of those honeyed afternoon when I don't know who I am." Peace, in Gold River, exists outside of awareness, in a forgetfulness of the self.

Gold River seems to be sort of an anytown USA—my first thought was that it was a variation of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Goldengrove, a place of childlike wonder that loses its magic with maturity, and Gold River does seem to be an advanced version of that mythical place, though now unleaved instead of unleaving. And Miss Peach is the fully disillusioned version of Margaret from “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child.” If anything, Miss Peach is Margaret after sex and the avant-garde, still grieving over her cruelly ordinary world while simultaneously aware that it is herself she is mourning as well. But she doesn't need anyone to explain that paradox to her at this point, in fact, when introducing Gold River, Miss Peach explains it to us:

There is wolf behavior here. Families around fires,
packs at safe distances. Just like the stars,
we make sense in groups. When asked about trees,

some say that branched things are lies
we’ve been telling about ourselves for years.
Some say you can’t walk by a thing flooded with sugar
and not know yourself better. Some say we are fire to things
that just want to be wooden…

When we walk back to the circle, the fires split each of us in half,

neatly at last, into what can be lit up
and what obviously cannot.

The passages about Gold River are enjoyable not only because they expand the world of the book, but because they provide some welcome relief from the desperation of Miss Peach. In passages like this, with the rhetorical we and us, Miss Peach almost seems like she’s fitting into the whole, a part of the group lounging around the fire, though this poem, like most others, ends with the discomfiting lines above, that continue to separate and ostracize.

Some of the later poems about Gold River are beautiful, such as “New Year’s Eve,” which begins with a group venturing out onto a frozen lake, and continues to incorporate imagery of the body:

The lake wouldn’t let us in. We had to walk on it
like a family of children talking to a mother’s grave.

The snow lifted from the ice like a face
breaking apart. Our own skin held tight
but smelled crushed

like mint. The wind had licked the sky clean,
but then we showed up with our pulses

tucked in gloves…

After reading the book, I’m impressed with how Rosemurgy is able to dwell so long on the same themes without straining her subject matter or feeling repetitive, and part of that comes from her resistance to any one particular form, and her self-aware, lyrical language. In the very first poem of the book, “Miss Peach Is a Cross Between,” the title of the poem syntactically leads into a series of comparisons culminating with, “A little black period/that holds down words like a tack/and a bright little universe/that loves to turn black.”

Attempting to blur the boundaries of control between author and authored, or between the reader and the page is a popular move these days, and ending the first poem with the above lines promises that it will be an important theme throughout the narrative. But now I’m freely interspersing the terms narrative and lyric. So which is The Stranger Manual? I would say the poems are lyric, though the book itself follows a strong narrative. And what is lyric poetry, again? Poetry that…affirms? Praises? Stems from sources of religious or poetic authority…? Here’s what Miss Peach has to say (57):

…There have only ever been two kinds of poetry:
narrative and lyric. And some other kind that is sort of lyric but in a new way that
sounds like a breakdown but doesn’t lead to the hospital because that’s a narrative...

I say, don't worry: narrative and lyric hate each other, but like the rest of us they share
a house and make babies. They buy one another the perfect gifts....

And that works for me. If, at times like this, The Stranger Manual is a little too self-conscious of its own self-consciousness, Rosemurgy’s wit and sense of exploration make them worth reading. She approaches the body and language like an amnesiac discovering them for the first time. And if the book is at times dark and sad, or unsettling rather than endearing, it has heart, and these faults are slight when weighed against the focus and originality of Rosemurgy’s lyrics, and the vision of Miss Peach moving through Gold River, estranging two worlds at a time—ours and hers—through language.

Taking a Break from Andres Dubus (III)

2011-04-21T09:15:00.000-07:00

I never thought I would like a poet named Bucky Sinister, but today I am pleased to announce that I have risen above my own preconceived notions of myself. I recently read Good Sir Bucky’s poem “The Gray Side of the Moon” on theRumpus.net, and really enjoyed it. It's kind of a plain-spoken narrative, (darkly) funny at times, about leaving Boston as a youth and becoming a drug addict in California, and it mixes in imagery from The Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. You should take a look. Since reading it, I ran an author search on ohiolink for Sinister, Bucky but apparently no public universities in Ohio have climbed aboard the Bucky bandwagon. I’ll have to be content waiting until someone gives me an amazon.com gift card, though I have no idea whether or not his other material is anything like this.

I’ve also been indulging in my Andres Dubus (III) addiction, reading both Meditations from a Movable Chair by Andres Dubus, and Townie by Andres Dubus III. I was a little hesitant to do this, since I like them both so much, and what I really wanted was to know more about their lives and writing rather than feel like I understand them. Are you with me? I just wanted more, but not for any end goal. I wasn't out to dissect the eagle. My second fear was that I would read something about them that would make me dislike them as writers. My episode with reading about Bruce Springsteen throwing a cake in a woman’s face at a concert still haunts me, though he was young, and there was a reasonable explanation for said cake-throwing. Not to say that I expect pristine lifestyles from writers, or even that I care very much about what they do, but Andres Dubus (not the third) writes with so much compassion that to find out he was a wife-beater or something would have deadened his writing for me.

I’m not going to launch into Townie other than to say, it’s really good, and reading it along with Meditations made for an interesting comparison. Lots of the same periods are covered from different angles—such as when and why Dubus the former started carrying a firearm, Dubus’s accident (he was hit by a car while stopping to help someone outside Boston and was in a wheelchair the rest of his life), and the relationship between Dubus and his first family. The latter circumstance is sad, especially how Dubus III and his family are essentially abandoned by their writer father, who never seems to realize how bad off his kids are.

In Townie, Dubus III’s slow journey away from the violence of his Boston youth is riveting. He’s able to articulate the consequences of physical violence and the restraint necessary to resist it so well. My only qualm is that he never really summarized where he was at with his opinion on the necessity of physical violence—in a long, beautiful passage at the end of the book he shows through a confrontation on a train that he’s willing to die to protect a boxcar of sleeping schoolgirls, but he also shows he’s willing to die rather than fight. He never really delves into a situation where violence might be necessary for the prevention of further violence, which I would have been interested to see him write about. Would he go so far as to say such a situation doesn't exist? I doubt it.

Finally, with less than two weeks left of school, I'm thinking about embarking on a summer reading project. All of Yeats, or something like that. Tracing the complete oeuvre of an author from beginning to end (probably a poet), which is something formal education doesn't (and shouldn't) make the space for. I'm thinking Yeats, or Wallace Stephens, or William Carlos Williams (this would mean Paterson...ugh), or maybe someone more contemporary? I don't know, but am open to suggestions.

In my Office, In the Rain

2011-04-04T12:38:00.000-07:00

It has been raining all morning and afternoon here in southern Ohio, which makes the lights in my office seem warmer and the conversations in the hall more cheerful. I say seem because I can hear only snatches of phrases—someone just loudly exclaimed “LSD and Layups!”—and this may or may not be part of a pleasant discussion. I also just finished planning for my Wednesday and Friday classes and looking up words on dictionary.com. Dictionary.com is helpful to me because while I have a diverse vocabulary from reading, I do not often use those words in conversation—so when I do, I sometimes horribly mispronounce them. In front of mentors and students alike I have pronounced concupiscent as con-cu-piss-ant, assuage as uh-swah-gh, and onomatopoeia as om-in-uh-top-pee-uh. That last one I made up as I went along and no one had any clue what I was saying. It sounded like jibberish. Dictionary.com correctly pronounces words in a robotic voice. When I look up words like efficacy I keep the volume on my computer down so people in my department don’t start speaking slowly to me. I just looked up sisyphean, and I felt alright about that.

For most of the day, I’ve been thinking about a book (a novella, technically) I finished last night called Voices from the Moon, by Andre Dubus. It’s about a father, Greg, who is marrying his son Larry’s ex-wife, Brenda. Greg also has a twelve year old son, Richie, who wants to be a priest. The plot sounds like it might have been adapted from an episode of Jerry Springer, but Dubus treats each character with so much dignity and respect despite their human failings that as a reader, it’s difficult not to share the sentiments.

It’s a book about family, and the choices people make, and how those choices (intentionally or not) affect the people we love. Richie struggles to be a good catholic despite his fractured family. And while the family is splintered because of Greg’s earlier divorce, and then his decision to marry his son’s ex-wife, Larry still finds himself drawn to his father.

As I write this, I'm struck by the thought that the book is also about human contradiction. Greg finds himself loving Brenda, despite the consequences for his family. Larry loves his father, despite his father marrying his ex-wife. And Richie, despite his desire to be a priest, finds himself drawn to a neighborhood girl, Melissa. Despite, despite, despite. One of the threads of this book is that often people don’t consciously decide their future—it just happens. For instance, Richie may want to be a priest, but if he doesn't stay away from Melissa he’s going to wind up loving her. I personally think he’ll end up becoming a priest, but I’d be interested in talking with someone else who’s read the book and seeing what they think.

This is also an important book because it’s the first time I’ve read more than twenty pages of something before realizing I already read it. I think 27 is too young for that to happen, but in my defense I've read a lot of Andres Dubus short texts and sometimes all these carnal bastards and their precocious children blur together. But I’m glad I read it a second time, it was worth it, and I picked up on things I know I missed on the initial read—for instance, when Richie goes horseback riding, he does so at Ripley Farms—owned by Luke Ripley, the narrator of one of my favorite short stories, “A Father’s Story.”

My name is Luke Ripley, and here is what I call my life: I own a stable of thirty horses… That first line has always stuck with me, and the ending, where Luke argues with God about the passion of a son as opposed to a daughter is a standard of great writing. Sometimes I envy musicians, because it seems like they can summon emotion so much easier than writers. But the end of "A Father's Story" moves me in ways that a song never has or ever could. I find that reassuring.

Sweet Ruin: Tony Hoagland

2011-03-18T12:35:00.000-07:00

It’s one o’clock on a Friday afternoon and while the day is warm, the sky is overcast, which is a dangerous combination for someone who just finished teaching their last class of the day—the weekend is upon me, and if I’m not careful I’ll be eating pizza and watching Justified on hulu (You deserve this!), until four hours later it’s Friday night and I’m recovering from a Hot-N-Ready hangover. So, in an effort to stay productive, I’m sitting at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee and my library copy of Tony Hoagland’s Sweet Ruin (1992).

I picked up Sweet Ruin last week along with Adam Zagajewski’s Tremor (Selected Poems) and Thomas Lynch’s Still Life in Milford, both of which I loved despite their very different aesthetics. Lynch is something of a neo formalist—he reminded me of Spencer Reece at times—while Zagajewski is more of a lush surrealist. Just to briefly point out a moment in each book where the differences between the two poets are laughably apparent, Lynch has a long poem in the second section of his book titled “The Moveen Notebook” which is essentially a history of his family (and their origins in Ireland). I read this poem before I began reading Tremor, and I really liked it. Lynch is concise (which is right up my alley) while remaining lyrical, and I love his use of occasional rhyme that knit his poems together. In contrast to “The Moveen Notebook,” I was reading Adam Zagajewski’s poem “Ode to Plurality” when I hit this stunning sequence:

…Who once
touched philosophy is lost
and won’t be saved by a poem, there is
always the rest, difficult to reckon,
a soreness. Who once learned a wild
run of poetry will not taste anymore
the stony calm of family narratives
whose every chapter is the nest
of a single generation.

It gets better and better as it goes on (Who has once met/ irony will burst into laughter/ during the prophet’s lecture), but the line “the stony calm of family narratives” made me laugh because I just finished reading one. I liked both the wild run and the family narrative. But, the title of this post is starting to function like one of John Ashbery’s poem titles, so on to Sweet Ruin.

This is my first encounter with Tony Hoagland, and while I know there’s some controversy over “The Change,” I haven’t read it, and wanted to start by reading something earlier in his career. Sweet Ruin left me with a bad taste in my mouth, but I decided to wait a few days before writing about it in case it was just the wrong afternoon to read it. But as I was flipping through it again yesterday, rereading some of the poems, it started to bother me even more than on my initial reading. I’ll say right off the bat that I think Hoagland’s style might be a little too loose for me, and I’m fully aware that goes back to my aesthetic tastes. I’ve already said I like the constriction of Thomas Lynch, and Thom Gunn appeals to me for the same reason, but I also like lots of contemporary poets who don’t apply the same amount of pressure—Philip Levine, Yusef Komunyakaa, Rebecca Wolff in Manderley, Ilya Kaminsky, and on and on. So my inclination for pressured language is only part of the problem.

In general, the images of Sweet Ruin always seem just short of interesting and original—and many times, they either seemed cheesy or like a reworded cliché, as if Hoagland knew some figurative language would spice up the poem but wasn’t sure what to write. The first poem of the book, “Perpetual Motion,” has some good examples. The voice of the poem is that of someone who has “the traveling disease,” and Hoagland writes that this drive to always be moving “makes a highway look like a woman/ with air-condition arms. With a/ bottomless cup of coffee for a mouth / and jewelry shaped like pay phone booths / dripping from her ears.”

A woman with air-condition arms? Jewelry shaped like pay phone booths? Dripping from ears? It seems like Hoagland’s trying too hard, and while one could argue that Hoagland isn’t taking himself seriously in this poem, the imagery should still be engaging, right? Or at least not make me cringe? In the following stanza, the narrator tries to pull the poem into a more introspective moment, saying that: In a little while the radio will/almost have me convinced/ that I am doing something romantic,/ something to do with “freedom” and ‘becoming”/instead of fright and flight… But this attempt still falls short of insight. I can almost see Hoagland filling composition notebooks with this stuff on a bus headed west. And “fright or flight” is an example of what I mean by rewording cliché—fight or flight springs to mind, all Hoagland did is tweak a cliché so that it takes a moment longer to recognize. Or how about these lines toward the end of the same poem: With my foot upon the gas,/between the future and the past/ I am here... Upon! Significance is suddenly communicated, and doubled with the slant rhyme of gas/past!

Maybe I’m getting carried away, and if I'm starting to sound strident, I apologize. Like I said, by the end of this book I was perturbed, because it's loaded with similar examples. For example, in “Poem for Men Only”: When/Like a weighty oak, my father fell… Or later, in “Doing This,” where Hoagland writes: I know, with a ten-pound sadness in my chest,/ that I can’t keep doing this. A “ten-pound sadness” is what I would write and then stare at, knowing it wasn’t much better than writing “really sad.” Obviously, Hoagland is successful at times, but I suppose my problem is that more often than not I was pausing at places that struck me as particularly mediocre, as opposed to particularly wonderful.
Here’s another snippet, about a father-figure from the title poem, “Sweet Ruin”:

He sat there, he said later, in the middle
of a red, imitation-leather sofa,
with his shoes off and a whiskey in his hand,
filling up with a joyful kind of dread—
like a swamp, filling up with night

The last poetic image—a swamp filling up with night—is just so nebulous and strained, especially when this instance of Hoagland ascribing a concrete quality to an otherwise intangible subject (For instance: night can’t be poured, it can’t fill something up) is compared to a master like Emily Dickenson effortlessly doing the same thing. This is from “359,” where she’s describing a bird coming down the walk:

Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb
And he unrolled his feathers,
And rowed him softer Home—

Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap, plashless as they swim.

The sky suddenly manifested as an ocean, noon with banks like a river…ED’s poetic language transforms the scene. This comparison is a little unfair because of the length of quotations I used for both pieces, but I also think that reflects back on Hoagland’s decision to even try pulling off an image like a swamp filling up with night in a single line. It just takes up space, it’s mannerism void of real feeling, a poetic tool utilized without power. But, now I’m erring into harshness again, so I’ll stop. Perhaps someone disagrees?

I’ll end by reiterating that although the moments of enjoyment were too often bogged down by my irritation, there were some. Despite my distaste for his sudden, epiphany driven endings, the conclusion of “A Change in Plans” and the book was really striking:

Remember how the reptiles,
after generations of desire
to taste the yellow flowers,
thrust out wings one day and lifted from
the ground?
Being birds by that time,
their appetites had changed.
But they kept on flying.

