Archive for August, 2008

Descartes’ Loneliness

Monday, August 25th, 2008

by Allen Grossman
New Directions 2008
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

6_5stars_6

Lens Crafter

grossman cover

In his new book Descartes’ Loneliness, Allen Grossman subtly displays the affects of a life of thought: the knife-edge between intellect and passion. As the first and titular poem shows, when Grossman strives for pure intellect, he comes face to face with the realities of being a subjective human: “But in fact, toward evening, I am not / convinced there is any other except myself.” This line encapsulates the strongest images in the book: the poet himself, the mind, and the passage of time as seen through light. It also capably establishes the poet’s major themes: objectivism vs. subjectivism, perspective vs. reality, and truth vs. experience. Overall, the book is an interesting read for anyone dedicating his/her life to Liberal Arts academia.

Intermittently, Grossman inserts bold, imagistic poems such as “A Day’s Work” and “Timor Mortis, Inc., A Switchboard Memory.” Each of these poems revolves around the mother figure, who serves as a counterpoint to the character of Descartes. In “A Day’s Work” he writes:

Bobbed hair conceals
ears. Starched white shirt (Sleeves
rolled up with fierce intent.)
Hands in pockets of a straight skirt
of heavy material. She is looking
at the ground.

There are a few moments like this throughout the work that impact the reader both directly and broadly. The poet’s mother represents all things vague and human. These are the poems that seem most honest and effortless for Grossman. The intellectual connection here is vague, but not invisible.

The majority of Descartes’ Loneliness is focused, obviously, on Descartes, although it is not as readily apparent as the title indicates. Two of the poet’s greatest notions come when considering Descartes. First, he indicates that a profound given is a type of ownership. And isn’t that true? That first person who truly blew your mind will forever occupy a piece of your life that you cannot extract. As Grossman puts it in, “A Kiss for You,”: “Take this kiss. / You are mine forever.”

Second, Grossman makes the self-important claim that truth in science, or direct scrutiny, cannot be ascertained, but can be detected through the lens of poetry. In, “Caedmon,” “Invention of Night,” and “A Long Romance,” Grossman does achieve moments of great poetry, exposing the truth of the Descartes mind that can only be understood, through metaphor: “You Will be Wrapped in Silk.”

The book is at its weakest when Grossman falls into explaining, which he does through direct address and, too often, exclamation. This is partially forgivable, as Grossman sometimes assumes the identity of Descartes in his letters to Princess Elizabeth. However, within the poems, the exclamations draw the reader out of the moment and put too strong a Grossman stamp on the poem.

There is a balance to be had. In the final poem, “Votre Altresse,” the reader sees a thinkers’ sympathy between Grossman and Descartes. Descartes’ final days are spent in a foreign court where he is beleaguered and misunderstood. He will die as a showpiece, a novelty, in the court of Queen Christina of Sweden.

Grossman sets a high intellectual bar with his new book, and he touches that bar, I think. But I did not detect anything novel in the conversations of philosophy or poetry. Although he does a nice job of framing the classic dilemmas of Descartes, he does not add anything new.

*

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A Yes-or-No Answer

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

by Jane Shore
Houghton Mifflin 2008
Reviewed by Christie Ann Reynolds

2

Worst Title Ever

yes or noIn Jane Shore’s A Yes-Or-No Answer, there are the usual Greek references: (“I saw my girl—Persephone carried off to Hell / who left behind a mash of petals on the trampled soil.”) There are the predictable religious undertones (see: “Gelato, Scrabble in Heaven, Body and Soul”).

Here also lie the predictable mother-father-aunt-and-uncle mourning poems anyone of middle age with a lack of contemporary vibrancy would write.  There are coming-of-age daughter poems (“My Daughter Reads My Old Diary”), and poems that reminisce over a childhood dummy doll.

Every poem is honest and clean, the lines broken deliberately. But what Shore’s latest book lacks is…anything extraordinary. The boom. The spark. In A Yes-Or-No Answer, you might say the lighting rod has been popped from the roof and buried in the backyard.

In an entire book of poems about family and childhood memories, I expected something more astonishing than the only moment I recall vividly:

Aunt Sadie frowned.
“What do you need all that hair for?”
She jumped up, yanked open a drawer,
she lopped off my ponytail
in one big hank, the rubber band
still holding it together.

It lay coiled on the floor.
Mine. Not mine.
She made me pick it up
and throw it in the trash.

The poems are gravestones and recipe cards for a mother and daughter who do not want to forget the commonplace intricacies in anyone’s length of life. But they appear too commonplace. There is nothing to uncover about the speaker that isn’t already understood by the first two poems. You might argue that there’s some maternal wisdom in these poem, but it’s not what I would call the impressive wisdom you see in books like The Shout by Simon Armitage. The opening poem in Armitage’s book involves a childhood friend who committed suicide. The first two stanzas introduce us to the speaker and his playmate and the irony of being a curious child:

  We went out
  in the school yard together, me and the boy
  whose name and face

  I don’t remember. We were testing the range
  of the human voice”
  he had to shout for all he was worth

The last two lines imbue us with a thought-provoking echo:

  He left town, went on to be twenty years dead
  with a gunshot hole
  in the roof of his mouth, in Western Australia.

