Posts Tagged ‘FSG’

‘Touch’ and ‘Pierce the Skin’

Monday, September 12th, 2011

by Henri Cole
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2011/2009
Reviewed by James Cihlar

“…to the whiteness of death”

Henri Cole’s new book of poetry, Touch, follows Pierce the Skin, which selected poems from his six collections published between 1987 and 2007. In the context of his work-to-date, Touch only gains in significance.

Although Cole’s The Visible Man was perhaps his most notable encounter with autobiography and gay identity when it came out in 1998, many of his abiding concerns and conceits have been present from the beginning. Despite the ongoing evolution of style and substance in his work, Cole has consistently written contemporary lyrics. Sometimes commemorative, as in “To the Forty-third President” in Blackbird and Wolf, sometimes occasional, as in “The Annulment” in The Zoo Wheel of Knowledge, Cole’s verse finds meaning in the luminous skin of the world.

Cole’s lightness and delicacy, his reserve and restraint, also unify his work. Situated on the branch of modernism that extends from Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Stafford, Henri Cole operates a poem through the senses, figures out the world through imagery. His lines are “tempered and formalized,” like the “Poppies” of Blackbird. His elegy for his father in Middle Earth, “Radiant Ivory,” shows humble objects doing heavy lifting in service of the poem:

After the death of my father, I locked
myself in my room, bored and animal-like.
The travel clock, the Johnnie Walker bottle,
the parrot tulips—everything possessed his face,
chaste and obscure. Snow and rain battered the air
white, insane, slathery.

Underneath the hood of these pristine poems roars a combustion engine, “memory, the motor of everything,” as Cole describes it in “Self-portrait with Red Eyes” in Blackbird. In “Chiffon Morning” from The Visible Man, he could be describing the sustaining act of writing when he says, “the mind replays what nurtures it.”  Blackbird’s “American Kestrel” offers an ars poetica:

…This is my home:
Woof-woof, the dog utters, afraid of emptiness,
as I am, so my soul attaches itself to things,
trying to create something neither confessional
nor abstract, like the moon breaking through the pines.

Beauty is always tempered by brutality in Cole’s work. And a dynamic tension runs throughout, like a dangerous undertow. The comprehensiveness of his view is reflected in his unselfconscious melding of East and West, of Japanese and Chinese culture and classical Greek and Roman mythology. Childhood and adulthood alternate within one poem, as “the essence of self emerges / shuttling between parents” (“Self-portrait in a Gold Kimono,” Middle Earth), and “a son’s life is punishment / for a father’s” (“Apollo,” The Visible Man). With each new book, the poet reveals more of the violence of his childhood. But these seeds were planted in the beginning, including “The family squabble, the bruised cranium” of “Ascension on Fire Island” in Zoo Wheel.

In his newest book, Henri Cole stretches the limits of his minimalist style, delves deeper into family memory, and widens the scope of the tensions he explores. Touch is divided into three sections, moving from the poet’s mother’s death to a troubled relationship with a younger man addicted to drugs. The volume begins with “Asleep in Jesus at Rest,” a poem of long lines laid out in overlapping caesuras, a looser and more expansive form than what we’ve come to expect from Cole. He repeats this form later in “Legend,” a bit further into the volume. And he includes “Grebe,” a poem that he translated from the French with the author, Claire Malroux. Although he continues his familiar syllabics, Cole includes more experimental pieces in Touch, such as the free verse collage of “By the Name of God, The Most Merciful and Gracious,” which gives voice to a victim of torture. If Blackbird’s “For the Forty-third President” signaled a more engagé stance, Touch does not disappoint, with additional anti-war poems such as “Quai Aux Fleurs” and “Sleeping Soldiers.”

Like his seniors—Glück, Gilbert, and others—and like his contemporaries—Frost, Powell, and others—Cole explores aging, loss, maturity, and mortality. If self, identity, and body have been enduring concerns throughout his work, then in “Myself Departing,” he treats the issue of age humorously:

My hair went away in the night while I was sleeping.
It sauntered along the avenue asking, “Why
should I commit myself to him? I have a personality
of my own.” Then my good stiff prick went, too.
It opened the window and climbed down the escape,
complaining, “I want to be with someone younger.”

This is in stark contrast to the stunning pathos of the first section of Touch, which is devoted to the poet’s mother’s illness and death and his affectionate care (as well as guilt and melancholy). Read Touch if only to appreciate the powerful poem “Shrike” in its full context. Cole begins by watching a bird capture a cricket, and then through association makes a poetic leap worthy of a trapeze artist. The cricket

. . . holds up
pretty good in a state of oneiric pain.
Once, long ago, when they were quarrelling about money,
Father put Mother’s head in the oven.
“Who are you?” It pleaded from the hell mouth.

In our inured age, we have ready clichés to describe abuse in families. Repetition has numbed their impact. Through understated elegance and direct simplicity, Cole makes this image indelible. In this section, Cole accurately captures the complexities of grieving, elaborating on the simple human truth he had first presented in “Paper Dolls” from The Look of Things: “goodbye / in a scene / at first holy, / then lurid.”

As a minimalist, Cole comes by ingenuousness naturally. An unlikely subject, such as a “Taxidermied Fawn,” leads to the discovery of a resonant truth:

A minor smear on the white spots is the only
evidence of a violent passage from bridal innocence
to the whiteness of death, which is the absence
of everything, and, in the end, all there really is.

After a career of deftly conjuring evocative imagery, Cole has earned the right to utter plain speech, as in the poem “Ulro”: “Cigarettes, love, work, liquor, brooding, despair— / one thing not controlled can destroy a life.”

More of the poet’s dexterity is on display in “Mechanical Soft,” which doubles and triples imagery, twisting the strand, while describing a son feeding his mother in hospice:

I am not
a typical son, I suppose, valuing happiness,
even while spooning mechanically soft pears—
like light vanishing—into the body whose tissue
once dissolved to create breast milk for me.

Cole’s Touch justifies the poetic obsession with childhood. As we age, circumstances call forward past experiences. We are never done remembering, or for that matter, discovering, as in “Dolphins”: “Recently, among Mother’s things, I found this: / ‘I am afraid of him. He need psychiatric care. He lead me / to believe strange things. He ignores me, threats me.’”

The dynamic tension of opposite forces evident in Cole’s previous books acquires deeper significance in Touch. The image of his mother’s hands in “Broom”—“hands that once chased me gruesomely with a broom, then brushed my hair”—underscores how we know tenderness through cruelty. Other poems help extrapolate: we know peace through war, age through youth, closeness through isolation. But these are not simple binaries, as Cole explains in “Hens”:

There’s a way the wounded
light up a dark rectangular space. Suffering becomes
the universal theme. Too soft, and you’ll be squeezed;
too hard, and you’ll be broken. Even a hen knows this,
posing on a manure pile, her body a stab of gold.

Through the accumulation of images of “the push-pull thing, the polarity stuff” (“Ulro”), we perceive the balancing act of walking a web of connections, the risks and rewards, pains and pleasures, and every subtle variation in between, tied to each step. Cole’s menagerie of poems grows with several more additions besides “Hens,” including “Pig,” “Hairy Spider,” Bats,” and more, in Touch. Animals tend to be more humane than humans and humans more bestial than beasts in Cole’s cosmology.

The tradition of story and storytelling encourages us to assume that those who suffer in youth find happiness—or at least escape—in age, like Cinderella or Jack and the Beanstalk. The poems in the last third of Touch help subvert those expectations. In “Passion,” Cole begins with the ending: “Our love has ended. / We only have a little time, darling. Let’s read / swim, and sleep in one another’s arms.” Ending and beginning run simultaneously, as do pleasure and pain. If “a son’s life is punishment / for a father’s,” then here we see a mature son engaged in a troubled relationship: “I watch you emerge from the bathroom, / having breathed your fix” (“Laughing Monster”). Cole may be the first poet to incorporate a partner’s texts: “‘Loser old man u r a cheap cunt,’ he wrote, ‘I need coke. Unless ur buying, answer is no’” (“Resistance”).

Cole’s elaboration of two additional themes from his previous work—gender identity and language—helps broaden the focus of Touch. The last poem in the book, “Swimming Hole, Buck Creek, Springfield, Ohio,” takes forward the questioning of masculinity and femininity that Cole started in such early poems as “The Marble Queen” and “My Father’s Jewelry Box.” Or the exploration of language and writing in “Apollo” from The Visible Man resurfaces in Touch, with the poet’s reassurance that “writing this now, / sometimes in a rush, sometimes after drifting thought, / I feel happiness, I feel I am not alone.” No mere ephemeral beauties, Cole’s spare, masterfully controlled poems are a sustaining activity, a necessary function to help keep the poet, and the reader, safely positioned in the world.

*

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Maggot

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

by Paul Muldoon
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2010
Reviewed by Erin Lynn

“…for having acted on a whim”

Commonly dubbed a “poet’s poet,” Paul Muldoon is well-known for his obscurity of references and ambitious rhyme schemes. His latest collection, Maggot, fits this mold, and is made up mainly of sequence poems, with sonnets and other shorter poems scattered throughout. It begins with “Plan B,” a sequence poem which was published separately in collaboration with photographer Norman McBeath in 2009. While readers of Plan B in its original volume had McBeath’s images to guide them through the poem, those coming to the poem in Maggot must simply rely on Muldoon’s vivid images, their own historical knowledge, or an intervention from Wikipedia. This is typical of Muldoon’s work. By the second stanza of the first canto, we have already been taken “away from the straight/ and narrow of Brooklyn or Baltimore for a Baltic state,” but Muldoon keeps us steady, from Cork to Vilna to New York, by beginning each stanza with the last line from the previous stanza.

After chasing the images in poems such as “Plan B,” which discusses Edward VII, Thomas Edison and the KGB, the reader might suspect that the links between these subjects are coming from the poet’s own associative mind. The poem, like McBeath’s photos, seeks to illuminate moments of cultural memory, particularly in times of great social change. The shorter poems are usually easier to decode. “Ohrwurm” is a four-line poem that begins with “Just as I’m loading up on another low carb pork rind snack” and manages to touch upon fears of mortality via the image of a crack in the speaker’s “wing-fuselage.”

Muldoon’s repetition of commonplace phrases like “I used to” in the title poem both unifies the poem and grounds it aurally, while simultaneously defamiliarizing it, somewhat in the fashion of Beckett–virtually detaching it from meaning. In the same poem, which is another sequence, the third stanza of each canto is the same “where I’m waiting for some lover / to kick me out of bed / for having acted on a whim.” The transitions are often awkward, even as each canto fits its rhyme scheme. A comfortable attitude toward sexual promiscuity and perversion runs throughout the book, often juxtaposed with images of gruesome death and decay. This is most apparent in “The Humors of Hakone,” a long sequence that enumerates the unidentifiable parts of a decomposing corpse, relating them to a girl the speaker met at a “purikura.”

Paul Muldoon remains an Irish poet. Frogs and mushrooms continue to people his poems, along with other images and themes relevant to childhood in the Northern Irish countryside. “Moryson’s Fancy” provides an especially moving look at imperialism. He takes an image from Fynes Moryson’s A History of Ireland in which starving children feed upon the “entrails” of their mother, and then expands upon the story. He imagines the family is starving after a forced march, which would have been enacted by Lord Mountjoy, Moryson’s superior. A reference to Boudicaa, an Iceni queen who nearly drove the Romans out of her territory in England but ultimately lost, comments upon the timeless savagery of colonial forces. In the next stanza, the speaker wonders if, looking into their mother’s entrails, the children could “haruspicate,” or divine that the Muldoons would be forced off their land centuries on.

Muldoon continues to keep a close relationship with Belfast, where he lived and worked from 1969 to 1986. On February 25, 2011, he returned to Belfast to headline at the annual Bel/Nash festival at the Rhythm and Rhyme Concert alongside other Irish writers such as Owen McAfferty and folk musicians like Brian Kennedy. Muldoon recited two new poems. The second one, called “Julius Cesar was a People Person,” was a wry indictment chock full of accessible historical references and had a rhyme scheme akin to a song. His understated stage presence and soft but clear reading voice completed the humor of the poem and the beauty of its sound.

The object of the Rhythm and Rhyme concert was to demystify the process of song writing for non-industry folk. Each writer and musician was asked to collaborate to write a song for the occasion. Muldoon was paired with Brian Kennedy. According to Kennedy, Muldoon had e-mailed him his lyrics a week before, but then showed up on the day with a completely different set of verses, although you wouldn’t know it from the performance. Kennedy’s vocals flawlessly and emotively delivered Muldoon’s beautiful lyrics. The song, called “When I Heard the Sirens, I Tried to Harmonize,” concerns life in Belfast during the sectarian violence and destruction known as “The Troubles,” which plagued the latter half of the twentieth century in Ireland. But the song has further reach, referencing various other violence-plagued cities around the globe. Here, as ever, Muldoon displayed both a raw reality of the Northern Irish situation while managing to universalize it. Muldoon’s performance was revealing in understanding his appeal as a poet. While his work is sometimes obscure and difficult, and while the reader may sometimes feel led up the garden path, reading Muldoon is never without its rewards, and the garden is always beautiful.

*

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Human Chain

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

by Seamus Heaney
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2010
Reviewed by Erin Lynn

7.5

“So this is what an afterlife can come to?”

heaney coverIn Human Chain, Seamus Heaney explores the innumerable ways in which human experience is more shared than not. Heritage and familial lineage, long motifs in Heaney’s work, are here concerned with aging and generational cycles. In “Album,” the poet evokes memories —  “Now the oil-fired heating boiler comes to life” — that recall his youth and relationship with his father. He details his father’s confused and helpless last days during which the roles were reversed and son had to support father. He calls this physical contact “an embrace in Elysium.”

Heaney also sees human inheritance through a broader lens. He often alludes to classical mythology. This is perhaps to infuse the everyday with the epic, but also to show how human daily life is and always has been sacred and largely universal. Mostly, Heaney focuses on the human experience of work, with particular attention to scholarly labours. “Colum Cille Cecinit” is a translation of an 11th/12th-century poem about the 6th-century scholar/saint Colmcille and demonstrates the eternal sameness of scholarly work: writing utensil ever in hand, “hand cramped from penwork.”

A similar attitude appears in “Hermit Songs,” where Heaney evokes the sensual experience of book-work, remembering with amusement his schoolboy days and the pride and reverence he took in study. Colmcille, or Columba, is a recurring character in this collection. Perhaps Heaney is in some way paying homage to the work this man began some 1,500 years ago near Heaney’s birthplace of County Derry, Northern Ireland.

In Human Chain, Heaney writes mainly in free verse, often in tercets, in poems number-divided by parts. Aurally, it is a masterpiece. Internal rhyme is interspersed. Ever the linguist, Heaney plays, using words like “skire” and “snottery” and others that even the OED can’t account for. While there are often multilingual allusions at play, Heaney never leaves them indecipherable, and the reader often benefits from an enhanced vocabulary. His love affair with language indelibly affords his writing with an almost endless variety, even as he comes back to beloved and heavy words like “lug,” “purchase” and “nib” repeatedly.

Humans are essentially a part of the natural world. Nature is central in many of these poems, often with a mind of its own. Heaney begins the collection with “Had I Not Been Awake,” a poem about a wind that rises over the roof of his house, setting him all “a-patter.” The wind, it seems, is a reminder to be mindful of nature. Nature headlines again in “An Old Refrain,” a nursery rhyme that delights in lush, hungry vegetation and the words that describe it. In “Derry Derry Down,” Heaney uses the sensual experience of picking berries to represent early sexual encounters. In “A Herbal,” which is an adaptation of Guillevic’s “Herbier de Bretagne,” Heaney hears and gives voice to grass and bracken. He presents nature as thriving, irrespective and unconcerned with human existence. Saint Columba saw oak trees and elderberry bushes just as we do today. Heaney reveres nature, presenting it as almost enchanted and certainly with its own agency. Nature’s constant presence and changingness teaches us that our own worries are often ephemeral and trivial.

It is not only the natural world that Heaney views as enchanted. Man’s quotidian experience is magical and important. He evokes this idea in several ways. Through his allusions to the classics, a bus ride becomes a voyage in the river Styx, with the driver playing Charon in “Route 110.,” while a near-death trip in an ambulance becomes a ride with the Charioteer of Delphi in “Chanson d’Aventure.”

Paradoxically, Heaney manages to portray life in its most unflinchingly human terms. By unapologetically engaging the reader’s senses, Heaney takes us into some of his most “up close” memories. In “Eeelworks,” the speaker remembers sitting next to a classmate in summer who reeked of eel oil, as well as his own first experience of skinning an eel, which was “like a silk stocking at a practiced touch.”

Heaney is also concerned with location, particularly Northern Ireland, where he lived until he was a young man. Here it is portrayed as largely bucolic and wild, infused with childhood memories. There is plenty of mention of the troubles that were so destructive to that land. Lorries rev in the distance in “Uncoupled,” which contains allusions to Caithleen ni Houlihan, a figure of Irish folklore. “Wood Road” deals specifically with a road plagued with “militiamen… harassing Mulhollandstown” that the speaker walks down to “the hunger striker’s wake.” The same road for him is forever painted in blood; a young girl is killed after being hit by a “speed-merchant,” or a lorry.

The speaker in “The Baler” pauses to revel in the glory of a dusk “eldorado” only to simultaneously recall a man named Derek Hill saying “he could no longer bear to watch the sun going down.”

The title poem “Human Chain” reveals Heaney’s agenda of “unburdening,” releasing the loads that weigh us down. But the overarching message coming from Heaney’s homeland — a bloody and fractured place — is that we are all more linked than not. And in spite of this heaviness, there is a distinct sentiment of joie de vivre that pervades nearly every poem. Heaney rejoices in the sensory experience of being alive.

Appropriately, aging and death are common themes in this work; Heaney views both as new adventures as in “Chanson d’Aventure” and “In the Attic” in which he likens aging to Jim Hawkins’s adventures in Treasure Island:

A cabin boy’s first time on the rigging,
As the memorable bottoms out
Into the irretrievable

This voracious fascination with the seemingly mundane is quite typical of the rest of the collection. In what may be my favorite poem of the book, “Wraiths,” Heaney finds himself taken in by Sidhe, or fairy people:

We stood under the hill, out of the day
But faced towards the daylight, holding hands,
Inhaling the excavated bank.

He finds magic at a parking lot bus stop, on his way to the Gaeltacht “between languages” and is reincarnated on the bus. And finally, in the last part, the speaker waits to hear the “learner” of a band:

Making an injured music for us alone,
Early-to-beds, white-night absentees
Open-eared to this day.

Heaney unfailingly leaves his reader open-eared.

*

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If I Were Another

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

by Mahmoud Darwish (translation Fady Joudah)
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2009
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

10 stars

“I remember only the road.”

darwish cover

Mahmoud Darwish has been Palestine’s de facto poet laureate for decades.  A new posthumous collection of poems, If I Were Another, selected and translated by Fady Joudah, provides readers with a carefully chosen intellectual continuum of Darwish’s thought through the last 18 years of his life. As is evident in every line of every poem, Darwish was a poet who never stopped evolving, and his two near-death experiences (1984, 1999) become points of reference and reflection for greater art and landmark poetic accomplishment.

Joudah is an accomplished poet in his own right, and has already received acclaim for his translation of Darwish’s Butterfly’s Burden.  In presenting these later works, which investigate the pain, anxiety and complexity of exile, Joudah has clearly taken pains to carry through the density of Darwish’s rolling, ever-changing lines. The result is a highly readable book of poetry, even for someone like me, with only an American-level understanding of the Palestinians’ struggle for a peaceful homeland.  

If peace is stillness, then the reader of If I Were Another is made to see how it is impossible in Darwish’s world.  There is constant flux, so much so that a reader might occasionally feel disoriented and disembodied. Every time Darwish seems to stand on something solid, some truth or moment, it is immediately overwhelmed, overcome and discarded. Darwish’s notions of self, his images of gardens, grass, animals, skies and oceans come from a fundamentally unique perspective embodied in mystery, fundamental sympathy and constant contradiction. In the love poem “Rita’s Winter,” for example, romantic passion – the urge to blend with another person – is matched with the omnipresent fact of individualism:

                 Rita sleeps in her body’s garden
the berries on the fence of her nails light up the salt
in my blood. I love you. Two birds slept under my hands…
The noble wheat wave slept on her slow breathing
a red rose slept in the hallway
a night that isn’t long slept
and the sea in front of my window slept to Rita’s cadence
rising and falling in the rays of her naked chest
so sleep, Rita, in the middle of me and you and don’t cover
the deep golden darkness between us
sleep with one hand around echo and the other
scattering the solitude of the forests
sleep between the pistachio shirt and the lemon seat
like a mare upon the banners of her wedding night…
The neighing has quieted
the beehives in our blood have died down, but was Rita
here, and were we together?

Romantic passion is all the more urgent when one recognizes that two bodies can never truly merge. Independence is central in Darwish, much as it is in Whitman: it is an essential stopping point, the only conception that allows for understanding of, or relationships with, others and the world. There are undeniable echoes of Whitman in the book-length poem “Mural,” one of the only great poems published so far this century. Like Whitman, Darwish identifies that things are defined by their contradictions:

I come from there. My here leaps
from my steps to my imagination…
I am who I was and who I will be,
the endless vast space makes me
and destroys me

Here cannot exist without there, light cannot exist without dark, life and death are two words for the same phenomenon. What remains is self: the single poet attempts speaking for all, and finds that his own profound limitation – his intrinsic smallness – might be what allows him to do so:

And the poet says: Take my poem if you want,
there’s nothing in it for me besides you,
take your “I.” I will complete exile
with the messages your hands have left for the doves.
Which one of us is “I” that I may become its other?

And later,

I found myself as present as a filled absence.
Whenever I searched for myself I found
the others. Whenever I searched for the others I found
only my stranger self in them,
so am I the one, the multitude?

Contradictions form a metaphysical whole, and allow for transcendent oppenness – ”I” am profoundly isolated, individual as any human, including “you,” and on these terms, you and I are one. Like Whitman (“Do I contradict myself? / Very well then….I contradict myself; / I am large….I contain multitudes”), Darwish finds the impossible contradiction that the singular individual is component of a singular universe. The individual, through essential singularity, speaks to all-encompassing unity built upon the pairing of contradictions. Call the result yin yang, universe, self, even deity.

But Darwish expands upon the Whitman model with his unrelenting focus on the concept of exile both political and metaphysical. His obsession with contradiction presents exile in the metaphysical; life cannot exist without death, for example, so when one is alive, one is exiled from death – when one is dead, exiled from life. Darwish drives home with frightening diligence and accuracy how very little one knows about oneself or the directions one’s life will take. There is a constant movement in our lives; our level of control over it is minimal, and we are never capable of any sort of genuine “return.”  This is undoubtedly an exile theme, raised to the level of the human condition:

There isn’t enough life to pull my end towards my beginning.  The shepherds took my story and infiltrated the grass that grows over the beauty of ruins. They overcame forgetfulness with trumpets and radiant rhymed prose, then bequeathed me the hoarseness of memory on farewell’s stone and didn’t return…

(“Mural”)

But exile is meant literally as well. Darwish is very interested in the concept of naming, or labeling, a person or thing (“Mural” opens with a birth: “This is your name / a woman said / and disappeared in the spiraling corridor”). Yet to be named one thing is to be branded, and to not be named another thing; to be native of one country is to not be native to another – and to be exiled from a homeland can mean being stripped of whatever identity you thought that you had. Darwish obsessively navigates this balance: identities are in some sense accidental or arbitrary, but this does not make them meaningless. One name might be as good as another, and the same would be true of national identity, if not for the violent, corruptive forces that impose their will upon whole populations of individuals and make it harder and harder to try and live a life, let alone discover a self.

Where Whitman’s terrestrial expanse tended to account for the promise of the then-nubile United States, Darwish stretches around the globe. His references to the West are not antagonistic; he represents another culture, not an opposition culture. He is often political, but is not dependent on being pro-Palestinian or anti-Western.  He comfortably references Sophocles, the Bible, the Koran, Saladin and more.  He is not stuck in the modern conception of a juggernaut “West” with all other cultures in some degree of orbit:

And if this autumn is the final autumn, let us move away
from the sky of exile and from others’ trees. We grow a little older
and didn’t notice the wrinkles in the flute’s timbre…the road lengthened
and we didn’t admit we were on the marching path to Caesar. We
          didn’t notice
the poem as it emptied its folk of their sentiments to widen its shores
and pitch our tent where the wars of Athens with Persia,
Iraq with Egypt, tossed us. We love the plow more than
we love the sword, we love the autumn air, we love the rain.

