Not Gwendolyn Brooks, not Robert Hayden, not Amiri Baraka, not Jay Wright, not Michael Harper, not Yusef Komunyakaa, not Rita Dove — no “person of color” won the National Book Award for Poetry between 1950 and 1999, Elizabeth Alexander pointed out as part of a National Book Foundation panel designed for “six leading poet-critics to offer their opinions on the list of winners of the National Book Award in Poetry since 1950.”
“Keep counting,” she said in a statement echoing the recent release of VIDA’s “The Count 2010,” which revealed that far more men than women were published in major literary publications last year.
The panel was held last night at The New School’s Tishman Auditorium in Manhattan. Panelists, who included Alexander, Stephen Burt, Tony Hoagland, James Longenbach, Maureen McLane, and Susan Stewart, spent a long time discussing the ways that cultural and political context influence institutions like the National Book Award, and the fact that most published poetry gets swallowed whole by history.
“This history of taste is not the same as the history of art,” Longenbach asserted.
Hoagland suggested that poetry be judged by its “irrationality and cultural relevance,” and panelists pointed to Adrienne Rich’s Diving Into the Wreck and Robert Bly’s The Light Around the Body as examples of culturally relevant NBA winners. Both Burt and Hoagland addressed the feminist politics that inform Rich’s book.
“[The books displays] anger that’s not quite sure what to do with itself,” Burt stated. He spent his entire talk celebrating Diving Into the Wreck and its “rage turned inward,” pointing out that nine poems end with something burning.
“The thinking that goes on in poetry is more capacious than the thinking that goes on anywhere else,” Stewart said.
Stewart focused her talk on the four listed NBA winners that are “most worn from rereading” on her shelf: A.R. Ammons’s Garbage, John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, W.H. Auden’s The Shield of Achilles, and Wallace Stevens’s The Auroras of Autumn.
“Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror explores what is lost to time and history,” she said, hitting on a topic that would dominate discussion late in the panel.
“All will be lost,” Longenbach claimed matter-of-factly.
Burt suggested that all arts suffer the same fate.
“Most films go unseen,” he said. And later, “there’s only so much time you have to devote to anything while you’re alive.”
Burt also said that it is important for critics to find out what is in danger of being lost.
“What matters is that we are lost now,” added Hoagland, who called James Longenbach “Ecclesiastes Longenbach.”
Panelists roundly praised the most recent National Book Award winner, Terrance Hayes’s Lighthead. Hayes is one of four poets to win the award since 1999 who are African-American or part African-American. The other three are Ai, Lucille Clifton, and Nathaniel Mackey.
As to whether any contemporary poetry might stand the test of time, Longenbach stated, “no one this room will live long enough to know.”
by Timothy Donnelly
Wave Books 2010 Reviewed by Stephen Burt
“The suffering from which we had come to expect so much.”
For most of its extraordinary length The Cloud Corporation is the most abstract, the most inward-turned, and the grimmest of recent good books. Timothy Donnelly meditates on the very terms that make meditation possible—terms such as “knowledge,” “mystery,” “particular,” “mind,” and “will” (all occur on the first page)—and he makes the tough time we have pinning those terms down into one of his typical subjects. His kind of pessimistic introspection, cast in long sentences and in three-line stanzas, might remind you of late Wallace Stevens, the grey, chastened Stevens of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” Stevens described “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain”; Donnelly gives us “The Malady That Took the Place of Thinking”:
There had seemed to be only one world to adhere to
but now I can see how there really isn’t any, just roads
with signs directing further, towards and away
from the same humiliating noplace you already are.