  Boy with the name and face I don’t remember,
  you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you.

It’s the kind of romantic catharsis that never quite washes up in Shore’s work. For weeks, I’ve been waiting for A Yes-or-No Answer to redeem itself. I’ve read it over and over. I’ve put it away for some time, hoping to coerce some fresh dust to settle favorably in the crevices in my brain. I honestly and truly attempted to like this collection. But I couldn’t help coming to the realization that my grandmother would probably place this book on a shelf under Mitch Albom’s (vastly superior) The Five People You Meet in Heaven. She may make a few recommendations to her coworkers or even suggest that I, as her granddaughter, read it to accumulate some appreciation for the elderly. My grandmother would also smile when Shore writes:

Putting on my socks, I noticed,
on my right foot, an ugly bunion and hammertoes.
How did my mother’s foot
become part of me?

I on the other hand, cringe.

Many young workshop poets use their childhood and the tired angst of their adolescence as fuel. Many poets also use their experiences as ammunition for a few soul-searching combustible poems that leave you aching in the gut. But anyone writing so complacently about him-/herself had better have one damned impressive and odd life, have the capacity to lie well about their life, or have the ability to make the ordinary seem wondrous. David Orr once wrote:

“And in poems, autobiographical information serves the same purpose as references to birch trees or happiness or Subarus—all are simply ways of creating the experiences we desire from lyric poetry. The real question, therefore, isn’t what kind of life we’re being shown in a particular collection, but what kind of writing.”

What I want when I read this kind of writing is to be in AWE—preferably by both content and style. Consequently, any writer lowers the bar when they begin writing about an old address book of their parents’ and surprise, surprise, recall specific entries and where they’ve moved:

  Great-uncles, aunts,
  cousins once removed,
  whose cheeks I kissed,
  whose food I ate,

  are in this book still
  alive, immortal, each
  name accompanied
  by a face:

  Fogel (Rose and Murray)
  474 13th St. Brooklyn,
  moved to a condo
  in Boca Raton:

The Lifetime tv-movie “voiceover” quality is just too much. I wanted to say yes to each poem, and even considered whether or not I was too young to appreciate the kind of nostalgia that resonated here. But after reading with an open mind, I can only say that if asked to speak well of A Yes-or-No Answer, I can only give the appropriate answer of: no.

*

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Overnight

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

by Paul Violi
Hanging Loose Press 2007
Reviewed by Matt Hart

9

Some Notes Pretending to be a Review of Paul Violi’s Overnight

overnight1. Paul Violi has long been a purveyor of strategic and diversionary guerilla tactics in poetry: slippage, wobble, & recklessness. I mean this as a compliment, of course.  And related to this is the fact that one of the single most important aspects of Violi’s work (both in his newest collection Overnight—his eleventh book of poems—and in his previous work) is the way that he has again and again reinvented writing poetry by ever reinventing (often radically) what a poem can be—the grounds upon which a poem can stand up straight and hold water (or lemon juice or blood, what have you, whatever).

2. His poems are also hilarious, packed with fabular zaniness, brainy sharp teeth and mountains of props.  I would hate to have to match wits with him or with Overnight.  My assessment: hands down, he’s a poetry giant.  My worry, hands up and reach for the sky.  No, on second thought, don’t worry, it’s a pretty inspiring sky.

3. Clearly, Paul Violi has two eyes and a nose and some ears.  He was born in 1944, a very good year near the end of the war.  I think he lives in New York.  He’s received a lot of awards, and for very good reason.  (See some reasons below).

4. When I think of Paul Violi’s poems, I think of Peter Pan, Dennis the Menace, and Casper the Friendly Ghost hanging out in a blender with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Raymond Queneau and Kenneth Koch.  I think of indexes, police blotters, and TV Guide listings masquerading and functioning with great intelligence, human torque, and good humor as poems.  I think of words like “fracas” and “splurge”.  When I look at his author photo on the back of Overnight, I think, “It’s good that he’s smiling, otherwise I might be afraid.”  I think he has a shadow.  I’m afraid of his shadow—and also in awe of its philosophical and historical, though perhaps ridiculously playful, coloring of the sidewalk.

5. Lately, however, when I think about Paul Violi’s poems I think of this quote from his poem “Thief Tempted by the Grandeur of February” which appears in Overnight, “… poetry it’s easy/And impossible—like stealing from yourself.”  To me this is—and has always been—the conundrum at the heart of Violi’s work—a conundrum which he works hard to enact and formalize by taking (stealing) linguistic shapes out of the world of language which is not poems (the ordinary language of speaking, working, and making) and then placing them in poetic contexts where he makes of them electrical, brilliant, and hilariously hardworking poems.  In other words, he recognizes that poetry wants to be as big as the world, so he just keeps appropriating bits of it for use in poetic contexts,making it bigger and bigger and bigger.  For example, take his poem “Acknowledgments” (one of three poems with this title in Overnight) where he appropriates the utilitarian “acknowledgments” paragraph found in nearly every published book of poems these days:

A month of twilights, laglight, fritterdusk.  Withered plants, soggy   bulbs, stubble.  The Garden in February.  Mold and tendrils, colorless   scribbles dangling from a ripped-back carpet of matted leaves.  Fresh hole   in the frozen ground that looks like it was made by a pickaxe, a fang.   Smeared dirt and frost, diamond slime.  Paradise a child’s notion.     Paradise painted one stroke. One phrase, one glimpse at a time, whatever   lightning flare reveals of it.  Blunderblink.  An invitation.  Mr and Mrs.   Dwindle.  Request.  Demand.  The pleasure of your company, your antics,   your fervor, your moodiness, your stolid numbing small time solemnity,   your contempt, your pig-headed pride, your carelessness, your squalling   self.