(“We Will Choose Sophocles”)

There may be some subtle suggestion in Darwish’s frequent referencing of Rome, but poems like “We Will Choose Sophocles” show cross-cultural interest. The poet’s access to all cultures and none adds to the feeling of permanent exile:

Where is the road to anything? I see the unseen clearer than
a street no longer mine. Who am I after the stranger’s night?
I used to walk to the self along with others, and here I am
losing the self and others. My horse on the Atlantic coast disappeared
and my horse on the Mediterranean thrusts the Crusader’s spear in me.
Who am I after the stranger’s night? I cannot return
to my brothers near the palm tree of my ancient house, and I cannot
          come down
to the bottom of my pit. O the unseen! There is no heart for love…no
heart for love in which I can dwell after the stranger’s night…

(“Eleven Planets and the End of the Andalusian Scene, part vii: Who Am I After the Stranger’s Night?”)

This confusion of constant exile manifests itself in the construction of Darwish’s poems. Nearly all are at least several pages long (often much longer), cyclical and self-referencing.  Each poem’s structure draws out of the reader what Darwish intends to communicate: confusion that is at turns blissful, and at turns devastating.  In Part 1 of Exile, titled “Tuesday and the Weather is Clear,” he writes:

I walk lightly and grow older by ten minutes,
by twenty, sixty, I walk and life diminishes
in me gently as a slight cough does.
I think: what if I lingered, what
if I stopped? Would I stop time?
Would I bewilder death? I mock the notion
and ask myself: Where do you walk to
composed like an ostrich? I walk
as if life is about to amend its shortcomings.
And I don’t look behind, for I can’t return
to anything, and I can’t masquerade as another.

Repetition, refrain, rhetorical question and (in many other cases) sprawling lines sychronize with the notion that space and time are fused, immeasurable, mutating.  One is always in a state of exile. At many points in If I Were Another, the setting becomes a nothingness which is only an extension of the speaker and his present company, who could be a friend, father, Death, or another self.  “Dense Fog Over the Bridge” shows Darwish’s constant identity crisis in which he is all other people, not himself, himself again, no one, everyone, and on:

I said: Don’t bet on the realistic,
you won’t find the thing alive like its image
waiting for you. Time domesticates
even the mountains, which become higher, or lower
than what you knew them to be,
so where does the bridge take us?
He said: Have we been that long on this road?
I said: Is the fog that dense on the bridge: how
many years have you resembled me?
He said: How many years have you been me?
I said: I don’t remember.
He said: I remember only the road.

The flux of existence is ceaseless, personal, and universal.  One thing remains fixed in Darwish’s centerless world and that is poetry.  Darwish seems to say that, for right or wrong, poetry is the song we instill in life.  Passively waiting for inspiration from the world is pointless. One must actively push to imbue life with value; if doing so is delusional, it presents our greatest delusion:

If the canary doesn’t sing,
my friend,
blame only yourself.
If the canary doesn’t sing
to you, my friend,
then sing to it…sing to it.

(“Tuesday and the Weather is Clear”)

Where other recent translations of “Mural” have comes across as strained, even claustrophobic, Joudah’s translation allows private access to the fluidity and expanse of one the great artistic minds of the modern era. Mahmoud Darwish’s late poetry, spilling over with hard beauty and visceral philosophy, is essential.

*

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A Village Life

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

by Louise Glück
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2009
Reviewed by James Cihlar

9
“And the adults, they’re all dead now.”

gluck village life coverHow do you follow a book like Averno? Distilled, evocative and crystalline, Louise Glück’s previous title seemed to be the consummate modern re-imagining of the myth of Persephone. At first glance, the expansive lines and colloquial tone of A Village Life may appear very different from the austerely beautiful verse of Averno. As her new book proceeds, however, we see that these deceptively loose poems revolve around a talismanic set of images. Even the multiple personas who impart their various narratives use a shared lexicon: mountain, window, fountain, plaza, night, earth, sun, leaves, fire. What emerges is an incantation, a rosary, a mandala. Not unlike Averno, this meditation on aging and mortality uses narrative to speak archetypal truths.

A host of narrators populate this Village, and plot lines recur with circadian rhythm. Children swim in a quarry, leaves burn in a pile, and husbands resort to the bottle, among others. The opening poem, “Twilight,” deftly establishes tone and method, framing through the home window of a mill-worker “not the world but a squared-off landscape / representing the world.” If aging is a progression, then this speaker advances by embracing the subconscious: “I open my fingers— / I let everything go.” Seemingly everyone takes a turn at the microphone, including worms and bats, who happen to offer some of the most elevated metaphysical observations in the book. Locating her speakers in an unnamed village, with a fountain in a plaza at the center and a mountain on the edge, where figs and olives grow in the summer and snow flies in the winter, Glück establishes a hierarchy of story, with rank based on the speaker’s position in beginning, middle, or end. In “Tributaries,” personal trajectory is reflected in proximity to a fountain: children and mothers near the water, old couples at the tables at a safe distance away:

They’re alone at the fountain, in a dark well.
They’ve been exiled by the world of hope,
which is the world of action,
but the world of thought hasn’t as yet opened to them.
When it does, everything will change.

These poems phrase dynamic tension through approximate contrasts: work perverts the human character, leaves conceal the winter, the mountain cleaves from the village, the city overwrites nature, anticipation ends virginity, estrangement undermines marriage, lies pollute truth, and, if we are lucky, the spirit learns to manifest itself in the body. If an aggregate narrative emerges from the multiple perspectives, it is that of the prodigal daughter restored to her hometown, having made the journey through virginity and marriage and career, disillusioned and dispossessed, and able to glimpse, through a comparison of the human life span with the seasonal aspect of nature, what comes after mortality.

You will leave the village where you were born
and in another country you’ll become very rich, very powerful,
but always you will mourn something you left behind, even though you
           can’t say what it was,
and eventually you will return to seek it.

(“Midsummer”)

Through the observation of rituals at the passing of seasons, the villagers aspire to a higher understanding of temporality. Put simply, time as a concept feels much different to the young than to the old. When we are young, we wait out life, and expect to forget mistakes.

It seems a strange position, being very young.
They have this thing everyone wants and they don’t want—
but they want to keep it anyway; it’s all they can trade on.

(“Noon”)

The girls who accompany the boys to the quarry’s swimming hole treasure the sexless democracy of adolescence, uneager to leave behind the broad suspension of inexperience. Limitless in potential, youthful imagination is better than reality, the way that the ephemeral reflections of the stars in the river are better than their real correspondents: “they were like having some idea that explodes suddenly into a thousand ideas, / not real, maybe, but somehow more lifelike” (“At the River”).

But even this static expanse of time must end, and we find that our omissions or indiscretions survive to haunt us, “because whatever you did then you do forever” (“At the Dance”). In youth, the broad expanse of the present is interrupted by premonition; in age, by memory. Glück seems to say, a life’s expenditure of moments is simply incremental, not cumulative, leaving us no better off. To avoid decay, one would have to be like the shape-shifter, the incubus of “In the Café,” the serial boyfriend who takes on the likes and skills of his current paramour, then discards her. Instead, the enlightened seek erasure. In the second of two poems titled “Earthworm,” Glück subverts expectation by uniting earthiness with holiness, putting wisdom in the voice of the reincarnated:

It is not painful to return
without language or vision: if, like the Buddhists,
one declines to leave
inventories of the self, one emerges in a space
the mind cannot conceive, being wholly physical, not
metaphoric.

The unity of the spirit and the body takes a form beyond human ken, describable only as “wholly physical,” and visible only in a reverential study of the world.

Eroding the distinction between novel and verse, A Village Life bucks recent trends by embracing narrative, even if fragmented. Glück avoids the triteness of small town catalogues like Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology. Classically disciplined, her imagery arises directly out of the setting, evoking an austere, timeless, and archetypal community. Sometimes Glück astounds with loving descriptions of nature: “The sky above the fields has turned a sort of grayish pink / as the sun sinks. The clouds are silk yarn, magenta and crimson” (“March.”) Her infrequent similes provide insight while staying close to home: a pile of burning leaves is “a small thing, controlled, like a family run by a dictator” (“Sunset”); the sun hangs steady “like an actor pleased with his welcome” (“A Warm Day”). Despite maintaining a measured, contemplative tone throughout, she is also able to capture personal inflection: the bartender runs the television with the sound off, and “we spend hours watching this junk” (“Via Delle Ombre”). I caught only one instance of melodrama, at the end of “Hunters”—“the cries of love drown out the screams of the corpses”—although this is in persona for the poem. A Village Life is a wise statement about the body’s relation to the earth, and rewards with beautiful if, of necessity, fleeting glimpses of eternity, as in “Sunrise”:

Between them, the hills and sky took up all the room.
Whatever was left, that was ours for a while.
But sooner or later the hills will take it back, give it to the animals.
And maybe the moon will send the seas there
and where we once lived will be a stream or river coiling around the base of the hills,
paying the sky the compliment of reflection—

Blue in summer. White when the snow falls.

*

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Sestets

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

by Charles Wright
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2009
Reviewed by Jason Bredle

8

We’re All Going to Die

wright sestets coverComprised entirely of six-line poems yet continuing his aesthetic of long lines seated in the rural, Sestets takes the best qualities of Charles Wright’s work, compacts them and delivers them in smaller, more powerful doses. Whereas I oftentimes get completely lost in the description of Wright’s earlier work and lose sight of what his poems are even about, here, because of the length constraint, his descriptive powers are tighter than ever and on full display, giving way to lyrical, compelling meditations on nature and impermanence that unfold like the landscape he so often returns to.

In “Homage to What’s-His-Name,” Wright writes:

Ah, description, of all the arts least appreciated.
Well, it’s just this and it’s just that,
someone will point out.
Exactly. It’s just this and it’s just that and nothing other.

From landscape to unsuppressed conjunction, it’s only itself.
No missteps, no misreading.
And what’s more metaphysical than that,
The world in its proper posture, on all fours, drinking the sweet water?

Description is just description, but here Wright shows us its power – not in the form of describing something, but moreso in the form of explaining exactly why it’s powerful. Like a landscape, it is what it is, and like a landscape, it can lead one to a spiritual revelation of sorts. For Wright, one rooted soundly in nature:

We live on Orphan Mountain,
each of us, and that’s how it is,
Kingfisher still wet
And chattering on his empty branch.

Water remains immortal—
Poems can’t defile it,
The heron, immobile on one leg,
Stands in it, snipe stitch it, and heaven pillows its breast.

Certain aspects of a landscape – water, mountains – will, for the most part, remain here forever. Those of us who trod the landscape, however, can exist upon it, but will go away soon enough. Here, not only does Wright address the coming and going of the world, but also our loneliness – “We live on Orphan Mountain” – no matter how many things we may surround ourselves with, we’re ultimately alone.

Death is the mother of nothing.
This is a fact of life,
And exponentially sad.
All these years – a lifetime, really – thinking it might be otherwise.

What are the colors of despair?
Are they calibrated, like vowels?
How will we know them?
Who knows where the light will fall
As the clouds go from west to the east?

It seems macabre to think of Wright’s own age and its relationship with the subject matter of the poems from this book – particularly mortality – but like Merwin’s In the Shadow of Sirius, I find myself drawn to the wisdom of age and what’s truly important in the world when the day winds down. Here, the speaker confesses a lifetime thinking a release from the inevitable might exist, but ultimately gives up and questions what the reality truly is. In the end, is there really an answer?

Seventy years, and what’s left?
Or better still, what’s gone before?
A couple of lines, a day or two out in the cold?
And all those books, those half-baked books,
Sweet yeast for the yellow dust.

What say, Orazio? Like you, I’m sane and live at the edge of things,
Countryside flooded with light,
Sundown,
The chaos of future mornings just over the ridge, but not here yet.

Here Wright continues his meditation on death and nature. It’s a harsh reality – what does one really have and what will one really leave behind of importance when death finally arrives? This poem also evokes the sense of doom or dread just beyond the horizon in much of the book. We know death is coming, but we will never know when. Still, this doesn’t mean all is bleak.

In “Future Tense,” Wright writes

All things in the end are bittersweet—
An empty gaze, a little way station just beyond silence.

If you can’t delight in the everyday,
You have no future here.

And if you can, no future either.

And time, black dog, will sniff you out,
and lick your lean cheeks,
And lie down beside you—warm, real close—and will not move.

Just because we’re all going to die doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy what we have. In poem after poem in Sestets, Wright uses his familiar Appalachian landscape to expound upon nature and our mortality and the mortality inherent in nature. I couldn’t recommend this book enough to everyone. It feels like the truth, like a deathbed repentance, and like a tranquil meditation in the forest. It feels like not only an elegy for the self, but an elegy for the world. These poems are wise beyond imagination. They’re like a hymnal dug from the ground and handed to us all to help us deal with the inevitable.

*

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Selected Poems

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

by Thom Gunn
Farrar Straus & Giroux 2009
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

7.5

Frequencies

gunn selected cover

Music and Verve

In his introduction to his new selection of Thom Gunn’s poetry, August Kleinzahler notes that in an interview with James Campbell, Gunn once stated the following: “I distrust myself with rhetoric.” Yet as Gunn largely eschews emotive abstractions and sentimentality in his poems, he is somehow very personal; the specific poems that Kleinzahler chose for this collection combine to form a speaker that is all at once subtle, expressive and intensely human. The result is this diminutive collection’s triumph.

Gunn’s anonymous yet universal speaker deals with strong and severe subjects such as drugs, AIDS and deaths (including his own mother’s suicide). He harnesses the emotional charge of such topics through his strict use of form, almost always relying on rhyme and meter as a means to synthesis. His often laconic verse achieves immaculate control throughout difficult themes. The only criticism of this collection that is fair is that it is, perhaps, too sparse, including too little. However, the brevity of the book underscores the verve of these particular poems.

Selected covers Gunn’s early work, but emphasizes poems from My Sad Captains, Moly and The Man with Night Sweats. Although a much later collection, The Man with Night Sweats is an integral component of Gunn’s lifework; it addresses the complex and harsh realities of lives affected by AIDS. Gunn explores the ways in which people come to terms with death. Poems like “Lament” and “Still Life,” which appear consecutively in this collection, are able to find the universal humanity in all deaths, the “difficult, tedious, painful enterprise” that it is.

 

All Everybody Dead and Dying

Even Gunn’s early work addressed the dilemma we face when we encounter loss. In early poems such as “Tamer and Hawk,” the speaker is reflective but destructive. He unexpectedly takes on the point of view of the hawk: “Through having only eyes / For you I fear to lose, / I lose to keep, and choose / Tamer as prey.” The concept here is applicable to any situation in which one feels as though control has been lost. In order to feel in command of one’s own fate when something must be lost, one often takes it upon him- or herself to destroy that which he or she fears losing, even if that means the destruction of one’s own body or life.

Later in “My Sad Captains,” a balance of the emotive and the brusque is flawlessly achieved. Again, Gunn addresses the obstacles that must be overcome in the face of bereavement. A poem that recalls old friends that have passed has the potential to become an overwrought, schmaltzy disaster, but not for Gunn. The remembered friends become “disinterested / hard energy, like the stars.” Just as they are “distant now,” Gunn is able to maintain a somewhat distant or removed tone which allows us to respond with unpolluted emotion; dead doesn’t mean gone, it means reconstituted.

It is the same sense of detachment that allows Gunn to be one of the best romantic poets of the last five decades. Poems like “Touch,” “Three” and “The Bed” examine the ways, both physical and non-physical, in which two individuals can come together to cast off the cold, the darkness, the unknown. From “Touch”:

  the ferment of your whole
  body that in darkness beneath
  the cover is stealing
  bit by bit to break
  down that chill.

Gunn asserts that human connections, relationships, are the real matter of our lives, that within a simple touch we can find the ability to “walk with everyone.”

 

Acid Test

Amid Kleinzahler’s nearly ideal choices for this collection lies one significant failure. “Listening to Jefferson Airplane” is a two-line poem: “The music comes and goes on the wind, / Comes and goes on the brain.” It is a nice thought, and under the influence of LSD, or if I’d seen Jefferson Airplane live at the Fillmore East (remember the lights?), it might resonate more. The poem is flinty and takes up a full page in a firmly-controlled Selected. I don’t blame Gunn for having written the poem, but rather I blame Kleinzahler for choosing to include it.

In contrast to “Listening to Jefferson Airplane,” Kleinzahler includes poems like “At the Centre,” which emerged from Gunn’s use of LSD and are much more insightful and weighty than the former. The speaker of this poem is hyperaware of his surroundings, and at the end of the poem he describes the room filled with his friends: “The faces are as bright now as fresh snow.” Though some might describe the line as sentimental, nostalgic, it renders the faces a mere component of the speaker’s environment. It vivifies the emotional quantities of a singular, responsive mind; it implies a ceaseless blending of things and of persons, and it gives all of it value.

 

Because We Separate

Gunn writes a lot about his friends. In “To a Friend in Time of Trouble,” he comments on destructive relationships by describing a bird scooping up its prey. Then he writes, “You know / It is not cruel, it is not human.”  He suggests that in order for an action to be cruel, the actor must be aware of the cruelty. The bird, however, is acting out of necessity; it follows a natural instinct within itself to survive, whereas humans often act out of self-importance. On some level, it is true that the human animal (and whatever we think we know about its ability to cognize) should not be held to a higher standard than other animals, but it seems that understanding natural elements of balance within our environment can often help us deal with “grief and rage,” and the speaker sees his friend benefiting in this way.

Most struggle to understand the elements of the natural world, the balancing act that it is. We particularly struggle to understand the process of death, and many rage against its onset in their lives; however, in “Death’s Door,” Gunn takes a more level-headed approach to the unknown. While some mourn for their loved ones, Gunn chooses to reflect on the fact that they “can feel nothing”; “they unlearned their pain so sprucely” in death.. It is almost as if Gunn doesn’t have the adverse reaction to death that many do, but instead accepts it as an inevitable open ending. For example, he begins the poem with the following two lines: “Of course the dead outnumber us / —How their recruiting armies grow!” Perhaps it won’t be such a bad thing to be “recruited.”

Gunn continues to take a unique look at death. His mother committed suicide, and he didn’t publish a poem on the subject until Boss Cupid in 2000, but in the poem “The Gas-poker,” his attitude regarding death is the same as in his earlier work despite the fact that his own mother is the one that has been “recruited.” As difficult as a death can be for those that are left behind, Gunn’s speaker musters the strength to acknowledge the ways in which death may have been something positive for his mother: decompression. He calls the room in which she met her end the “room of her release.” The poem is straightforward, and does not carry the overbearing emotions that many poems on this topic might.

Which could be said of most of these poems. The poet writes about people; he loves them and cares about them and seeing them die and disappear is a scandal—but a scandal that follows plain logic, that makes sense, as things are wont to blend. Gunn is a master of subtlety, and his ability to write about such distressing subjects in “plain style” is ultimately what makes them moving.

*

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Speak Low

Monday, May 18th, 2009

by Carl Phillips
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2009
Reviewed by Jason Schneiderman

8

Melancholy, Baby

phillips cover

There is a change in Carl Phillips’s work that began in 2006’s Riding Westward and that continues in this year’s Speak Low.  The syntax is less pyrotechnic and disorienting.  There are fewer of those brilliant sentences that won’t reveal who or what was being discussed until they’ve already ended.  The bodies and the selves are more clearly defined.  In his first seven or so books of poems, there was a sense that every speaker, character, body, image could be as easily or as vicariously inhabited by Phillips as he was by the reader, and that there were no boundaries to anything.  But now there’s a sense of settling in, of stability.  In some ways, it’s more erotic now that bodies are more bounded, less likely to shift into each other—although with clearer boundaries, it’s precisely the limned border between them that he explores.  In the opening poem, “Speak Low,” Phillips begins by looking at how two things might touch:

The wind stirred—the water beneath it stirred accordingly…
The wind’s pattern was its own, and the water’s also.  The
water in that sense was the wind’s reflection.  

The water and the air are neither interchangeable nor permeable, and yet the sight of one is only allowed by the other.  The next poem begins with the speaker waking, “still on top of him,” and moves through a sequence of observations and questions about eroticism and affection—but the template is in place—the lover’s body is revealed against the lover—the boundaries that the pornographic imagination can never place on screen are evoked, the chest of the lover against the back. 

Phillips is a master at depicting a melancholic sex that never erases the desire that led to it—or rather, Phillips is a master of the melancholic moments after sex, without ever needing to reject sex itself for the sad commitments it can bring.  He never chooses between moralism and desire; the poem finally comes to a question about the relationship of the ocean to the sea, questioning the definitions, “I think the sea must be, / to the ocean, as disappointment is to sorrow…”.  At the conclusion of the poem, the boundaries are stretched, but intact:

When I woke, I was still on top of him—still inside him.
The sea isn’t far from us, it can’t be, I remember thinking:
through the dark, I could smell the sea.  It isn’t ocean, at all.

As it has been through much of Phillips’s work, erotic play in Speak Low is always in flux with intellectual examination—though in this volume, the bodies are more literal and physical.  In a meditation on drooping peonies, he writes

                                   …I even think they look, more
than a little bit, like rough sex once it’s gone where, of
course, it had to—do you know what I mean, his smell
on you after, like those parts of the gutted deer that
the men bring home with them, fresh from the hunt…

before contemplating Augustine’s ideas on passion, hunger and habit.  But Phillips is a consummate master of combining lyric leap with direct address.  He hooks the reader in at that “do you know what I mean” (and I’ve had more than one student who would respond, “I certainly do not!”) and implicates the reader in the desire and the image.  The poem concludes masterfully, urging the reader’s complicity:

           …Don’t go.  Let me show you what it looks like
when surrender, and an instinct not to, run side by side.

Elsewhere, when Phillips speaks of “humiliation’s / not-so-strange allure,” it’s not an offhanded comment.  It’s well-reasoned ars poetica.
 

Phillips works frequently through short lyrics in this book.  “A Little Moonlight,” a sequence of three thirteen line sonnets, was one of my favorites.  In such small space, his vision is focused, even as the subject keeps turning away.  The second poem begins in the middle of a thought—

Suspecting, even then,
that the best way to avoid being
broken by flaw would be to shape my life
around it—

—and the final poem ends with a question about why sadness would come to one who wanted sadness: “Tell me why, when what I loved / from the start was how eventually each leaf must go.”  The smaller form increases some of the velocity of his shifts, and the poems pull into wonderfully tight conclusions.

Phillips is a master of what one might call the “concrete abstraction.”  Even as he works in the broad or general world of philosophical truth, the reader never loses sight of the bodies or objects in question.  Other attempts to name what it is that makes him so essentially appealing might include “melancholy logic” or “erotic reasoning.”  His carefully pitched poems keep turning the subjects in front of them, examining and re-examining, finding compelling conclusions or beautiful rules.  To enter a Phillips poem is to lose one’s bearing, to wait for the image to focus.  You trust that when the image becomes clear you’ll want to look.  But you also trust that you’ll want to look away.

*

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Watching the Spring Festival

Monday, November 17th, 2008

by Frank Bidart
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2008
Reviewed by Jason Schneiderman

9

Seed Breeze

bidart coverIt would be unfair to say that Frank Bidart is purely a poet of intellect, though he’s often cast that way.  The truth is that he’s a poet who needs a distance to feel from, and his poems are strategic movements to external vantage points.  It’s often as though his material is too hot to handle, and the poems are the asbestos gloves that suggest the shape of the hands beneath them.  Bidart is certainly a poet who thinks on the page, but I think that perhaps more than anyone since Ashbery (circa Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror), Bidart shows just how emotional a process thinking is. 

To think and to feel are artificial distinctions in Bidart’s work—they always arrive together.  Bidart is a poet of urgency.  All of his utterances have a directness and make a demand on us.  He creates a kind of vortex out of syntax, but unlike most of the poets we associate with disorientation, he always reorients us by the end of the sentence.  Sometimes he’s convoluted, but always in the name of precision.  One has the sense that he’s trying to get at something very important, and that he has to work in a kind of contortionism in order to get it right.

In this particular book, Bidart has dispensed with the frequent capitalizations of words for emphasis—a move that has always amazed and dazzled me—and mostly uses italics to signal a switch in voices.  Bidart often feels to me like he’s completely outside the rules.  But it would be a mistake to think that he’s become a rule abiding citizen of the poetry world. 

