Posts Tagged ‘Ecco Press’

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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The Continual Condition

Friday, October 16th, 2009

by Charles Bukowski
Ecco Press 2009
Reviewed by Joseph Goosey

5_5

“drinking. yeh.”

bukowski coverI am often among the first to hop on the wagon and buy a new Charles Bukowski collection. On whole, I have looked forward to and more or less enjoyed even the posthumous collections many Bukowski fans rail against. So naturally, I’ve been waiting around for the release of The Continual Condition for awhile.

First time through, I consumed the entire 127-page collection – a group of “never-before-collected,” and mostly later pieces constructed of sparse, one- or two-word lines – in the amount of time it took to drink five Budweiser American Ales.  Some poems reward scrutiny; the vast majority are depressingly interchangeable. Bukowski essentially summarizes the collection with four words in the almost memorable “my soul is gone”:  “screenplay, horses, drinking. yeh.”

While it’s true that these themes would be expected (perhaps even relished) by readers familiar with Bukowski, they come across as flabby and repetitive in The Continual Condition. Generally, his insights edge dangerously toward platitude; in “died 9 april 1553,” our poet declares:

life is not what
we think it
is, it’s only what we
imagine it to
be
and for us
what we imagine
becomes
mostly so.

This borderline greeting card-verse represents neither the hard-luck wisdom of Bukowski’s best work nor an insight we can’t get from NYC Transit’s “Train of Thought” series (the series, which consists of literary quotations posted in subway cars, recently offered this pearl from Schopenhauer’s “Studies in Pessimism: “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”) Bukowski’s spare lines dramatize what is a fairly predictable conceit.

There is some return on this $27 hardcover investment. Upon finishing my fifth beer, I arrived easily and indifferently to the end of the collection – and suddenly it was as though the editor (or the book itself) knew that I’d be clamoring for something that would last. The final poem, “bayonets in candlelight,” is electric, filled with absurd, desperate energy that shucks mortality:

you can take my bones and paint them green
and hang them out the window like letters from Spain
but
I will be running down the hall of your granite heart
for years

Do what you like to him. The poet is dead, yes, but he stops somewhere waiting for you. The only question is what he’s going to do with you when you get there; if “to kiss her long dark hair” serves as any indication, perhaps he’s not the type that means to inflict harm. At least, not to abstract things:  

I don’t want to murder art.

He didn’t, and hasn’t here. Some say Bukowski slipped in his old age. Maybe. But a book like this might also have to do with corporate common sense: spread every ounce of work by a popular name to as much of the public as possible. It’s a slippery slope, but it has yet to murder art, and in this case, certainly won’t afflict Bukowksi’s legacy.

*

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The Ghost Soldiers

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

by James Tate
Ecco Press 2008
Reviewed by John Deming

8_5

“What a desperate creature man is, or, no, / not man, I am.”

ghost soldiersA winter ago, I drank beer at a bar with a literary critic. He told me that he had all but given up on James Tate for a pretty credible reason: he’d been let down too many times by story-poems that started with cleverness of purpose, but meandered into what seemed a series of arbitrary whims. His disappointment in Tate was like that of a dog owner shocked when his “good dog” bites a neighborhood girl and has to be euthanized. Like that of a ten-year-old whose divorced Dad always calls eight minutes before their weekly visits to Applebee’s to say “too busy, but definitely next week.” After a while, I suppose, one stops believing.

But believe me, The Ghost Soldiers is going to linger. It’s true that sometimes, the suspension of disbelief one must employ when entering a Tate tale doesn’t pay off; the poem ends, one feels duped. Both The Ghost Soldiers and his last book, Return to the City of White Donkeys, are bulky and so include such poems. But all of Tate’s new poems are refreshingly chancy, and the lesser poems martyr themselves before their more marvelous battle-buddies. His most fully-imagined poems crystallize as they proceed, and present an otherwordly quality that no contemporary writer can match. Living in Tate’s world has to do with waking up and realizing you can’t remember your own name. For the reader, too, it means waking up on a battlefield in civilian clothes with a loaded M-16 at your side and no idea which side you’re fighting for. You enter, in Tate’s best work, a dream world. Or, in the case of The Ghost Soldiers, an Orwellian nightmare.