Charles Simic at University of Cincinnati (3.03.2011)

2011-03-04T14:51:00.000-08:00

The opportunity to hear Charles Simic read his poetry in Ohio is rare, so when I heard he was critiquing the poems of a graduate class at the University of Cincinnati before the evening reading I decided to make a day of my trip to Cincinnati. Both the three o’clock critique and the eight pm reading were free and open to the public, so I started skulking around the Elliston poetry room on UC’s campus a little after two o’clock in case a massive crowd gathered, or, more likely, every professor at UC required their English classes to attend. The last thing I wanted was to be squatting in the aisle while some undergrad who hadn’t heard of Charles Simic before last week lounged in the front row checking facebook on their iPhone. That being said, a small crowd accumulated outside the doors of Elliston while I leaned against a wall and pretended to send a text, got a drink from the water fountain, then stared at my phone some more and smirked to myself as if a friend had sent me a witty text. FYI—I get about one text a week. I’m sure my self-conscious little performance was unnecessary, but I had the sinking feeling that the event was actually not open to the public (it seemed too good to be true), and that any moment someone would ask me if I was a student, and then ask me to leave.

Charles Simic arrived with a miniature entourage right at three o’clock, and by then the crowd had migrated to the hall outside Elliston, so we all filed in while Simic (Or Charlie, as I was calling him by the end of the day) took a seat at a small podium facing the room. Elliston Poetry Room, on the third floor of Langsam Library, is a really neat space. Wide canvasses cover the walls, and several wooden bookshelves packed with poetry volumes fill one side of the room, blocking in a small area of chairs. It’s an intimate setting, which works well for poetry readings that are often sparsely attended. Sometimes a room that looks empty (regardless of how well attended) lends the room a disheartening kind of “Only a dozen people in the world give a shit” atmosphere. (Photo below is Simic in Elliston, courtesy of my cell phone.)

Simic was tall and lean, wearing green trousers, a silver collared shirt under a gray sweater, and brown loafers along with his round silver spectacles. (As opposed to pants, shoes, and glasses.) I also wrote in my notebook that he was wearing a “simple black wristwatch”, which I must have thought was significant at the time. Who knows. Maybe I just wanted to look busy. As people found seats up front or in back according to strategies only they knew, someone handed out copies of the student poems Simic was going to be discussing. Simic just sat behind the podium with his hands clasped between his knees, and after looking around the room of about thirty people, he cleared his throat, dry-washed his hands and said, “Am I supposed to start?”

Simic said he was mostly going to talk about the poems and make a few suggestions, which I think would have been a relief for me. A typical workshop can be stressful enough, but to have your poetry read by a master poet—and then commented on in a public forum!—must have been nerve-wracking. While it was clearly a great opportunity, I’m glad it was theirs and not mine. Much more fun to watch.

I won’t go into detail about any of the student poems except to say a couple of them were really nice. There were about ten on the handout, and each student had a turn to read their poem and listen to Simic respond. He would typically think for a moment, repeating a particular phrase to himself a few times, and then he would share an anecdote the poem reminded him of while the student author attempted to grind a finger through their temple or cheek and look nonchalant. Some of the stories were really funny, such as visitors in the early 60’s insisting that he take them to a terrible Greenwich Village poetry reading, or a recent trip to Greece he took, or working in a New York bookstore watching customers flip through poetry books to pass the time. Not funny? Maybe you had to be there.

Most of his comments on the actual poems focused on—and no surprise here to people who’ve read Simic—images. He pointed out when an image was “too much”, or overly self-conscious, and just as often his advice was to cut. He didn’t always say what needed to be cut, instead choosing to talk about how much should be cut. “This poem needs to be about two lines shorter,” he said about one poem. After one student read, and the room quieted, Simic cleared his throat a couple times, told a story, and then said, “This poem needs to be about half as long,” while the student mouthed “Wow.” Simic’s steady advice to reduce length might have seemed unreasonable to some—during an end Q & A, one observer asked if there were any long poems Simic respected, and some people chuckled. Not me. My face was like a stone. “Rodney Jones is a great poet,” Simic said, and a moment later added Tony Hoagland’s longer narrative poems.

Overall, Simic was genial and generous with the poems he read, often praising a line or image, and he had some great snippets of advice as well. One of my favorites was when he said, “Every poem is a clock. You set up a beat in the first line.” Frost said something similar about the first line directing the rest of the poem, but I must have known Simic would riff on the metaphor, which is why I instinctively took note of the wristwatch as an obvious symbol of his aesthetics. Towards the end of the session, one student read an epigram and Simic gave the advice that, “Even in short poems, several things must be going on.”

Obviously none of this is mind-blowing, but for me, it was good to be reminded and to hear what I already knew rephrased in ways that made me rethink how I write—in addition, the session (which lasted almost two hours!) provided some really interesting insight into how Simic operates, and what he values in poetry. Not just his aesthetic, which can be seen in his own work, but how he operates line by line—his composition process. For instance, did you know Simic values minimalism? Oookaaaayyyy, everybody knows that. It was interesting anyway.

I did think it was odd that there were so few people at the session, especially considering there are a number of major universities within an hour’s drive—UC, Xavier, NKU, and Miami—and also taking into account that everyone and their little brother is filling up Composition Notebooks with cruddy poetry. But when one of the most renowned living poets is providing a free public critique, under thirty people show up? Are a lot of creative writers working regular hours these days? Joking! This is what I pondered as I ate the grossest Chick-fil-A sandwich of my life (the spicy chicken breading was like red slime) at the student center, graded essays, and waited for the eight o’clock reading.

I arrived an hour early for this event as well, and since the lights in the auditorium were still off, I went back outside and tried not to look like I was lurking in the shadows. Note to self: it is unnecessary to arrive more than a half hour early to poetry readings. I was halfway hoping Simic would change clothes for the reading, which would have been interesting to write about—“For the eight o’clock event, Simic wore a black shirt with a black and red checkered fedora”—but instead he looked the same with the exception of one sleeve uncuffed and rolled up.

Discounting some minor microphone problems, due not only to the microphone but also Simic’s habit of talking to his crotch, the reading was great, albeit short. I think all factors considered—a typically late start (PRT=Poetry Reading Time. Anywhere from fifteen to forty-five minutes after the advertised time) and technical difficulties—the reading itself was just over a half hour. Simic was really funny at the critique, and was again at the reading. Highlights were “Factory” and “1938.” And while I’d seen clips of Simic reading online, I was still surprised at the prominence of his accent. It certainly wasn’t “heavy,” and he was easy to understand, but it was definitely there, and the way Simic read has made me see some of his poems in a new light. For instance, when Simic reads his list-like poems, his voice doesn’t remain steady—he’s not simply reciting like lots of American poets—but rather his voice will acquire a lilt, or a slightly higher pitch that rolls over each new line. It’s a much more subdued version of how Ilya Kaminsky reads his poetry, and it gave me a new appreciation for his written work.

Afterward, I bought two books—Jackstraws (1999) and My Noiseless Entourage (2005) because I wanted to get them signed, and also because I fiscally support poetry.

So, what do you say when you only get a few seconds to talk to an author? I’ve come to a point in my life where I’ll settle for banality rather than err into something outrageous, so I set my books down in front of him and said, “I really enjoyed hearing you talk about the master class poems this afternoon,” an obviously calculated statement to elevate my ten second status in the auditorium. Simic scribbled his name in my book and said, “Ah, thank you, yes, we got through, what, ten of them? I was really worried because, you know, someone comes, you want them to see your poem,” and then I jumped in pretending to be an angry student and said, “Yeah, Ahh, he didn’t look at my poem!”

And yes, as I write what I said it looks kind of idiotic, but it seemed funny at the time, and Charles Simic repeated what I said, laughed, and thanked me for coming.

(Above Photo: I'm a crappy photographer, but this is Simic leaving after the reading.)

On Inspiration

2011-02-22T10:12:00.000-08:00

As I continue to write and evaluate what I write, as I continue to read interviews with artists about their writing process on websites and in magazines like The Paris Review, one thing becomes increasingly apparent—inspiration comes secondary to discipline. While this seems to be generally agreed upon by serious artists (Ergo—if you disagree, you are not a serious artist. Kidding.), sometimes it can seem a touch threatening, as if the magic or mystery of art has been replaced by a staid workmanship. I don’t see it that way at all. Rather, I view discipline as a grappling every bit as serious as Jacob wrestling with the angel in Genesis, a confrontation that lasted throughout the night until at last the struggle gave way to blessing. Art can be easy and instinctive. Oftentimes it is not.

Anyway, I didn’t set out to write a blog on differing perspectives of inspiration and discipline, because while I would take discipline over inspiration six days out of the week, I still want some inspiration for my own writing on the seventh, and this past couple of days I found it in unexpected places. This weekend, after I finished Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs, I read James Tate’s now canonical 1967 collection of poetry, The Lost Pilot.

It was fine. I’m glad I read it.

But for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, I was expecting great things, and my expectations were unmet. Part of my disappointment, I think, goes back to the strange sense of connection I felt with the book even though I had never read it. I’m sure other people have experienced something similar. I had this completely unfounded idea that James Tate’s first book was going to be something right up my alley, something that would inspire me and be similar to what I wanted to do with my own poetry except much better. And all this based on…what? A poem or two I read in some anthology? His name? (Which I do think is pretty cool.) The title of the book? Like I said, the book wasn’t bad (I realize that's an understatement), I enjoyed much of it, and maybe I’ll write more about it later, but when I finished the last page I was left feeling peculiarly tired. Drained. Uninspired, when I what I wanted was to be excited and energized.

Where I did find inspiration last week was when my wife (Angela) and I were watching the documentary The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town. After the album Born to Run was released in 1975, Bruce Springsteen was embroiled in a legal battle with his former manager and was prohibited from recording new music for a period of almost three years. He had lost control over his own art, which must have been devastating. That’s the kind of obstacle that ruins people. But Springsteen, in a time fraught with barbs and thorns not only kept his band together, but wrote approximately seventy songs, only ten of which he used on the album that eventually became Darkness on the Edge of Town. He practiced, and he wrote more than he ever had before, and he toured, and three years later in 1978 he finished one of the most savage, dark, human, and riveting records I’ve ever heard. And as I watched the documentary I couldn’t stop thinking about how tough Springsteen’s artistic situation was at that time, and the things he could have easily filled that empty space with—alcohol, women, self-pity and bitterness—and yet he never slowed down. He was accountable to no one but his own vision, and he worked at it. (I just had the urge to start singing I’m working on a dreeeaaaammmm….)

The other source of inspiration—and feel free to laugh at me, but I’m going to be honest—was when Angela and I were watching the most recent episode of The Office. Michael is showing his just finished movie, Threat Level: Midnight, when he picks up vibes that Holly doesn’t like it. In a fit of temper, Michael says (and I’m paraphrasing, because I’m not going to rewatch the episode on hulu just to get this right): What do I have without my movie? I don’t have anything. Without his “art”—his movie, his comedy, his HBO pilot—he feels like he has nothing. But the reason comedy is so great is because it blows up ridiculous human qualities into caricatures—what we haven’t noticed before is expanded until one would have to be blind to ignore it, and when it’s that visible, everybody can have a laugh. Look at how egotistical we are! How selfish! How manipulating! How petty! For me, there was a reminder in that last episode when Holly inquired What about me? that art—however much time I pour into it, however much I value it—is not everything. And that's a good thing.

While this may not seem like an inspiring idea, for me it was a valve turning to release pressure, as well as a reminder. That Life is changing even as my own life wanes, and it’s a series of moments and relationships that will always exist beyond the confines—however entrancing and true—of poems, and novels, and the photographs we frantically take to try and preserve seasons we know are already passing. But even as I write that last sentence, I worry that the ring of truth is leaving what I’m trying to get at. Because perhaps the best way, the most noble and honorable way to express the pleasure and pain of this transitory Life is through art. I suppose it’s a question of balance, and of remembering that just as there are seasons of life, so are there seasons of art. A time to experience, a time to read, a time to create, and a time to share. We would do well to remember Shelley’s admonition at the end of “Ode to the West Wind”, that poem shot like a signal flare into the dark sky of humanity, still bright across generations:

O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Poem Submissions

2011-02-11T09:09:00.000-08:00

I’m currently in the midst of waiting for replies from PhD programs in creative writing, and I’m also in a (short) stretch of time with my teaching where I can coast on lesson plans for a day or two. So today, instead of mindlessly checking gradcafe, or the new creative writing PhD blog, or reading online articles I decided to do something I haven’t done in a long time—send out poetry submissions.

I used to do this regularly, sitting down on a Friday afternoon and printing out poems, addressing envelopes, stuffing envelopes, then dropping them off at the post office. Initially, I even enjoyed receiving rejections and took pleasure in sticking them on a nail in my office, a practice I stole from Stephen King’s memoir On Writing.

At some point though, I was worn down by the deluge of generic rejection slips in familiarly creased SASE envelopes and I started acting like Anne Bradstreet. One afternoon, when I saw the mailman drop another SASE in my mailbox I opened the door, struck a dramatic pose, and shouted, “I cast thee by as one unfit for light,/ The visage was so irksome in my sight!” Okay, I didn’t do that. And Bradstreet wrote that about her published poetry (false modesty) and not a rejection slip (much less cool).

Anyway, I told myself I’d work on writing better poetry before I invested time in sending it out the door again, and that was probably a year or so ago (Occasionally I’d send out an essay or short story to one place, but nothing serious). I’ve generated quite a bit of material since the beginning of that hiatus, and this week started to feel like the season for sending work out into the world again. I put on Horse Feather’s latest album, Thistled Spring, sat down in my office with a cup of coffee, and went to work. My handwriting isn’t great, so it takes me a long time to address envelopes that an editor won’t think are from a 5th grader—but after a while I started enjoying myself. I was something like a sewing circle of one—my hands were busy scribbling, leaving my mind unoccupied.

I eventually settled on six literary journals, all print. Only four of them needed physical letters sent, the other two were online submissions.

1. The Paris Review
2. Alaska Quarterly Review
3. Crazy Horse
4. American Poetry Review
5. Third Coast
6. Passages North

I thought I’d start with top tier publications, and when the rejections come, send to five or six more that may be more realistic. Third Coast and Passages North would be cool because they’re both Michigan publications (Western Michigan U. and Northern Michigan U, respectively), and I have a long standing beef with Alaska Quarterly Review. In my very first poetry course as an undergrad at Indiana Wesleyan, one of my assignments was to research a literary journal and send them a submission. AQR, naturally, rejected mine. I have no idea what I sent, but I’m guessing it sucked pretty bad. Nevertheless, at some point in my life I’m going to redeem that day.

One other tip I learned from the professor of that course was to keep track of all my submissions, something I still do. Here’s my sweet recording journal:

In other news, I’m past page 200 in Swann’s Way, and making my way through Swarm (Jorie Graham) and an anthology of Michigan poets as well (you can see it in the picture of the envelopes). I think after I finish those I’m going to look for some modern fiction—something by Michael Chabon, perhaps, or Margaret Atwood.

Fingers crossed until then, and may the cream always rise to the top.

The Vocation Poem

2011-02-02T17:27:00.000-08:00

I went to Hollywood casino with a friend this weekend in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, and as I was sitting at the No Limit Poker table waiting for a hand worth playing, I wondered if there were any good poems written about casinos. Not a Kenny Rogers ditty about winners and losers and gambling (Don’t get me wrong, I love "The Gambler" and actually listened to it on the drive over.), but a poem that accesses the sights and sounds and unique vocabulary of the casino experience. The blinking neon lights and cacophony of hundreds of slot machines, the middle aged women dancing to an Elvis impersonator with plastic cups in their hands, the streams of people flowing past the Jeep being given away at 11:30, the queue at the poker room, people swiping their Club Hollywood cards at the table, the inane chatter between players trying to take money from each other...what would a poem like this look like from a dealer’s perspective, who sees the same scene play out night after night? What would he or she say? What kind of person decides to become a professional dealer?

Part of what makes poetry interesting is its desire to incorporate a wide range of vocabulary. I still remember the first time I saw some words that pulled me up short—lacustrine, for instance, from John Ashbery, or concupiscent in Wallace Stevens. These words can hit you out of left field, not only because they represent vocabulary that’s rarely heard in conversation, they're also words rarely seen in writing unless you’re reading John Updike.

Writing a “vocation poem” is a way to not only hear a distinct voice, but to access and meaningfully incorporate interesting language into poetry through jargon—that is, vocabulary specific to a job field or community of specialists. A recent example of this that I really enjoyed was Spencer Reece’s “The Clerk’s Tale”, the title poem from his 2004 debut collection. Reece wrote the poem while working at Brooks Brothers, and his representation of himself and his coworker as aging men working at a department store, the brands he names, and the specific vocabulary of shirts and ties and knots—it wouldn’t be possible without believing that a poem about work was worthwhile. It’s pretty long, but I’m going to reproduce it below anyway because the internet doesn't have space restrictions.

The Clerk’s Tale
by Spencer Reece

I am thirty-three and working in an expensive clothier,
selling suits to men I call "Sir."
These men are muscled, groomed and cropped--
with wives and families that grow exponentially.
Mostly I talk of rep ties and bow ties,
of full-Windsor knots and half-Windsor knots,
of tattersall, French cuff, and English spread collars,
of foulards, neats, and internationals,
of pincord, houndstooth, nailhead, and sharkskin.
I often wear a blue pin-striped suit.
My hair recedes and is going gray at the temples.
On my cheeks there are a few pimples.
For my terrible eyesight, horn-rimmed spectacles.
One of my fellow-workers is an old homosexual
who works hard and wears bracelets with jewels.
No one can rival his commission checks.
On his break he smokes a Benson & Hedges cigarette,
puffing expectantly as a Hollywood starlet.
He has carefully applied a layer of Clinique bronzer
to enhance the tan on his face and neck.
His hair is gone except for a few strands
which are combed across his scalp.
He examines his manicured lacquered nails.
I admire his studied attention to details:
his tie stuck to his shirt with masking tape,
his teeth capped, his breath mint in place.
The old homosexual and I laugh in the back
over a coarse joke involving an octopus.
Our banter is staccato, staged and close
like those "Spanish Dances" by Granados.
I sometimes feel we are in a musical--
gossiping backstage between our numbers.
He drags deeply on his cigarette.
Most of his life is over.
Often he refers to himself as "an old faggot."
He does this bemusedly, yet timidly.
I know why he does this.
He does this because his acceptance is finally complete--
and complete acceptance is always
bittersweet. Our hours are long. Our backs bent.
We are more gracious than English royalty.
We dart amongst the aisles tall as hedgerows.
Watch us face into the merchandise.
How we set up and take apart mannequins
as if we were performing autopsies.
A naked body, without pretense, is of no use.
It grows late.
I hear the front metal gate close down.
We begin folding the ties correctly according to color.
The shirts--Oxfords, broadcloths, pinpoints--
must be sized, stacked, or rehashed.
The old homosexual removes his right shoe,
allowing his gigantic bunion to swell.
There is the sound of cash being counted--
coins clinking, bills swishing, numbers whispered--
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. . .
We are changed when the transactions are done--
older, dirtier, dwarfed.
A few late customers gawk in at us.
We say nothing. Our silence will not be breached.
The lights go off, one by one--
the dressing room lights, the mirror lights.
Then it is very late. How late? Eleven?
We move to the gate. It goes up.
The gate's grating checkers our cheeks.
This is the Mall of America.
The light is bright and artificial,
yet not dissimilar to that found in a Gothic cathedral.
You must travel down the long hallways to the exits
before you encounter natural light.
One final formality: the manager checks out bags.
The old homosexual reaches into his over-the-shoulder leather bag--
the one he bought on his European travels
with his companion of many years.
He finds a stick of lip balm and applies it to his lips
liberally, as if shellacking them.
Then he inserts one last breath mint
and offers one to me. The gesture is fraternal
and occurs between us many times.
At last, we bid each other good night.
I watch him fade into the many-tiered parking lot,
where the thousands of cars have come
and are now gone. This is how our day ends.
This is how our day always ends.
Sometimes snow falls like rice.
See us take to our dimly lit exits,
disappearing into the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul;
Minneapolis is sleek and St. Paul,
named after the man who had to be shown,
is smaller, older, and somewhat withdrawn.
Behind us, the moon pauses over the vast egg-like dome of the mall.
See us loosening our ties among you.
We are alone.
There is no longer any need to express ourselves.

There’s a touch of Elizabeth Bishop lurking in the quiet details of this poem (though Reece lacks her artful style, I think), as well as some of Charles Simic in the way the poem is arranged as a long list, and sometimes even hints of Robert Lowell where the adjectives start to pile up in groups of three. The first three lines of the poem especially remind me of “Memories of West Street and Lepke”, where Lowell writes:

Hairy, muscular, suburban,
wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,
they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.

Reece uses irregular rhyme throughout “The Clerk’s Tale” like Lowell did in “Memories of West Street and Lepke” which keeps the poem interesting, because otherwise the redundancy of Reece’s listing would start to wear thin.

Anyway, other examples of the vocation poem that I like are Philip Levine’s “Fear and Fame” from What Work Is (2009), where he writes about “new solutions from the great carboys/of acids” and “A gallon of hydrochloric/ steaming from the wide glass mouth”. The majority of the collection, as you can infer from the title, is based on working class characters from Detroit. An older example, also from Michigan (Saginaw) is Theodore Roethke’s “Big Wind”, a poem about weathering a storm in a greenhouse, and finally, I just read Jorie Graham’s “Reading Plato” from her book Erosion (1983), a poem which is ostensibly about a person fashioning lures for fly fishing, but ultimately becomes (among other things) a beautiful ars poetica.

We happen to have a large number of poems about teaching and writing, and I think that's not only inevitable but wonderful (shouldn't people write about what occupies their time?) but in a better world, where everyone was a reader and writer, literature would be flooded with a wide range of stories and poems that accessed vocabulary from doctors and gas-station attendants and pastors and movie theater ticket-takers and carpenters and judges. In a society where everyone was the singing citizen, our stories would expand to include a diverse vocabulary drawn from an array of professions and lifestyles, and we would all be the richer for it.

Rebecca Wolff & Remembrance of Things Past

2011-01-26T20:31:00.000-08:00

Two nights ago I attended a reading by the novelist John Casey, and in between reading sections from his novel Compass Rose he mentioned that one of the most beautiful sentences he had ever read was from Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Casey went on to quote the sentence but I can't for the life of me remember it. I only remember filing away a mental note to go find Remembrance of Things Past at the library and one of John Casey's character's exclaiming "I smell biscuits!"

I was already going to the library this afternoon because I wanted to check out Rebecca Wolff's latest book of poetry The King and Jorie Graham's Swarm. Although I'm teaching an Introduction to Poetry course and two composition classes, I've found that I have ample time to write and read if I plan my time carefully. By that I mostly mean drinking lots of coffee in the day to stay awake, and never, ever turning on Netflix instant watch while I eat lunch. I found the poetry books quickly, and I ended up adding Wolff's first book, Manderley, followed by a biography on Springsteen as I browsed my way from the PS aisles to PQ, the section where Proust is shelved.

I had some impressions of Proust. I vaguely recalled that Remembrance of Things Past was supposed to be remarkably long and full of unapologetic, meandering flights into memory and nostalgia. I should expect plenty of window gazing, plenty of forays into the past sparked by the smallest of catalysts--a scent, a sound, a taste. I thought I was prepared to tackle a classic, so I glanced at the piece of paper in my hand, PQ2631.R63, and scanned the shelves for a heavy tome.

I couldn't find Remembrance. There were several copies of books I hadn't heard of--Swann's Way, Within a Budding Grove, Cities of the Plain, The Captive...but not the one I wanted.

I knew something was up. King Library typically has a great selection, and Remembrance is a famous title. I started flipping through the books, looking at publishing dates, when I saw a note before the title page in Swann's Way. "Marcel Proust's continuous novel (Rembrance of Things Past) was originally published in eight parts, the titles and dates of which were..."

The title of the first book? Swann's Way. That's when I took a closer look at the encyclopedic Random House editions looming battered and black from the top shelf--Remembrance of Things Past Volume I (Swann's Way, Within a Budding Grove). I was...unprepared.

Immediately the idea of reading through the set overwhelmed me, and I thought I might wait until summer when I could (ideally) devote more time to the book(s). Sometimes the classics can be tough to get through--here's to you and unmet expectations, Thomas Wolfe-- but, out of curiosity, I opened the book and read the first few sentences:

For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say to myself: "I'm falling asleep." And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francois I and Charles V.

And I was hooked. I wanted to continue reading in the aisle, hot from wearing a winter coat inside with a scarf and my backpack dangling from one shoulder, already half-full of books. So, despite the possibly poor timing, I'll start with volume one and continue forward so long as the reading remains a pleasure. And the moment it becomes a chore, I'll quit, because eight volumes is too long to spend on something I don't enjoy, and I can always lie and tell people I finished as long as I can remember some crap to mention from the beginning of the book. (The way he describes reading in bed...it's perfect. It's exactly like me!)

I began reading Rebecca Wolff's The King this afternoon, which I already like more than Figment (and I liked Figment, as you can see), but that has more to do with her new subject matter--Motherhood, child-bearing--than any real changes in style.

So, if I can't hurl enough of my free hours into the black hole of "time spent planning for class", I now have other distractions, although I'm not taking any bets on finishing Remembrance on this side of the coming decade.

The Divine Narrative: A Comparison of Ilya Kaminsky and Seth Abramson

2010-12-09T09:01:00.000-08:00

While a juxtaposition of the two poets Ilya Kaminsky and Seth Abramson may initially seem arbitrary, there are enough links between the two rising stars—in terms of both background and aesthetic—to warrant exploration. Consider some of the surface similarities: born only a year apart, Abramson in Concord, Massachusetts in 1976, and Kaminsky in Odessa, Ukraine in 1977, both began a career in law and received their J.D before entering the creative writing field and winning prestigious awards from Poetry Magazine. Kaminsky won a Ruth Lilly Fellowship in 2001, while Abramson won the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood prize in 2008. And, surprisingly, perhaps, considering the amount of attention and praise both have garnered from poets such as Robert Pinsky, Donald Revell, and Carolyn Forche—each has released only one complete book of poetry. Ilya Kaminsky published Dancing in Odessa in 2004, while Seth Abramson published The Suburban Ecstasies in 2009.

Yet while a span of five years separated the release of their first volume, the planets have aligned for their second. While Abramson continues his schooling at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and blogs like a man who believes his death is imminent, and Kaminsky teaches at San Diego State while releasing an anthology of international poetry as well as a translation of the poetry of Polina Barskova, the next collection from each poet is forthcoming within the next year. Kaminsky is releasing Deaf Republic from Tupelo Press, while Abramson’s Green Rose Prize winning collection Northerners will be published under the auspices of New Issues/Western Michigan University press.

While these areas of overlap are fascinating, and borderline uncanny—have many poets since the days of James Dickey and Wallace Stevens begun careers so removed from poetry?—more important similarities are embedded within the aesthetic of each poet. It’s worth noting that both poets composed their first book not simply as a collage of disparate poems—though the individual poems of each book do, for the most part, work well on their own individual terms—rather, both poets have crafted a book-long narrative complete with reoccurring characters. While this isn’t uncommon, it strikes me as rare for first time authors who have likely been writing a variety of poems over the span of several years and experiences. That is to say, by the time a first book is ready for publication, many poets are backlogged on stand-alone poems they’ve been using to hew their way into literary journals. In contrast, the concentration and focus of Abramson and Kaminsky’s respective books is impressive.

Additionally, Jewish culture, tradition, and mythology are interpolated and intertwined throughout both volumes, though the flavor of Kaminsky’s Russian-Judaism is vastly different than the culture of Abramson’s East Coast American Judaism. And the purpose of Judaism within Abramson’s narrative is different as well. The narrative arc of Kaminsky’s Dancing in Odessa is crafted more from Kaminsky’s desire to recreate a specific place at a specific time—Odessa in a period of political upheaval—than to tell the story of any character. Odessa itself is the best characterized, through its markets and music, its stories and food, while the people who appear and fade from the pages of the book—the doctors and poets, the speaker’s grandmother and Aunt Rose, Natalia—are the blood throbbing through the city’s veins. In contrast, The Suburban Ecstasies focuses on one specific character, Gideon, who carries the weight of his past wherever he travels, eventually scraping away the magic of his youth against the abrasive surface of the mundane.

This interweaving of the physical and the spiritual is a commonality Kaminsky and Abramson share, and while many other poets aspire to illuminate moments of beauty in the everyday, or, more ambitiously, to transform the mundane through their slanted perspective, Kaminsky and Abramson differ in that their narratives take for granted that the two qualities are inseparable, already fused together. And what may simply be “beauty” transformed by a poet’s sharp eye in other writing is often the residue of divinity for Kaminsky and Abramson. And the manner in which both authors continually incorporate the myths and folklore of their Jewish history with the boredom and drudgery, or worse, the brutality and violence of everyday life, lends each volume an air of magical realism reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salvador Plascencia. Take, for example, the poem “Natalia” from Dancing in Odessa:

On the night I met her, the Rabbi sang and sighed,
god's lips on his brow, Torah in his arms,
—I unfastened her stockings, worried

that I have stopped worrying.
She slept in my bed—I slept on a chair,
she slept on a chair—I slept in the kitchen,

she left her slippers in my shower, in my Torah
her slippers in each sentence I spoke.
I said: those I love—die grow old, are born.

But I love the stubbornness of her bedclothes!
I bite them, taste bedclothes—
the sweet mechanism of pillows and covers.

A serious woman, she danced
without a shirt, covering what she could.
We lay together on Yom Kippur, chosen by a wrong God,

the people of a book, broken by a book.

From the very beginning the poem couples the spiritual and the physical; the speaker meets his lover on the night the Rabbi sings and sighs, his arms around the Torah. The sacredness of Yom Kippur is simultaneous with the carnality of the night they lay together. And both planes are suffused with music—the music of the Torah and the music of love and sex, both overlapping and seamlessly creating the world of Odessa, a city populated by images that correspond to emotion rather than intellect.

Abramson’s world comes together in ways that are less organic, perhaps—the seams are visible, but wonderfully sewn—and the narrative is no less satisfying in its evocation of the fused spiritual and physical, or, the suburban and the ecstatic. In the opening poem of the book, “Gideon Gets Central Air,” Abramson summons his reality into manifestation with the words, “This is the scene”, a phrase strongly in the orphic tradition of, “It is as if,” or “I imagine.” And the scene into which the reader is hailed is the infanthood of the character Gideon, a recasting of the story of Moses abandoned in a basket and set adrift down the Nile, which quickly bleeds into the modern world and its representations of Jewish culture:

…the reeds of the basket slip serpentine
off their coils,
upward and through his still-attuning fingers—
which steeple together,
as if to poke out the sun, that spot
where the bulrushes too
are now thrillingly braiding and hewing
themselves…

and continues a few lines later:

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,
clasping this branch of universe just inches above
the killing floor of the Nile;

The two separate qualities of spiritual and physical are still layered atop one another, but they’re recognizable as two distinct aspects of the poem. The reader can see the joints of what Abramson is fitting together—that is, the mythic and the modern. What begins in memory—Gideon-as-Moses afloat on the Nile—is suddenly transformed into a landscape recognizably American. The highway. The Jewish delicatessen. The State Welcome Center.

Again, though Abramson’s world isn’t as naturally constructed as Kaminsky’s, it’s no less appealing or powerful in its evocation. If anything, the way Abramson represents a place that feels familiar, and then suddenly recasts it as a landscape of mystery and wonder may strike some readers as delightfully appealing. What’s more inspiring than seeing the divine pressed against the everyday, especially through the eyes of a speaker who refuses to shed the lens of history and culture through which they view the modern world? Especially if it’s only through that speaker’s eyes that we’ll ever have the chance of seeing our world transformed in the same manner?

As far as the mechanics of transferring the emotion and distinctiveness of culture onto the pages of their distinctly American poetry, both authors delight in—and often take advantage of—the well-wrought list. Both recreate slivers of culture and the past by following poems down discursive trails of cultural specifics, which may strike readers as enchantingly foreign and unfamiliar. Some may note the debt both poets owe Charles Simic, a master of the list poem who often wrote about his Yugoslavian past such as in his famous poem “Prodigy,” where he writes that:

I grew up bent over
a chessboard.

I loved the word endgame.

All my cousins looked worried.

It was a small house
near a Roman graveyard.
Planes and tanks
shook its windowpanes.

This style of writing bears more similarity to Kaminsky’s in its minimalistic approach, especially in comparison with Abramson’s lush diction and crowded collage of dropped lines rarely broken even by stanzas. Still, both authors utilize Simic’s habit of listing facts or descriptions while ignoring the lyric impulse to follow through with intense, metaphorical descriptions. Kaminsky’s lists often follow suit with Simic’s in that they’re composed of narrative details strung loosely together without much in the way of follow through, evoking a scene rather than rationalizing it such as in the title poem, “Dancing in Odessa,” the second stanza of which begins:

My grandmother threw tomatoes
from her balcony, she pulled imagination like a blanket
over my head. I painted
my mother’s face. She understood
loneliness, hid the dead in the earth like partisans.

The night undressed us (I counted
its pulse), my mother danced, she filled the past
with peaches, casseroles. At this, my doctor laughed, his granddaughter touched
my eye-lid...

And on it goes, a surreal list of narrative fragments designed to leave the reader with an emotional impression of the Odessa of Kaminsky’s past, an Odessa which no longer exists because the past has irretrievably slipped away. In poems such as this, the question of "what does it mean" should be left outside the reality of the poem, and the reader should instead be prepared to enter a world one step off from ours, where the music of the past is still thrumming through the speaker, and the senses are more reliable guides through the narrative than logic.

While Abramson also frequently employs the list poem, his are typically tangential outpourings of specifics which fit into the larger frame of the narrative. They provide concrete images, while allowing Abramson the freedom to indulge in wordplay that might not fit cleanly into his narrative, which is much tighter and more cohesive than Kaminsky’s. Abramson’s lists, however, in deviating from a logical starting point, often become discursive to the point of irrelevance in regards to the overall scheme. They’re part of the narrative arc only under the thinnest of guises, which again, isn’t a weakness or flaw so much as a curiosity. Take, for example, this section from the poem “A Dream (Gideon Asleep by the River)”:

Instead of him being taught
how to clean and load a pistol,
to fire with accuracy and discharge
twelve times per minute
to man a barricade
to file papers with the Communists,
to salvage property from a rental
being burned to cinders by Papists,
to gravitate with the urgency of light
towards men whose least warps
bend the plane of history further yet
in the direction of equity,
who study not just the mechanics
but the politics of a skirmish, a siege,
an ambuscade, a cannonade, trench
wars, the charge, the banner, the fife…

And again—onward it marches, to the point that I forget from where we’ve embarked or where we’re going. Granted, the rhythm is enchanting, but by the end of the above segment, the reader is working through the third list-within-a-list, and if they’re following the narrative and wondering how everything fits together, well—it’s all part of Gideon’s dream. All that to say, the skeleton, muscles, and blood of this poem are one long list, and it’s about as discursive as they come. Still, it serves its purpose of liberating Abramson from his own constraints, and some of the sound play is really quite pleasurable, though at times it becomes too self-conscious for my taste. But, this is poetry, and even with a narrative as neatly formed as The Suburban Ecstasies, cohesion is always going to take a backseat to lyric power and spontaneity. The departure is just more obvious than in Dancing in Odessa, where Kaminsky never truly establishes a narrative foundation to begin with. The only law is that each phrase pulse with the music of a mythical Odessa, whereas the character of Gideon, as he moves through the world, is listening for the same music as the reader.

I’ve always found it interesting to look at the poets born close together. How did John Ashbery and W.S. Merwin, both born in 1927, influence one another? Okay, not much. But what about Merwin and Galway Kinnell? And how did they influence the generations to come? I wonder, because I believe that with Ilya Kaminsky and Seth Abramson, we have the opportunity to watch two important poets begin their careers. And perhaps, consciously or not, they’re helping shape one another. Either way, their writing will undoubtedly shape the generation of poets reading their work, and for that reason alone, the next book of poetry from Kaminsky and Abramson is an event that demands attention.

Why I Love Robert Frost's "Directive"

2010-11-24T11:34:00.000-08:00

Randall Jarrell described Robert Frost’s “Directive” as a poem “easy to love, but difficult to understand,” and while I’m going to devote an essay to supporting the first half of that remark, I don’t necessarily believe the second half, which may be a matter of semantics. Because when Jarrell termed the poem “difficult to understand,” he was likely circling the inherent and central contradiction of Frost’s great poem and his “directive” to readers—that we depart from our present times, our modern way of thinking and living, and return to the cleaner waters of the past and “drink beyond confusion.”

What Frost is suggesting seems to be an impossibility, and if readers approach this poem and its driving commandment from Jarrell's paradigm—as a search for cohesiveness and intellectual understanding—then they will likely be left frustrated, though to be fair Frost warns such readers from the beginning and several times throughout the poem that he “only has at heart your getting lost.” Instead, “Directive” is best read as a poem that is processed and “understood” through emotion—and in this sense, its contradictions ring true. Because don’t we, at times, resent those that we love? And don’t we, for our own human reasons, cherish, and even cling to, painful memories? Why? Intellectually, it doesn’t make sense, and it’s into these impossibilities that Robert Frost descends.

The poem, published in 1946, is ostensibly basic. A guide (Robert Frost) proposes to take us on a journey through some woods to an abandoned town. Our starting point for the journey, however, isn’t a place on a map but rather a moment in time. Frost wants to depart the unhappy present, and in the first lines he urges us to “Back out of all this now too much for us,” to “a time made simple by the loss/ of detail.” It’s in these first lines that Frost sets up the premise for a journey into the past, while simultaneously warning readers that he knows the period he’s taking us to is desirable because the details have been lost or forgotten, or in Frost’s words, “dissolved, and broken off/ Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather.”

In short, it may only be revisionist history that makes the destination desirable, though it’s unclear whether Frost is forgetting the details of his personal past or if we as a nation are forgetting the details of our national past. It soon begins to seem like an amalgamation of both, but either way, Frost’s early caveat alone should be enough to make him as a guide untrustworthy—yet somehow, the spirit of Frost making his declaration and then barreling forward in spite of it inclines us to disregard his warning and follow him to an ambiguous and mystifying destination that he describes as, “a house that is no more a house/Upon a farm that is no more a farm/And in a town that is no more a town.” But before we follow the guide, in case the subtleties of the first insinuation were missed, he outright explains that he, “only has at heart your getting lost.” Fair enough.

What stands out in this journey back through history to the abandoned town are the images of the past, of time passing, of age. The majority of the poem turns on Frost’s idea of the romanticized past, to the point that even the physical landscape itself becomes a cipher for this idea, and once the reader understands that this is the paradigm Frost is operating under, the entire poem becomes much easier to digest. And as the reader moves toward the town, a hierarchy of ages is quickly established—the older the better, because the past was always better than the way things are now. Right? It’s also worth mentioning that this is a part of the central contradiction I mentioned earlier. Frost knows how ridiculous and illogical it is to claim that the past is always better, and that’s why he repeatedly shows that nostalgia and this particular journey have a lot—maybe everything—to do with revisionist history. But part of what makes “Directive” so powerful, and so strange, is that Frost is still deadly serious in his indulgence in nostalgia and his pursuit of the past despite the knowledge that his mind may be playing tricks on him. The poem itself is a monument to the truth of human contradiction.

One of the first major landmarks we pass on the journey is an enormous glacier:

The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.

These five lines, almost hinting of what Robert Lowell would do with his offhand but quirky descriptions (The third line in the above section especially seems to recall Lowell, though where Frost ends with a period, Lowell would just be warming up.) can be a touch confusing at first, especially if the reader hasn’t yet picked up on Frost’s paradigm of “older is better.” I reread this section several times wondering why so many lines were devoted to the description of a glacier and its relationship with us as readers on a journey before I realized the glacier was one of the oldest images Frost could get his hands on, older even than the landscape it had carved up. And his pun about the glacier’s “coolness” towards us as humans, or a nation, is meant to puts things into perspective. Our human timeline and events are still fairly recent in the scheme of things, and amount to little compared with a glacier’s span of existence.

In turn, the lines about the glacier sets up a strategy for reading the lines that follow about the forest that we need to travel through in order to reach the town. The “coolness” of the glacier contrast with the “wood’s excitement” over the reader passing through:

As for the woods’ excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.

Like the glacier, and now the woods, the natural (and artificial, in the case of the abandoned town) landscape is continuing to serve as a medium for what Frost has on his mind, a trick of romanticism Frost employs in many of his other works such as “Design,” and “Birches.” The woods are younger than the glacier, so while they’re still older than the travelers passing through, they don’t have the perspective to realize how young they are, and how much younger the travelers are. Besides providing Frost with yet another chance to juxtapose images of varying degrees of age, the lines about the forest serve a second purpose of diverting the reader’s attention from the primary goal, that is, arriving at the abandoned town Frost first mentioned. Structurally, the woods become an opportunity for Frost to try and get the reader turned around or “lost” in the forest, and the next lines arise out of this sense of uncertainty that he’s tried to evoke in the reader. Frost encourages the travelers to:

Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone’s road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
It’s lines like this, where Frost summons the ghosts of past days that imply we’re going farther back than simply his personal past, especially when compared with the earlier lines in the poem, “And there’s a story in a book about it;/Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels.” Here, the line between personal memory and a national consciousness briefly blurs. Why turn to a story in a book if Frost could turn to his own memory, especially if he’s unconcerned with reliability (as we know he’s not)? And how long ago had people quit using wagons with iron wheels? These small cues intimate that we’re returning to a period that feels not only idyllic, but almost fairy-talish in its simplicity, a tone that becomes important at the end of the poem, where a certain suspension of belief becomes necessary.

At this point, we’ve arrived at the outskirts of the town, and Frost, in the hopes that we travelers “are lost enough to find yourself,” instructs us to “pull in your ladder-road behind you/And put a sign up CLOSED to all put me./ Then make yourself at home.” We’ve finally arrived in the abandoned town, and after briefly mentioning a field that’s closing like a harness gall, or a sore, Frost immediately shows us one site—“the children’s house of make-believe”—that slowly gains significance as he dwells there.

First there’s the children’s house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
One of the beautiful things about this poem is the way Frost continually surprises readers and complicates his own theme of the romanticized past, and this is a wonderful example of that. What begins as just another stop on the tour of the fading town becomes a site of central importance to the poem, and the last line adds a sudden weight to the description that came before. Because if the past is the ideal, then childhood is privileged over adulthood, and in the above lines we can see Frost imbuing the scene with an innocence that contrasts with the present era we first embarked from, that state “too much for us.” And “Weep for what little things could make them glad,” is a profound and tragic line, because suddenly we’re not just weeping for these obscure, lost children, gone god knows where—we’re weeping for ourselves, and mourning what the passing of time has done to us. “This was no playhouse but a house in earnest,” Frost confirms. While the earlier images of the glacier and the forest were perhaps necessary to calibrate readers to Frost’s paradigm, they were also important as scaffolding for this moment, when it’s not just abstract notions of time and the landscape that have aged, but we as human beings and a nation. We can no longer be satisfied with the simple things we once took joy in—those are the days of the abandoned town. And like the image of the field which has slowly filled in until it’s no larger than “a harness gall,” Frost shows us the cellar of “the house that is no more a house,” which is “slowly closing like a dent in dough,” another moment where Frost shows the past fading right before our eyes, becoming ever more inaccessible.

The culmination of the journey, the “destination” Frost has been winding his way towards the entire poem is nearby:

A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)

In the above lines Frost points out a brook where people in the house would drink from. The point we’re watching the stream from is the source, where the waters are cold and pure, and too calm to be very wild. But, we’re told that farther down the valley the stream grows wider, faster, and at times the waters surge violent and high, throwing tatters of cloth into the barbs and thorns along the bank. The stream at its source is one final image of a pure and innocent past, but it’s slightly different in that unlike the glacier and the woods, we’re allowed a glimpse of the brook at its genesis contrasted with what it will become—violent and out of control, and in this sense it becomes a metaphor for the passing of time, for the train wreck of history piling up one freight car after another. Just as we are the departed children who no longer have the ability to take pleasure in simplicity, so we as a people have become the raging stream long departed from our source, helplessly out of control in the entropy of history. Or so it must have seemed to Frost, who began his life on the cusp of the modern era—to put things into perspective, he was already almost twenty before Walt Whitman died—and in his middle years watched two World Wars ravage the country and the world.

But the reason we’ve traveled so far, and followed Frost on his journey isn’t simply to gaze into the pure waters of the past. Frost tells us, with the first sense of hopefulness he’s yet offered in the poem, that:

I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it,
So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t.

The verse Frost is referencing is likely Mark 4: 10-12, which says that:

And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them (KJV).

The use of this verse may be to say that only those who follow Frost in his “directive” into the past will find the goblet, or perhaps he’s momentarily playing the part of Christ—he’s delivered his parable of a poem, and only the people it’s meant for will find meaning in it. Perhaps those are the aged sufferers, people like Frost who was in his 70’s when he wrote this, and had been jaded by life and the cruelty of history—or perhaps it’s anyone who pined for the past, and was filled with nostalgia for a time when things seemed better. Either way, what follows is a devastating line that unravels all the work he’s put in. This holy object he’s lead us to? In parenthesis, as if the next line could not matter less, he explains that “(I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse.)” Whereas before Frost lead us to a place he claimed was “the children’s house of make-believe” and later turned out to be “a house in earnest”, so this goblet that was first presented as an instrument of salvation is admitted to be only a discarded toy he stole, an unexpected and dramatic reversal that then leads into the most powerful and hope-inspiring lines in the entire poem, the stunning conclusion of “Here are your waters and your watering place./ Drink and be whole beyond confusion.”

So where does this leave the travelers who followed Frost? The reader? The lines themselves are simple—by the end of the poem, Frost has lead the way to the source of a stream, and he directs us to drink from those clear waters. The waters of the past and of childhood. The waters of youth and innocence. But what complicates this final coda is that by the end of the poem, Frost has made it clear that memory isn’t to be trusted. The past is made simple by the “loss of detail.” The grail-like goblet was stolen from a playhouse. And yet, it’s perhaps because of this confusion that Frost’s final lines are all the more poignant. In the final moment, he’s able to disavow all that he’s written before, his warnings and disclaimers, so that his longing for the past is all that exists, the only truth that matters. By returning to a simpler time he’s able to erase—or more telling, forget—the darkness and confusion of his present. He’s tried to leave it behind, though the town he turns to for refuge is itself abandoned and ruined. We can’t go home again. Yet Frost attempts to defy the maxim and try, though what it costs him in honesty is perhaps too high a cost. He’s caught in a paradox, an illogical yet striking tragedy that’s impossible to unwrap, yet instantly relatable because it’s so recognizably human in its helpless contradiction.

William Logan: Our Savage Art

2010-10-21T13:41:00.001-07:00

William Logan is a terrifying critic in that his pleasure—that foundation from which both poetry and criticism begins— is fused inseparably with principle, and these principles govern not only Logan’s taste in poetry, but also his purpose in judging poetry. Reading through Our Savage Art, the reader is often reminded by Logan that time, above contemporary critics, is the great judge of poetry, and that with the exception of two golden ages in English poetry, only one or two poets from each century will be considered great—and often they’ll be poets no one could have predicted, such as a certain agoraphobic spinster from Amherst, Massachusetts. This being the case, Logan looks at the contemporary poetry scene and sees a host of poets writing, only one or two of whom will be remembered.

That being said, whether the reader’s taste aligns with Logan’s or not—whether the reader has even read the poet under review—Logan can be funny as hell in a nasty way. Reading his reviews are like staring at an accident as you pass on the highway. He finds the soft spots in a book where the poet is revealed as flawed—or, sometimes, simply human—and expands the weakness into a caricature the less critical reader can easily recognize. In some ways, he resembles early Randall Jarrell in that his writing is as entertaining as it is informative, although at times the tone of his criticism seems more mean-spirited. But, Logan is perhaps more honest about the contemporary situation of poetry than Jarrell was at his time, when he was championing friends like Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams, though he began to sour on Williams after the second book of Paterson.

Still, though some readers may be offended by Logan’s brutal candor, his essays on Hart Crane—which include Logan’s original review (“Hart Crane Overboard”), his response to readership outrage (“On Reviewing Hart Crane”), and a final post-script where he responds to specific complaints from Marjorie Perloff—systematically evidence that Logan almost always has a valid point. The disjoint comes from whether or not the reader agrees with the principles behind Logan’s critique. For instance, Sherod Santos writes suburban verse dealing with sadness and regret—after a dozen examples of them, Logan claims, “...you want to put your hand into a lawnmower blade.” This made me laugh aloud, but you see the discrepancy—while it may be difficult to deny that Santos writes a lot of suburban verse, I tend to enjoy that sort of thing. If it’s well-written, I can plow through loads of it. Such is taste. I’ve never read Sherod Santos, but ironically, Logan’s review made me want to. I also laughed when Logan wrote that Gary Snyder’s prose looked like a volcano “erupted in Mrs. Purple Prose’s 11th grade English Class,” and when he remarked that, “The only way Ammons could have improved Ommateum would have been to burn it.” Ouch. I could go on—and on—but you get the point. Logan’s reviews are entertaining, in part because few allow what he writes past their social censors, especially in a world as small as poetry, where everyone knows everyone.

Logan’s sparingly positive reviews of poets still writing (he praises most modernists) or recently deceased include Anthony Hecht, Don Paterson, and Geoffrey Hill. Geoffrey Hill in particular, to whom Logan devotes a significant amount of writing in Our Savage Art, reveals some of the prejudices in Logan’s taste. He favors difficulty and obscurity, or at least he favors what these traits have to offer poetry. Conversely, poets who are not difficult are typically lambasted. Of course punching bag Billy Collins receives the worst of it, but Ted Kooser doesn’t fare well either, and Mark Strand only makes out a little better. Logan also guns for the jokester inheritors of funny man Kenneth Koch, specifically James Tate, Dean Young, and Tony Hoagland. Behind the harsh reviews of these figures is one underlying principle—a well-crafted joke is not worth a serious reader’s time.

Some of the work Logan does is indispensible to readers, for instance, the chapter “Frost at Midnight”, in which Logan systematically debunks The Notebooks of Robert Frost, edited by Robert Faggen. The amount of errors and mistakes Logan points out in the edition, some of them beyond ridiculous, makes one thankful there are critics to hold editors and poets accountable. Logan estimates there are well over 10,000 mistakes in the edition, something most readers would never know—texts such as The Notebooks of Robert Frost are supposed to exist so people don’t have to pour over barely legible source texts.

Our Savage Art is an insightful and honest book of criticism, as entertaining as it is erudite. It covers a variety of well-known authors currently writing, and it revisits established poets such as Ashbery, Bishop, and Lowell. It should be noted that Logan doesn’t cover many under-the-radar poets, or really much discuss post avant-garde texts or performance poetry at all, but I imagine the omission is the primary criticism—he doesn’t consider them worth writing about. Ah well. There’s no complete accounting for taste, and no reader should agree with everything a critic writes. But Logan is one worth listening to. Again, more often than not, it’s difficult to disagree with what he’s saying—instead, the question becomes whether or not you agree with the principles from which Logan’s acumen stems.

Thomas Wolfe: You Can't Go Home Again

2010-08-10T20:40:00.000-07:00

You Can’t Go Home Again is the story of George Webber, a young man from a small southern town who writes a novel—Home to Our Mountains—the title of which, at first glance, seems to contradict that of Tom Wolfe’s.

George publishes his book toward the beginning of You Can’t Go Home Again, and afterward he's ostracized from his hometown of Libya Hill for his portrayal of it in his book. A large part of the remainder of You Can't Go Home Again is devoted to the time between George’s first and second book, while he travels, and learns to reconcile the meanings behind the titles of the two narratives—his own fictionalized title, and Tom Wolfe’s. But You Can’t Go Home Again is concerned with much more than the life of George Webber—his career begins with the great depression, and the second novel is published close to the outbreak of World War II, events which Wolfe works to directly relate to events in the novel. Because ultimately, You Can’t Go Home Again is a novel concerned more with ideas than characters like George Webber, who only serve as stages for Wolfe to orate from.

I began You Can’t Go Home Again with high expectations. The title itself is haunting and sad, and before I point out what I see as major barriers between the novel and the reader, here’s a striking passage from the book:

You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing’s sake, back home to aestheticism, to one’s youthful idea of “the artist” and the all-sufficiency of “art” and “beauty” and “love,” back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermuda, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time—back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.

Even as I transcribed the above passage I caught myself thinking that I was about to be too hard on the novel, and that it was inspiring and beautiful in ways that a lot of novels don’t have the ambition or patience to be. Because this is a wonderful piece of writing. It’s electric, and it rings true from the loss of childhood to the collapse of old forms and systems, be they political, economic, or personal. But while the novel was often interesting, and had beautiful passages (though few as powerful as this one), it was absolutely clogged with meaningless dialogue (slowed further by the half-dozen types of dialect Wolfe writes in) between unimportant, one trick characters, and clogged with an endless repetition of ideas and phrases. What people like Faulkner termed genius, to me felt like indulgence. Between pages three-hundred and four-hundred, I had to force myself onward with the illusory promise of some final pay-off for what I was slugging through. A significant chunk of the novel is spent rephrasing the title in ways less poetic, and much more tedious—fine, I can’t go home again. Could this have been said in two hundred less pages? (Don't worry, the book would still have been close to 400 pages.)

Now, I’m certainly not against length, or following rabbit trails, but what’s sad is that Wolfe’s characters, from George Webber on down to the bell-hops who get chapters to themselves, never become more than card board cutouts. Here’s the aspiring artist. Here’s a rich New York Jew(ess). Here’s a door-man. Watch out! He’s a union fella, and he don’t like no commie’s who don’t show up ta meetins’!

Though George flitted close to humanity in spots before Wolfe returned hom to an archetype, I never really found myself engaged by any of the characters , let alone emotionally attached. And while there's an argument to be made that the power of this novel, the gas that makes the great wheels turn is ideas, well—Wolfe himself choose to link his ideas to characters, presumably so that readers would care. And I didn’t.

So while I was able to appreciate the fleeting moments of wonder, ultimately, the novel failed for me. And while the passage above was epic and inspiring, it wasn’t worth the hours I spent dragging my slow way toward the end.

I was going to read Look Homeward, Angel next, but I don’t think I will. I’m afraid I’ve already read the most beautiful passage.

Thom Gunn: The Man with Night Sweats

2010-08-03T19:08:00.000-07:00

Although Philip Larkin and Thom Gunn, both English Movement poets, wrote in approximately the same stylized manner of verse, their similarities are only aesthetics deep. The cynical, often abrasive voice of Larkin’s final book of poetry High Windows clashes violently against the compassion and thinly veiled anguish of Gunn’s autobiographical 1992 collection, The Man with Night Sweats, which begins with a sobering look at sensuality in the later years of a man’s life. And while the primary subject matter of the book—AIDS, and the decimation of Gunn’s community of homosexual friends—is not immediately addressed, the early poems are still quietly sad and nostalgic for youth and life before the AIDS virus.

The first poem in the collection, “The Hug,” recounts a night spent drinking and dining with a friend, and as Gunn climbs into bed, the friend follows behind: It was not sex,” Gunn writes, but I could feel/ The whole strength of your body set,/Or braced, to mine,/And locking me to you/As if we were still twenty-two/When our grand passion had not yet/Become familial.

Really, the early poems in the collection are more about age than AIDS, though the hardships that Gunn faced certainly darkened his later years, and perhaps made him long for his youth more passionately than those who are graced to have more time with their loved ones. Gunn’s friends and lovers (who are named in the epilogue), as we’re shown in the 4th sequence of poems, were slowly and painfully stripped from him.

The effect of losing his friends on his writing is that the elegiac, often tormented poems are imbued with both a survivor’s guilt at the mystery of why some were infected while he was not, as well as a penchant for imagining the dead in their afterlife—free from pain and content, such as in “Death’s Door.” Gunn writes about four deceased friends who sit together watching the living on a television set: Arms round each other’s shoulders loosely,/Although they can feel nothing, who/ When they unlearned their pain so sprucely/Let go of all sensation too. Although these are captivating lines, the image of the friends watching the living on TV is a touch too cheesy for me, and while this is a nit-picky complaint, it bothers me that Gunn first claims the dead feel nothing, yet they watch the TV with both delight and tears at first. It's not that I particularly care whether, in Gunn's imagined afterlife, the dead are supposed to be numb or sentimental, so much as the image looses some potential for power by losing its focus.

Gunn attempts a catharsis of sorrow once again in “The Reassurance,” writing that, About ten days or so/After we saw you dead/You came back in a dream. I’m alright now you said. But this time Gunn won’t allow himself to find solace so easily, ending the poem by writing, How like you to be kind,/ Seeking to reassure./ And yes, how like my mind,/ To make itself secure. It’s a painful moment, where Gunn once again forces himself, as well as the reader, to recall the tragedy that Gunn’s life has become.

The final sequence of poems is brimming with beautiful lines in the midst of a brutal reality, beginning with the opening stanza of the title poem, “The Man with Night Sweats”: I wake up cold, I who,/ Prospered through dreams of heat,/ Wake to their reside,/ Sweat, and a clinging sheet. Gunn creates a style of verse that’s cutting, and always seems to end sooner than expected, leaving the reader slightly jolted and with a sense of whiplash. Another elegant moment in the darkness occurs in the final stanza of “Still Life,” when Gunn writes of a deceased friend, Back from what he could neither/ Accept, as one opposed,/ Nor as a life-long breather,/ Consentingly let go,/ The tube his mouth enclosed/ In an astonished O. Again, the same short lines, which are simply but powerfully delivered, illuminating the synthetic beauty of the lines brilliantly against the inhumanity of the moment.

The modern poetry reader may initially hit a wall reading The Man with Night Sweats; while the subject matter is contemporary, the verse may feel contrived because of the maniacally metered lines and the unfashionably perfect rhyme schemes. The poems with an ABAB ryhme scheme, such as “An Invitation,” can be especially hard to take seriously at first, but ultimately the poems have the opposite effect. The crafting of the verse is in tune with the voice. The anguish and compassion of Gunn's writing pours unfettered from each poem, and after reading this collection, it seemed to me that Gunn was one of the most unabashedly sentimental poets I had read in quite some time. Rather than feeling I had read a book of masterfully constructed machines, I finished the volume believing I had witnessed the remnants of a man's heart.

The Brigadier and The Golf Widow: John Cheever

2010-08-01T13:26:00.000-07:00

Bullet Park is rife with marital drama in John Cheever’s 1964 collection of stories, The Brigadier and The Golf Window. If the affluent couples of this collection aren’t weathering their nuptial storms in Nantuckett, they’re seeking refuge in alcohol and adultery. Neither these, nor the divorce that usually follows, provide the characters with any relief, as evidenced by “The Seaside Houses”, the story of a family who always summers in a different house, and is affected by the residual atmosphere of the house they're renting. By the end of the story, this is the point the husband and wife have come to:

“Oh, God, you bore me this morning,” my wife said.
“I’ve been bored for the last six years,” I said.
I took a cab to the airport and an afternoon plane back to the city. We had been married twelve years and had been lovers for two years before our marriage, making a total of fourteen years in all that we had been together, and I never saw her again.

Should have picked a different house. One element that sets these stories apart from other tales of cocktail swigging parties in 1950’s New York, is that they are often more surreal and mystifying than the straight forward narratives of authors like Raymond Carver. The most famed example of this surrealist style is, of course, "The Swimmer," the story of Neddy Merrill, a man who decides to journey home from a party by swimming across eight miles of his neighbors’ pools.

The image of Neddy at the beginning of the story is one of wealth and vitality. Neddy slides down a banister and smacks the rear end of a statue of Aphrodite. Cheever writes that, “He might have been compared to a summer’s day, particularly the last hours of one, and while he lacked a tennis racket or a sail bag the impression was definitely one of youth, sport, and clement weather.”

As Neddy sets out, his whimsical quest is easy—the neighbors are delighted to see him, and after a cocktail at each stop (He's had four or five by the time he’s halfway through the trip.) he resumes swimming. But as Neddy progresses, the neighbors are less and less pleased to see him. It seems he’s fallen into some sort of social disfavor, and can’t remember why. Mrs. Halloran cryptically remarks that, “We’ve been terribly sorry to hear about your misfortunes, Neddy.” But Neddy has no idea what she’s talking about. As he continues, he begins to tire and move as slow as an old man, and by the time a storm rolls in, the season has transitioned from summer to autumn. After an exhausting journey, Ned arrives home, only to find his family gone, his house long abandoned.

On some instinctive level, the reader senses what’s happening: Neddy’s swim is a kind of allegory for the passing of time. But why Neddy is the target of so much misfortune, or what he’s done to deserve it, perhaps, is slightly unclear. We’re given hints that he is arrogant and a philanderer. Is this why he’s left with nothing? Is Cheever so moralistic? Several of Cheever’s stories, packed dense as poetry, were enjoyable, but left me with a set of questions, or the sense that I was missing a major facet of the story. And while I can love a story simply for the pleasure of good writing and interesting characters, many times I was still nagged by questions:“Why this particular moment? What is Cheever trying to convey?” Sometimes it helped to push forward and discover what obsessions of Cheever’s floated to the top: after reading “The Swimmer,” for instance, this passage of “The Music Teacher” struck me as something of an ah-ha! moment:

“The night was dark, and with his sense of reality thus shaken, he stood on his own doorstep thinking that the world changed more swiftly than one could perceive—died and renewed itself—and that he moved through the events of his life with no more comprehension than a naked swimmer.”

So, while the “The Music Teacher” wasn’t exactly meant as a companion piece to “The Swimmer,” (though both were collected in the same volume, linking them in some basic way) something similar in Cheever’s ideology surfaces in both tales, made manifest in the image of the swimmer. This passage also sheds insight into why Neddy suffers like the biblical Job, losing money, respect, his home, and ultimately his family—it happens not because Lord God Cheever hated affluent old Neddy and the corruption he stood for--though that may play a less significant role--but instead because, life, as Cheever writes of the night, is dark. It is as violent and quick as a river, and man fares no better in its swirling riptides than a naked swimmer.

That’s what Cheever thinks, anyway, and the manner in which the lives of his characters are presented as weary, the way temporary happiness is torn suddenly away—at times it left me feeling somewhat deadened myself. But it’s passages such as the above example from “The Music Teacher” that both depress and inspire me. Yes, the overwhelming tone of the section, the first impression, is crushing, and hopless—but Cheever takes care to remind that the world renewed itself. This too is a recurring theme in the collection, such as in “Just One More Time,” when the Beers, after weathering a series of social and financial hardships, are praised because they “…appear to be smart, for what else was it but smart of them to know that summertime would come again?” The moments of hope in these stories are precarious and rare, but Cheever never lets the completely topple from the edge of the horizon. The world renews itself. Summer will come again.

On a bit of an academic note, Cheever’s treatment of gender relationships is fascinating, and it’s difficult to discern when he’s being ironic, and writing from a male narrator’s point of view, and when he’s simply operating as a misogynistic product of his times. To use the example of “The Music Teacher” again—the story of a man in a rough patch because his golly darn wife is always burning dinner, letting the kids run wild, and being unsocial—is a good example of the first, I think.

The narrator, Seton—a likably guy—hints that though it would be his final contingency, he’s considering divorce. When a friend gives him the number of an older woman who teaches piano, I initially thought the same thing Seton did—this lady is going to be some sort of shared neighborhood mistress. Instead, the piano teacher gives him one simple piece of music to practice. And Seton practices this piece for weeks. The teacher won’t let him practice anything else, until it begins driving his wife crazy, and she finally pleads that she’ll do anything, if only he’ll stop. Ultimately, although Seton doesn’t realize it, he uses the music to subjugate his unruly wife, and beat her back into line.

It’s a good story, and doesn’t come off as moralistic as this summary makes it seem. Again, what makes “The Music Teacher” so interesting is the nature of the parable. Is this simply a 50's fable of husband oppressing wife? Or is something more going on? The capping Cheeveresque moment is the ending, when the piano teacher is suddenly found murdered, and the police pick up Seton for questioning. For me, this came completely out of left field. The police want to know if Seton's ever seen any young men around the teacher, and although the reader was pointedly told he had, Seton says no. The story ends, “They were satisfied with this explanation, and they let him go.”

But least the reader believe that "The Music Teacher" can be taken at face value, at the other end of the spectrum is “An Educated American Woman,” the story of Jill Madison and her unintellectual husband Georgie. Jill is well-bred and intelligent, but she’s also portrayed as a real bitch, whereas Georgie is pretty much a martyr—just a good guy trying to keep the peace at home. He does the dishes and polishes the silver until late at night because Jill doesn’t do housework, and Georgie is also the one taking care of their son, Bibber, who acts as though his parents are divorced.

One night, as Cheev- I mean, Georgie, is going about his household duties, and being trampled on by Jill, he ruminates on how gender roles are shifting in society:

“He did not like to polish silver, but if he did not do this, the silver would turn black. As she had said, it was not her style. It was not his style, either, nor was it any part of his education, but if he was, as she said, unintellectual, he was not so unintellectual as to accept any of the vulgarities and commonplaces associated with the struggle for sexual equality. The struggle was recent, he knew; it was real; it was inexorable; and while she sidestepped her domestic tasks, he could sense that she might do this unwillingly.”