This collection alternates between mediations and narratives, though with more weight directed towards the narrative.  The book opens with a meditation on Marilyn Monroe’s destructive seductiveness, a theme picked up in a later narrative poem (“Seduction”) about a failed seduction. Bidart is as stunning in his narrative details as he is in his meditative pronouncements. Here the gay protagonist sits in the car with the inaccessible object of desire:

You ask what is this place.  He says
kids come to make out here.  He has driven

out here to show you lover’s lane.

because your power in the world exceeds
his, he must make the first move.

His hand on the car seat doesn’t move.

The car seat, and all it implies, is devastating.  And when Bidart moves to explanation, he is equally powerful.  Why can’t the narrator let go of this memory?

He is the dye whose color dyes

The mirror: you can never get free.

The image is carefully-constructed and perfect.  The reflection of the speaker can never escape the tint of failed love.

The technique that is most visible in this collection, as has long been Bidart’s métier, is collage—the blending of voices and themes and subjects.  He has a talent for guiding the reader so deep into his labyrinth of associations that one forgets how it is the conclusion arrived.  In the poem “Song,” he begins with the simple setting of an evening at home:

At night inside the light

when history
is systole
and diastole

awake I am the moment between.

Already we are in odd territory, the body and history collapsing into each other and insomnia.  But the poem continues through the house, addressing God, and finally arriving at a Whitman-esque and beautiful conclusion:

so try as you will
you cannot make me feel
embarrassment

at what I find beautiful.

It’s entirely shocking, entirely earned.  Bidart lets us feel ourselves being guided without ever letting us see where he is going.
 
The masterful poem that anchors the book, “Ulanova At Forty-Six At Last Dances Before a Camera Giselle,” describes the transformative experience of watching the film named in the title.  The poem blends together the dance, the film, the experience of watching the film, the story of Ulanova, and a critical text about her.  The reason I think it works so well is that he cares so deeply about every single aspect of the poem.  The poem begins with a section in an alternating couplets and half lines.  The form makes the movement almost painfully slow, the motion of the poem speeding and halting in an evocation of the pacing of the dance:

Many ways to dance Giselle, but tonight as you
watch  you think that she is what art is, creature

who remembers

her every gesture and senses its relation to the time
just a moment before when she did something

close to it

In describing the dance, he describes his experience of the dance, and we see his transformation as we see what transforms him.  As a general rule, only one thing can be at stake in a poem—but Bidart is masterful in his ability to pull together the disparate strands to make a coherent whole. He is even able to pull back the veil and insert his own commentary on the writing process:

The poem I’ve never been able to write has a very tentative title: “Ulanova At Forty-Six At Last Dances Before a Camera Giselle.”  A nice story about an innocent who dies because tricked by the worldly becomes, with Ulanova, tragedy.  A poem about being in normal terms too old to dance something but the world wants to record it because the world knows that it is precious but you also know the camera is good at unmasking those who are too old to create the illusion on which every art in part depends.  About burning an image into the soul of an eighteen-year-old (me) of the severity and ferocity at the root of classic art, addicted to mimesis. 

Bidart is forever breaking the rules (show don’t tell), but always making us feel the urgency that led him to break each of the rules.  In describing the process of writing this poem, he’s not just giving us a gloss on how to read or what the poem means, he’s actually revealing the urgency of the work.  He’s telling us how hard it was to get this right, to get to the poem we now read.  Bidart’s recounting of Giselle is devastating.  He invokes the tragic to explain Giselle’s refusal to let Myrtha punish the duke with the very death that he brought to her.  He describes Giselle’s love in the clear and crushing terms:

When Giselle dead defies her dead sisters

Death and the dramatist make visible
the pitiless logic within love’s must

Love must silence its victims,—
…or become their vessel.

She has become his vessel. 

Perhaps more than the collage, the vortex or the image of the storm is useful to understand his work.  Bidart positions the reader at the eye of the storm.  His reflective calm lets us watch the elements rage around us from a position of tenuous safety.  It’s hard to describe that which mesmerizes the reader (me), and yet Bidart has managed to yet again burn his images into my soul.

*

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Blackbird and Wolf

Friday, February 29th, 2008

by Henri Cole
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2007
Reviewed by Matthew Yeager

9

Life as Crucible, World as Church

colecoverTo put it simply, in Blackbird and Wolf, Henri Cole’s latest volume of poetry, we are encountering someone who is writing from the absolute center of himself. The aspect of intentionality – that puss of youth – feels entirely drained from these poems. The influence of other poems or poets likewise feels non-existent – like schoolteachers who’ve left the room, or clothing kicked off.

It’s not that Cole has cut off his lines to tradition. Blake is directly mentioned; Eliot’s “Waste Land” makes a secret cameo in the final line of the book; Marvell’s “The Garden” is referenced when Cole writes “a red thought in a red shade.” You’ll also find traces of his grapplings with Harold Bloom’s formulae. What’s happened, we must conclude, is that both tradition and the idea of tradition have been assimilated. Cole is impersonating no one; nor is he impersonating an earlier version of himself, wriggling around in a homemade box, pawning off a star-painted ceiling as the night sky. He is moving forward into a poetics that is entirely his own. Middle-Earth was a large step. Blackbird and Wolf is another.

Because the poems have that queer sense of purely existing, as leaves or flowers do, they can be somewhat evasive to talk about. William Logan said as much in regard to Cole’s previous volume Middle Earth – something like, “these poems escape all the praise I can heap upon them.” He’s very correct. Attempting to read Blackbird and Wolf with a “sentence-forming” mind is quite a bit like attempting to walk out across the surface of a pond. Immediately you sink in. On one hand this is frustrating. On the other it is such a pleasure, and it goes a long way towards revealing the nature of these poems. You could say that that they “resist the intelligence almost successfully,” but this notion tends to cast the poem as an infallible citadel, the intelligence as spear-chucking infantrymen. Blackbird and Wolf, in contrast, resists you by absorbing you.

The way that these newer Cole poems pull a reader in is by immediately establishing a situation and a setting. The work is swift, specific, and simple in a way that reveals it as an aesthetic choice. (Cole’s earlier poems are more ornate, more filigreed.) At most, a title and two lines are all he requires. Some scenes are commonplace, with a quiet sensuousness. “Haircut” begins: “I sit on the dock for a haircut.” Others are more traumatic. “Ambulance” starts off: “Gentleness had come a great distance to be there / as paramedics stanched the warm blood.” The deploying of simple language to produce a vivid, instantaneous image calls to mind prose writers like Hemingway or Richard Wright. In the context of Cole’s earlier work, it is an act of trust.

Once you’ve been through three or four, you find you can enter the next Cole poem as you can a pool once you’re acclimated to the water temperature. Rather, you enter like you do a favorite show with a through-running plot, a show that unfolds in installments. Like a TV character (and as one who counts the characters on The Wire among his friends, I’m speaking positively), Cole – the “being-in-the-world” that is his speaker – possesses a sense of being alive continuously, between poems, between his occasions for speech. Perhaps this is because the situations have a cumulative variety that, on the whole, replicates “life” as most of us know it. He writes well, for instance, of sickness. His speaker has headaches, fevers, colds that don’t necessarily debilitate him, but contribute to an overall mood.   

One of the pleasures of reading James Schuyler is that the room he’s in almost always enters the poem, and it tends to resemble – in spirit, at least – the room that the reader is in. There are such precise little details: an apple core on his desk, a paperback on an end table fat from having absorbed a spill, a desire to unplug a ringing phone. Cole’s is a similar knack (there is such a moisture to his writing), but what’s truly remarkable is his ability to leap from these securely pinned-down commonplaces to a spiritual meditation with far-reaching implications. More impressive is that he does so without attempting to heap an artificial importance on minutiae. He’s honest. He doesn’t b.s. The happenings of life are rendered at their precise emotional size, and the world as a whole comes out feeling sanctified.

