(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,