In this version of an acknowledgments page, references aren’t made to particular poems and poetry journals, but to the guts of writing itself.  Obviously, the joke here—and also the serious capital T-Truth of the matter—is that in “Acknowledgments” Violi notes the real places where a poet’s “work” first appears (to the poet!), i.e. in the poet’s world of experiences and perceptions and language. As Frank O’Hara once wrote in an article about the sculptor David Smith, “[In art] the slightest loss of attention leads to death” and in “Acknowledgments” Violi implicitly argues for extreme attention, a recognition of not only where one gets one’s work—where one finds it—but of the responsibility one has (both to oneself and existence) in the finding (no matter how one then uses—employs and deploys—what one’s found to make meaning).

I should note additionally

6. that the other two “Acknowledgments” poems in Overnight play a little more on the idea of the “acknowledgments page” as a sort of taken-for-granted but ridiculous mainstay of every new book of poems, calling into question not only the places we publish, but why we publish, and the whole in/significance of the endeavor.  For example, take these lines from the beginning of one of his other “Acknowledgments” poems:

The author wishes to express profound gratitude to the following publications in which some of these works previously appeared: Architectural Digest: “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”; Teen Life: “On the Death of Chatterton”; Cosmopolitan: “Constancy to an Ideal Object”; Bon Appétit: “Drinking versus Thinking,” “The Eagle and the Tortoise”; La Cucina Italiana: “Fire, Famine and Slaughter”; House Beautiful: “Kublai Khan,” “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”; Better Homes and Gardens: “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”…

This is funny sure, but it’s also a reminder that a) an acknowledgments page is always a sort of pledge of allegiance to a tribe of poetry and poets and b) that the subjects of our poems—our interests and preoccupations—perhaps (both are and) aren’t as transcendent and beyond the pale of popular life and culture as we (and others) sometimes like to think.  The juxtaposition here of the very literary (and mostly Coleridgean) poems with contemporary, popular, non-literary magazines marries the reading and the writing in a way that makes poetry (even old poetry) seem weirdly relevant—and very Violi.

It’s worth noting specifically here as well the heavy-duty role Coleridge plays in this “Acknowledgments” poem.  In addition to the mention of his “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” (not once, not twice, but three times) “Kublai Khan” (twice—it’s listed as having appeared in Interiors as well), “Constancy to an Ideal Object,” “Drinking versus Thinking” and “Fire, Famine and Slaughter,” the poem also later attributes “Dejection: An Ode” to Sports Illustrated and “Christabel” to Hustler.  Coleridge, as the granddaddy of imaginative play and t/error—not to mention as someone who was accused of plagiarism—seems a perfect reference point and match for Violi, who handily (easily and impossibly) makes a poem out of the traditionally non-poetic form of the acknowledgments page, while simultaneously “stealing” the works he is acknowledging as his own.  Furthermore, paying this sort of homage to one’s (in this case, romantic) forebears, not only recognizes one’s debt to them, but it literally (and literarily) puts one in alignment with (the) stars.

7.  This sort of elbow rubbing with the Vast (“From an early age I was habituated to the Vast” wrote Coleridge in a letter), as well as the appropriation of the formal parameters of non-poetic language-games (as Wittgenstein might call them) are consistently among Violi’s greatest strengths, both in Overnight and his other work.  Perhaps best known for his poems “Index” (which looks and reads like…well, a portion of an index referring to an imaginary artist/renaissance man, Sutej Hudney) and “Triptych” (which looks like a morning, afternoon, and evening TV Guide-style list of programs, including the various times and channels at which, and where, they will appear) (both poems are included in Violi’s sadly out-of-print 1986 book, Splurge), Violi has a penchant for creating works which WOBBLE back and forth between being formal-ish, language-game type poems and snapshots of language forms not ordinarily considered poetry at all.  For example, in addition to the three “Acknowledgments” poems in Overnight, there’s also the hilarious “Counterman” which is a sort of Abbot and Costello-ish “who’s on first” routine consisting of sandwich orders given and taken at a deli counter, “Finish These Sentences” which is a list of interrupted sentences that need to be finished (endlessly by the reader), and the marvelously cagey “I.D. Or, Mistaken Identities”— which is essentially 11 “who am I” style riddles.  Here, each riddle/section of the poem is a deliberately ambiguous and wildly uttered monologue of clues about its unnamed speaker—ostensibly some famous figure from history or culture—which ends with the question “Who am I?” Here’s number 3:

For handing over Philologus
To the widow of the man
I’d commanded him to murder
(She then made him slice off bits
Of his on flesh, roast them
And eat them)—For this,
Plutarch commended me
For at least one act
Of understanding and decency.

Who am I?

The upside down key at the end of the poem tells us that the answer to this riddle is (here comes the spoiler) Marc Antony (sorry, riddle purists for giving away the goods.  You’ll have ten more chances when you read the book).  Riddles like these often include various obfuscations of the riddler’s exploits, as well as puns, logical puzzles, figurative leaps, etc.  The idea is that a careful reader (a careful reader!) can solve the riddle simply by using the given clues and some brain power.  In “I.D.” the joke is that in many of the riddles one would need a PhD in history, etc. to have any hope of solving them.  The correspondence here between the stated clues and the persons they refer to are (to put it mildly) obscure—and these correspondences are the jokes inside the inside jokes.  Additionally, in every case, there’s the added difficulty that these riddles all have to do with “mistaken identities”.  For example, at least one of the speaker’s in “I.D.” is a movie character (a “mistaken identity”) played by a famous actor and so technically speaking not someone who ever existed at all.  In the riddle above, poor Philologus was punished for murdering Cicero—a crime which he didn’t actually commit (Herennius was the murderer)—but which he was commanded to commit by Marc Antony.  Thus, Philologus’ punishment was a case of “mistaken identity.”

8. For those with a more traditional formalist bent, Overnight includes several lush and often whacky sonnets: “Written in a Time of Worry and Woe, “To Dante Alighieri,” “Poet and Cynic” “Inkling in a Flurry” and a beautiful single sentence fragment sonnet, which appears at the end of the longer poem “Finish These Sentences”.  Both “Pastorale” and the aforementioned, “Light Rain Falling on Deep Snow” might be considered twists on the Romantic conversation poem, and the “The Art of Restoration” which is shaped like a broken commemorative dinner plate is a wonderful Apollinaire-like calligramme.

I mention this, because Violi is a formalist poet through and through—one who understands that working formally involves working with and against (never within) the formal parameters at hand.  Whether one is working with sonnets or acknowledgments page poems makes no difference

9. And now for something completely different: check out the musick [sic] in these final lines from “Toward a February Songbook”:

—Soon enough
The entire hillside will be buried
In greenery, the low stream will leap
Back into itself and guzzle away, but now,
Ah, now February is springtime for gray
And I’m at my light-hearted best
Heart as light as a hornet’s nest.

“Heart as light as a hornet’s nest”—reminds me of John Clare’s final lines from “The River Gwash,” “O thus while musing wild I’m doubly blest,/ My woes unheeding and my heart at rest”

“Heart as light as a hornet’s nest.”

10. Reading Violi, one always has the feeling of being on thin ice in terms of what one knows and can fathom, but also in terms of the grounds one is standing on.  His poems often feel like they might fall apart at any second, but for the fact that they’re so well hammered together/to the bone.  Strangely, this makes for thrilling (rather than annoying) reading and occasionally the poems are downright beautiful.  “Light Rain Falling on Deep Snow” is a good case in point.  It begins, “The muttering of sedentary artisans/ Hunched over desk and workbench/Two or three stories below/In the”.

11. Yes, that’s where the poem breaks off for, of all things, a big parenthetical distraction, which turns out to be a coming-to rather than a drifting away. The parenthetical in question is in the form of a 1st person, prose entry—almost diaristically written: “(I must have been half-listening for quite a while as I lay reading in bed […] I couldn’t return to my book until I knew the origin of that distant murmur[…])”—as if the initial lines of the poem were what the speaker was reading until he was disturbed by a sound coming from outside.

As he listens more intently, he comes to realize that the sound he’s hearing—the one that’s taken him so abruptly (and parenthetically) out of his book (and the lyric imaginary space of the poem) is actually “rain falling soft and easy on deep snow […] A natural fact […] more pleasurable than anything I could imagine, and I wondered if perhaps I had grown tired of imaginary things.)”  That is, the weather outside has undermined his concentration, taking him out of the poem and back to reality (which again I should point out is in parentheses, as if reality is somehow a mere aside to our imaginary lives).

Riddle solved as to the nature of the disturbance (light rain falling on deep snow), the poem (“Light Rain Falling on Deep Snow”) then jumps back into the imaginary world of the initial poem (the one the speaker was reading before he was disturbed by the rain) right where it left off, “basement of the year.”:

The muttering of sedentary artisans
Hunched over desk and workbench
Two or three stories below
In the

[(…)]

basement of the year…

Ultimately, the speaker finds his way back from his parenthetical prose distraction to the poem part of the poem (the shorter lineated lines and stanzas) by going through the rain—one might say by weathering the storm of consciousness.  Of course, now, having come back to the poem he isn’t the same (“sedentary artisan” reader) he was before the distraction, when (for a brief moment) there was an imaginary world to get lost in.  In the speaker’s new post-parenthetical reality, he has a different sense of things, “Imagination, methinks, is a closed shop/And even though I own the place/I’m treated like an apprentice.”  In other words, he’s aware of his imagining mind, and he can’t go back to his previous state in full-throttle flight.

The poem is a heartbreaking testament to the power and peril of reading, to paying attention, to thoughtfulness, and most importantly to the pitfalls of invention, and yet it manages well the conundrum of being wholly romantic at the very same time.

12. These notes were written in two overnight sessions at the end of July in Cincinnati, Ohio, 2008.  Is this a note important to note?

13.  Finally, I’d like to end by looking at Violi’s narrative poem “As I Was Telling Dave And Alex Kelley,” which appears near the beginning of Overnight and for me sums up not only Violi’s way of proceeding in this book, but in the vast-most of all of his books. First, however, I want to mention that Overnight is dedicated “To David and Alexandra Kelley”—I assume the Dave and Alex in the title of “As I Was Telling Dave And Alex Kelley” making this poem even more a sort of centerpiece/ars poetica than it might be otherwise.  By telling us what he told them (people he’s obviously close to, having dedicated the book in their direction), we are by extension made privy to a kind of classified information—that is, information outside the book, the overnight’s daylight inspiration in lines—information which has been previously (and under different circumstances) shared with people close to the poet/speaker.  The poem begins:

As I Was Telling Dave and Kelley

My brother swears this is true
And others have willingly—
generously testified,
As they did that other time…

The title and first few lines set us up for being told an apparently unbelievable story, which the speaker claims is, according to several other people (including his own brother), true.  So far so good.

From here, speaker Violi proceeds to relate the somewhat amazing true story of how his brother once went into a place he didn’t know to order some drinks.  While there, a vicious fight broke out between two women on the other side of the bar, so he “…jumped between them/To break it up” only to realize after he’d done so that this place where he’d randomly stopped to get a drink:

was a supper club theater
And he had just jumped into
The climactic scene of the play—
But this, I hasten to add, is not
About my brother but his neighbor,
A man whose roof needed repair,
A man, who, more than most feared heights.

In other words, the initial story about the brother and the dinner theater is a sort of tangent—in this case, a rational derangement of the poem’s narrative, which as we shall see Violi uses to shore up, and set the stage for, the poem’s actual/central narrative.

14.  Now the actual story of Violi’s speaker’s brother’s neighbor (whew!)—“A man whose roof needed repair” and was “more than most”  afraid of heights”—is not only a fabulous (and fabulously lineated) narrative, but a demonstration of the sort of shifts and slippage that makes Violi’s work so great.  With that in mind, watch your step, here we go.

Apparently this neighbor was so afraid of heights that before climbing the ladder to the roof (why he just didn’t call a roofer is never explained), “…he wrapped/A rope thick enough to moor a barge/Around his waist and lashed/The other end around the car bumper,” carefully asking his children to wait below and steady the ladder. Thus secured, he climbed up to the roof and began his work, when suddenly, “He heard the station wagon door/Slam shut, then the ignition,/The engine roar to life…”  Uh-oh…

Apparently the man’s wife, who was unaware of his rope anchor had some errands to run, so she ran them, and the poor man was dragged off the roof behind the car to his great misfortune.   And all the while his oblivious wife was driving along wondering “Where were those screams coming from?”  Yikes.

After some discussion of whether or not the wife could possibly not have known she was dragging her husband to his death (“Doctors, Police, all believed/ She could very well have not…”), the speaker re-enters the poem, stating:

This man deserves a shrine
Which, if donations are forthcoming,
I am willing to oversee
The construction of
At 145 Sampson Avenue,
Islip, Long Island, New York.
That’s right, that’s the name
Of the place: Islip.  I swear.

Snap goes the trap.  Unbelievable, yet believable as promised?  Yes.  A joke with real depths, both tragic and hilarious?  Check.  Wordplay lost and found?  You bet.  But what’s of premium interest poetically here is that just as the narrative of the poem itself initially slips off on a tangent as a way of illustrating and supporting the central narrative to come, Violi’s poems in general always find a way to yank the rug out from under us.  There’s always a slight or massive tear in the fabric of the poem, shifting the grounds beneath us as we read him.  We think he’s doing one thing, and then he does another, OR he does three or a thousand.  To put it in the simplest terms possible, Violi is a master of setting up expectations and then radically undermining and/or expanding their scope.  To me this is the foundation of his work, and the thing that keeps me reading him, one fantastic surprise to the next.

*

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A Time in Xanadu

Monday, August 11th, 2008

by Lars Gustafsson
Copper Canyon Press 2008
Reviewed by Jim Wood

6stars_7

Eternally Yours

Gustafsson coverAlan Weisman recently noted in The World Without Us that long after Earth is no longer habitable by any living thing, episodes of The Twilight Zone will still be broadcasting off into infinity. It is kind of comforting to know that the universe will forever be subject to the image of a man’s head bouncing out  of a jack-in-the-box, an image that terrified me almost as much last month as it did when I first saw it as a kid. The makers of the show probably had no idea that they were simultaneously affecting the audience of the time, me as a child, me as an adult, my interpretation of Weisman’s book, and the state of the cosmos itself.

The title of Lars Gustafsson’s most recent English translation alludes simultaneously to two vanished eras: the time of the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan, and the time of the Romantic poets who wrote about him. Oh, and Marco Polo as well. This allusion is indicative of the main theme of the book – that time is fluid, and the present constantly disappears while simultaneously affecting the shape of future “presents.” Whether I know anything about Kublai Klan, I might know something about the Romantic poets, and if not, I might at least be familiar with writers who are influenced by writers who are influenced by them. And I definitely played “Marco Polo” in the pool as a kid. Consider the poem “Traces” in this respect:

There is so little left.
Of dogs for example
only their collars.
Normally sent home in an envelope
along with the bill
from the vet.
Of the really great writers
some extracts in anthologies
that are soon thinned out
over a couple of decades
and die away in the ever-shorter footnotes
of secondary literature as the century passes.

Immortality of any kind is hopeless. We will certainly remember our dogs, and we may tell our kids about them, but our grandchildren are bound to forget. Leaving a legacy of writing is no way out either; at best it just prolongs the inevitable. The time of that poem, of that writer, is gone – no matter what.

But that doesn’t mean that anything is actually gone, in any strict sense of the word at least. Kublai Khan might be gone, but traces of his presence will never leave Mongolia completely. In “Conversation with the Dead,” we are presented with the image of snowy bicycles in the 1950s “or earlier.” The poem concludes “and this second space, / where we live / who are also both living and dead.” Time itself, and thus our status as living or dead, is subjective – at least from the perspective of the universe.

And this can give as much comfort as the thought of eternal radio waves. “In an old-fashioned bookcase, behind glass doors with green curtains on the inside, stand nineteenth-century travel accounts with etchings and woodcuts and neat cloth bindings with engraved illustrations.” There were people in the past who went to great lengths to record transient experience. But we don’t get the impression that anybody really reads these books, as they sit behind glass doors and curtains. They don’t even sound all that interesting. But that doesn’t matter, because “Yes, even they exist. / These other ones—the real places.” Time is one thing, but the universe is constantly shaped by the events within it, and so eternity happens whether one engraves illustrations into books or not.

A second theme permeating this book is the apparent stunning failure of logic and order. Lars Gustafsson, formally trained as a philosopher, comes off as a thinker who has thought about the universe from every possible angle – and has great difficultly making any sense of it at all. Even his organization of the book into sections (Prologues 5-12, Reminiscences 15-31, Philosophies 33-70, Everyday Life 73-76, Poèmes en prose 79-84, Notes 85-87) seems an attempt to impose order on chaos; are his reminiscences really that much different from his philosophies?

He displays a genuine an interest in formal logic and formalism with a concomitant doubt of its ability to express reality. In “Of Course Clark Kent is Superman,” he explains the formalism for expressing existentials, and then comments: “Did we really believe all this / in my youth? / Or did we just pretend?” Similarly, the first poem of Reminiscences discusses a poetry machine which takes works and organizes them into syntactically well-formed sentences. This machine and his description of it makes a not-so-subtle reference to early generative grammar, such as reference to “a language L” which is also featured on page 13 of Noam Chomsky’s 1957, now legendary, Syntactic Structures. However, the poetry machine composes lines of limited length, which is at odds with the early generative observation that human sentences are in principle infinitely long. “No string may be too long / And, least of all, infinitely long.” The formalization of language into technology, then, missed an important aspect of human language in the process: its infinite nature. Human nature is equally difficult to formalize, as he concludes near the end of the book: “Really interesting people have one thing in common: it is difficult to formulate what makes them such.”

Hope comes from elsewhere, namely, from whatever it is that makes things seem so chaotic in the first place, from the fact that you are a part of that chaos. “There is something in your voice … / that is for me / and no one else. / Not everything was senseless.” This is almost a non sequitur – why should we assume that because there was something which had some indefinable meaning “for you” make things make sense? But we are not to assume it; it is the position he argues for throughout the book. Time is fluid, and everything is constantly changing in response to everything else. How it changes defies logic, but when you are part of something so chaotic, only chaos makes sense.

I should mention that there are two annoying tendencies in this book. They are not fatal, but you do have to do some work to get past them. The first is his tendency to use clichés. When he declares, for example, “I did not choose this profession / This profession chose me” in reference to his career as a college professor, one is immediately reminded of Jay-Z: “This is the life I chose, or, rather, the life that chose me.” Of course, Jay-Z doesn’t get credit for the expression either, but like many clichés, it seems tired and lacking in insight.

The biggest problem with this book, though, is its tendency to over-explain. The ‘notes’ section is the most obvious example. Did you wonder what he was talking about with some kind of ‘poetry machine’? No worries, it’s all explained in the back of the book. What was that stuff about Clark Kent being Superman? Just check to the explanation in the back. Maybe I’ll look up that reference later to get a better understanding of the poem… no need, the poem and the reference are explained in full in the back of the book.

While over-footnoting might be okay (there are definitely times when footnotes are an absolute must), the tendency to over-explain also shows up in the poems themselves. “And libraries are subways.” A nice line. Would you like a minute to think about the comparison? Don’t bother, the next three lines tell you exactly what he means: “You often know where you emerge / to the agitated life of the surface again, /but sometimes in a completely unexpected place.” Great, now that line’s ruined.

An even better example is the poem “Centuries and Minutes.” The sub-title is “Poem for New Year’s Eve 1999.” Again, I wish he had left more up to the imagination. I have a hard time imagining how I would feel about this poem if I weren’t immediately accosted with the image of a maybe-slightly-too-drunk poet in the corner of a medium-sized party, pencil and notebook in hand, pretending not to be making a big scene about writing his “Millennium” poem.

Nevertheless, the poem has great moments. The fact that “Time is presence” is homophonous (in English – translator’s doing?) with presents (as in a series of present times) screams out the theme of the book along with another simple, but nice line “All that exists is a now /and that now can never end.” Again, eternity comes for free with a viewpoint which accepts the constant effect everything has on everything else.

This book is worth your time. If you can look past a few annoying clichés and some over-explaining, you will find genuine insight here. It will at least precisify ideas you might already have and supplement them with thoughtful examples and images (like, dogs). Although this book, like all others, will eventually be as moribund as anything else, it will certainly have an effect on you, and maybe that is all you can really hope for.

*

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That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness

Saturday, August 2nd, 2008

by Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney
Otoliths 2008
Reviewed by John Deming

8

Anthems for a Seventeen-Year Old Girl

Gabbert & Rooney CoverAmerican collaborative poetry is a peculiar rabbit, partially because the American tradition is so rooted in self-reliance. In the introduction to Saints of Hysteria, an anthology of collaborative poetry published last year, Charles Henri Ford (an early practitioner of 20th century collaboration) is quoted as calling the method a kind of “intellectual sport.” Yes, sport.  Play sounds about right; as the reader, you get to watch poets have a blast.

But I’m suspicious of most collaborative poetry. In Saints of Hysteria, poems are accompanied by authors’ notes explaining process. I can’t help but feel that this is because in much collaborative poetry, process is the only valuable part; the poems themselves are seldom live enough to outstrip the poets’ blatant need for creative, collaborative process—in select cases, their need for a public banding of arms. But of course it’s the resulting organism, not the authorship, which matters most in poetry.

That said, I’ll borrow a construction from the venerable Kurt Loder: I think I’d trade the last six “collaborative” books I’ve read for just half of Elisa Gabbert and Kathleen Rooney’s hip, smart, self-aware and incredibly focused new collection.

The best thing about That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness is that it is a singular, sustained inspiration spoken by a singular, if conflicted, voice. The other best thing is how completely unreserved the authors are about using “teenage” language. They live in 21st century United States, which means they live in the world of text messages, of expressions like “LOL” and “hottie”—and they have the speech of the place. Which of course means they risk a number of easy criticisms.

Yet these criticisms would not only show a complete misunderstanding of satire and irony–they would be the criticisms of some all-knowing “authority figure” who thinks—teaches, even—that things can only be one way. This “authority figure” is to be defied. Of course rebellion for its own sake, while charming, is ultimately juvenile. This poet willfully floats on her sinking raft, fully aware of the air as it hisses out, fully aware that she is, by natural law, on the road to becoming some form of “authority figure” herself.

That is, the Gabert/Rooney poet at once makes fun of and celebrates her own naïveté. She is a strikingly, believably conflicted young woman who is generally good-natured about her romantic, professional, and fatalistic struggles. She is sarcastic, but never cynical:

                                       …everyone knows
college is a rite of middle classage. They said
Write what you know—what I know is
waitressing.

These lines seem a refusal of banal regurgitations that might creep up in formal education. But there’s a nice contradiction; amid her anti-intellectualism, she relies significantly on formalism. There is a lot of speedy, associative back-and-forth, but there’s also an abundance of villanelles, tritinas and ghazals, even a cento. Our heroine has an unreserved flare for modern slang, pop culture references, and playful commentary on the business of poetry. In fact, the title That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness is a slice of poetic commentary, a neatly ironic reference to another line of “collaborative poetry”: a Robert Bly translation of Theodor Storm, one that can only be described as vintage Bly, almost absurdly romantic.

The jokey Bly reference is emblematic of how wholly ironic this book is. Early on, our poet remarks that “somehow bad drama is worse than bad comedy.” Some items in this book border on the latter, but do so knowingly. Take for example the constant impulse to rhyme:

Yet the leader of the rabbits was
making a racket, disappearing over
the ridge in a blaze-orange jacket.

There’s a whole history of forced rhymes that “work” because the poet or songwriter delights in his ability to find and link like-sounding language (think hip-hop, think Woody Guthrie and the folk tradition that predetermined him). Yet these moments of play are quick, associative distractions from various personal issues the poet encounters. For one, she has always had to obey authority figures:

                                             …Authority
figure, biblical allusions are the hobgoblin
of gregarious gasbags, frantic last gasps of your brand
of blowhard. Coming home in a body bag
is not what I got this bod all jacked to do. Can’t you
accept my pacifist vows? One more kapow
& I’m through being Officer Dirty Little Secret.

If one is to defy someone purely on the basis of the fact that that person is an “authority figure,” then what does one do if one succeeds, and overthrows the powerful? Regardless of their virtues, they are to become an “authority figure” and, by definition, should be resisted by the next generation. Our poet anticipates this transition: “The word monster comes from the Latin to show. / If you don’t believe me, you might have a problem with trust.”