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On an entirely different note, Blackbird and Wolf (like Middle Earth) is also one of the finest volumes in terms of layout that I can recall reading. The first thing you’ll notice, in picking it up and flipping through it, is that the poems are double-spaced. This suits them well. Moreover, the font size and margins of these double-spaced poems dictate that a title and exactly fourteen lines appear on a single page. As thirty-one of the thirty-eight poems in the volume are sonnet-length, the result is that the majority fit perfectly onto a single page, like cars into parking spaces. Although in the name of fourteen lines, he occasionally breaks off his poems too soon, on the whole it’s very gratifying aesthetically.

Of course, there is a basic – yet somehow mysterious – animal pleasure in a perfect fit. A toddler, seated at a primitive wooden puzzle, slipping a triangular block into a triangular hole, feels it. As does the fifth grader at his math test, right at the moment in the long division problem where he sees he’s going to be left with no remainder. Why is this, I wonder? Though a cigar is often simply a cigar, there’s an impulse to channel the inner Freudian and assume an inherent sexual aspect to all this – as if we are sexual creatures in all our interactions, not merely when we fantasize, fuck, or kiss. I am presently recalling the panic that swept through the bicycling community in New York City several years ago. It became known that the Kryptonite chain and lock, the industry standard, could be picked using the hollow tube of a Bic pen. I have little doubt the shit-storm of thefts and factory recalls could be traced to one bored man, alone in his apartment, who noticed a size/shape similarity between the opening of the pen and the circle-shaped key hole and, out of curiosity, just stuck it in there. A question: would he have were we not, at bedrock, sexual?

I wonder what Cole would say to that. Regardless of what he’s writing about, he writes a highly sexualized poem. He’s also unusually tuned into that aspect of animal comfort that comes when a body is right in its space. I simply find it interesting the way he is posed throughout his work. “Shaving” begins with “Outstretched in a tub, like a man in a tomb.” In another poem, he remarks: “and hunchbacked loons in flight, projecting / their feet out behind, like me in my twin bed.” (Out of curiosity, I substituted beds of various sizes into this poem (“like me in my double bed,” “like me in my queen-sized bed,” “like me in my California king-sized bed.” Try it: it’s dazzling how much if lost if the size of the bed is increased.)

Connections, connections, even more connections. A twin bed, a tomb, a bathtub: sleep, death, purity.

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There is, as most would agree, a symbiotic relationship between a poet’s poems and his ideas regarding the making of poetry. Because the creative process is ineffable, we must find terms to express it, and whatever terms are set forth tend to constitute a blueprint, an instruction manual. What I mean is that if someone, drawing on his experiences of making, says, “Writing poetry for me is like pounding on a wall that, after a certain amount of thumps, transforms into a door that opens me into an unexpected place,” then chances are that the creative act will indeed be like that. That person will not make poems on the first try. If someone else says, “Poetry for me is a natural act like excretion: I ingest experience, I crap poems,” then his verse will tend to lean on his life, as upon a crutch. He’ll need to have experiences the way a car must have gas. It’s akin to the self-fulfilling prophecy.

Take a poet like Yeats. Yeats’ idea of a soul enlarging as a body decays, of vision clarifying as eyesight dims, proofs itself in a poetry that keeps improving and improving as he nears death. Witnessing his higher and higher and still higher flights, one secretly thinks, “Well that will be my idea too.” But the thing is, you can’t control your idea. It has you; you don’t get to have it. Cole says as much himself. In Dune, the volume’s best poem, he writes “[Poetry] is stronger / than I am and makes me do what it wants.”

In thinking about Blackbird and Wolf, particularly in light of Cole’s earlier work, you almost feel like the rituals of purification, which he enacts in individual poems, have occurred on a larger, macrocosmic scale. Purification is a process of subtraction, a removal of impurities in quest of an altered or ideal state. It involves suffering, and for many is the only logical way to process suffering. Undertaken actively, it has an end in mind. In a poem like “Gulls,” one of Cole’s best,a kind of clarified vision seems to be the aim. Like the view from any peak, vision is a temporary phenomenon, so it’s no wonder that so many of Cole’s poems follow a similar movement, that they scale the same proverbial hill. Here is the poem in full:

      Naked, hairy, trembling, I dove into the green,

      where I saw a form that was Mother

      in her pink swimsuit, pushing out of water,

      so I kicked deeper, beyond a sugar boat

      and Blake’s Ulro and Beulah; beyond grief, fate,

      fingers, toes, and skin; beyond speech,

      plagues of the blood, and flowers thrown on a coffin;

      beyond Eros and the disease of incompleteness;

      and as I swam I saw myself against the sky

      and against the light, a tiny human knot with eyes,

      my numb hands and repeated motion, like the gulls aloft,

      touching the transparent structure of the world,

      and in that icy, green, silver frothing,

      I was straightening all that I had made crooked.

Beautiful stuff, eh? When I read this poem a second time, it brought to mind a line from the book of Malachi:

      “He [the Lord] will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver.”

It’s one of the bible’s most beautiful similes, and also one of the most beguiling. Like many metals, silver is heated to remove imperfections. The process requires constant attention, as too long a subjection to the heat ruins it. So how does the refiner know when his silver is pure? It becomes suddenly reflective, a mirror; he can see his image in it.

What’s interesting is that, in this metaphorical terrain, after swimming past the pressures of literature, his own body (where he seats desire), diseases, recollections of funerals, Cole’s speaker sees himself as tiny – “a tiny human knot with eyes.” An experience of smallness is common to all experiences of mysteriumtremendum: the I shrinks, the not-I enlarges. Even colloquially, when we speak of “putting something in perspective,” we most always mean we understand something, or ourselves, to be of less consequence than we once did.

And what is this thing that he mentions, “the transparent structure of the world?” Whatever it is, it seems to connect to a belief, expressed throughout Blackbird and Wolf, that all on earth is molded from the same substance, cut from the same cloth. As a reader, you not only find it in the parallels Cole habitually draws between the human body and the animal body, but in his overall use of simile, which is now less logical, more freely associative, a merging of essences. “Trees, mammals, fire, snow – / they are like emotions.” As Cole is such a powerful poet, we believe him when he says things like this just as we believe Stevens when he says, “the deer and the dachsund are one.”

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Forgive me for exploiting the fact that this is an internet review, with somewhat looser guidelines….

I actually paid (or rather, am slowly in the process of paying) $1,500 dollars for Blackbird and Wolf. Strange story. Originally I ordered it from a used bookseller on the Amazon network, but over a month passed without it arriving. I sent this seller a series of agitated emails. Nothing. After meeting a friend one evening, I poked my head into St. Marks bookshop, saw it on the shelf, and went through a few poems standing up. Though I was convinced that if I bought it, a manila package would materialize in my mailbox the following day, I went ahead. The clerk slipped it into a small plastic bag. Harlem, where I live, is about a forty-minute bicycle ride from the East Village, and for some reason I was riding without a pack that night. (Why this was, I don’t know. Riding without a pack makes me feel naked, a wrist without a watch.) Still, holding a “drugstore-style” plastic bag in one hand while steering a bicycle is simple. No more difficult than holding a cigarette while steering a car. After a few blocks, though, in an attempt to switch the bag from one hand to the other, I pitched over the handlebars.

I’m always amazed at the body, how it can remain quiet as to its true condition. My hand hurt, but not unbearably. Maybe I was simply embarrassed at having fallen and being asked by half-giggling, half-concerned people, “Are you alright? Are you okay?” (My bicycle is my nicest possession, and sprawled on the street, I felt a bit like a pool player who screws together a fancy, two-piece cue at a bar and then emphatically blunders.) The next morning, like an idiot, I went to the emergency room. NEVER GO TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM IF YOU CAN HELP IT. EVER. I was charged almost a thousand dollars to be told my wrist was broken, then sent to a hand doctor. Can you believe that? The equivalent would be crossing a street so as to ensure a confrontation with a group of young men with a “we’re going to mug you” vibe about them…..

Anyhow, the poetry world is small enough that of course I have imagined meeting Henri Cole and telling him about this (all as those behind me in line at a signing sigh and think, “Oh Jesus just get on with it.”) Or perhaps I’d make sure to get at the back of the line, as in a line at a water fountain. I’ve heard he’s a nice person, with a dry sense of humor. Perhaps he’d ask if I got my money’s worth. Truthfully, looking at my current bottom line, I’d have to say no. I’m just not doing very well right now. But that isn’t to say that Blackbird and Wolf isn’t one of the best books of verse to come out in quite some time. We should all be looking forward to what he comes out with next.

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