by Richard Meier
Wave Books 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough
Hurry Up, We’ll Be Late for Homeroom
Though I never actually met Richard Meier, this review has all the makings of long-delayed revenge. I have here two of his poems from Slithy Toves, our high school literary magazine, which he edited more than 20 years ago. I torture him knowing full-well that my own early efforts similarly (but far more embarrassingly) exist; but I’m taking the risk to highlight the positive qualities which persist in Meier’s current book, Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar. And because I couldn’t resist. “To Rake,” an almost obsessive poem about yardwork, ends:
i smile,
and touch my
hand to my cheek to feel the blood.
i smell myself,
I like my smell,
smell of movement
In the second one, the speaker seems both childlike and very adult in his description of taking a bath:
the drip burns my eye
is sweat
my face has not
broken the skin above the temple
warmth removes the fear from naked
The speaker is grounded in the repetitive physicality of his actions as well as the wonder and surprise of perception. Meier obviously has a much larger bag of tricks now, but his strongest poems still draw from the same source, and mix the same childlike and adult intensity. Speakers in Meier’s current poems are quite aware of their relatedness to the world, but are more discomfited, and more tenuously placed. Take these lines from “Shaken”:
…you
thought I was sleeping because I wasn’t in the room
Bishop Berkeley thought stopped existing when he left it
which is love’s generosity, like the sentence that made it seem
the milk was from the farmers
who needed cows called L 47.
The content shifts line by line from the metaphysical to the absurd, which is great for skewering Berkeley but might make it more difficult for the reader to become emotionally involved. Highly charged images merely float by: “at the end of a long vagina, the constellations / tell their secrets” (“The Schedule”); “we lived in a house/ that expanded like a uterus in space instead of people” (“150 Eyes in My Head”). Admittedly, these images would be hard to sustain as a solemn conceit. They can only proceed like children’s dreams; their “hilarity” remains “unable to climb out of knowing why it happened.” For Meier, the dream, the memory, is not necessarily release. Waking and sleeping provide the same resistance to sense, as if we were constrained to walk in the pool rather than swim. Occasionally the willful oddness of this gets frustrating. Somewhat unfairly, I’ll cite “Post Hoc” though I don’t think it’s bad:
If you think about experience, I didn’t do anything,
or deep seeded unhappiness,
the vernal equinox is on the calendar with the turning of the pages
long since over and long approaching
again is in the form of the dream
about leaving the cave, known by the dump, effluvia,
effluvium, to launch into what’s already another
summer the quartz warhead of the great farm
of the unfenced prairie…
There is a great interest in the turn of each line, since we don’t quite know where the syntax will pick up again. The images relate in a Farmer’s Almanac-meets-Plato fashion, but don’t necessarily add up to more. The descriptions stop short of being detailed enough to convince as mimesis, or lyrical enough to convince as song. Nor are they set free of sense to become “just words.” In this nearly endless sentence, the speaker leaves us only scattered clues as to why we should care. Meier’s syntax retains just enough continuity to sideswipe the pathos of a convincing speaker confronting real events, making us long for a solid character sketch, or a more clearly stated motive.
But whenever Meier hits a ground note and sustains it, beautiful things happen. One appealingly direct poem that combines his earlier, childlike sensuousness and his more adult persona is “I Know You Are But What Am I.” Here, the quick perceptual shifts keep the reader emotionally grounded, and quite literally rooted.
He went outside and a tree fell into his mouth
He became a root. A boy grew out of it.
I died at that point, like I was buying a house…
Though time frames and personas shift, the details are not simply whisked away. Inside and out, tree, mouth, house and boy lend lasting support to each other, even as the title recalls the shaky schoolyard tautology used to ward off insults. The boy seems to insist on the continuity of memory, even to the point of casually willing the death of his older self: “I died at this point.” These memories are a house of cards, but the wonder is that it stands at all:
Acres of water the dam held back,
The brow of shade and light,
the flicker of interest
A mouth like a tent in a rainstorm,
I loved it here and he
was those things, just as he said we were.
But throughout Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar, flowing, lyrical lines loudly switch to deliberately clunky passages—perhaps because, unlike the original Surrealists, Meier’s work describes a world dislocated not by war or political repression, but by petty acts of individual or corporate will insinuating their consequences between the lines of his poems: “the body thought the body was taking precedence./ They’re buying it to do a teardown.” It’s as if identity itself bore the cancer of suburban sprawl. Here’s an extended riff from “Evening, Various People”:
when you forced a path between waistband and skin—
space appeared where there had been none,
a hand to occupy it and then the space
became material whether something had beentaken or removed was like a man
This section is also preceded and followed by lines that are deliberately less lyrical and more disjunctive. While I agree that one should not entirely trust lyric or narrative modes, Meier’s mix often reads less like a collage than a willfully awkward series of frames, with the last line bearing the weight of the whole structure by default.
Sometimes he’s defter at striking a balance. In “Not Dead, Not Dream, Not Poem, Not Faggot” the speaker is suddenly confronted by the memory of Reggie Clark, an eccentric gym and geometry teacher “who wore his knitted hat inside and outside,” and “always late,” climbed into homeroom from the window. He would demonstrate “foul shots all follow through and saying, like a faggot, no tension, knowing nothing, as he put it, what survives of misunderstanding…” In a distant corner of a suburban schoolyard where PC etiquette hasn’t taken hold, we are suddenly grounded by this eccentric character and his tossed-off epithet, and even more by the repeated physical act of practicing the foul shot (no free throw here), a fine touch unforgettably demonstrating that language is both profoundly physical and inextricably bound with memory and painful misunderstanding, even shame. The poem ends with: “contained wrongly but contained into a motion knowing nothing, like all poems, and all poems not written, Reggie Clark and all the not dead my beloveds?”
This poem has a heat that has nothing to do with any reader’s (or reviewer’s) inside knowledge of a particular high school. I wish there were even more like it. When Meier insists on the stubborn persistence of character, of physical reality as well as the slipperiness of perception, he creates indelible moments which no rueful philosophic fall from lyric grace or narrative continuity can dissipate.
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