This coming-of-age quality resists being rote or sentimental because it’s completely unabashed, unhinged. This narrator is like Allen Ginsberg’s narrator in “America”; she indicts the Established Order as a means of exposing her own weaknesses. She propels herself into adulthood in the most American way possible: goes to college, makes friends, makes sloppy decisions, learns about herself from them. “Temp” offers some cloudy intoxication:

           …I can’t breathe in here. Are those
the hands of an angel holding my hair? 
Throwing up, I think, it’s just like me to think
this is so unlike me, this thick upheaval.

Forget the puns for a moment and you see a person—one person, not two—growing older, testing her own limits, seeing if the image she’s projected of herself lo these many years is in fact the person she is growing into: a college graduate taught with great cliché to write what she knows while wondering (perhaps with an eye on the job market) if she knows anything at all.

If her business of choice didn’t turn out be as glamorous as it could’ve been, neither did her love life. The poet often addresses her partner; in “Second Person Omnipotent,” he’s likened to (or is) one of those odd Renaissance Faire aficionados:

Ever since you bought those pantaloons
it’s King Richard’s Feste this, Renaissance
Faire that. Can’t we stay home? I’m sick of
jousting. Any time you go to a spectacle,
you expect to be “slayed.” This willingness,
nay, desperateness to be impressed,
your notorious sense of wonder has long
been one of the world’s greatest blunders.

Playful, virulent. In “What Happens in Vegas,” we even learn that someone is “in serious recovery / from the breakup of the century.” But if relationships aren’t quite perfect, that’s okay. The book also offers what I’ll call a tongue-in-cheek Sex and the City aesthetic (I say this as a person who despises the show). Talking with girlfriends about relationships and sex is as good, if not better, than assorted attempts at meaningful, long-term relationships. Sadness is replaced with nostalgic sass:

                                …Misty looks bombed
& Crystal’s passed out in the unisex restroom.
A fitting name, really, since we’ve all had sex
in that funky little lovesexy wreck of a room.

Some people will hate this kind of talk, which is fine, but I think if they do, they misunderstand satire. This book catalogues the mutation—not destruction—of idealism. This is an important distinction. While I love Cate Marvin’s book Fragment of the Head of a Queen, I’ve always hated a rhetorical question issued as part of the “summary” on the back of the book: “What are we to do when experience hands our idealism back to us in pieces?” I think anyone who grows up thinking they’ll someday wear a sparkling gown and glass slippers probably deserves to get blindsided. The poet behind Voluptuousness treats disappointment with perspective, as though there are far greater evils in the world.

Which leads to the important point that the book’s formal bent and slangy girl-talk bent would be for naught if no for its fatalistic bent. The quotes I’ve presented so far should give you a good sense for the tone and play of Voluptuousness, but leave out an important element: the surety of death, of nothing, of how empty ambition can be, even as a war on death. “The Day After the Day After Tomorrow” is emblematic of how play (the poem’s title puns a movie title) can be counter-balanced by our most elemental fears:

                                    …I never asked to be a hero,
friends, but since when have we gotten what we want?

I know there was something I wanted to do before the end,
but I forgot. Tell mother I loved her. The sky is green.

And earlier, in “Lucid Villanelle,” we see this balance again: “& I’ll never die b/c this is a dream.” Yes, even people who say “LOL” and “b/c” will die someday. “Tritinal w/ DTHWSH” has a morbidity all its own:

A death wish is a normal wish

for the girl who’s done everything. I wish
I could fill the blanks of every if-then
scenario w/ surprise. But life, friends,

upends all wishes & dies—see you then.

The poets are in such accord that you forget it’s a collaboration; the poets are single cells on alternate sides of the brain; the poems are the point, not the process. “Ambition makes you look pretty ugly,” writes ironist Thom Yorke. You still have to pay the bills. In the final poem, our poet wraps up every loose end and resists her childish rebellion:

Tiny hearts all over my c.v. led me
to a lovely unemployment. I say:
Let the kids do what they’re gonna—
that’s the only way they’ll learn.
I miss it already, all the kissing
of my youth, the days of yore.
Forget what I’ve said before. This is
all I’ve got. There isn’t any more.

She indicts the authority figure; she’s also ready to make some concessions; it’s the stuff of growing up in America.

If Ford is right and collaborative poetry is “intellectual sport,” I think that most collaborative poetry is more like the Home Run Derby than it is a real game; all pomp and workout, little at stake (pardon the baseball reference; the MLB Home Run Derby just took place a few miles from my home). And Rooney and Gabbert have a good bit of fun. The poem titles, for example, are often funny (“Dark Days With the Dark Knight”), sometimes annoying (“Abercrombie Addresses Fitch”), and always enthusiastic (“Baby, Oh No!”)—yet I have hunch that each knows what it is doing. You might argue that the slang and references will soon be outmoded and irrelevant, that looking back, this book might look like little more than two pals goofing off with way too much free-association and forced rhyme. Fair enough. But a book that’s able to simultaneously accept and reject the Established Order of its own medium is not a common thing.

*

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