Posts Tagged ‘Paul Violi’

by Paul Violi
Hanging Loose Press 2007
Reviewed by Matt Hart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I should note additionally

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who am I?

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Heart as light as a hornet’s nest.”

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

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

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

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

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

[(…)]

basement of the year…

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

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

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

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

As I Was Telling Dave and Kelley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

Tags: 9 stars, Hanging Loose Press, Matt Hart, Paul Violi
Posted in reviews