Tate is brilliant about war (has been since The Lost Pilot), and war is everywhere in The Ghost Soldiers. Which war? All of them, none of them. The roots are what matter: the fear, confusion, and powerlessness that impel individuals to become members of a group that means to destroy another group. Yet in The Ghost Soldiers, battlefield poems blend seamlessly with poems set in living rooms and kitchens on the homefront. Human interaction is everywhere, but nearly every conversation involves some kind of misunderstanding; everyone’s anxious, ripe with forboding, but hardly anyone knows why.

Tate’s men and women live in purgatory. People are accused of things they can’t say for sure they did or didn’t do; anyone can be perceived as both innocent and guilty, and everyone constantly, constantly forgets. Fear abounds: fear of death, fear of pain, fear of war, fear of trust, fear of Big Brother. In “The Goldfinches,” an average man is accused of plotting to bomb a building. He is innocent, so the charge feels outrageous. But the powerful can do whatever they like: “They are masters of illusion. The can make / you believe anything is real.” The man’s life was one thing, and now it is something else:

                                                       My lawyer says there
 is no use fighting it, they always win. He advised me to plead
 guilty and plead for leniency.

With such a ruthless power structure in place, it follows that the bulk of the public will work to serve their Leader; if confusion leads to fear, and fear to powerlessness, wholesale devotion is a way to route all three. Tate penetrates the grave consequences that can result from such blind devotion, to the extent that The Ghost Soldiers is the most violent thing he’s written. The chilling “Long Live the Queen” is told from a torturer’s perspective:

                                         …I threw him back against the wall,
 then smashed him in the face. When he fell to the floor, I kicked
 him in the ribs. He laid there moaning and sputtering. I lay
 down beside him. “You’re quite a remarkable man, you know,” I
 said, “with many admirable qualities. The Queen would like to
 meet you for tea. She’s a single lady now that her husband,
 the King, has died. She’s very attractive for her age, which
 I believe is the same as yours. I don’t mean to put any ideas
 in your head, but I hope you’ll think it over,” I said. “Over
 my dead body,” he said.

Smashed him in the face, however. Human reason only takes us so far, Tate offers; people need to find what, if anything, they can control. The torturer is validated by serving the Queen; the prisoner sustains himself by maintaining some abstract moral high ground. We readers don’t know the stakes, so beyond perhaps a general disapproval of torture, we don’t even know which side we’re on. It’s trancelike; life, we’re reminded, is a waking dream. War itself seems the enemy, but war is initiated by the same sense of confusion and powerlessness it generates.

So in Tate’s world, Big Brother too is a symptom. Perhaps people need government conspiracies in order to feel that something is being controlled. Someone has power. Perhaps we create problems for ourselves, if only so that we can control them, or let them control us:

                                                    …I want to have my wits
 about me to know what’s going on. Maybe nothing’s going on,
 just mass hysteria, waves of it sweeping over the country, people
 whispering, then screaming, something is invading their lives,
 stripping them of everything, covering them with spiders. The
 fear grows and crushes them. They barely have the strength to
 visit their doctors, who give them pills that make them happy.
 And then they become addicted to these pills, and are terrified
 of running out or being cut off.

Maybe the people are afraid and crazy; maybe the best way to control them is to keep them feeling afraid and crazy. Either way, it’s bleak, so it helps to align oneself with a cause, sidelining innate anxieties about living a meaningless life. Power structures come and go, but the urge for power will never leave us:

                               “This World Peace stuff is a load of crap,”
 I said. “Men are killing each other all over the globe. That’s
 what they do. They hate each other over land, religion, money,
 whatever. It’s a way of life. What are we supposed to do, take
 that away from them?”

An impossible war for peace, then, is the human predicament. And folksy Tate offers plenty of humans; you’ll meet Clifford, Joaquin, Mavis, Darcy, Jasper, Lester, Jones, Kimball, Jennings, Jaffee, Brian, Uncle Raymond, and dozens more, even Phongsri, who “lived in a very tiny world / but he knew how to blow it up.” Even from the relative safety of the homefront, individuals are thick with impending horror. In “Honey, Can You Hear Me?”, a confused husband thinks he and his wife have plans to go out for the evening, and says, “It will be wonderful to be there tonight”:

             “We’re not going anywhere,” she said. “I meant here. It
 will be wonderful to be here tonight,” I said. “A little romantic
 night at home,” she said. What did she mean by “nomadic?” A little
 nomadic night at home. There were times when I worried about
 Alison.

There is confusion and miscommunication here that only the omniscent reader (or writer) is privy to. Perhaps the husband could reroute his confusion by joining the military and fighting for an ideology. But sometimes, even loyalty to a cause can’t deceive someone long enough for him/her to forget s/he too is confused. Confusion permeates the battlefield, too; in “The Enemy,” a man confesses that his life had been “squandered” until he joined the army: “I was an ideal / soldier… There / was nothing I wouldn’t do to please my officers.” Yet when we see him in battle, “right” and “wrong” break down:

               I said to Kansas, “What are we doing wrong?” He
 said, “You still don’t get it, do you? We’re the enemy.” I was
 confused.

In The Ghost Soldiers, war tries, but can’t but provide what, say, professional sports provide: battle lines. Meaning, clearly defined. A war vet in the supermarket is interrupted by a woman who claims he “saved her village.” He’s hard pressed to see it that way, or to see it at all, but she insists:

                                                     …“No, that’s not true. You
 were so brave and courageous,” she said. “That was a long time
 ago. I have forgotten many of the details,” I said, and tried to
 push past her.

Perhaps he’s right; the next person he bumps into says, “I ought to break your neck / right here in front of everybody, you low-down, vicious killer.” Rightness then amid nothingness and confusion has to do with perspective, and little else.

This tension is also implicit with Tate’s forward-minded formal considerations. Each poem is indented, and has the look and feel of a prose poem, but is in fact broken into lines. There a slow swell at work; while individual poems maintain singular line-lengths, line-lengths from poem to poem swell gracefully, and tend to get longer as the book proceeds (as they did in Return to the City…). Here we have the ebb and flow of tension, tension too shy and fearful to step out of line and become rage. They are poems of strong and secretive rhythm, poems as hidden and fearful as Tate’s narrators. Lines disguise themselves; they break at odd moments, the result of a mysterious compliance to order. Tate is the only poet of his stature that insists upon yet conceals invention in this way.

I should note again that The Ghost Soldiers is not exempt for the meandering I mentioned in the beginning. Does Tate make it up at random as he goes along? Charles Simic seems to think so: “To write a poem out of nothing at all is Tate’s genius…just about anything can happen next in this kind of poetry.” Some poems become boring or inconsequential as they progress. In others, the poet too plainly writes himself out of the poem; in “Map of the Lost World,” for example, our narrator describes interesting objects that he finds while cleaning his house. He then sits down to think, and concludes by likening his contemplation to “pulling a yak over / a mountaintop, hauling water and rice to a dead wise man, / who knows nothing, says nothing.” Literally, the man is sitting on his couch. Early on, the poem is tastefully peppered with nostalgia. But Tate’s poems are so deeply metaphorical by themselves that when a narrator starts making his own yak and rice metaphors out of the blue, the results are uninteresting.
 
But the improvisational vibrations in these poems tend to arrive flush with their subject matter, as if they too are written purely from powerlessness and confusion, and stand as an experiment; the poet sits as scientist creating hypotheses, looking for something–and somehow maitains his charm throughout. What he finds is what Wallace Stevens found: imagination (incidentally, Stevens supplies the book’s epigraph: “The paratroopers fall and as they fall / They mow the lawn.”). He creates a world and controls it the best he can. Sometimes his findings are insignificant, but in more than a few cases, they are as palpable and meaningful as the sacs in your lungs, as whatever it was you dreamt last night. In the end, the ideal answer to Tate’s challenges is a form of personal responsibility: “What a desperate creature man is, or, no, / not man, I am.” Man, not men, woman, not women. Individuals may seem powerless, but the extent to which they can control their own actions is the extent to which they can control anything at all.

*

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Time and Materials

Wednesday, November 14th, 2007

by Robert Hass
Ecco Press 2007
Reviewed by Matthew Yeager

6stars_7

All that is Happening

hass cover

Few recent volumes of poetry have arrived to as much anticipation as Robert Hass’s fifth, Time and Materials. It’s his own doing. Hass is a heavyweight, a former laureate, and nearly twelve years have come and gone since he put out Sun Under Wood. With that much time (and is it really that much time?), an expectation mounts in the reader – so unfair to the writer – for a masterpiece, or at least a relative one. As human beings, (recollect both Hamlet’s address to the players and Eliot’s indictment of Hamlet), we crave that things be commensurate – be it expressed emotion with a given dramatic situation, time spent with product quality, punishment with crime, or simply “what goes in” with “what comes out.” This is why cleaning an apartment is such a predictable, reproducible pleasure: if I devote two hours to the task, I know my apartment will improve half as much as it would were I to sink four hours into it. On the flip side, it also explains why making art is frustrating to the point where frustration must be elevated to an ideal if one is to have some satisfaction. Whole mornings can disappear changing an “a” to a “the,” and the unfortunate fact of the medium of poetry, as all know, is that the finished products tend to veil the true process.

 I feel obligated, before I begin, to confess that no poet’s work and world-view have affected me so much those of Robert Hass. Of course, like any first love, logic of position had a good deal to do with this affection. I first encountered him five years ago, as a 22 year old undergraduate, new to poetry. I’d never seen such a Thanksgiving table of sensuous life. Over the next two years, I carried Sun Under Wood around with me were it a security blanket. On several occasions my relationship to the volume even engendered a thought that between the years of 2002 and 2004, no single human had read this one book more than I had. (These sorts of thoughts are dizzyingly pleasurable.) I’d also become visibly angry if anyone had a dismissive word to say about him. “Look at this!” I’d respond, jabbing my finger into a page. “Just look at what he does here!”

I can still hear the slow sound of the surf
of my breath drawing in.

I still think these lines are majestic. Perhaps with exception of “I have passed by the watchman on his beat / and dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain” (from Frost’s “Acquainted With the Night”), I cannot think of a line break that achieves such a startling mimesis. Over the course of the first of these lines, the reader’s breath, word by word, like a string of knotted kerchiefs being pulled out a sleeve, is taken out of him. One must physically draw a breath before uttering “of my breath drawing in.” It also teaches you what to read for. Much like a curiously-positioned accent mark in a poem by Berryman, Hass’s effect locates his poetry in the oral, at the speed of the ear. (In my opinion, much like vinyl records, poems have two basic speeds – eye speed and ear speed – and playing a poem at the wrong speed leads to distortion.) And I do think the ear is the best way to process Hass, although he certainly does work on a page. His formal ability to fold a complete, multi-clause sentence over five, six, seven lines (building and releasing tension, delaying pertinent information skillfully as Cicero in his periodic sentences) reminds me – how should I phrase this? – of attempting to re-fold shirts I’ve tried on in clothing stores. “How on earth,” I always think, moments before shuffling away from my fat, clumsy effort, “do these shop girls and shop boys do this?”

So anyhow, on my first trip through Time and Materials (though I’d girded myself against unrealistic expectations), I was surprised – and a little saddened – by how much of the language I felt like I’d seen before. I’m not talking about those fingerprints of phrasing and movement that one would file under “style.” And while not as distinct as, say, Lichtenstein’s Ben-day dots, Hass does have his stylistic signatures – most notably his grouting of statements with haiku-worthy everyday images (beach towels drying by moonlight on fences, gaps in people’s teeth, stones and shells on a windowsill). He also has his go-to subjects – the limits of language and imagination, the challenge of autobiography, the California wilderness, the literary tradition of Eastern Europe (especially Russia), etymology, Catholicism, sexual love. It would be nonsensical to demand of him a complete upheaval. It’d be like asking Egon Schiele to paint cows and barns. For instance, in no contemporary poet are the emotions of post-coital lovers drawn more movingly, more realistically, than in Hass. When I meet a “he” and a “she” towards the beginning of one of his longer poems, I immediately page ahead to see how much longer they’re going to exist. It’s a fine feeling like waking up before your alarm, and measuring how much sleep you have left – the longer the poem, the happier I am. There’s simply that much line-by-line pleasure.

No, what I’m talking about is a line like “it is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us,” which appears in “The Problem of Describing Trees.” In his previous volume, in a poem entitled “Regalia for a Black Hat Dancer,” Hass wrote this line: “it is good sometimes that poetry should disenchant us.” Although I consoled myself that it wasn’t an exact facsimile – the Time and Materials version is more colloquial – I could hardly believe my eyes. What bothered me wasn’t that this line was recycled, but the fact that the gesture (and others like it) doesn’t enter into the expressed subject matter of the poem. Surely the poet knows he has written this line before. In all probability, it’s a line that pops into his head with regularity and has accrued, with the years, a personal significance. So why not interject and write the true poem? Why not tell us about what the line means to him, what sorts of situations call it to mind? Why not talk about that voice in his head that tells him, “Robert, tempting as it is, you can’t put these words in every poem, just as you couldn’t, as a child, wear your favorite sweater every day, but I will allow you to put it in here.” This isn’t a book like Berrigan’s Sonnets, where the overarching form has everything to do with cutting apart and re-configuring existing poems; in Berrigan the bells of recognition in the reader’s mind constitute a music that is, in fact, the poem. Hass’s work functions much differently; to work, it requires fresh language at every turn. And that’s a very high bar.

Of course, demanding a comment from him is only to hold him to his own standards; the man’s consciousness is vast, it’s “vast-vast,” and though his idea of the shorter lyric doesn’t admit much for it, he’s adept in longer pieces at overhearing himself, at reading the reader’s mind. This is why his longer pieces have such a sense of intimacy. He’s responding to you. He’s talking to you. In “I am your Waiter Tonight and my Name is Dimitri,” he addends a gorgeous, fourteen-line parenthetical phrase with:                                    

I frankly admit the syntax
of that sentence, like the intestines slithering from the hands
of the startled boys clutching their belly wounds
at the Somme, has escaped my grip. I step over it
gingerly. Where were we?

This is not easy in poetry. Unlike stand-up comedy, or any art where one has the instantaneous mirror of a present, responsive audience, a poet’s readers are wholly in the poet’s head.

On a second reading, I admit I liked Time and Materials more. There are even two or three poems that I love. Perhaps, with more readings, I’ll like the whole more and more. As a reader, I am personally not all that interested in what it is I feel in the midst of reading a poem. Scratch that. As a reader of poetry, I’m somewhat more interested in what comes after, how my own reality in the subsequent hours, days, and months is filtered to me through a particular poet’s poetry, in those subtle changes it undergoes, as if a different colored light-bulb were screwed into a fixture.

If one is looking in Hass for Hass, for a moment where he reveals, like a ship at sea radioing its whereabouts to shore, the exact positioning of his heart in regard to his world, one can find it in Time and Materials’ title poem. He writes:

The object of this poem is to report a theft,
In progress, of everything
That is not these words,
And their disposition on the page.

The phrasing of these lines has a wryness to me, a spread tail-feathers of intelligence that I’m not sure I like, but that’s not important. What’s important is the content. When I read them, they called to mind an earlier poem of his entitled “Our Lady of the Snows.” In this poem, one of his best, about his mother’s battles with alcoholism, Hass reflects on the experience of sneaking into a church as a child and bargaining with a statue for his mother’s recovery. After establishing the scene (and it’s a moving one), he makes a surprising turn:

Though mostly when I think of myself
at that age,
I am standing at my older brother’s closet,
studying the shirts,
convinced that I could be absolutely transformed
by something I could borrow.
And the days churned by,
navigable sorrow.

What is peculiar to Hass’s being-in-the-world is how unusually conscious he is of all that is happening outside his given moment, of all that ends up excluded when he focuses. The burden he feels is the abundance of reality, the fact that there is always both a forest and trees (and trees and more trees). When one pages through one’s mental autobiography – particularly in a support-group or a shrink’s office – there is that tendency to highlight those moments when joy or melancholy is at its most acute. The danger is that one will then substitute an inventory of those highlighted passages for the whole, thus diminishing and misrepresenting the whole. Likewise, when one writes this thing the obvious next question is “what about that thing?” And what about every single thing? The crisis that arises is a crisis of limits, and I think this informs a great deal of his work. To his own imagination (or my sense of it), writing is not so much an act of creation, as it is for someone like Stevens, but an act of re-creation. He dwells, mentally, in an inner-world equal in detail and history to the outer world. As this is the case, certain items are bound to not get the play he’d like to give them. Probably he is too hard on himself as a result. He shouldn’t be.

***

The best poems in the volume: “The Dry Mountain Air,” “After the Winds,” “For Czeslaw Milosz in Krakow,” “Then Time.”

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