Yet Donnelly rarely sounds or feels like Stevens: Donnelly’s music is harsher, his bitterness decidedly up to date: his “cardboard city/ collapses around us; another beautiful document/ disassembles into anguish.” Donnelly’s questions about the futility of thought, the inaccessibility of souls, join up willy-nilly to contemporary questions of political economy. How much of the alienation he describes (so his verse asks) arises from the conditions of all human life, and how much arises, instead, from American lives overstuffed with commodities, based on unsustainable consumption, beclouded by corporate entities, propped up by intermittently visible wars? Had Stevens written anything entitled “The Rumored Existence of Other People” it would have been one of his late poems against solipsism; when Donnelly uses that title, it describes his guilt when he thinks about the ill-paid “people I would never meet or know,” who grow or manufacture most of our stuff. “Intuition stopped short of determining whether or not/ any of the objects kept in contact with their makers.” Half-buried by the shiny new products of alienated labor, we inhabit a new Atlantis, ripe for deluge; “to those who lacked the ability to see// through the radiance of things, the Atlanteans appeared/ to be thriving.”
When not economic, not weighed down by cloudy commodities, Donnelly’s vision of human life is positively Lucretian in its atomized meaninglessness—“Here is the river from which/ we crawl, there the next into which we one day dissolve.” When other people and their poems propose ways to palliate his sense of isolation, salves for his sense of futility, Donnelly simply knows too much to believe them. (He has read a lot of other people’s poems; Donnelly co-edits the poetry and the poetry criticism at Boston Review, where he has accepted, and improved, much of my own prose.) Some of the funniest, harshest lines in The Cloud Corporation show Donnelly’s alienation from other writers’ less incisive work:
…I don’t want to have to
locate divinity in a loaf of bread, in a sparkler,
or in the rainlike sound the wind makes through
mulberry trees, not tonight. Listen to them carry on.
(from “The New Hymns”)
Relatively consistent in attitude, in tone, Donnelly takes care to vary his rhythm, his line: some short stanzas owe less to Stevens than to Creeley. He varies, as well, the arguments in his complaints, the reasons he gives for feeling stuck, baffled, oppressed: it’s no fun to feel alienated from everything and everyone, but it’s even more disheartening, and morally worse, to feel bound up in the sort of collective entity (the United States, the Western world) that stands to blame for the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, for “what’s// done in my defense, or in/ its name, or in my/ interest or in the image// of the same.”
Short of resigning from Western civilization, short of devoting one’s life (as this poet could not, temperamentally, do) to a possibly fruitless radical activism, what on Earth should we do? Is there nothing to do? “I just feel soporose, so// soporose tonight… You think/ I should be concerned?” So ends his six-page poem about Abu Ghraib, “Partial Inventory of Airborne Debris. ” The subsequent poem, “Fun for the Shut-in,” begins as a scary tutorial:
Demonstrate to yourself a resistance to feeling
unqualified despair by attempting something like
perfect despair embellished with hand gestures.
What to do? “Embellish”: it’s useless, but so is everything else.The demonstrations in The Cloud Corporation stand out not just for their unflinching look at such sad speculations but for their intricate combinatorics: each long abstract sentence really makes sense, really says something about the course of a thought, something that could not be said in some other way. Donnelly can make a drawn-out music of self-attenuating introspection, or a self-resenting music of grinding, gnashing sounds, dissatisfied with every move in its repertoire: a villanelle, “Claire de Lune, ” says “We tire, we bore./ We revolt ourselves; we disgust and annoy us” (that second line is a refrain).
There is something disturbingly Puritanical about Donnelly’s introspective annoyance, as if tactile or gustatory or indeed sexual delight just deserved our suspicion: what’s wrong with liking 47 flavors of ice cream? why should abundance, in and of itself, make us cringe? But in eating all that ice cream, we are not just using the rest of the world for our pleasure; we are using it up, consuming lives and resources we can never replace, and we seem (at least collectively) unable to stop. No wonder Donnelly cannot stop worrying, not even when he tries to think about metaphysics instead. When he asks how to measure time passing, he proposes “a unit known as the snailsdeath”:
…the average length of time,
about 43 seconds, elapsing between the loss of the first
snail to toxic waters and the loss of the next, roughly
equivalent to the pause between swallows in a human
throat.
(from “Globus Hystericus”)
It is as if speech itself, ostensibly the least harmful of human activities, were killing off the Earth all by itself, one invertebrate species at a time.
Other contemporary poets—from Frederick Seidel to Joyelle McSweeney—have answered violence with violence, reacting to ecocatastrophe, to the metastasis of the corporation, with poetry whose aggressive imbalance seems to reject everything associated with ordinary (and therefore privileged) American life. Neither Donnelly’s temperament, nor his sense of how language works, can let him do that: chaos is for him less interesting and less attractive than a self-questioning, even a self-hating order. Not content to be merely chaotic, aggressive, “subversive,” averse to the writings that simply mime smashing things up, Donnelly has found a way to try to think about our imbrication in what he attacks, about the pleasure we get, the habits we have, and the parts of civilization—perhaps inextricable from baser pleasures—that we perhaps ought to want to preserve.
That way of thinking comes out in his intricate sentences, in his relentless introspection, and in his sour moods: he is—as I am—attached to an unjust order, an order that in its complex, “corporate” entirety can (so it seems in December 2010) neither be defended, nor replaced. The loneliness of a helpless spirit in space, unable to know other people’s inmost souls, and the helplessness of a sad citizen unable to stop consuming, are for Donnelly part of the same problem, the general problem of individual helplessness, and prompt the same sort of inquiries, the same baffled tones. It is a poetry in which (as Matthew Arnold said of his own early poetry, disliking it) suffering finds no vent in action: “the suffering/ from which we had come to expect so much/ remained mere suffering; the swamp due south… stayed water choked in excess life.” Donnelly wants to cut off (but cannot cut off) the part of himself that keeps discovering (in the economy, in his ontology) problems that cannot even be palliated, only chewed over and turned into art:
The times the thought of being pulled apart from
you comes as a relief have come now to outnumber
those it startles me like light from a hurricane
lamp left burning unattended dangerously near
the curtains of the theater we both attend and are.
That stanza sounds as if he were breaking up with a lover, or asking for a divorce, but he is not; the poem instead bears the title “Antepenultimate Conflict with Self.” Antepenultimate, outnumber, average, equivalent: the generalizing, philosophical or mathematical language that comes naturally to Donnelly sits just one chair away from the easily mocked word-hoards of the legal profession and the social sciences, and Donnelly knows as much, writing half-serious halves of poems in legalese:
And such proceedings shall be considered criminal:
amusement amendments, two or more individuals,
any dream proceedings which engage in the activities
indicating intention, love or other things of value…
(from “The Last Dream of Light Released from Seaports”)
Here the trick is to keep the tone neither wholly satirical, nor wholly exempt from satire. When the trick works—as in the writings of Donnelly’s Columbia University colleague Ben Marcus—we may be shocked to see how similar the supposedly deep and personal language of literary introspection and the supposedly hollow, or impersonal, languages of law, of economics, of sociology, really are. (Lines in this poem, a note says, actually take language from the USA_PATRIOT ACT and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.”)
It would be hard to create a whole book of poems—especially a long book, and this one is long—from such projects, and Donnelly does not try. Pithy illustrations, one-page, one-scene poems, become superb counterweights to the extended, distressed abstractions. Take “Montezuma to His Magicians,” here quoted whole:
If they are gods, if they have
divinity in them, then why
when we lay at their feet
garlands of quetzal feathers
and gold coins do they leap
upon the gold as dazzled
monkeys might and tread
on sacred plumage like dust?
Conquistadors are closer to monkeys, to base animals, than to their own immortal souls: they prefer the baseness of exchange value to the pleasure of the sacred, the precious-in-itself. Animals with such preferences are doomed, as the Aztecs were doomed, as imperial Spain was doomed, too; Donnelly accretes analogies between our own empire and the doomed civilizations of the remote past—Aztecs, Sumerians, Egyptians (“Advice to Baboons of the New Kingdom”), Rome (“Tiberius at the Villa Jovis”).
Donnelly’s pessimism never amounts to stoicism, to indifference—he likes the world, and the words in it, too much for that. Instead, it amounts to a kind of gray, faute de mieux aestheticism—he suspects that the greatest accomplishment words can achieve is to help us lose ourselves inconsequentially amid a merely verbal order:
Miraculous to find time to do nothing other than gather
dust like the mismatched furniture in whose slow company
my gratitude increases the longer I don’t think about me,
no cringe at what I’ve done, no wince at what’s to do.
(from “Explanation of an Oriole”)
At least, like the Earth in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the contemplation of still life, of dust on furniture, of words on paper, is mostly harmless. It may even lead to a quasi-Buddhist distance (much sought) from the desiring self, or else to a delight in baroque arrangements (as in the mesh of clauses above), whose very contours seem to lead him back to the “I” that worries so much, though he would rather be led, at last, away: “You wager too much, small self, on the way you feel. Nothing/ you have thought should last forever can’t be lost.”
And so Stevens comes to Donnelly’s aid again: not the discursive Stevens of that all-too-ordinary evening, but the earlier, slightly sunnier Stevens of “Sea Surface Full of Clouds.” The Cloud Corporation points back to that poem in its title and in its many oceans, lakes, ponds, seas, each of which stands (as in Stevens) for the contrast between an alluring surface and a monotony beneath: “Looking out on the water in time we came to see/ being itself had made things fall apart in this way.” Stevens’s “Sea Surface” delights in variations on its underlying Thing That Will Not Change. In Donnelly’s seven-part, eight-page title poem, that Thing could be our all-American class system, with its half-hidden privileges, its half-hearted meritocracy, whose surface churns like “a mythology of clouds” while down below the foundations of power remain. The Thing could be, instead (in a neat reversal of Stevens) imagination, delusion, wishful thinking, the human faculty that starts and continues “wars/ to keep clouds safe”: we like to imagine that
whatever is desirable will come to pass, a caressing
confidence—but one unfortunately not borne out
by human experience, for most things people desire
have been desired ardently for thousands of years
and observe—they are no closer to realization today
than in Ramses’ time. Nor is there cause to believe
they will lose their coyness on some near tomorrow.
The Cloud Corporation toggles between the two modes of pessimism that Donnelly’s self-scrutinizing sentences explore: first, the private-introspective-philosophical, the poet lamenting entrapment in his own head; second, the public-economic-political, the poet sad to be trapped in our civilization. On the one hand, the attempt to conclude “a single, half-articulate drama/ about the self and the wearing it must suffer”; on the other hand, the attempt to account for “the infinitesimal portion of the blue/ planet’s mass that answered to my name.” Both attempts seem ultimately futile, and yet perversely beautiful, in Donnelly’s long lines.
And yet he does not end his book on a note of futility: instead he finds ways to imagine a return to the social, and to the concrete, a fictive resurrection that will bring him “back to you, World, wholehearted for the real.” “Chapter for Not Dying Again,” the penultimate poem, marks the end of the “private” book: Donnelly sees himself as an Egyptian spirit, able to return to life, “counting the hours/ until the plover carries me back in pieces in its beak.” Death and bodily resurrection in fleshy pieces: a happy ending, as such things go.
But that is the private, domestic (with “tuna fish and breakfast flakes”) ending to The Cloud Corporation. The very last poem provides a “public” ending, a final take on “the cloud of food-court/ breakfast,” “the shopping center… escalator… up to the story/ intended for conference space.” Having spent much of the volume identifying himself with the civilization that will fall, the Babylon of seven-syllable words, corporations, and food courts, he can finally, ironically, quietly, imagine himself instead as a barbarian at its gates. So Donnelly concludes by envisioning “His Future As Attila the Hun,” coming to the shopping center as it were from the outside, finally ready “to lay/ waste to the empire now placed before me at my feet.”
by Mark Bibbins
Copper Canyon Press 2009 Reviewed by Stephen Burt
“Truly, it never gets old.”
In the whirligig monologues and post-rock lyric throughout his first book, Sky Lounge (2003), Mark Bibbins sent kids with high hopes and low dreams into a glittering, punishing, shimmering dusk-to-dawn city. The kids in this second book are almost grown up, trying with very mixed success to make, and to understand, their remixed lives. The “I” and the “you” here sound almost self-assured, almost confident, but never quite: they face autonomy with all the demands of youth unmet, and since those demands are so great – sex, love, civic solidarity, promises kept – they may never be met, or not all at once. “Whatever you say sounds better with your thigh / against mine and caught in the camera-phones / of our undoing,” Bibbins writes in “There Is No You Are Everywhere,” which is either a poem of betrayal admitted, a breakup opus, or a regretful ode to averted risk: “you’re too burnt to burn,” he complains, to a lover more risk-averse than he, “or admit we wanted to try what feels almost new.”
Like Sky Lounge, The Dance is a book of subcultural scenes – “white kids giving / mad props to zombies, Jersey studs / with waxed eyebrows and brilliant / buffed nails” – but it’s also a book about feeling fake, urbane and inauthentic, too old for the makeup and too raw for anything else: “another false copy of me returns.” The real appears only through negatives, glimpses, outlines: “the best way to see a thing,” Bibbins says in a fine long poem called “The Devil You Don’t,” is to
catch
the edge of light
that burns
around its opposite, that
which it would otherwise
obscure.
The slipperiness, the unstable pronoun reference and the constantly changing scenes, that in another poet would point to a theory of language or comprise a postmodern Everyman in Bibbins are signs of a worried, anxious, too-cool-to-stay-cool personality: one who has learned to cherish, perhaps too much so, his power to offer scruples, to change his mind. “I’m not acting coy,” he protests; “I’m just terrified / of some rhetorical you.” But in Bibbins’s city every “you” is rhetorical, and rhetoric – verbal flourish, conscious construction – is not a block to strong emotion but a condition for its expression. Almost every scene and every figure seems both made-up and real, staged and genuine, disturbingly rickety and yet lovely enough that we wish it could stick around. (The devil “adores / the show, the high // tech of it, the low.”) When “an actual naked human stands / on a pedestal on the street” on West Broadway, Bibbins says, “you… don’t stop because you figure // it’s only art,” but Bibbins stopped; otherwise he could not have written the poem. He does not stop for long, though; his language keeps going, almost helplessly churning or burning through whatever phrases he finds: “I grew into a stuffed animal who wanted / only to insert itself into the fossil record…. When / it burns you move away // is good enough advice.”
For all its anxieties, The Dance is still (like Sky Lounge) an exhilarating New York book, even an I Love New York Book. It fizzes and sparkles against the sunlit buildings like O’Hara’s love poems to Vincent Warren:
They’ve hired skywriters
to compose clouds in a sky
off-color but clear; such
clever hats the chimneys
wear; so furiously they twirl.
If you hear something sour in that sparkle, something disappointed in that final iamb, so do I: the lover and his love don’t fit the poem, don’t fit the sky, can’t keep up the twirl. Rural areas give other poets ways to think about nonhuman nature, about what grows and thrives outside and beyond us, but they usually give Bibbins reasons to think about why “we” are artificial, unruly citizens, neither hardy nor solitary, and urban to the core: “a picnic in early autumn” becomes “a perfect time to resent / vegetarians, fuel-efficiency, / and ideas,” while geese overhead set “a kind of gray / fire down at our heads.” He tries, in other poems, to visit the ocean, the desert, even Germany, but he still feels like a poet of city life.
When Bibbins does not remind you of O’Hara, he might remind you of D. A. Powell: one poem is literally a collaboration with Powell (it begins “I used to have the shampoo / by the balls but the wind hurt my hair so”), and others could be. Like Powell, he makes the urbane and colloquial collide with the High Romantic; like Powell, he is inescapably sexy and unmistakably gay, and like Powell he is fond of square brackets and white space: “I want him to kiss me and another way of saying so // [he left a spark on my lip].” Sometimes Bibbins seems too fond of white space: the pages that look like erasures or ancient fragments, with two or three words to a line (“[crawl to // an end / an edge] // defer suffering // without proof”) may not play to his strengths. Even there, though, a racy, divine youth presides: “mercury / in a dirty hat // we see / ourself // but aren’t curious per se.”
Mercury presides over the whole book (as he presided over Sky Lounge): he is the god of quick changes, of youth, of speed, of thieves, of translation, of commerce and of the cities (built around marketplaces) where commerce accretes the connections it also destroys. Bibbins’s “devil” (who also rides a skateboard) is Mercury in Judeo-Christian drag; the beautiful youth who might know everything, the young man who is always running (but not always running away), makes a fit sponsor for Bibbins’s electric lines, and he sees himself, still, parties, in crowds:
Kids roll hash into
their cigarettes and spotlights
turn the smoke pink
in the trees. If he’d had
a childhood, he’d have spent it
running under sprinklers
to cool his smoldering skin.
“He” is the devil, the “abominable fancy” identified earlier in the same poem with Bush-era politicians (“the president who is not the president / trapped in a red room”). But “he” in the passage above is also the poet, always observing, and on fire, like it or not.
Those poems full of white space, their margins all over the place, look at first like failed attempts at philosophical, cod-Greek texts, but at their best they are worldlier, and more personal, and less idea-driven, than their format suggests. One of the best white-space sequences reinvigorates that hoary amateur genre, the breakup poem: “Forcefield [Ardor]” reads, in part,
take the couch
the stove you’ve seen
and even touched me somewhere near
I want more city to kiss you in
[you say]….
you can leave your hand
on the empty
chair between us
Bibbins can sound almost helplessly hip, a poet who cannot help but represent his generation (which is no longer the youngest one to publish poems): a prose page entitled “Suicides of the 90s” alludes to Reagan and Bush in terms undergrads today won’t understand (“Creepy cowboy got an era, crossword lothario got years”). Another poem asks, “Why shouldn’t he let someone / else fuck him to the mixtape / I made?” That such phrases will sound dated soon, that they will need footnotes in 30 years, makes no case against them, no more than against Lunch Poems, or against “The Rape of the Lock.” Bibbins does not write an entirely new kind of poetry (it is a very rare poet who does): he writes a kind perhaps 15 years old, old enough to have prompted reductions to absurdity (as in some of the poetry now called Flarf) and worthy counterrevolutions (as in some of the poets published by Flood). Yet it is a kind that still works, whenever (as here) it takes an interest not only in words on the loose, on bits of culture in the wind, but in people who mean those words or cherish those bits, who watch their city as they watch and love and often lose one another, caught up or caught out amid the mercurial fun.
by Stephen Burt
Graywolf Press 2006 Reviewed by Melinda Wilson
Wildman
Stephen Burt’s Parallel Play makes an impressive start with a poem called “Bluebells.” The final six lines are as follows:
Now that we’ve spent
a year on Fairmont Avenue, such heady sights remind
me less of balmy days in Central Park
and more of a rock star from Iceland, who lived in a tent
for a year in a climate-controlled New York apartment
in order to think of the wind, the cold, the wild.
Burt has a knack for spinning inspiration. Returning to “the wild” seems to account for a significant part of life and this stanza recognizes the possibility of a metaphorical return, a spiritual exercise in which “the wild” can be found amidst advanced civilization or one’s daily life.
A similarly vitalizing poem is “Tenth Avenue.” Again, the final lines are perhaps all we need to inhabit the poem’s sentiment.
…All your decisions
Are yours now, to be made over again.
No one will tell you when you get them right.
Somewhat more directive than “Bluebells,” “Tenth Avenue” challenges us to define success for ourselves. It echoes the idea that one must create happiness for one’s self. These enlivening poems highlight Burt’s talent to transform ordinary events into quests, pursuits, or the pursuit of primary quests.
So, what is primary for Stephen Burt? He seems to enjoy order, symmetry and form. Parallel Play is broken into four sections, each ending with a short reworking of Callimachus, and comprising a bulk of sestinas, rhyme and meter. Burt’s punctilious and formalistic attention to sounds and control of language is often fruitful and results in astounding diction. In poems like “Postcard Sent on New Year’s Day” the alliteration produces a stunning musicality: “Ash in their air; / a quota of dead pigeons in our path.” Each line of “Paysage Moralisé” ends with a form of the word place; there are thirty lines—ambitious and impressive. His sestina, “Six Kinds of Noodles,” contains many clever variations on end words such as a push from “menu” to “Men, you.”
Unfortunately, Burt’s obsessive wordplay is not always successful and often results in shoddy punning. One particularly unjustifiable pun appears in “Amaretto Sour (Drag Night at the Nines)”: “…the dawn / Breaks promises.” He also dips into the world of jejune pop culture, but if 90210 was your fave then perhaps “Scenes from Next Week’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer” might be of interest to you. It’s not my thing and I’m unable to judge whether the poem is poking fun at Buffy and the “vamps” or earnestly recounting precious scenes from the hit show. Either way, I’m bored.
Burt is best in poems like “A Long Walk on a Weekday Afternoon” and “‘What Else Should We See in San Francisco.’” Both poems are built on several small vignettes. Here’s one of the most notable:
Defunct refrigerators form a row
on the sunlit walks, their backs peeled
up and off like rusted tins of fish.
Here’s another:
Back and forth of prerecorded accordion,
back and forth with the inland-tending bay.
Sine and cosine. Red graph of the bridge.
“Parallel play” refers to the phenomenon of children who, when placed in the same room, play separately and don’t interact. The book, the publisher boasts, shows how people attempt “lives dependent on each other but still pulled inevitably into preoccupations of their own self-awareness.” Burt’s preoccupations traverse the landscape of science and Americana as such until the end, when he he inevitably returns to the wild. Rather than taking us inside the tent of an Icelandic rock star, he tries his luck “At the Providence Zoo.” The speaker describes a man-made marsh constructed for the egret: “…the next / best thing to living out your wild life.”
Not Gwendolyn Brooks, not Robert Hayden, not Amiri Baraka, not Jay Wright, not Michael Harper, not Yusef Komunyakaa, not Rita Dove — no “person of color” won the National Book Award for Poetry between 1950 and 1999, Elizabeth Alexander pointed out as part of a National Book Foundation panel designed for “six leading poet-critics to offer their opinions on the list of winners of the National Book Award in Poetry since 1950.”
In the whirligig monologues and post-rock lyric throughout his first book, Sky Lounge (2003), Mark Bibbins sent kids with high hopes and low dreams into a glittering, punishing, shimmering dusk-to-dawn city. The kids in this second book are almost grown up, trying with very mixed success to make, and to understand, their remixed lives. The “I” and the “you” here sound almost self-assured, almost confident, but never quite: they face autonomy with all the demands of youth unmet, and since those demands are so great – sex, love, civic solidarity, promises kept – they may never be met, or not all at once. “Whatever you say sounds better with your thigh / against mine and caught in the camera-phones / of our undoing,” Bibbins writes in “There Is No You Are Everywhere,” which is either a poem of betrayal admitted, a breakup opus, or a regretful ode to averted risk: “you’re too burnt to burn,” he complains, to a lover more risk-averse than he, “or admit we wanted to try what feels almost new.”
Stephen Burt’s Parallel Play makes an impressive start with a poem called “Bluebells.” The final six lines are as follows: