Archive for November, 2009

Sleepers’ Republic

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

by David Gruber
Astrophil Press 2008
Reviewed by PJ Gallo

7

The World Outside

gruber coverNo matter how deliberately we arrange language, certain states of mind defy our attempts to freeze them into poems.  David Gruber’s Sleepers’ Republic is a book of tightly composed, rhythmic dreams, and like all dreams, they are undermined by their translation into English.  They shift through geography and time as dreams do.  They turn suddenly forbidding where they were once joyous.  They slip into and out of coherence.  But necessarily, the words his speakers choose are the words used to describe a dream, not the dream itself, and the best poems in Sleepers’ Republic faintly acknowledge that even a dream world is limited by language.  In the first stanza of “Approved Methods,” Gruber reveals one of the ways he will attempt to recreate the experience of dreaming:

Strange wedding music, savage
echo against the brass door
a coughing
an interruption
that slid through the water
where we hung.

Here, Gruber presents a set of disconnected images that seem uniquely compatible with one another.  It is hard to place why “wedding music” and “brass door” make such an appropriate pair, but together they become a foundation for the tiny universe of the poem.  The poems are held together with a recognizable Lynchian logic, though even in his most acclaimed and recognizable dream sequences, David Lynch can only capture the spirit of dreaming.  While Gruber’s poems are less superficially provocative than Lynch’s sequences, like Lynch, Gruber is restricted to conjuring the spirit of dreaming.  Interestingly though, he discloses the impossibility of such perfection.  Sometimes this acknowledgement is explicit, as in “No vocabulary is enough / to catalogue your geography,” and sometimes it is subtle.  The first several stanzas of “Prelude in a Time of War” dither over where to begin:

In the queen’s closet, with no mirror:
lavender soap, open window, the scent
of oranges and sky beginning to blue.

Or: a broken pane of glass
held together with masking tape.
Bacon frying down below.
Photographs pinned to the wall.

Or: the worm tunnels through our guts,
the moth settles in our nostrils.

Gruber’s speaker cannot decide which image is best, and when he makes broad, cinematic cuts from image to image to image, he admits the failure of all three.  None is a perfect beginning, and the failure of language begets the failure of dreaming. 

Though his poems arise out of a sleepers’ republic, they are a way for Gruber to reckon with the real world’s troubles.  His speakers’ inability to effectively construct their dream-like existence becomes their failure to effectively contend with real sociological, political, emotional and intellectual concerns.  In one moment of such concern, Gruber imagines a glossing-over of agriculture, a deeply necessary pursuit, with media-induced artificiality:

There are field and dreams about wild herd. Once the clover is gathered the hay is baled and rolled. There are cartoons of these things: the soiled colors that overtake knowledge and replace the organs under flesh with a composite of image and speculation. Every eye an iris, all the leaves dampened by snow dissolve in their cinema.

In moments like this, it becomes clear that Gruber’s speakers are not hiding behind dream logic, but that they have been forced behind it.  The “cartooning” of the landscape is the speaker’s way of reaching out from behind the veil of the dreaming and into a world where “cartoons” have specific implications.  Of course all language has specific implications, and the world of the dream, rooted in the subconscious of real people, is a negative image of the world outside the dream.  Through a process of reverse-engineering (i.e. reading), the stilted goings-on of the poems’ dreams appear increasingly representative of the real world, and the speaker’s prohibition from proactively responding to a very real, very important reality depict a common, contemporary feeling of individual helplessness.

If dreaming is an apt half-metaphor for contemporary life, any confrontation of the world’s violence (as made unconfrontable by distance or time) is restricted to waking and describing the dream.  If the dream is indescribable, the world eludes consequential influence from the individual.  In “Lisbon,” Gruber writes, “Once the softest word made the world tremble / […] but it came that we wrote loud / large on land and sky.”  The speaker here is privy to the ineffectuality of language because, unlike in the past, language has little manifest effect on the world outside the poem.  The speaker is caged by the way the world demands certain things from language.  One poem, “Film: Butterfly Oeuvre,” is stuck pretending to be a film.  Another, “Instructions for Antigone,” is stuck pretending to be stage directions.  Even the emotional realities of many of Gruber’s poems cannot avoid infiltration by the bits of premade language that float overbearingly around in contemporary speech.  In “Ingathering of the Exiles,” Gruber writes “Satellite passes you to me again, a plea from / outside my service area.”  That the emotional reality of the poem is supported by the phrase “service area” makes great sense, as if amid many attempts to cut through language toward truth, Gruber takes language back and stabs deeply and momentarily at those things that keep us contained in our dreams.  Even where no art is perfectly accurate, we still continue to try, and when the world becomes “like a magazine forgotten / on a chair, then reupholstered,” it is not only forgotten, but also noticed again.

*

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Ashbery, Proust and Time

Friday, November 20th, 2009

john ashberymarcel proust

***

by John Deming 

John Ashbery is releasing a new book, Planisphere: New Poems, this month. Ashbery is prolific, but is not to be confused with the many successful older poets often accused of over-publishing. Ashbery’s many books, each distinct, are very much a part of the same project: small projects that combine to form an expansive interpretation of time, among other things. In that sense, he probably as more in common with a figure like Marcel Proust. Here is a look at both writers. First, I have listed some comments Ashbery made about Proust; next, I have included the whole of his poem “Proust’s Questionnaire”; finally, I have included a short essay about these two writers and their common obsession: time.

Here are some comments Ashbery made about Proust in a1983 Paris Review interview with Peter Stitt:

“Sometimes I would do a Proustian excursion, looking at buildings he or his characters had lived in. Like his childhood home in the Boulevard Malesherbes or Odette’s house in the rue La Pérouse.”

“I read Proust for a course with Harry Levin, and that was a major shock.”

“I started reading it when I was twenty (before I took Levin’s course) and it took me almost a year. I read very slowly anyway, but particularly in the case of a writer whom I wanted to read every word of. It’s just that I think one ends up feeling sadder and wiser in equal proportions when one is finished reading him—I can no longer look at the world in quite the same way.”

“Yes [I was attracted by the intimate, meditative voice of his work], and the way somehow everything could be included in this vast, open form that he created for himself—particularly certain almost surreal passages. There’s one part where a philologist or specialist on place names goes on at great length concerning places names in Normandy. I don’t know why it is so gripping, but it seizes the way life sometimes seems to have of droning on in a sort of dreamlike space. I also identified with, on account of the girl in my art class[1], with the narrator, who had a totally impractical passion which somehow both enveloped the beloved cocoon and didn’t have much to do with her.”

 

[1] Earlier in the interview Ashbery mentions taking an art class and falling “deeply in love with a girl who was in the class but who wouldn’t have anything to do with me.” (392) 

 

Here is Ashbery’s poem “Proust’s Questionnaire” from 1981’s A Wave:

I am beginning to wonder
Whether this alternative to
Sitting back and doing something quiet
Is the clever initiative it seemed. It’s
Also relaxation and sunlight branching into
Passionate melancholy, jealousy of something unknown;
And our minds, parked in the sky over New York,
Are nonetheless responsible. Nights
When the paper comes
And you walk around the block
Wrenching yourself from the lover every five minutes
And it hurts, yet nothing is ever really clean
Or two-faced. You are losing your grip
And there are still flowers and compliments in the air:
“How did you like the last one?”
“Was I good?” “I think it stinks.”

It’s a question of questions, first:
The nuts-and-bolts kind you know you can answer
And the impersonal ones you answer almost without meaning to:
“My greatest regret.” “What keeps the world from falling down.”
And then the results are brilliant:
Someone is summoned to a name, and soon
A roomful of people becomes dense and contoured
And words come out of the wall
To batter the rhythm of generation following on generation.

And I see once more how everything
Must be up to me: here a calamity to be smoothed away
Like ringlets, there the luck of uncoding
This singular cipher of primary
And secondary colors, and the animals
With us in the ark, happy to be there as it settles
Into an always more violent sea.

The ceaseless passage of time is among the most prevalent concerns in both Ashbery and Proust. “Time” is the last word in Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (both the book and the poem, as the title poem concluded the collection); every daily event “arrives / Flush with its edges,” posits the title poem. Faith in a single deity is a “contradiction of fundamental logic,” he writes in “The System,” one of three prose poems comprising Three Poems. The devout live “with the eye and the mind focused on a nonexistent center, a fixed point, when the common sense of even an idiot would be enough to make him realize that nothing has stopped.”

Still, the elaborate sentences in “The System” are full of irony and often contradiction, indicative of an internal debate that resists resolution of any kind, even the resolution that there is no such thing as resolution. Like Proust, Ashbery has created a “vast, open form” for himself. Over the course of 28 books, he has published poems of every conceivable variety and tests the limits of his forms on a very large scale. It’s equally freeing, it seems, to constrain each poem in a collection to four quatrains (Shadow Train) and see what develops, or to let dense prose dictate it own course page after page (Three Poems).

Here’s how Proust concludes his six-volume serial novel In Search of Lost Time: “So, if I were given long enough to accomplish my work, I should not fail, even if the effect were to make them resemble monsters…for simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years, they touch the distant epochs through which they have lived, between which so many days have come to range themselves—in Time.” Another novel, Jean Santeuil, concludes, “the work of life and death, the work of time, proceeded on its course without a break.” Each end defies the notion of “end”—time continues, leveling, perhaps equalizing, discovering anything in its path. Time is presence, fitted with otherness; as Ashbery states in his 2007 poem “Anticipated Stranger,”: “God will find the pattern and break it.”

Much of Proust’s prose, much like certain passages in Ashbery’s poetry and creative prose, involves extended sentences that arrive flush with the passing of time; they do their best to hold off the “certitude” or “stopping point” of a period, or the stopping point of a fixed, certain idea. Time is positioned as a human being’s most fundamental problem, and accomplishing whatever work time permits one to accomplish – accounting for time as it passes, and learning from it – seems the appropriate response. This says something about the volume of work that both have produced. Time is the space a person occupies; passed time is “beneath” a person, according to Proust, leaving one standing on higher and higher stilts until they either collapse for good, or extend to a new, unrecognizable set of circumstances. Ashbery notes in “Convex” that days grow “concentrically” around a life, a more useful representation of time than the traditional “linear” timeline. Time is not backwards to forwards; it is a plane, and to feel it passing is to feel warps in the curve of spacetime.

As Ashbery notes in his Paris Review interview, any profound realization a person comes to, any moment of epiphany or catharsis, is greeted with the passing of that profound realization and the presentation of a new, perhaps more complex set of problems:

“Things are in a continual state of motion and evolution, and if we come to a point where we say, with certitude, right here, this is the end of the universe, then of course we must deal with everything that goes on after that, whereas ambiguity seems to take further developments into account.”

It’s a fitting justification for what has often been considered ambiguity in Ashbery’s poetry; it’s the “I’m doing this, I’m doing that” of the subconscious, the “droning on in a sort of dreamlike space.” There is room in time for “cold pockets / of remembrance” (“Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”), and romantic obsession and memory might fill that dreamlike space for the obsessed, regarding nothing as a final truth or certainty except for the fact that time will continue to pass, and that truths and obsessions will shift and evolve, settling “into an always more violent sea” (“Proust’s Questionnaire”). Time is a “vast, open space” to occupy, and both writers chronicle the still blanker spaces. The contradiction about “settling” into a “violent” sea is unsurprising, because Ashbery always allows for contradiction — the passing of time can’t be quantified as purely violent or purely settling.

What questions might Proust seem to be asking of Ashbery, or of anyone, in “Proust’s Questionairre”? “It’s a question of questions, first: / That nuts-and-bolts kind you know you can answer / And the impersonal ones you answer almost without meaning to. / ‘My greatest regret.’” Attempts to answer these questions “are brilliant”: nearly a conscious antidote to the passing of time—“words come out of the wall / To batter the rhythm of generation following on generation” — like Proust’s “distant epochs” through which everyone passes at once.

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Waldrop wins National Book Award

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

keith waldropKeith Waldrop has won the 2009 National Book Award for poetry for his collection Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy. “If transcendental immanence were possible, it would be because Keith Waldrop had invented it,” reads the citation for the award. “He’s the only one who could—and in Transcendental Studies he has.” Waldrop was also nominated for the award in 1968 for his first book, A Windmill Near Calvary. Other nominees included Versed by Rae Armantrout, Open Interval by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Or To Begin Again by Anne Lauterbach and Speak Low by Carl Phillips. Judges were Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, A. Van Jordan, Cole Swensen and Kevin Young.

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Monday, November 16th, 2009

Matt Lombardi has a story about poets at Bellevue Literary Revue

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Swimming Back

Friday, November 13th, 2009

by Taylor Altman
Sunnyoutside 2008
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

5

“little occurrences / become catastrophes”

altman coverIn her first book, Taylor Altman highlights the neutral essence of time and the emotional traumas that result from the death of her narrator’s father. The poems are consistently melancholy, drab, numb. Appropriate for the subject matter. However, the consistency of the landscape in Swimming Back becomes distracting, makes the poems feel repetitive and prohibits the narration from achieving any sense of progression. The opening poem, “Fog,” is one of her best.

The obstacle “Fog” has to overcome is the same obstacle many poems in this book have to overcome. Altman often relies on her impulse to “reinvent” cliché. In “Fog,” the narrator skirts around the admission of a void; many objects in the poem are “empty”; a dog begs by the door, hoping for an opportunity to escape. The narrator is also looking for an escape, an exit. The tone of the poem is well-established, but has nowhere to go. Altman writes, “Lobstermen / come back with empty traps, maybe a boot // that floated up.” The boot is boring, but what follows is unexpected: “from the carcass of a whale.” Suddenly, I’m reminded of Pinnochio, Gepetto, Monstro…and sneezing. But I don’t know where to go from there.

What’s most interesting in “Fog” is the final image. “On the jetty, someone has left a wetsuit, // arms spread wide on that vacant space of rock, / as if embracing a thing which has no name.” The wetsuit is indicative of the speaker’s feelings of loss and abandonment, the attempt to grasp the ungraspable or reconnect with someone who is no longer physically accessible. The lines are reminiscent of Mark Strand’s in “The Night, The Porch.” He writes, “baring oneself / To the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by.” Where Strand’s narrator allows himself to wallow in the unknown, to feel its presence and stand in awe of it, Altman’s attempts control, is unable to produce an emotional response and so projects her sensations onto her surroundings. “Fog” achieves a measure of stasis that other poems in this book attempt to achieve. Most don’t come close. The poem is full of rhythm, and occassional end-stopped lines add to a veiled, but general sadness. The poem has a thoughtful and internal pace; it is slow and solemn, but peaceful.

Nearly every poem in the collection deals with the speaker’s inability to form an emotional response to the loss of her father. Instead, she interacts with, or imposes herself upon, her environment. In “Bees,” a young speaker is stung by – a bee. However, she, once again, seems numb to the experience, and, at first, doesn’t notice that she has been stung. Once she does become cognizant of what has happened, she doesn’t cry like might be expected of a young girl. The stinger is removed and the only thing the speaker is aware of is “a pair of hands / pushing [her] into the yard again. / And the summer afternoon goes on, unchanged.” The idea here seems to be that the external world ignores the difficult experiences of its inhabitants. Again, from “The Night, The Porch”: “There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there / Tells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.” The universe was never sensitive to humans’ existence; it has little regard for humankind’s self-importance. The speaker in Altman is relying on human support; she fears the overwhelming and inevitable absence that Strand’s speaker has made his religion.

The passing of each poem mimics the passing of time on earth. The only change in the rural and residential landscape is the change in seasons. However, as time passes, the mood of the speaker darkens. In fact, “The Girls at the Pool” makes reference to suicide. Altman’s narrator feels like an outcast, is alienated and isolated from the other girls her age. The other girls recognize this division. It is tangible, and they stare intensely and cruelly at her. Altman writes:

…Their gaze
falls on my shoulders, pulls me down
the way I’d later go, into the river,
trench coat packed with flatirons.

The lines reference the suicide of Virginia Woolf and suggest that the narrator plans to end her life in a similar fashion, or at least that she has fantasies of doing so. Rather than healing, the passing of time seems to be bringing further difficulty and mental anguish. It is a common misconception that time itself is an agent of healing.

But the notion that time heals carries an anesthetic and paralytic effect that is perfect for suburbia. (I’m a fan of the suburbs. Many people require sprawling spaces to develop into full human beings, to explore their inner psyches, spirituality, and humanity; however, many also succumb to the lack of culture and competitve edge in the suburbs.) In a poem called “Fireworks” — one of the most exciting social events in the suburbs—Altman comments on the banal life that is often referred to as “the real world.” She writes, “Whenever grownups / talk, it’s always about nothing / but always urgently important.” While this may be true, it is hardly unheard of. It recalls the poignancy of books like Revolutionary Road, but without the representative dialogue. In the sitcom King of Queens, Arthur Spooner (Jerry Stiller) characterizes the lassitude and monotony of suburban life. He asks his daughter if she is happy “schlepping coffee by day and folding giant underwear at night.” These humorous images produce more effective commentary than Altman’s bromides.

The speaker grows frustrated and ever-angrier at the isolation and sterility of her environment. She envies the intimate relationships of those around her. Poems like “Night Music” emanate a deep sense of desperation and lonlieness. The speaker of “Night Music” listens to her neighbors making love or having sex (it’s unclear which). In the last three lines of the poem, the speaker nearly becomes one with the experience: “I felt it as her tongue / passed across his bottom lip / and receded like a wave.” The lines are far too prosaic. But their banality is rivalled by that of “Back to School Shopping,” where wide-ruled notebooks and unsharpened pencils are the major players. The speaker waits for the bus with her peanut butter sandwich and leather satchel. She is waiting for a familiar sight: a yellow bus. It is yet another reminder that sometimes the unfamiliar is frightening, but that its urgency should not be ignored.

*

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NY poets mix up the medicine

Monday, November 9th, 2009

bob dylan subterreanean

On Friday, October 30, Roddy Lumsden gathered 30 poets inside the Ding Dong Lounge on the Upper West side of Manhattan in observance of Bob Dylan’s song “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” The poets had been emailed part of the lyrics to Dylan’s song and asked to riff off it.  Some poets chose to rework lyrics or write poems inspired by or in the style of the lyrics. Monica Youn’s poem was one of several that rhymed. Amy Lemmon’s worked with a narrative that seemed explicitly related to having the “blues.” 

Other poets focused on wordplay and rhythm, including Flarfist Sharon Mesmer, who to no one’s surprise managed to make the crowd laugh and work “tits” into her poem.  Mark Bibbins’s poems utilized the word “honkey.”  The constant repetition of this word managed to make it at turns funny, offensive or often poignant, capturing both Dylan the musician and Dylan the personality.

A majority of the poems were aggressive.  Sasha Fletcher read a piece (it sounded like prose, maybe it was a prose poem?) which reminded me of Raun Klassnick’s work; the Ding Dong Lounge proved to not exactly be a holy land for Bob Dylan.  In fact, I was a bit surprised at how many poets eagerly admitted that Bob Dylan meant very little to them, or that they actually disliked him. One poet mentioned that she had always preferred The Smiths and hated Bob Dylan. I’ve always liked both Dylan and The Smiths, and didn’t know before this reading that one must have an allegiance to one or the other.

I appreciate that this reading allowed for both praise and dissidence in regards to Bob Dylan – but no one who pronounced their dislikes for Dylan posited reasons why, so most of the anti-Dylans came off as taste-makers concerned with posturing as “cool” and “anti.”   Maybe that’s how they perceive Dylan – and that was their point?  Seemed like bland “for or against” opinion-making aimed at avoiding careful study of Dylan. Seemed that way.  Overall, to organize 30 poets and have an attendance that swelled to at least 75 on a Friday night is a success.

–Steven Karl

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Motion rebuts plagiarism claim

Monday, November 9th, 2009

andrew motionFormer British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion is “jarred,” and unconvinced, by historian Ben Shephard’s claim that Motion’s poem “An Equal Voice” – a “found” poem about war which Motion prefaces by acknowledging he uses excerpts from Shephard’s 2001 history of medical psychiatry, A War of Nerves – is an act of plagiarism. More at Guardian, which published the controversial poem on Saturday.

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O Holy Cow!: The Selected Verse of Phil Rizzuto

Friday, November 6th, 2009

by Phil Rizzuto
Edited by Tom Peyer and Hart Seeley
First Edition: The Ecco Press 1993
Reviewed by John Deming

5_5

“Very Confusing…”

rizzuto coverIt is true that, by their nature, organized sports serve as a constant assertion that there is a very real difference between winning and losing. It is true that there are those who take this lesson too seriously. But sports, especially professional sports, can also provide what the arts can provide: the absence of confusion, the presence of order. Each game represents, to borrow a line from John Ashbery, “the perfectly plausible accomplishment of a purpose”: the game will be played to its conclusion. Somebody will win. At season’s end, somebody will win it all.

It is transitory order, but order all the same. Over a period of three or four hours, the sports fan lives a whole life: there is success, there is failure, there is the always mutating ratio of ability to effort to luck – and in the end, there is a clear determination as to whether you, the follower, are damned or redeemed. The first pitch in a baseball game, then, is the enactment of form against time; something has to happen by the end. Oceanic swells of calm and chaos ensue, and a viewer feels, to quote a B.H. Fairchild poem, “the wide wings of the present tense.” Sports broadcasters – with their excruciating know-it-allism, insularity and bugaboo lexicon – are charged with stitching order throughout the affair, and negotiating a truce between the game and the outside world.

Enter Phil Rizzuto, nickname Scooter, who played shortstop for the New York Yankees from 1941 to 1956. He won seven World Series titles in his tenure, and never played for any other team. He became a broadcaster fairly quickly upon leaving the Yankees, and kept it up for four decades. He was quaint, quirky and likeable. His catch phrase was “holy cow”; players who disappointed him were “huckleberries.” He unabashedly rooted for the home team, and invented the scoring notation “WW” for “wasn’t watching.” Rizzuto was a character who misread Teleprompters, who reportedly left games early when he heard thunder because he had a tremendous phobia about lightning.

All the while, it seems he lived in the game as equally as he lived in the abstractions he perceived around it and around him. Holy Cow!: the Selected Verse of Phil Rizzuto demonstrates a broadcaster who speaks from the very center of the present tense. The “verses,” if you’ll call them that, are comments that Rizzuto made to fellow broadcasters during games. They are “found” poems, in this sense, and are broken into lines and titled by editors Tom Peyer and Hart Seeley. Here is “Doom Balloon” in its entirety:

Another balloon coming our way,
Seaver.
Must be a downdraft
Right here.
Pink balloon.
THAT SON OF GUN’S COMING RIGHT—

Rizzuto uttered these words on August 14, 1992 at Chicago with Alex Hernandez pitching to Charlie Hayes in the third inning, two outs, bases empty, White Sox leading 1-0. I know this because each verse is fitted at the end with a game-time scenario indicating what was happening while it was spoken. Reading one of these game-time scenarios is something like looking at a photo from your third grade best friend’s birthday party – it mattered then. But each also has the potential to equalize past and present with the sudden reminder that every game will vanish as such. The balloon is coincidental, but it also an invasion. Somewhere beyond the confines of the game, there is menace – there is doom, there is the absolute certainty of death and suffering. But now, there is the game, which means the perpetuation of possibility.

So, clearly Rizzuto’s is a baseball-centered universe. The game is constant, like light. Rizzuto focuses on literal events as they take place, but also uses the game’s continuity as a platform for distraction. Baseball is a game of tempered and immediate rhythm; the stasis it provides is a given, so Rizzuto is free to think aloud – to associate stored bits of thought and experience, and allow them to float above the game itself, much in the way that characters in a novel begin to float above an entire ocean as one reads on the beach.

It is as though the occurrence of thought during a game is in the same arena, and is a serviceable a matter to discuss as an event in the game itself, because each takes place within the same dimension. No topic is off limits, because it blossomed from the static unfolding of the game; “Very Frustrated” is about fast food:

I tell ya,
I tried that new McLean burger.
Very good.

Of course,
my cholesterol is very high.
Very high.

That his McLean burger couldn’t possibly have been good, let alone very good, is beside the point. The atmosphere permits the confession about his cholesterol; the thought could’ve been internalized, but is externalized, because – why not. In the verse “Concord,” the Yankees are “at Boston” in September 1991. Rizzuto riffs on local culture, specifically Henry David Thoreau’s old town, Concord, MA:

Everything is named Walden up there.
Yeah.
Great great poet.
Another one . . .
Uh.
I gotta think of the other one up the –
Another great poet that they . . .
It really is beautiful country.
I could very easily move up there.

Thoreau, the author of Walden, was a terrific essayist and mediocre poet. But the point is that Rizzuto shows no need to internalize any thought. Everything is relevant; the game has ripened time, made it lateral and encouraged the swift blossom of association. It doesn’t matter that a moment later, Rizzuto realizes that the other “great poet” he had been thinking of is actually from Greenwich, CT, not Concord: “But I don’t have enough money / To move up to Greenwich. / So I might move up to Concord.” Phil, we all know you aren’t moving anywhere.

Sometimes, he doesn’t know why he’s saying what he’s saying; in “Hall and Nokes,” – a reference to Yankees Mel Hall and Matt Nokes – he says the names paired sound “like a good rock group.” He’s reminded that there is a group with that kind of name, and that the group is called “Hall and Oates.” He replies, “Oh yeah? / That’s one I missed. / I’ll have to go out and buy some of their records tonight.” Why?

Sometimes he loses track of what he’s saying. He begins “Go Ahead, Seaver” with a story: “You know, / Some kid wrote me a letter.” He gets distracted; the verse finishes, “I was gonna tell you something, / But I forgot what it was. / Go ahead.” The initial thought evaporates, but it doesn’t matter, because it’s not his thought right now.

In truth, much of this book reads like sports broadcasting; to that end, the line breaks often dramatize what amount to fairly benign observations. But plenty of these verses proffer the same ball field tranquility that rallies millions around the game. By tranquility, I mean a resetting of value that exists between the first pitch and final out. I realize that many sports fans are far from “tranquil” in their actions during games, and that a game can at times become a bizarre forum for misplaced anger in the way that, for Rizzuto, it becomes a bizarre forum for misplaced wonder.

But maybe that anger has more to do with the misplaced concept that the world will be worse – unfair, even – if the team loses. It is true that in sports, winning is essential and provides a necessary premise for the game to exist at all (it had to be for something, right?). I attended 11 New York Yankees games this year; if I weren’t working further uptown today, I would have gone down to the ticker tape parade up Broadway. But what’s nice about the game-time scenarios at the bottom of each Rizzuto verse – and about the verses themselves – is that they emphasize process: the communal process of the game, not its necessary end. The presence of one’s life being lived, not constant terror at things that might go wrong as you press towards an inevitable, and likely painful, death, as well as those of everyone you care about. The game itself is ecstasy; winning is merely a waking dream. Things fall apart, and this year, like the last, and the one before that, will end, Rizzuto laments in a verse named for a line by Yeats, “Mere Anarchy in Loosed Upon the World”:

I tell ya.
Before long,
Football starts.
This weekend
In seriousness.
And pretty soon
It’ll be hockey
And then basketball.
And then baseball
Will still
Be going on.
And it’ll be
Very confusing,
Very confusing.

Everyone manufactures methods for measuring time. The easiest way to dismiss sports, or any measure of devotion to them, is to regard that the sense of “order” I’ve described is wholly imagined. That if one does not play for the New York Yankees, hinging any measure of one’s mood on them barely short of stupid, and that the whole thing is a charade: the players, even the owners, are seldom natives of that town. But the important thing to consider is not that the sense of order a ballgame provides is diminished by the fact that it is manufactured; it’s that any measure of order exists because of our ability to manufacture it.

*

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Brown, Hopler, Kane win Whitings

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

jay hoplerThree poets, Jericho Brown, Jay Hopler and Joan Kane, are among ten winners of this year’s Whiting Writers’ Awards. Winners receive $50,000 each. The Whitings have been awarded to “emerging writers” annually since 1985.

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