The way I read this passage is that Jill might actually be resisting some part of her nature that is nurturing, and caretaking (which includes the little household chores), because she’s caught in this inexorable tide of feminism. And in short, Jill is kind of a bitch because she’s an educated American woman. It’s hard to believe something like this isn’t somehow satirical, or facetious, but as far as I can tell—it isn’t. Cheever wrote a story about how education makes women bitchy, and not want to perform their household duties.

Now, I don’t like to rely on biographical information to sort out stories, but I had to laugh at this anecdote from Cheever’s life via Wikipedia. To summarize, so you don't have to read the whole page: Cheveer went to a therapist about his wife and her “needless darkness,” (!) but after the therapist had Cheever bring his wife along for a joint counseling session, the therapist told Cheever that his wife wasn’t the problem—he was. Cheever found a new therapist. Take that with a grain of salt.

Unsurprisingly, Jill and poor Georgie also end in divorce, although again, divorce is rarely presented as any kind of a solution in Cheever’s stories. It never seems to bring more happiness. Instead, it’s simply another consequence of the age and social circle the characters inhabit.

Cathedral: Raymond Carver

2010-06-04T19:50:00.000-07:00

Raymond Carver’s 1983 collection of short stories, Cathedral, is filled with characters immobilized by the past. They grapple with death and divorce, and they are often alcoholics because of what has occured before the moment in time Carver captures. Taciturn, working class narrators, they stumble and grope through their present, feeling for connections with the outside world, with other human beings. They think about phone calls they could make. They sleep with their televisions on.

Although many of the narrators begin to seem similar, almost every story in the collection was gripping and fresh. The two stand-outs were the first short story, “Feathers,” and the title story “Cathedral.” I suppose it’s telling that these are my two favorites, since both are written from the perspective of men who are struggling to express a moment in their lives, and manage to transform fairly commonplace events into hazy, vaguely surreal experiences.

In "Feathers," Jack and his wife Fran have been invited to dinner by Bud and his wife Olla. Jack and Bud work together, but their wives have never met. Jack and Fran, who are childless, like to stay at home watching TV, and generally being alone, and the dinner invitation is a shock, and something of a foreign experience for them. Should they bring something? What will they talk about? When they arrive at Bud’s house in the country, a strange bird flies in front of their car, and Jack and Fran assume it’s a vulture. It turns out to be a peacock, but the fact that Jack and Fran mistakenly identify the bird reveals two things—first, that Jack and Fran truly are out of their element, and slightly out of touch as well. They’ve lead insulated lives. Second, the vulture seems to be a bad omen for whatever will happen next.

I read though the dinner party with some trepidation. Carver has a talent for cooking up strange little details, like Bud and Olla keeping a cast of Olla’s old, crooked teeth above the television, but other than these oddities, the dinner party seemed to go well. Fran (Jack’s wife), who was initially reluctant to accept the dinner invitation begins to warm up to the evening, and keeps asking to see Olla’s new baby, which is strange since Jack and Fran don’t want children, and don't seem to like them. But overall, the dinner goes well, and Jack especially seems happy and fulfilled for the first time in the story--perhaps due to the pleasure of sharing an evening with another couple, rather than spending it alone. Something changes in Fran as well, and that night she and Jack make love and conceive a child. The narrator informs us in the very next sentence, rather abruptly, that, “Later, after things had changed for us, and the kid had come along, all of that, Fran would look back on that evening at Bud’s place as the beginning of the change.”

The sign of the peacock has come to pass. Fran gets fat, and rather than the child being a source of joy, the narrator describes his child as “conniving,” and leaves it at that. Jack and Fran both miss the past, but “Feathers” differs from the majority of other stories in this collection in that it focuses on life before the events that served as a catalyst for sorrow, depression, ennui, world-weariness, whatever. It begins in a kind of resigned contement, and trails off into the inauspicious future.

“Cathedral” is more lush compared to the minimalism of other stories in the collection. The narrator’s wife has invited her friend Robert to come and stay with them for a night. Robert’s wife has recently died, and he’s blind, which the narrator doesn’t quite know what to make of. Here’s an exchange between the narrator and his wife shortly before Robert arrives, which is a brilliant sequence—it’s hilarious, while providing insight into the narrator, who I found immensely likable, though in many ways, inadmirable.

Now this same blind man was coming to sleep in my house.
“Maybe I could take him bowling,” I said to my wife. She was at the draining board doing scalloped potatoes. She put down the knife she was using and turned around.
“If you love me,” she said, “you can do this for me. If you don’t love me, okay, but if you had a friend, any friend, and the friend came to visit, I’d make him feel comfortable.” She wiped her hands with the dish towel.
“I don’t have any blind friends,” I said.
“You don’t have any friends,” she said. “Period. Besides,” she said, “goddamn it, his wife’s just died! Don’t you understand that? The man’s lost his wife!”
I didn’t answer. She’d told me a little about the blind man’s wife. Her name was Beulah. Beulah! That’s a name for a colored woman.
“Was his wife a negro?” I asked.
“Are you crazy?” my wife said. “Have you just flipped or something?” She picked up a potatoe. I saw it hit the floor, then roll under the stove. “What’s wrong with you,” she said. “Are you drunk?”
“I’m just asking,” I said.

What I love about this scene is the how the banter between the husband and wife works, the way the narrator interjects the “I said, she said” throughout the dialogue, as if he’s talking aloud, or relating the story through conversation. And yes, he’s being a bit of an asshole, needling his wife and giving her a hard time, but simultaneously, he’s trying to work the situation out in his head. He really doesn’t quite understand, and he continues to be perplexed by Robert, who has a beard and who smokes, until the end of the story, when he and Robert are watching TV together late at night.

A show about cathedrals is on, and the narrator tries to explain a cathedral to Robert. Again, the narrator lacks the ability to articulate the world before him, but as Robert pushes him, the narrator falls to saying, “In those olden days, when they built cathedrals, men wanted to be close to God. In those olden days, God was an important part of everyone’s life.” This sentence becomes even more important, when the unreligious narrator begins drawing a cathedral on an old paper sack, with Robert’s hand resting atop his own, so that Robert can better understand the design of a cathedral.

It’s a strange moment the reader has been slowly hailed toward since the beginning of the story, and while the narrator struggles to understand the experience, we as readers realize that the narrator has, if only for a moment, broken through the chrysalis of his insulated life into a moment of communion with another human—he has built a cathedral. He has, if only for a time, come closer to God.

Poemland: Chelsey Minnis

2010-02-03T16:01:00.000-08:00

Poetry, ego, death, inebriation, the past, cash, and gender—such are the intertwining themes of Poemland, not so much explored as remarked on in droll, four to six line stanzas surrounded by empty space. The open white of the page, in addition to the ellipses that follow most lines, provide a Zen-like quality to the poems, and an aura of wistfulness that Minnis confesses she can’t (or doesn’t want to) escape.

There’s a cohesiveness of theme throughout each stanza, but because the narrative voice seems to exist solely in Minnis’ iconoclastic mind, little effort is made to expound on or illuminate thoughts within the context of individual sections—across the volume, however, images accumulate texture and weight as the world of Poemland forms. Still, even outside the book’s discourse on life in relation to art, several of the sections are laugh out loud funny, such as this one:

I like a man in a fur-coat…especially a man with very little self-
discipline…

I like a man with self importance and sexual grandeur…

A man who has a romantic idea for himself!...

He is just a little tramp…

Minnis' tone, and the way she considers bizarre qualities she values in a man before deflating the previous three lines with her typical “on second thought” final line is startling, more down to earth than the reader is prepared for, and dryly funny.

Ron Silliman mentions in his review of Poemland that he feels as though Minnis couldn’t sustain the trajectory of the book throughout the end, but I actually found the opposite to be true. The book’s initial ruminations on poetry—while witty—are somewhat weightless, until two-thirds of the way through the book when these initial stanzas become a foundation Minnis builds on, raising the stakes for the book as her voice becomes both more conscious of itself as a work of art, and—problematically for some readers—confrontational. On page 77 Minnis declares, “With this book I have made a very expensive joke…” and on the next page she continues:

Sometimes I try to please someone I hate…

So that I can enjoy a range of satisfactions…

You should always be doing a service for others…

Even in poetry…

Is Minnis implying that the “service” she’s providing is her poetry, and the book being read? And if so, does the reader become the “someone” that she hates? Later, less consequential lines are read through the lens of these insinuations. On page 110, the god-voice of Poemland is no longer arguing with itself, but instead addresses the reader in typical post-modern fashion, removing the ellipses from the first line for more impact:

Do you like this?

It is like pulling off someone’s clip on bowtie and throwing it into
the pool…

Don’t walk out on the best revenge!

The last line especially seems to dare the reader to abandon Minnis’ book, and she tops herself again a few pages later when she emphasizes as though to an uncomprehending animal, “This is a long boring attack…” (113)

While some readers may feel belittled or offended by this point, or that they're the butt of some elaborate joke, I’ll respond to Minnis’ question—I do like it, quite a lot actually. I find Poemland to be humorous, and honest, and risky, and Minnis’ taunts begin to feel very much like a dialogue with both her own doubts and her audience. She’s voicing questions she doesn’t know the answer to, and it shows.

Interestingly, the middle lines of the poem above aren’t as random as they may first appear—like Wallace Stevens before her, Minnis architects her own connotations to images by recycling them in a variety of new contexts—earlier in the book she wrote that she wanted to be buried in a pink bowtie, and the image of the pool, which was used in the book’s opening poem in relation with the past, continues to resurface throughout Poemland. The final sections of the book take on textures not possible at the beginning, while continuing their ludic play in a field of muddy questions.

Figment: Rebecca Wolff

2010-01-27T06:35:00.000-08:00

If John Ashbery’s dreamy lyrics were amalgamated with Frank O’Hara’s sharp but meandering city writing, the result would be a style resembling Rebecca Wolff’s Figment. Lessons learned from reading Ashbery’s poetry apply to Wolff as well—working too hard to locate a string of logic through each individual component of a poem may prove a frustrating task. Wolff acknowledged this when asked to identify her ideal reader in three words. Her response? "Kind of lazy."

Instead, the logic of the poems are based around an overall sense or tone, and the emotional logic of the poems are usually consistent, even if a traditional narrative is not—still, the lyrics of Figment aren’t discrete to the point that they bear no relevance to the overall cohesiveness of a poem, and in pieces such as “The Big Snow,” there’s a definite sense of the poet communicating a message to the reader:

Out of nothing
how do you conceive of anything?

By imaging what the better part
might applaud.

A few lines down, Wolff writes:

It means something,
that is clear, but without charm,
is it worth simply meaning?

One of the major themes of Figment seems to be the current state of the poetry community, or, perhaps, the current state of the poet in soceity, and this poem seems to be poking fun at an aesthetic that Wolff has termed “The Big Snow,” perhaps for its connotations of mass blindness and uniformity. The stanza above, specifically, seems to be a reversal of mainstream critiques of poetry that is being written for the sake of language play, or “charm,” but without narrative, or meaning. “Have no fear,” Wolff comforts the reader. “The Big Snow/ will never find us./ It mistrusts us, essentially.”

It’s easy to see that Wolff is actually very funny, and her wit, which shifts from aesthetic targets to self-deprecation in a few lines, is what gives many of the poems their energy. The second poem in the volume, “A good idea, but not well executed” also contains lyrics that lightly mock narrow-mindedness in poetry before skipping quickly on: “A first draft: Why the very idea/ to suddenly lose consciousness” might be a statement Wolff heard while discussing her aesthetic. I’m guessing that self-hypnosis or meditation plays a role in Wolff’s procedure, especially as association—recording a line or image and following it stream-of-consciousness style—plays a role in her poetry. Like Frank O’Hara and his lunch time jaunts, Wolff explains that since she’s so strapped for time between Fence (The magazine and book publishing company she founded in 1998) and her family, she often records what she experiences on the bus or subway.

“A good idea, but not well executed” also introduces another major tone in Wolff’s poetry—nostalgia, or more accurately, a wistfulness for the past often brought on by occurrences in the present. It ends with the lines:

a sweet breath flew from the mouth of the Northeast,
the last thing you want to be familiar with,
flush of unlove. O Mama

your baby in the future

The tone of “A good idea, but not well executed,” builds in a strange way, and the reader isn’t fully prepared for the emotional impact the last lines deliver, which again, I think comes from the reader being willing to enjoy Wolff’s obvious talent for crafting language that hooks into emotion. This stanza also highlights the way Wolff’s passages flow throughout Figment. She puts together some beautiful lines and stanzas, such as the one above, where the alliteration of the ‘F’ and ‘L’ sounds carry through the middle lines (flew-last-familiar-flush-of-unlove) and transitions to the deep assonance of “flush of unlove” and the astonishing ‘O’ that breaks the rhythm—this is a brilliant sequence of sounds which simply drops off, unpunctuated, into the white space before the final line, “your baby in the future,” with the final ‘F’ sound providing closure to the poem.

Rumpus Interview with Rebecca Wolff
Fence Books

Questions of Travel: Elizabeth Bishop

2010-01-26T11:42:00.000-08:00

“Here is a coast; here is a harbor;/ here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery.” So begins Elizabeth Bishop in “Arrival at Santos,” the opening poem in Questions of Travel, which is divided into two sections, Brazil and Elsewhere. “Arrival at Santos” is a brilliant poem to open the volume with because it both establishes the narrative of Bishop as a traveler reimagining Brazil’s landscapes and myths in poetry, and also because the landscape works as a Rorschach for Bishop, allowing the reader an intimate and revealing look at a poet in emotional turmoil. For instance, this is how Bishop interprets Santos upon first arriving:

Here is a coast; here is a harbor;
here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery:
impractically shaped and—who knows?—self-pitying mountains,
sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery

Only Bishop could read mountains as “self-pitying mountains/ sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery.” The warehouses are termed “feeble,” and the palm trees are “tall, uncertain.” If the reader is still not conscious of Bishop’s vulnerable self-portrait, she intimates herself again with a typically deliberate line break: “and some tall, uncertain palms. Oh, tourist/ is this how this country is going to answer you...” Thus, in the opening two stanzas, Bishop begin the process of revealing both herself and a country.

I suspect part of what made Questions of Travel so appealing in 1965, besides the quiet charm, the endearing frailty, and the meticulous details of Bishop’s writing, was that it was written during the heat wave of Confessionalism—Ariel was published the same year as Questions of Travel, and Plath had committed suicide only two years earlier. Bishop’s sensibilities must have struck many readers like a cool breeze. Of course, not everyone found Bishop refreshing. The primary criticism during her career was that her voice was cold and dispassionate, which might make more sense if she was compared to the likes of Plath and Sexton, or even the emotionally violent verse of her contemporary Robert Lowell.

These accousations of sterile verse differ from the post-colonial criticism of today, which explores undertones of imperialism and racism in Bishop’s work—one such reading of her poetry, specifically Questions of Travel, is that from the beginning she sets up a dichotomy between Brazil and Western culture as savagery and civilization. Specifically, the long poem “Manuelzinho” is attacked for its racist intimations. The character in Manuelzinho is a local laborer whom Bishop portrays as sleeping on the job, superstitious, and a liar—basically mirroring American stereotypes of the lazy black—and towards the end of the poem she declares, “You helpless, foolish man,/ I love you all I can.” Though this poem (we are told in an epigraph) is supposedly delivered through the voice of a friend—I’m guessing Lota de Macedo Soares—there’s little denying the condescension.

Elizabeth Bishop, for most of her time in Brazil, lived in a semi-rural setting, and she was attracted to nature both in her life and in her writing. Thus, it makes sense that much of her poetry would focus on the jungle and animals (similar to Marianne Moore, who had to travel to the zoo for inspiration), but to suggest that Bishop characterized Brazil only by savagery is, I think, melodramatic.

Technically—syntactically—Questions of Travel employs several modern strategies, and in some ways it was ahead of its time. For example, in many of Bishop’s poems there’s a duality of voices, often signified by italicized font. This device was used throughout her career, perhaps most famously in “One Art,” when Bishop reminds herself that, “though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.” This duality of voices comes into play for the first time in Questions of Travel in the title poem. At the end, Bishop writes that:

Continent, city, country, society;
their choice is never wide and free.
and here, or there…No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?

The italicized section is in quotations, which makes me think it’s a direct quote, perhaps from Bishop’s journal. But what’s significant about this section is the shift in tone and style and the italics (again, although I italicize quotes on this blog, these are original to text), which clearly mark the section as a second voice, albeit another aspect of Bishop’s. This technique is used again in “Sunday, 4 A.M.” to represent a character’s speaking voice within the poem, and another well-known example comes at the end of “The Armadillo,” when Bishop writes:

Too pretty, dream-like mimicry!
O falling fire and piercing cry
and panic, and a weak mailed fist
clenched ignorant against the sky!

These lines seem to work as a sort of hazy elegy, but they also strike me as mawkish, immature, and indulgent—somewhat in the vein of Hart Crane’s introduction to “The Bridge.”

When my aesthetic taste aligns with Bishop’s, her images are crisp and striking. The poem “Filling Station,” comes to mind, where Bishop writes "Somebody/ arranges the row of cans/ so that they softly say/ ESSO—SO—SO—SO." Brilliant, and the sign of a careful eye. But at times her aesthetics—which I think in this selection are informed partly by verse more formalist and classical than I like, as well as Brazilian folklore—lean a direction I dislike, such as the long poem, “The Burglar of Babylon,” which Lowell praised, and I found only readable. I did enjoy “The Dolphin,” but it still walked a fine line. Although I’m not as enthusiastic about the subject matter of the poems based on folklore as I am about her poems on travelling and the discoveries of self, I would enjoy them more if Bishop didn’t alter her style and tone so dramatically in order to write them. “The Burglar of Babylon” reads like a nursery rhyme, which is what Bishop intended, though it wore me down with its tedious repititions. I like Bishop better when she takes her cues from Marianne Moore.

Life Studies: Robert Lowell

2010-01-19T18:03:00.000-08:00

To read Life Studies fifty-one years after its initial publication is to wade into the myths of Robert Lowell, whose reputation seems to teeter-totter wildly according to critic, year, and the mode of Lowell’s aesthetic. His maniacally formalist early years? His middle period, of which Life Studies is the locus? Or the Lowell of later years, aged author of Day by Day and The Dolphin, the latter volume of which his long time friend Elizabeth Bishop wrote him that she couldn’t approve of his manipulation and public exposure of source materials such as personal letters from friends and ex-lovers?

The last sentence hints at some of my problematic understanding of Robert Lowell. As long as I’ve read poetry, I’ve been drawn to select poems of Lowell’s such as “The Quaker Graveyard of Nantuckett” from Lord Weary’s Castle, as well as “Memories of West St. and Lepke” and “Skunk Hour” from Life Studies. But rather than simply sitting down and reading one of Lowell’s volumes, I read all around him. Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell: A Biography by Ian Hamilton, and chunks of Lowell’s selected poems. My understanding of Robert Lowell as a poor husband and desperate father, as a son who obsessed over his weak-willed father and overbearing mother, and as a trust fund college student who ingratiated himself with the last vestiges of the Vanderbilt Fugitives and then the New Critical movement—all of these overshadowed my understanding of Robert Lowell as a poet. I was peeking behind the curtain to see how the tricks worked before I let myself be dazzled by the show.

And I do find Life Studies slightly dazzling. The arrangement of the volume is powerful, showing Lowell’s transformation from his early style to the reckless (“violent” it’s typically described as), yet still concise free verse he was moving into. And the autobiographical work, starting from when Lowell was a boy on his grandfather’s farm, and presenting New England high society in all its flawed, snobbish glory, until after Lowell’s parents were dead and gone (Memorialized in poems such as “Father’s Bedroom”, “For Sale”, and “Sailing Home from Rapallo”) and he had a wife and daughter of his own. Darker moments in Lowell’s adult life, such as his manic breakdown and incarceration in a mental hospital are also recorded in poems such as “Waking in the Blue” and “Home After Three Months Away.”

Life Studies is organized into four major sections. Part I contains four poems that don’t exactly fit into the volume’s overall narrative arc, except in their capacity to show a transformation from Lowell’s earlier style. “Beyond the Alps” is a longish poem based on his travels in Europe, and is somewhat difficult to follow because of its compact, vatic writing, evidenced by the final two beautiful though cryptic lines, “Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up/like killer kings on an Etruscan Cup.”

The second section is a long (approximately forty pages) prose essay entitled “91 Revere St.” and contains reminiscences from Lowell’s Boston childhood. I suppose in its function to provide preparation and foreground to the biographical poems to come, the section works, but I question its inherent artistic value. It comes off as a slightly indulgent piece of catharsis, and the majority of the essay is spent painting a portrait of a patriarch Lowell would have us believe was spineless, and out of place wherever he was—“a fish out of water,” he calls him. I never completely bought it, Lowell was too adamantly against his father to be believed, and his mother, though portrayed as flawed, seemed idealized at times. In addition, most of the material contained within “91 Revere St.” was presented in the fourth section, though in lineated form.

The third section is mostly poems about about other poets, the strongest of which is “Words for Hart Crane”, which is powerful both as an elegy for Hart Crane, and an indictment of the academic poetry community: “Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age,/ must lay his heart out for my bed and board.” Striking. And the fact that I don’t like Hart Crane, and that I find a poem like this by Lowell slightly hypocritical (The man was on more than his fair share of awards committees, and partook in a fair amount of “buddyism” himself) is all the more testament to its power to move and to challenge the artist.

The final section, which is actually broken into two subsections, is titled “Life Studies.” The first section begins with the long poem, “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” and is about Lowell’s childhood memories, and ends with his return from the mental hospital, “Home After Three Months Away.” The second subsection begins with the poem, “Memories of West St. and Lepke”, and I’m not sure why. It seems like this poem, as well as the three following it, which are also biographical, should have been a part of one sequence. I suspect Lowell sequestered them only because he didn’t want to end the first subsection with a single, out of place poem, “Skunk Hour,” which doesn’t thematically fit with earlier poems, and he also didn’t want to put the poem by itself. I think he should have just tacked “Skunk Hour” on the end of the first sequence, it wouldn’t have disrupted his thematic arc, and it would have been a nice bookend to “Beyond the Alps.” Or, perhaps a better option would have been to put “Skunk Hour” on the end of the section about poets, and then end the entire book with that section. That way all the autobiographical pieces would flow together, and the book wouldn’t end on a note that might be interpreted by some as self-indulgent.

I’ve already discussed some of the stylistic transformations Lowell underwent in this volume, mainly from that of a severe formalist to an autobiographical writer of free-verse, but there’s a specific trick Lowell developed in this period that I find fascinating, in that it violates some basic premises of good writing, but still works—namely, his habit of piling adjectives on top of one another, typically in groupings of three or four, such as in “Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow”:

Like my Grandfather, the décor
was manly, comfortable,
overbearing, disproportioned.

This example actually works better than other times Lowell uses this trick, because he’s making an overt comparison between his grandfather and his grandfather’s décor—to prove it’s true, he’s going to list them. It still sounds nice in other places, and it has some technical purpose in slowing the reader down, and painting a picture with quick, broad strokes—it just mars the flow, or the feeling of the whole poem being one perfect unit, with each component intrinsic and indistinguishable from the whole. He uses this strategy most famously in “Memories of West St. and Lepke” in two places—at the end of the third stanza:

He tried to convert Bioff and Brown,
the Hollywood pimps, to his diet.
Hairy, muscular, suburban,
wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,
they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.

and also in the fourth to describe Czar Lepke of Murder Incorporated:

Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,

Finally, I’m not quite sure what to say about the label Life Studies is often given as an early proponent of Confessionalism. It’s easy to see the similarities between Life Studies and Snodgrass's“Heart’s Needle”, but these manifestations of Confessionalism don’t resemble the works of later poets more often associated with this school such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I suppose I’ll buy the label in poems such as “Waking in the Blue” and “Memories of West St, and Lepke”, but in many of his autobiographical poems, Lowell is only the observer, and doesn’t mention himself. In longer poems such as, “Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereaux Winslow,” and “Beyond the Alps”, Lowell’s presence all but disappears, and his work is so strikingly different from that of neo-confessionalists such as Sharon Olds that I wonder whether they really can be grouped in the same school at all. Lowell truly does seem to be studying, in the sense of examining, searching for meaning, whereas later poets seemed more intent on exploiting their lives for the sake of a handful of poems.

Evening Man: Frederick Seidel

2010-01-10T12:41:00.000-08:00

Adam Kirsch said it best when he wrote that, “Fred Seidel’s favorite subject is Fred Seidel.” The title poem in Seidel’s most recent collection, Evening Man (2008) is no different, and begins with the stanza:

The man in bed with me this morning is myself, is me
The sort of same-sex marriage New York State allows.
Both men believe in infidelity.
Both wish they could annul their marriage vows.

A set form (quatrains) with this sort of in-your-face, fairly cheesy rhyming is signature Fred Seidel. Taken by itself, a stanza like this has a certain amount of charm. The speaker clearly has some ironic distance from his own life, and is able to turn an observation about the self into a universal generality—a move in lyric poetry readers typically appreciate. And what’s more, Seidel seems to be making a rare politically correct statement, with only a touch of the usual taboo he can’t seem to resist writing about. Fred Seidel is poking fun at New York for not legalizing gay marriage—this, we can all have a good snicker about—but he is also implying marriage makes people miserable! Fred Seidel, master of contradictions!

The problem is that here, as in other places, Seidel is only using peripheral issues as a means of writing about himself. Everything else comes at that expense, including lyric intensity. The strongest line in this poem immediately follows this stanza, and it really isn’t all that interesting: “This afternoon I will become the Evening Man.” There’s some mystery in the line. What, as a poet of exactness, does Seidel mean by his deviation into a vagary such as Evening Man? Is it a nod to his aging? Has some Donald Justice slipped into the infamous Seidel aesthetic? Perhaps, but according to Seidel in a recent interview in the Paris Review, Seidel explained that he meant dressing up in evening wear, and getting ready to go out on the town. I would rather be left guessing.

But this is a problem that stretches beyond “Evening Man.” Very few of Seidel’s lines are striking at all. What one notices in regards to his technical aesthetic is the plainness of Seidel’s verse, and the way syntax is contorted in order to accommodate obvious end rhymes. There’s little lyric pay off for these convolutions, but this often excused flaw is noticed after the fact, because what Seidel has made a career out of is violating taboos, usually involving religion, race, or women—a recurring fantasy of Seidel’s is a powerful woman with big breasts. By writing about his fantasies in a jocular tone, with juvenile end rhymes, Seidel's readership feels as though they are on the inside of some clever joke. But the joke has been on the poetry community—when Seidel writes about the pleasure of money and expensive tailors, when he writes about women as objects—he’s writing exactly what he means.. When Seidel writes lines such as this, from “A Song for Cole Porter”:

I for years was unable to decide,
Tits or ass? And don’t forget legs.
Which one do you think is the best?
My choice would vary. Who would you choose?
It was all too good to be true. Then came you!

Everyone’s a sexual object.
Everyone is something to use.
Everyone is something good.
I’m her vibrator—but believe me,
Everyone is something unphysical also.

I’m so cool—I’m so hot!
I make her oink when we fuck.

he’s not writing from the voice of some culturally warped, chauvinistic, entitled old man who thinks he’s being charming, or honest—he’s writing exactly what he thinks. There’s no tongue-in-cheek, no redemptive satire or irony. The fact that Seidel recognizes this debasement and writes about it honestly (happily) is of little value.

Even Seidel’s attempts at sentiment fall short. In the poem “Boys”, a slightly atypical descent into nostalgia, Seidel writes:

Sixty years after, I can see their smiles,
White with Negro teeth, and big with good,
When one or the other brought my father’s Cadillac out
For us at the Gatesworth Garage.
RG and MC were the godhead,
The older brothers I dreamed I had.
I didn’t notice they were colored,
Because older boys capable of being kind
To a younger boy are God.
It is absolutely odd
To be able to be with God.

A poem like this does put the title Evening Man (despite what Seidel says) in a slightly different light, and because it’s the first poem of the book it's clear that Seidel wants the idea of reflection in the forefront—Seidel is now past seventy, and it seems age is softening his subject matter. The problem is, I don’t believe there was a time when Seidel didn’t notice the people working for his father were black. And I think remembering them for their white teeth (“big with good,” no less!) is, at best, unoriginal. The two end lines are jarring, to no poetic effect other than a loyalty to form. A stanza such as this is not the work of a master, which is what Seidel is credited as being, but rather the work of a man writing mostly for himself, who has managed to survive by violating the taboo, by over a half-century of relentless dedication to form and style, and by recording the shallowness and decadence of a culture—the problem is that Seidel never dares to transcend it, either in technical mastery or in spirit, and he doesn’t care to.

The Suburban Ecstasies: Seth Abramson

2010-01-08T10:46:00.000-08:00

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.

The Pink Guitar (Writing as Feminist Practice):Rachel Blau DuPlessis

2010-01-07T11:53:00.000-08:00

The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice is a collection of essays by Rachel Blau DuPlessis based around the idea that the cultural contexts women operate in, specifically those of language, “are formed and reinforced gendered human beings, produced in the family, in institutions of gender development, in the forms of sexual preference, in the division of labor by gender, especially in the structure of infant care, in the class and conditions of the families in which we are psychologically born, and in the social maintenance of the sexes through life’s stages and in any historical era.” (3) In other words, DuPlessis is interested in examining representations of women in literature, in the hope of destabilizing power structures and allowing other voices to be heard—specifically, the under-represented voices of women. But this is only the surface of what DuPlessis is working toward.

Not only is DuPlessis questioning the representation of women in literature and in writing, she is also questioning the manner in which women are forced to represent themselves through writing. DuPlessis posits that because the English language is a history of repressions and silencing, each individual word carries narratives that the female writer is not really a part of (and never was), and thus does not relate to. Males and females read the symbols, connotations, and myths of language differently, and thus, women do not utilize language in the same way that men do—and, problematically for women, the way that is typically acceptable in academia.

The title of the book comes from the Wallace Stevens poem, “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” which reads, “Things as they are/are changed upon the blue guitar.” The Pink Guitar, then, represents a filtering of language and the world through a feminist aesthetic (Not the feminist aesthetic, DuPlessis often reminds the reader. She resists the idea of the writer as elitist, as power-holder, and doesn’t wish to claim that authority. Thus, she uses the indefinite article to represent the possibilities of other feminine asthetics.) and it’s true that The Pink Guitar, stylistically, has a unique form.

At times, the writing is borderline paratactic, and like a lyric poem DuPlessis often eschews normal language structures and syntax. Much of her writing is jumpstarts and sentence fragments, especially in earlier sections like “For the Etruscans.” The style can be daunting initally, but it doesn’t take the reader long to slip into the rhythm. At times it’s almost like reading an Ashberry poem, in that it’s more important to follow the flow of the essay than to become overly concerned with an individual component that doesn’t fit exactly into place. Another reason for these components that don’t always fit, or point like an arrow to some narrative conclusion, is that DuPlessis—and she makes the claim that this is a part of feminine aesthetic, and it’s certainly true for writing that labels itself as post-modern—is interested in process as informative of product. Another word for this mode of writing is “diaristic,” which DuPlessis traces back to other female writers such as Virginia Wolf. Here’s how DuPlessis explains her rationale for this style of writing in one of the latter sections, “Otherhow”:

I struggle to break into the sentences that of course I am capable of writing smoothly. I want to distance. To rupture. Why? In part because of the gender contexts in which these words have lived, of which they taste. (144)

And here’s how she describes her actual mode of writing:

Poems “like” essays: situated, breathless, passionate, critical. A work of entering into the social force of language, the work done everywhere with the social force of language...(147, ellipses added, italics original to text)

In terms of the writing that she examines, DuPlessis has a strong affinity for the modernist movement, and has some respect for what poets like Pound, Eliot, and Williams were trying to accomplish. But an important problem with their attempted rewriting of the rules of language—of their attempt to drain significance from language—was that they were still exclusive of other voices. Or, in other words, DuPlessis writes that:

Destabilizing language, form, narrative has historically been the task of both modernist and post-modernist innovation. But there is a central problem with these two twentieth-century movements of linguistic and formal critique. The problem is Gender Politics. Modernism has a radical poetics and exemplary cultural ambition of diagnosis and reconstruction. But it is imbued with a nostalgia for center and order, for elitist or exclusive solutions, for transforming historical time into myth.

DuPlessis wanted more from the modernist movement, not least an acknowledgement that the literary cannon is a history of power, surrounded by the shards of other repressed or silenced voices. In part, I think some of the modernists might have agreed with this. In the Cantos Pound writes about “twenty gross statues and old books,” (paraphrase), referring to the worthlessness of European history, and Eliot is intimating both Europe and memory when he writes about the lilacs spring from the dead land. But, this was somewhat disingenuous of both poets, as they both utilized Eurocentric myths in their poetry in order to convey meaning, and Pound wrote sort of a double whammy with his “Portrait d'Une Femme”, when he compares a woman to the Sargasso Sea. In part, what DuPlessis is doing is pointing out the disingenuity of the modernists, who had ideals similar to hers, but failed to live up to them.

Of the modernists, DuPlessis is most interested in H.D., and cites her work throughout The Pink Guitar, specifically turning to passages in H.D.’s memoir referring to Pound. DuPlessis does this as a means of mapping some of the gender relations in the modernist movement. One of the interesting points DuPlessis raises concerns the importance of the muse in modernist literature. Obviously, the muse was a woman, but DuPlessis interrogates what characteristics make up the muse—silence, beauty, and inspiration, among others. For H.D., writes DuPlessis, the muse was a problematic figure, because a female muse for a female writer doesn’t have the same effect as it would for a male writer, who modeled the muse after a fantasized female representation. And what’s more, the qualities of the muse are qualities that are expected from women in general, and it’s easy to see why those might be detrimental qualities for a female writer to possess. And to further complicate the situation, Pound wanted H.D. to be his muse, which of course, could only come at the cost of her own writing.

By the latter chapters, DuPlessis begins to focus less on H.D., and more on Susan Howe, who interrogates language structures in different ways, such as punning, and the use of palimpset, a term DuPlessis credits to H.D., and means one text layered over another, so that both are visible as separate entities, but also create a new, jumbled text. Howe views text as an object, and everything about the object—whether intentional, such as font and format, or unintentional, such as pen marks and notations—is significant, and altered by its physical appearance.

The Modern Element (Essays on Contemporary Poetry): Adam Kirsch

2010-01-06T11:46:00.000-08:00

The book jacket for The Modern Element claims that Kirsch is “among the most controversial and feared critics writing today,” and that the book is “Sure to cause heated debate.” I’m not so sure. While Kirsch approached a wide variety of contemporary poets in an erudite, if perhaps slightly cautious manner, I get the feeling that much of the controversy surrounding Kirsch stems more from his position as a New Formalist critic than from his actual critiques. I’m not sure what I was expecting in these essays that cover a range of mostly well-known poets such as Derek Walcott, Charles Simic, C.D. Wright and Anthony Hecht, but I was left feeling as though Kirsch did more summarizing that critiquing.

Kirsch was tough on Sharon Olds, claiming that when she writes about sex it’s only that, rather than a symbol of the complications sex represents, and he had reservations about Jorie Graham as well, but the one place Kirsch started to get a bit nasty (and where I lost some respect for him) was Billy Collins, whom Kirsch lambasted for laziness. Kirsch’s summary judgment of Collins is that, “His amused indifference resembles wisdom only, to borrow a phrase from Four Quartets, as ‘death resembles life.’” Well, I don’t disagree, but for Kirsch to whet his acumen only on Collins, the academic poet’s favorite target, is like hunting farm animals.

To understand Kirsch's critical approach to the poets he’s selected, it’s a good idea to examine how he defines a poem’s “modernness.” What makes a poem modern, he suggests, is its capacity for “intellectual deliverance,” a definition borrowed from Matthew Arnold’s 1857 lecture “On the Modern Element in Literature.” It’s an idealistic phrase, and I think Kirsch is an idealistic reader and critic—he’s also interested in the idea of redemption and transcendence. This idea of modern poetry is in contrast with Robert Von Hallberg’s, who speculates in his book Lyric Powers that lyric poetry is a discipline, “built on an expectation of failure,” or, in other words, Hallberg believes that poetry will change nothing and no one.

I, like any sane person, am attracted to the idea of “intellectual deliverance”: the phrase has a noble ring to it, and although a discussion on the transformative power of poetry is for another essay, it’s important to say that as far as Kirsch’s book is concerned, I’m not sure what modern poetry is supposed to deliver humanity—or, the cultured human—from. It’s a moralistic, spiritual phrase, which would explain its 19th century origins, but what does Kirsch mean by “intellectual deliverance” in a poetry world leaning more towards a secular humanism? Is Kirsch suggesting that modern poetry should be capable of delivering us from a flawed, ugly culture? Or does he mean it in a spiritual sense, as in, the modern poem will (buckle up for a vagary) elevate the human spirit? A combination of both? The modern poem will lift a veil from our eyes, allowing us to see the world differently—and thus reinvent it?

One thing I appreciate about Kirsch’s definition of modernness is that it operates under the supposition that modern poetry is timeless—it transcends history—which is exemplified by an example given that the poetry of ancient Greece is more modern than, say, Mary Oliver. Because it continues to liberate the mind. This idea of poetry delivering is evidenced by the characteristics Kirsch routinely praises in poems, namely, a certain amount of clarity, followed by maturity throughout career. One of his qualms with Jorie Graham (and, to a lesser extent, Ashbery) was the impenetrable mystery of some of her poetry. Kirsch does have some tolerance for obscurity—from what I can deduce, he thinks Eliot is the great American poet, and Four Quartets and The Wasteland among the great American poems—but he points out that complexity and confusion are not the same thing, and that often contemporary poets substitute one for the other.

Kirsch’s approach to each subject usually followed the same format. Anecdote about the poet’s life (Larkin looked at porn! Wright and Roethke were boxing enthusiasts!), summary of work, similarities to other writers (again, high praise was comparison with Eliot, closely followed by Lowell, ambiguous praise was comparison to Pound), judgment, conclusion with a quote.

Although it would be too time consuming to summarize Kirsch’s thoughts about each individual poet, a few reviews struck me as of particular interest, such as Frederick Seidel, whom Kirsch praised, writing, "...his ambiguous courage is what makes hom one of the significant artists of a corrupt, chaotic time," although Kirsch he also says that Fred Seidel's favorite subject matter is Fred Seidel. And I'm not sure being the artist of a corrupt time is a compliment, perhaps in a corrupt time. Kirsch caused me to lose some respect for James Wright much in the same way Willam Logan debunked his egotistical son, Franz. It's been a tough year for the Wrights. The essay on Philip Larkin was also of interest, if only because it was yet another sign of an artist whose reputation contemporary critics are trying desperately to revive (with good reason). Although Larkin died over twenty years ago (1985) his stock has steadily decreased in the poetry world due to public exposure of his splentic personality and unpleasant personal habits. As Larkin wrote mostly in verse, I wonder what this critical resurgence says about the view of formalism. Maybe nothing. There was also a lot about Lowell in The Modern Element, though almost nothing on Elizabeth Bishop, which I found surprising since her popularity seems to grow as Lowell's wanes. Still, as loved as Bishop now is, Lowell was a much larger influence on contemprary poetics (first with Lord Weary's Castle and then with Life Studies) which plays into Kirsch's formula for showing what vein each writer is emerging from.

Kirsch is a critic of principles, and while much of what he wrote makes sense, my criticism of him is the same he made of Yvor Winters—at times, Kirsch needs to widen his perspective of what poetry can and should do. He seems to believe in transcendental qualities such as redemption and deliverance, but as a critic, he hasn't discovered those qualities in any contemporary writers, to the point that I'm starting to wonder whether he’d recognize them if he did.

Lunch Poems: Frank O'Hara

2009-12-30T09:32:00.000-08:00

What powers the poetry in Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems more than anything else is the charm of O’Hara’s voice, and his speed of thought. The poetry in Lunch Poems skims rapidly across images and thoughts in a fashion mirroring O’Hara’s conversational tone, and the poems often end in places far removed from where they began, such as in “Cambridge,” which begins:

It is still raining and the yellow-green cotton fruit
looks silly round a window giving out on winter trees

and ends:

Across the street there is a house under construction,
abandoned to the rain. Secretly, I shall go to work on it.

The surprise in O’Hara’s lines are what makes them engaging (and fun), the only issue I have is that O’Hara often breaks lines for no particular reason, with two notable exceptions—he enjoys breaking lines to make a pun, and in his more conversational poems, he’ll break on weak end words such as “and,” “it,” “on,” and "a," which enhances the sensation of a man thinking aloud or talking to himself—flickering from subject to subject in associative leaps.

Here’s some examples. This is from “Poem,” (pg. 19—there are several titled “Poem.”) and I don’t think the line does much:

Instant coffee with slightly sour cream
in it, and a phone call to the beyond

The first line is nice, and has some good sounds, and it’s a typical O’Hara beginning of him setting the scene—he’ll often start with the exact time of day, most notably in "The Day Lady Died." But the “in it” is such an ugly beginning for the second line, and it’s a jolt against the speed of the first line—I already assumed the sour cream was in the coffee, and by adding it to the second line, the flow of the poem is interrupted. The lines sound better with the beginning cut: Instant coffee with slightly sour cream/and a phone call to the beyond. Or, maybe to keep the quick pace: Instant cofee with slightly sour cream and/a phone call to the beyond. Just a thought. As for a line break with a pun, this one is from “St. Paul and All That,” and made me laugh out loud:

such little things have to be established in morning
after the big things of night
do you want to come? when
I think of all the things I’ve been thinking of

Cheap and funny. As for the conversationally toned line breaks, they’re in almost every poem, for instance, “A Step Away from Them,” which is also loaded with little jokes and sexual puns.

O’Hara is consistently funny, for the most part his tone is light, and there’s a reflexive, self-mocking edge to his voice that adds to his appeal. There’s nothing really special about “Five Poems,” but I found the second stanza really funny:

an invitation to lunch
HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT?
when I only have 16 cents and 2
packages of yoghurt
there’s a lesson in that, isn’t there
like in Chinese poetry, when a leaf falls?

That habit of not taking himself too seriously is probably one reason why O’Hara’s poetry continues to endure—he writes a lot about himself, his jaunts around NYC, and friends like Kenneth Koch—if he didn’t have a little ironic distance from himself, the poems would seem self important and obnoxious (Read: Hart Crane). Another effect of the light-hearted poetry is that when O’Hara decides to break his own mold and be serious, the effect can be really powerful, such as in “The Day Lady Died,” which has a typical (and famous) beginning:

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille Day, yes

but then finds its way to an emotionally devastating ending, the death of Billie Holiday:

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

I think this is one of O’Hara’s stronger poems. The way this conversational poem runs the reader headlong into the unexpected newspaper headline and then into O’Hara’s memory and then the final five words “everyone and I stopped breathing,” sans any sort of bracing punctuation…it’s just really nice, and one of the few poems where all O’Hara’s tricks seem to cohere. There’s a smiliar effect with “Poem” (78) which is about Lana Turner collapsing, and ends with "Oh Lana Turner we love you get up," a desperate, sad line.

I don’t have much to say about O’Hara’s epic poem “For the Chinese New Year & Bill Berkson.” It’s the only poem with an epigraph (D.H. Lawrence), and the only one well over two pages, but since I just finished Lunch Poems yesterday, I still have some processing to do.

Lunch Poems was entertaining, and ironically, I read it yesterday…over lunch. I don’t think O’Hara will ever be one of my favorite poets, to be honest, I think I just like more ambition. BUT I don't mean that to be a negative statement-- I like what O’Hara did, and think he knew what he wanted his writing to be like, and for the most part, achieved it. He does a great job of capturing the tone of a place (NYC) and its artistic scene, and he made poetry that was fun to read. Still, O’Hara’s other book, Meditations in an Emergency, reigns supreme over Lunch Poems for me, and it contains my two favorite O’Hara poems, “To the Harbormaster,” and “For Grace, After a Party.”

Dancing in Odessa: Ilya Kaminsky

2009-12-26T18:07:00.000-08:00

Ilya Kaminsky is a bit of a young gun, born in Odessa, Ukraine in 1977 and winning the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize (among others) in 2002 for Dancing in Odessa. The book is organized into six major sections, the shortest of which is only a page (Author's Prayer), but most of which contain several poems, such as the title section. Kaminsky usually chooses to write in loose, self-imposed forms such as couplets or quatrains, and internal and end rhymes knit in and out of the stanzas, carrying the reader through the music of the poem. But what sets Kaminsky apart is his consistent use of repetition, which adds a highly lyrical, musical quality to his verse, while presenting his surrealistic subject matter in a slightly nostalgic, often haunting tone. Some of these qualities are evident in the first two stanzas of “In Praise of Laughter,” from the second section, Dancing in Odessa:

Where days bend and straighten
in a city that belongs to no nation
but all the nations of the wind,

she spoke the speech of poplar trees—
her ears trembling as she spoke, my Aunt Rose
composed odes to barbershops, drugstores.

While the easy rhyme of “straighten” and “nation” in the first two lines comes across as mildly cheesy, there's a brilliant thread of assonance in the last two lines of the second stanza. “Spoke” leads to “Rose,” “composed,” and “odes,” and the heavy 'R' is emphasized in “barbershops” and “drugstores.” Both stanzas evidence Kaminsky’s signature word repetition, which occurs in almost every poem: “nation” in the first stanza, “spoke” in the second.

Kaminsky is an Orphic poet, and just as his Aunt Rose sings of the everyday—barbershops and drugstores—Kaminsky often focuses on life in communist Odessa. He assumes the role of namer from the very first poem, “Author’s Prayer”:

If I speak for the dead, I must leave
this animal of my body

Kaminsky speaks for others, affirming a reality that resembles life in Odessa, and at the same time creating an alternate reality (here's where the surrealism comes in) through his use of image and narrative.

I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak

of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever we say

It's clear from the line breaks ("speak," "say") that Kaminsky is emphasizing the role of poet-as-prophet. He goes on to create an alternate version Odessa, and the poems often cohere (even across some sections) as a narrative. "Aunt Rose" is mentioned multiple times, and the image of tomatoes reoccurs through the text. It should also be noted that Kaminsky's Odessa breathes the air of magical realism--it's a place populated by images that usually correspond to emotion rather than logic. The question "what does it mean" should be left outside Kaminsky's reality, and the reader should instead be prepared to enter a world one step off from ours, where Kaminsky speaks in coded images the reader learns to translate, much like Wallace Stevens and his use of images like "green," ("green freedom," "green sun") "portals," and "wells."

In the prose poem "Musica Humana" (Kaminsky blends form in a variety of ways, including a series of poems beginning with epigraphs, and another which include footnotes.) the speaker's uncle is dying, so the uncle's brothers ask the neighbors to donate a few days of their life to the uncle. A woman who is secretly in love with the uncle donates the rest of her days, and when the uncle suddenly gets better, the woman dies. But for the rest of his life, the uncle hears the woman's life overlapping with his own: he hears her sing in church, he hears her when she gives birth (Aspects of female sexuality work their way into many of the poems, from the rape of the speaker’s grandmother to references to sex) and one day he hears her die: He sat down on the pavement, whispering that he suddenly heard someone's sickening scream. We understood.

Or, here's a section from the long poem "Natalia." It's a striking example of what I'm trying to explain--the irregular rhyming, the consistent repetition, the sexuality, and also something I haven't touched on yet-- the pervasive religious atmosphere that the poems are seeped in. The old-world Russian-Judaism is a major part of what gives these poems their character. From "Natalia":

On the night I met her, the Rabbi sang and sighed,
god's lips on his brow, Torah in his arms,
—I unfastened her stockings, worried

that I have stopped worrying.
She slept in my bed—I slept on a chair,
she slept on a chair—I slept in the kitchen,

she left her slippers in my shower, in my Torah
her slippers in each sentence I spoke.
I said: those I love—die grow old, are born.

But I love the stubbornness of her bedclothes!
I bite them, taste bedclothes—
the sweet mechanism of pillows and covers.

A serious woman, she danced
without a shirt, covering what she could.
We lay together on Yom Kippur, chosen by a wrong God,

the people of a book, broken by a book.

Dancing in Odessa is a pleasure to read. Kaminsky writes about men and women living in Odessa during a time of love and strife, and he focuses as much attention on the physical reality (lemon trees, tomatoes, sex) as the spiritual (birth, death, religion). Readers may also be interested to know that Kaminsky has published excerpts from his forthcoming book, Deaf Republic, and it seemed more focused and refined than Dancing in Odessa. Deaf Republic appears to be one long narrative as opposed to a number of sections. Some of Dancing in Odessa was released at separate times as chapbooks, and at times the volume as a whole lacked cohesiveness. Readers of Dancing in Odessa will see that in his new volume, Kaminsky is simply taking his ideas and inclinations in subject matter to the next level, one that seems more liberating for him in terms of imagination and ambition.