by Mark Halliday
Tupelo Press 2008
Reviewed by Ken L. Walker
Oh, Like a Rock
Hopefully, it is unquestionable that intelligent people read poetry. Interesting people too. One would have to be far more than a saltine cracker to come to this microcosm. The ever-sentimental medium has faced consistent backlash and change, in the sense that, like human beings ourselves, we are always studying the currents and paddling against them. Keeping up. Originally, I was going to utilize this space to discuss the milieu of prisms that poetry has offered. Instead, I’d rather pose the question: why is there a dividing line (or series of partitions); and, the answer to that question will hopefully manifest via a review of Mark Halliday’s new book, Keep This Forever.
There are a few dozen poetry-writers that seem to speak to an invisible audience who wear regular shoes, of Iowans, corn farmers that might otherwise hate poetry (See: George Bush’s nomination of Ted Kooser for poet laureate). The peddler riding the fence between mainstream, academic, experimental, etc. poetry may be someone like Billy Collins or Charles Simic (though those two do not go together at all). The point is, there will always be a poet that can be elevated to the status of talking head (See also Elizabeth Alexander’s over-willed effort on Inauguration Day 2009). And the talking head is usually a low-bar piece of spoiled fruit or a middle-bar piece of trash.
Mark Halliday is the worser version of the above. His new book, Keep This Forever, is no less than hanging around with your boring uncle that took his undergraduate education barely serious enough to average 8 Genessee cream ales a day and now looks back on it, while drinking bad scotch, with a plasticized, pathetic nostalgia. Halliday, ends his poem “Venus Pandemos” from the award-winning book Little Star, like this: “I wonder if any intelligent feminists / will ever read this poem.” More than likely, “they” don’t and would not need to waste the energy or effort because a Halliday poem, in no way, is a learning experience. Should be a burning experience.
The only redemptive moment of the new book appears at the beginning of the poem “Enchanted Field” when M.H. writes, “I am being given my chance / and I am blowing it.” Symbolism. Symbolism.
Examine this horrific attempt at poetry: “I was a fool! Because the cheese and fruit were finite//whereas you were of infinity.” That just happened. The poem’s title is “Confession to Mary,” starring Tom Hanks and an ugly Audrey Tautou rip-off. The book’s best poem is “Bonnie,” when Halliday decides to get fresh with his white/male privilege and pull off a liberally slanted political comparison poem. But, everything else is a cookie the exact childlike shape of a Christmas tree or a Valentine heart. Nothing here is a sumptuous dessert in the form of a boulder on a man’s shoulders (as it should be since the bulk of the book deals with the death of M.H.’s father). The attempt is spit on a lamp, only to burn up and evaporate by sizzling dust.
Halliday is noted, in the past , for his “unsentimental reminiscence.” This book flips that script: M.H. tries his hardest to break the local Waltham, Massachusetts Hallmark store window. Instead, he goes limp, drops the brick on his foot and gets arrested. If you’re going to be “unsentimental” then do it, balls to the wall, blood on the floor, body parts organized in the freezer. Hell, push someone in front of a bus. Not here, this is lazy unsentimentality.
This brings me to the place I would rather not traverse, especially with Halliday—a place John Ashbery understands when he says he doesn’t think poetry should be all that accessible. When poetry turns into Bob Seger right around his “Like a Rock” phase, maybe that is exactly (under the rock) where it should go and hide. So Chevrolet or the US presidency cannot co-opt it. So its fans stay steady. The dividing line that exists between those of us who nerdily and retroactively read and seek out wonderful poetry and the folks who (maybe) work too damn much to want to get off and read a poem—the dividing line should not exist. Bad poetry is bad no matter if you’re in a New York library or an Iowa corn field. Thank Halliday for making that very clear.
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I’ll begin with the external. When I first picked up wing’d, a limited edition chapbook from Blood Pudding Press (ick), I knew it would be a strange journey. It’s a beautifully crafted little artifact with intriguing cover art by 
In 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”).
I wanted to like this book. The set up is a recasting of Ezra Pound as Merlin enacting some kind of ritual self-sacrifice, killed by the irrelevance of his own magical poetic myths, and it contains interesting quotes from Buddha, Churchill and William Carlos Williams. The idea became less and less coherent as I read. In this book we do not care about Pound, Merlin, or the knights of the Round Table, or wonder at how magic persists without them. In the first section, there is much talk about food and the creativity of chefs, and if I had to choose, I’d rather eat than read poetry, but somehow with all this talk of food, I am never made hungry. It is one thing to try to cure yourself by glut, as was done so gamely in Fast Food Nation, but it is entirely another if you don’t like the taste of McDonald’s food in the first place. I am all for a reconsideration of our pieties, but this overwritten mess makes no sense.
A book of poetry worth returning to is touched in some respect with the unexpected and unpredictable. In Hayan Charara’s second book, The Sadness of Others, they never arrive. The narrator, freshly abandoned by his wife, also struggles with his mother’s death. The intentions are there, and the emotions are there, but by and large the work comes off as sentimental, and almost every poem seems overwritten. In several cases, solid poems are spoiled by Charara’s attempt to write his way in and write his way out. Take the poem “To My Mother on the Occasion of the Fifth Year of Her Death.” There’s some nice narrative: