Sunday, June 7, 2020

There are No Simple Stories: Ten New Poets




(this review was commissioned by Harvard Review Online, but they never published it)


However disappointed by T. S. Eliot’s private life (marred by anti-Semitism, racism, and authoritarianism), we have to admit that he knew a thing or two about poetry and criticism. In the preface to the 1928 edition of The Sacred Wood he argues that “when we are considering poetry we must consider it primarily as poetry and not another thing.” Primarily, not exclusively: yet most reviews and a great deal of more considered criticism focus on the content of poetry—its political views, social views, racial, ethic, sexual orientation. Poetics become irrelevant except as a carrier of social, historical, or personal data. But poetry is not about that data: it is about doing interesting things with words. Strongly foregrounded, the formal and linguistic features of poetry distinguish it from other forms of discourse. If I wanted to review political tracts, memoirs, theology, gothic romance, etc., I would do so. In the meantime, faced with yet another flock of newborn poets with first full-length books fresh from the press, I would like to invoke some of their formal qualities—imagery, rhetoric, rhythm, and so on—and consider content not as something separate but intrinsic to a particular poem.

Mario Chard is drawn to fable, ritual and ceremony, and so his poems have a formal air even when their subjects are profane. Two of his poems have the word “Parable” in their titles, while others titles— “The Oath,” “Paradise Lost,” “Beget”—suggest affinities with the poetry of chant, incantation, and magic. His voice is colloquial and engaging, though, and the tension between formality and intimacy empowers his work. The publisher’s flyer describes this work by its topics: immigration, the fall in Paradise Lost, and the worries of parenting; but I was most struck by its measured and sometimes stately cadence, which tames its sometimes wrenching subject matter into orderly meditations, as in “Prosthetic”:

            Damned by an amateur’s gun. The buckshot
            that took one eye of the young watercolorist

            took also his genius. Therefore he taught
            middle school children to paint, to cut

            bound stock of construction paper with that
            flat ruled blade he feared would carve their

            clumsy fingers.                              (44)
           
“Therefore” is a chilling word here. The routinization of loss and displacement haunt these poems, and the poetry itself, by measuring and assessing, offers at least a hint of healing.

Rail, on the other hand, by Kai Carlson-Wee, offers huge blocks of fine detail that at first sound only half-digested, but when traced through the poems become almost epic, like the catalogue of ships in the Iliad. Listing many things rather than focusing and on developing the metaphorical value of one or two images is the essence of his aesthetic. He makes it work, too. “The Cloudmaker’s Bag” exemplifies his method:

            He shows me the camp stove he cooks with.
            Ten-dollar poker chips. Crystals he carries
            in small leather pouches, tied to his shoelace,
            his belt loops to harness the sun. He carries
            a matchbook, a cell phone and charger, a lighter,
            an old deck of cards with nudes
            on the backs of them, needles and balled thread….  (38)

In his lengthy poem “American Freight,” an exploration of the hobo life, the poet elegizes American restlessness and distance, the Whitman-like rush of the poem brought to a fine pitch and finished beautifully. With its grasp of the fine textures of the world, Rails provides a rich and fulfilling read.

The blurbs on the back of Amy Meng’s Bridled make it sound like a collection of country and western songs. They claim the poems are about “the most troubling parts of love” and are poems of “sensual pleasure.” But I found it a book of raw metaphor, with exposed bone a recurrent image, and openings like “I was a fist / caught under my chin” (“Girlhood”) and “My tongue was held / like a cut flower” (“The First Story”). The exposed bone opens the book:

            I’ve tasted bones from the butcher’s

            house and once a sun-bleached fragment

            of skull. The longer I live the closer I get.         (“Orpheus, Asymptote”, 11) 

A couple of poems later we find, “Ogling radishes, noticing the girls’ wet hair / bare their skulls like bulbs of scallions,” (14) and then, “I find a set of bones. They seem / like bat-wings….” (34). followed by “There was never a man with ribs like a bear.” (38). The poems that are actually about sex, like “After Maine,” are grim rather than sensual. The force of these poems derives not from their topics but from their deployment of primal imagery of the body—bone, brains, hair—which deepens into metaphor to create an aura of exploited vulnerability. What blurb-speak calls “sensual pleasure” doesn’t seem available to the protagonist of these poems, who seems cornered by doubt and shame. “How unanswered / I was,” she concludes one of her longer poems, “how shoelace tip— / how bitten tongue (50).

Unearthing also arrives shrouded in blurbs that list Wendy Chen’s unexceptional subjects (family history, ethnic identity, etc.) but say nothing of her poetry as poetry.  At a glance, her poetics seem defined by the usual free verse mostly in short lines, sometimes in sentence-long lines. But her imagery, subtlety based on the colors red (“My lips as red /as a temple door” [35], “a small red house / on the Connecticut River” [30]), and white (“A trail / of white jasmine” [26], “Dog’s tooth white” [27], “a white, / maternal sheet” [85]) masks her poems with a bold but understated contrast that invokes the fragility of the human body. Many of her poems invoke body parts (“Madame Butterfly at the Auction House,” for instance [42]), and an air of threat of punishment, violence, and dissolution hovers over the entire book. Few poems seem free of this threat. The horrors of “The Ghosts” (79), a poem that opens with the notorious rape of Nanjing, seem to infect the descendants of the generation that suffered under the Japanese in the Second World War. The red and white imagery, diffused through the book, fosters a ghostly, sometimes ghastly tone that is dramatic and compelling.

Social and economic malaise has devoured much of contemporary America, particularly West Virginia, where death by analgesic overdose is a daily event in small towns cringing in the rubble left by reckless mining. In I Know Your Kind, by William Brewer, coal mining embodies the malaise eating away the human heart; while pills, the quick fix, express the failure to alleviate pain they conceal but can’t cure. “Leaving the Pain Clinic” suggests how deeply the actuality and the aesthetic of drugs penetrates:

            Always this warm moment when I forget which part of me
            I blamed. Never mind the pills kicking in, their spell
            that showers the waiting room, one full of shame,
            in a soft rain of sparks that pity sometimes is,
            how it mends the past like a welder seams metal….                   (23)

The deft rhetorical interweaving of emotion and image characterizes Brewer’s work. The town of Oxyana, actually Oceana, West Virginia, is a matrix of irony in which everything solid has hazed over with drug-induced desire, as “Daedalus in Oxyana”:

            Now I practice craving;
            it’s the only maze I haven’t built myself and can’t dismantle.

            I gave my body to the mountain whole.
            For my body, the clinic gave out petals inked with curses.                           (17)
           
In a climatic passage an old glassblower describes the fire of his process and also the process that is devouring the town:

            Fire isn’t matter. It’s plasma.
            It’s process—flame and light…

            What about that white glow,
            both energy and brilliance,
            deep in the furnace
            you blew in, I ask.

            That, he says, that’s becoming                              (62)

As for what that becoming eventually becomes, where this benighted town is going, the glassmaker has to resort to further metaphor:

            He says the heart
            (factory of blood) is iron,
            names are only ever glass.                                           (63)

Industrial imagery has become deeply ironic in a region that like most of the mid-Atlantic and Midwest has lost most of its industry, but it is the heritage language of working-class America. Now and in this book, it is being displaced by the language and imagery of self-medication and oblivion. Brewer uses both languages well.

Sarah Lefsyk’s striking and original prose poems depend on those internal leaps of imagery that at first seem to defy logic, but then reveal a logic of their own making. This is what Robert Bly called “leaping poetry,” and Bly, along with Borges, James Tate, and Russell Edson, lurks behind these poems. Lefskyk’s imagination is entirely her own, though. She does not title her poems but capitalizes or bold prints her opening phrases. Slow-motion calamity seems the topic of much of her work. A kind of evil gynecology run s through it, frequently ripping the speaker’s innards apart. But the surreal or irrational juxtaposition of elements is the most striking aspect of her work, and its effects are difficult to describe. For example, this brief poem, entire:

            Once I met a man who could divide himself into lakes. “It is imminent,” he said, “we    are aligning ourselves with the great spectral figures of our time.”

            Then, with a landscape of pheasants in his eyes, and the darkness of hospitals in my          blood, we spilled a thousand empty moons.

            We had to.                                                                          (41)

While her poetics may in some ways suggest Ashbery’s, the results are more focused and dramatic, driven by visions of entropy and ruin. Despite this, Lefsyk’s poems are not gloomy but sprightly and often quite funny. This is a remarkably distinctive voice.


After Lefsyk’s challenging juxtapositions, the prose logic of Nausheen Eusuf’s poems seems almost too comfortable and familiar. Although written in verse, these poems seem to rely on sentences more than lines to chart their impeccable syntactical logic. The young Robert Bly would have deplored this prosaic construction, but Eusuf deploys clear narrative strategies to good effect, fulfilling Pound’s notion that poetry should be at least as well written as prose, and Lowell’s suggestion that poetry should learn from the prose of Chekhov. One of her primary concerns is her relationship with the past—the literary past, particularly. She is the only poet I know of (no doubt there are others) who has written a poem about Northrop Frye, and she explicitly invokes Stevens, Auden, Moore and others poets. The preface to her book notes some of her obvious allusions, but more interesting is the way she assumes the larger stance of certain master poems, particularly in a poem like “Musée des Beau Morts.” The title and subject matter suggest Auden, but much of the imagery reminds us of the Stevens of Harmonium, although with a deliberately flatter affect:

            On your right here is the china cabinet,
            well worth a look, for she loved her china.
            She loved her tea sets and her dinner sets,
            her Noritake and her Corningware,
            the largest numbering 96 pieces in all
            (though some are chipped or missing).                                   (22)

Another poem, “Mind of Winter,” besides borrowing its title from Stevens’ “The Snow Man,” directly critiques its source by dirtying and urbanizing the scene. Much of the pleasure of reading Eusuf’s book is in recognizing and appreciating her ongoing conversations with poets she has read and studied. Her own voice avoids the cadences and resonances of her sources by distancing itself with artfully constructed sentences that with frequent enjambment trip back and forth over the line between verse and prose. Not all of her poems toy with the academic-literary, but those that do are among her most interesting.

Romantic problems and the consequent psychological fallout are the subjects of Daryl Sznytr’s poems, and uncertainty of voice is the flexible instrument of their expression.  The opening poem, the title poem, jettisons formality and punctuation and capital Is to embrace a self-consuming negativity:

            i am fat & i am invisible
            I go out to eat in groups
            & the waitress always
            seems to forget my food                                                             (17)

But this excursion into E.E. Cummings territory is not necessarily characteristic. Other poems, usually in longer n more leisurely lines, unfold in a sophisticated syntax with strong enjambments and a confident rhythm, as if “Fourth of July, a Week Before his Death”:

            By the time we grew close, you
            had already started posing in pictures,
            but in this one you’re laughing, a genuine
            laugh, with a lazy arm slung around him
            and a piece of chicken stuck between
            your two front teeth.                                                                   (78)

Sometimes this movement slackens, and the poem consequently loses its rhythm and fades. And while many of the poems incorporate vivid or startling imagery, some feel anemic. Still, Sznyter’s poems at their best are energetic, frank, and emotionally compelling. When her grasp on the rhythm of the poem is unyielding she is at her best.

Grady Chambers’ poems fall into the standard free-verse patterns of the last fifty years of American poetry. but they display a sound dramatic sense and an orderly development that brings them to logical but not always obvious conclusions. Their subjects are familiar:  childhood, adolescence, friends, parents. They skirt but avoid sentimentality, and at their most effective generate a fulfilling aura of immediacy and presence. “Far Rockaway” is a good example of an autobiographical-sounding poem that develops a real and subtle argument:

            so many lives
            seem possible
            so many Rockaways
            a beach in a movie
                snow stacked on sand
            or a place where the dead go
            stiff bodies stanchioned
            like foundations for a pier                                                 (18)

Chambers’ poems avoid the clumsiness and clichés of nostalgia, resist excess of verbiage, and develop their scenarios economically and with some force. Like most of the other poets in this review, he has yet to take the next step by shedding some of the dos and don’ts of the MFA world and taking some of the risks poets like Hart Crane and Marianne Moore braved long ago. By courting a prose simplicity and consequent lack of intensity, Chambers sometimes falls into banality, as in the opening of “The Window”:

            This was my routine: I woke, and in the morning
            carried my houseplants to the courtyard,
            three small succulents
            potted in a wooden box.
            Each evening I returned to retrieve them.                      (30)

Chambers only occasionally writes so blandly, but this vacuous style has sometimes been identified with the writing of MFA graduates in general because it suggests that the poem has been so ironed out by workshopping that everything in the least challenging has been deleted.

“There are no simple stories, because language forcers distance,” Jenny Xie notes in a prose poem (44). Distance is estrangement, and poetry often seeks to defamiliarize ourselves, place us in alien landscapes among objects that require close scrutinizing. Xie’s long lines often swerve into prose without losing much intensity. Yet just as often they veer into the ether of strange juxtapositions:

            The husband and the brother-in-law remove every item from the refrigerator
            and arrange it all on the old card table for a Kodak photo.

            It’s the first point-and -shoot in the neighborhood.

            The iron-rich spinach and clementines loose in their skins.
            One bottle of artificial mango drink for show.                                           (32)


Even her short poems feel like sequences because they tend to move from one discreet phrase to another, lending a sense of discontinuity that is in itself distancing. Contrasting phrases that signal their distinction with line-breaks, writing in long lines that usually end with punctuation, or short lines grouped into rhetorically complete phrases or sentences are characteristic strategies. Her brief prose poems read as unified wholes, but with the momentum of a single impulse. Xie is a poet not only of distance and estrangement, but of folk wisdom, origin, and history, as in “Old Wives’ Tales on which I was fed”:

            Eating the fat inside the crab sharpens the mind
            so too with roe extracted from a steamed fish

            Never let your feet touch cold water from the bathtub or the sea
            on days when you’re menstruating                                                           (25)

Despite the longish lines, Xie’s poetic lacks the rhetorical drama of Whitman. In fact, the absence of such drama seems to be one of her topics: a sense that the world is sinking into entropy. “Nothing is as far as here,” she notes (76). Although Xie came to the United States when very young, she writes like an exile about the gaps and discontinuities between her growing selfhood and the world. She has found a form and rhetoric to enhance a vision of otherness, embodied in everything and everyone around her. Xie is the most deeply meditative of these poets, but also the most inclined to drift into abstraction.

These ten new poets all display great skill, ingenuity, and care in their writing. But I only occasionally find in their work the tension between reality and imagination that generates energy in the romantic and post-romantic lyric or meditative poem. For the most part (Lefsyk and Meng are the exceptions), these are poets of reality, and their poems unfold with prosaic calm and order. Their figurative imagery is often strong and vivid, but it usually seems decorative rather than intrinsic to the development of the poem. Brewer in “Resolution” suggests why the amalgamative imagination of Coleridge and Eliot has lost its luster:

            The clouds aren’t real
            because no matter
            how hard I look I see

            only clouds in them, not rabbits
            or a pirate ship or hands.                                              (34)

On the one hand, he realizes that metaphor, the imaginative leap, is in some sense more real than the clouds; on the other hand, he is unable to embracing that metaphor, possibly because he’s too engaged with the actual world. The poem goes on to explain that the speaker knows too much about this world and is disappointed by it, “A thing to be looked at / not felt. (40). Brewer understands and uses metaphor, but like other of these poets he resists it as a basic aesthetic principle. Possibly in this complex political and social climate poets are disinclined to regard metaphor as more than rhetorical embellishment. Political poetry, poetry of witness, invests more in reality than in the imagination, as it must. But the poetry under review is not outspokenly political, and bears witness mostly to domestic dramas that are not, in themselves, especially compelling. A glance at Robert Lowell’s “Life Studies” poems suggests how dramatic such domestic matters can seem when filtered through the metaphor-making imagination.

 Perhaps because committed to the narrative thrust of the quotidian, these poets also avoid the intense compression that characterizes the work of Stevens, Hart Crane, Frost, Williams, Plath, and other modernists. When poets write about themselves in ordinary situations, flirting with familiar emotions and seeing things we all have seen, they have to defamiliarize these subjects to refresh our attention. The usual method is highly compressed metaphorical language. But neither this fecund estrangement nor the familiar lyric tension between meditative stasis and narrative urgency seem important to contemporary poetics. Is the romantic notion of reinventing the world and self through generative metaphors fading from our poetry? Maybe such ambition now seems pretentious, unnecessary, or simply uncool. Maybe workshops crush with critique such larger efforts. If so, we can no longer expect the kind of poetry that braces us against the bitterness of the world. No more figures of capable imagination, or fragments to shore against our ruin.

Books reviewed:

William Brewer, I Know Your Kind. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2017. ISBN 978-1-57131-
            495-6. $16.00, paper
Kai Carlson-Wee, Rail. Rochester, NH: Boa Editions, 2018. ISBN 978-1-942683-58-2. $16.00,
             paper.
Grady Chambers, North American Stadiums. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2018. ISBN  978-
            1-57131-504-5. $22.00, cloth.
Mario Chard, Land of Fire. North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2018.  ISBN 978-1-946482-09-9.
            $16.95, paper.
Wendy Chen, Unearthings. Portland OR: Tavern Books, 2018. ISBN 9781935635802. $17.00,
             paper.
Nausheen Eusuf, Not Elegy, But Eros.  New York: NYQ Books, 2017. ISBN 978-1-63045-050-
            2. $15.95, paper.
Sarah Lefsyk, We Are Hopelessly Small and Modern Birds. Mount Vernon, NY: Black Lawrence
            Press, 2018. ISBN 978-1-6257-997-3. $15.95, paper.
Amy Meng, Bridled. Warrensburg, MO: Pleiades, 2018. ISBN 978-0-8071-6889-9. $17.95,
             paper.
Daryl Sznyter, Synonyms for (OTHER) Bodies. New York: NYQ Books, 2018. ISBN 978-1-
            63045-055-7. $15.95, paper.
Jenny Xie, Eye Level. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2018. ISBN 978-1-55597-802-0. $16.00, paper,

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