(This review first appeared in Harvard Review)
Alison Titus, Sum of
Every Lost Ship. Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2010.
ISBN 978-1-880834-88-6. $15.95, paper.
Samuel Amadon, Like a
Sea. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010. ISBN 1-58729-860-0. $17.00,
paper.
Julia Story, Post
Moxie. Louisville: Sarabande Books, 2010. ISBN 978-1-932511-84-0. $14.95,
paper.
Joyce Wilson, The
Etymology of Spruce. Middleborough, MA; Rock Village Publishing, 2010. ISBN
978-1-934400-18-0. $17.00, paper.
Amy C. Clark, Stray
Home. Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press. ISBN 978-1-57441-280-2.
$12.95, paper.
Leslie C. Chang, Things
That No Longer Delight Me. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. ISBN
978-0-8232-3200-0. $19.00, paper.
Henry R. Williams, Seasons
Smooth & Unperplext. Buffalo: BlazeVOX Books, 2010. ISBN 978-1-9354-9272-5.
$16.00, paper.
Ken Chen, Juvenilia.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-300-16008-6. $18.00, paper.
Jennifer Boyden, The
Mouths of Grazing Things. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010.
ISBN 978-029923514-7. $14.95, paper.
Barbara Claire Freeman, Incivilities.
Denver: Counterpath Press, 2010. ISBN 978-1933996158. $14.95, paper.
Todd Hearon, Strange
Land. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010. ISNB
0-8093-2966-2. $14.95, paper.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, Shahid
Reads His Own Palm. Farmington: Alice James Books, 2010. ISBN
978-1-882295-81-4. $15.95, paper.
Carrie Fountain, Burn
Lake. New York: Penguin, 2010: ISBN 978-0-14-311771-1. $18.00, paper.
Reading a great deal of new poetry
on hot summer nights induces vertigo. The profusion of first collections, mostly
through pay-to-enter competitions, is an odd and challenging cultural phenomenon.
Although the audience for these books usually limits itself to the poet’s
friends and relatives (and sometimes the poet’s hapless students), these contests
flourish. Despite their limited claim on the reading public, these books deserve
serious attention. One or more of these poets might turn out to be of lasting
value. Faced with a stack of some two dozen of these hopeful volumes, the
reviewer needs to select, sort, classify, and find some aesthetic leverage with
which to pry them open to a critical gaze.
The critical grouping and classification
of contemporary poetry began in earnest in the late 1950s with Robert Lowell’s division
into the “raw” and the “cooked” (after Claude Levi-Strauss’s famous work), and the
conservative Donald Hall anthology (New
Poets of England and America) versus the experimental Donald Allen
anthology (The New American Poetry). While
exponents of formal experiment favored historical or narrative objectivity, the
term “confessional,” first applied by M.L. Rosenthal to Lowell’s poems about
mental illness, came to designate almost every expression of the lyric self. while
subsequent anthologies of the 1960s and 1970s insisted on the primacy of free
verse and lyric voice by exploring the concepts of Naked Poetry (1969) and Open
Poetry (1973). Various international anthologies, especially those produced
by Robert Bly, reified the image as the basic element of poetry. Language
Poetry, however, in the late 1970s rejected the lyric or autobiographical self and
almost everything else about poetry as unnecessary fictions, and replaced them
with a primordial soup of unmoored signifiers. In the 1980s and 1990s a “new
formalism” emerged with anthologies and essays commending a return to end-rhyme
and accentual-syllabic meters.
Anthologizing the poetry of more
recent years, David St. John and Cole Swensen have labeled it “hybrid poetry,”
arguing that it melds the experimental and traditional into a new formulation. Yet
this hybridization, however startling its visual effects, is superficial.
Draping poems across the page in eye-challenging formal shapes or compressing
them into taut dimeter or trimeter, embracing the prose poem or bulking up with
long Whitmanesque lines do not conceal the essential voice of the poem. Examining
several first books by various twenty-first century poets suggests that even in
this era of hybridization the inward-looking lyric self, rather than the
dramatic or narrative voice, remains the dominate mode of poetry.
With her
first collection, Allison Titus provides a broad catalogue of contemporary
formal effects. She violates the coherence of her lines with extra spaces in
and between them, and in some of her most striking work does away with lines by
absorbing them into blocks of prose. Her technique informs reader response by
slowing or jolting the eye:
Across the meadow the doeskin
sack waits empty,
no cord of wood stacked clean.
The new is old and the news gets
older.
I while away the dormant season
with the broken Casio and rolling
papers I found in your jacket
or was it your desk. Thief or witness;
I do not boast. (“The Nineteenth Century”)
Yet when she presents a poem like “Shepherding” as an unbroken
stream of steeply enjambed brief lines she gains a force and momentum her more
eye-catching pages sometimes lack. “Shepherding” is about inhabiting the world
through the force of the imagination, one of Titus’s vital themes. It projects
a syntactical vitality that invigorates the poet’s voice and shows her at her
best. That voice, filtered through an array of formal gestures, retains the
intimacy of the lyric first-person.
Samuel Amadon
prefers a blocky look, fairly regular lines, convoluted syntax, and non sequiturs.
His voice favors the declarative, but frequently wraps itself around a series
of rhetorical gestures not easily reconciled. “Like an Evening” gives some
sense of his complex procedure:
Comfort is not what keeps me here
deciding I cannot like my seat as
much
as what it means to topple
out and where it would be difficult
to separate me from airport
when instead it is the plane
taking off….
Perhaps overly impressed with Gertrude Stein’s grumbling on the
mundane, Amadon refuses a poetics of imagery in favor of one of self-conscious
syntax and grammatical combativeness. The effects can be striking and powerful,
as in the opening of “North Meadows”:
There were no rods for where we
were showing her the consideration or too cold telling her the difference was a
little more ghetto than one gets to keep.
Language is an open question for Amadon, and its
predilections confound his sense of a world beyond the poem. Like the Language
Poets, he questions the fixity and viability of the relationship between
language and the world. His formal struggles occur inside the poem, in complex
syntactical gestures that shape themselves into neat stanzas and lines that
appear disciplined yet wrench themselves at the level of the phrase. His
challenge comes from within the lyric voice, and rather than reject it in favor
of something more objective he chooses to reform it by complicating its syntax
and grammar.
One way to
privilege voice over form is to embrace the banality of received form to render
it moot through familiarity. Hart Crane and Robert Frost, in their different
ways, do this, enabling Frost to develop his notion of sentence-sound and Crane
to compress metaphor into agonies of juxtaposition no subsequent poet has matched.
Another way, highly popular now, is through the prose poem. Julia Story’s poems
in harshly justified rectangles and squares resemble windows opening into
places where the objective and human worlds intersect and clash. Although many
of the poems address “you” or refer to a third person this is not the other of
the lyric I-you but the animus / anima of the divided postmodern self:
I bring her the
new robin and she puts
it on the shelf
with the others. I have
lost, I have
lost, I have great loss is my
song. The girl
can wash up near me she
can wear this
mask and frighten away
the dancers, the
dream dancers, the dog
dancers. The
gray water will fill me
instead. She
doesn’t want to hear this.
She only wants
to hear the delicate song
of the worm.
By refusing the comfort of line endings, the prose poem
reifies the sentence as the basic structural element of the poem. Frost’s
applied theory of sentence sound does the same for blank verse and even the
rhymed lyric; but poems like Story’s, by stripping away competing notion of
form, remind us how absolutely the laws of grammar shape us.
Most
contemporary poets, however, retain line endings, stanza breaks, and the
rhythmic phrase and brandish them without the irony of cubist nostalgia. Amy M.
Clark and Joyce Wilson write about the self and others without reflexive ironies.
Their project, common to much of our poetry, resists the pull of universal
angst and particularizes experience (or the fiction of experience) into
syntactically and sensuously pleasing gestures. In “Provisions,” Wilson invokes
the life-changing journey-metaphor in homey terms:
Our first car needs a push to
start;
every evening we lie together on an
old tarp
gazing up at a vast universe of
engine.
Equipped with a month’s provisions—
freeze-dried stew, your father’s
pup tent—
you vow to provide for me, and I
for you.
Clark, wielding a similar unrhymed triplet, in “The Donut
Shop” embraces the sensuality of food, another domestic motif: “I stood before
the bakery’s donut case, / eyeing the plump mounds, yellow-lit, / ordered on
their trays, oozing sweetness….” Such writing invokes time-honored pleasures of
poetry: the lilt of sound on the tongue and in the ear, the summoning of past
experience, the recovery of sounds and odors. Proust as much as Stevens or
Eliot lurks behind the modern and postmodern forms of nostalgia, and without
his example of sensuous grace much contemporary poetry would collapse into
unmediated sentiment.
Yet even as
poets try to avert their gazes from the sentimental implications of their
subjectivity they risk it in order to mediate between the worlds inside them and
the external world-- which usually means a few beloved individuals, several
places or landscapes of personal significance, and a variety of evocative
relics. Leslie C. Chang confronts this difficult mediation when she contemplates
her mother’s tortoiseshell combs (dangerously nostalgic items) and accepts the
banality of their attraction:
I’ve enough
longing to fill a Song dynasty
tea-bowl
glazed a shiny brown and black, its
“hare’s fur” pattern my own tulip
mania—
predictable as the weather. (“Augury Again”)
Insofar as she overcomes banality she does so by displacing
it into metaphor—the image of the tea-bowl lingering long after the predictable
emotion has faded.
The lyric
voice may have originated in the need to vent private emotions in a publicly
digestible manner. Whether disciplined or freed by form, it continues to
perform that function. But if Eliot’s “objective correlative” still holds sway,
in the work of many contemporaries the escape from feeling occurs only at the
last possible moment. Henry R. Williams, on the other hand, is among those most eager to shed lyric
subjectivity. Many of the poems in his unusually handsome book are third-person
Olson-shaped narratives (mostly about a character named Philby, presumably
after the British spy) with titles like “Reading the Cross Assorting,” “Epenthetic Nîmen,” and “Protojounce.”
However, in poems like “The Identity of Seedlings” he shows how the lyric
evocation of feeling functions in the third-person, demonstrating that the
fiction of authorial presence is unnecessary:
a chorus
offering milkweed, bracciliah,
nightshade
& a few choked evening-
primrose.
Lately her lacerated
hands have
left digging to other
badgers
& reliant on flock reassurance.
The pathos of those “lacerated hands” that “have left
digging” requires no self-referral for its effect. Despite the narrative
framework, Williams’ unusually fecund linguistic resources generate more
emotion through metaphor than incident through narration, so although complex
and remarkably allusive, his poems remain firmly rooted in the lyric mode.
But lyric
is a genre, and lyric voice is generic. How do poets distinguish their voices
from one another in an era of no particular aesthetic tendency or expectation?
Have MFA programs ironed out the eccentricities of voice that empower poets
like Dickinson, Whitman, and Hart Crane? None of the twenty poets read for this
review offers a voice as distinctive as the one Charles Simic generates even in
his earliest small press work. The generic lyric voice of many of these
collections is that of the quotidian, innocent of the variety of reference that
according to T.S. Eliot characterizes the mind of the poet.
That
problem often coincides with an unwillingness to concede areas of experience to
prose. Keen Chen frequently and pointedly veers into prose to utilize the
certitude of sentence and paragraph to authentic his verse, which itself is
relentlessly prosaic in a vaguely post-Ginsberg way. “The City of Habits” opens
with this serviceable paragraph:
When you
speak of how poorly I treat you, you speak as though we
have a thing inside us, such as a
heart, a mind, or other flint ball that
we strike with our thoughts and
spark into intentions. I do not believe
that we have intentions. We possess
practices, an ecosystem of habits
that may or may not be good for us.
The dew on the grass stalks, the
air-moistening leaf and the dark
and breathing woods—our lush
habits give us a life that we can
breathe before we dive back into the
black waders. We spend most our
lives in these waters.
This seems poetic enough in its feeling for metaphor and its
grasp of emotional complexity. It surrenders the little graces of line endings,
but typically Chen’s line endings coincide with sentence endings anyway. The
substance of these poems simulates autobiography to such a degree that the
fiction of the lyric voice seems irrelevant. Perhaps this is the point, the manner
in which Chen wishes to distinguish himself from his contemporaries. The
publicity material accompanying this latest volume of the Yale Younger Poets
series speaks of “the forms of the shooting script, blues, song, novel,
memoir,” but this range of formal reference is superficial: Chen makes all of
these genres sound alike. That they all sound like Ken Chen is probably to his
credit.
But refusing the self-defining characteristics
of poetry is not the only route to individuality. To carve aesthetic space for
herself, Jennifer Boyden adds an air of absurdity to the quotidian,
underscoring the surreal in the ordinary. This is not a unique procedure, but
she succeeds when she finds metaphors that seem arbitrary, odd, and yet
heartfelt:
All
night we wore the masks
of chemical
thieves. So children grew listless, so
the neighborhood dwindled
like a band of crickets. It was
big,
we said, and made the measurements
again.
(“Making it Big,
Standing Back to be Sure”)
Expertly written, like all the poetry discussed in this
review, Boyden’s work reminds us that one of the poet’s tasks is to estrange us
from the familiar. If she doesn’t do that quite as vividly as Wallace Stevens,
she doesn’t forget that poetry occurs when two words come together in an
unexpected way. We have to admire a collection that begins with this startling
quatrain:
I begin
each day blank as an uncut key,
but in the
shower I start hearing
neighbors twelve blocks over
washing the body of their
mother. (“The Listener”)
But not all
lyric estrangement is personal. Barbara Claire Freeman presents an
extraordinary array of formal experiments, and yet is perhaps the most frankly
political of the poets under review. She realizes that the banality of public
disaster requires massaging to make it palatable as poetry, and that a poem has
to remain autotelic even as it critiques the world outside itself. In “Apocryphon
II 5, 29-86, 19,” a poem that suffers the triteness of “Their fruit, / poison.
Their calls for amnesty, lies” she generates the astonishing and yet precise
assertion, “Burying alphabets / in the sky is part of the pattern.” But her
best poems do not have to rescue themselves from facile complaint. “The Closing
Bell” mates Ashbery’s casual surrealism with Bernstein’s language-ruptures but
sounds like neither:
The screen
was overcast and in the endless iterations
of the same
type we could see no passage. The frozen
mud lying
ahead paralyzed the turnpike after night
frost extended January after
beautiful adaptations….
In poems like this, Freeman, in forcing the concrete and the
abstraction together under great pressure, generates a singular and compelling voice.
But must the contemporary poet so fiercely challenge the reader with implacable
conundrums to distinguish him or herself from the crowd? Must every poet now privatize
the language?
Not
necessarily. In several of his poems, Todd Hearon moves away from the
faux-autobiographical mode that defines so much contemporary poetry and assumes
a voice approximating that of Shelley’s “Ozymandius” or Yeats’ “Second Coming.”
But it is difficult to sustain this lofty tone in twenty-first-century idiom,
and so “Atlantis,” which begins “About that country there’s not much left to
say. / Blue sun, far off, a watery vein / in the cloud belt,” maintains a cool
remove until the ending:
All
spring
the
nightingale perched on the green volcano’s lip.
The rats
had abandoned the temples.
My mind was a voyage hungering to
happen.
However the reader might regret the belated concession to
introspection, this and some of Hearon’s other poems, by resisting the cheap allure
of emotional intimacy, project a sense of detached and fairly objective
intelligence. This contrasts effectively with the sentimental obsession with
family, childhood, and self that often blunts the intellectual verve of otherwise
promising new poetry.
Another
poet who resists an oppressively private stance is Reginald Dwayne Betts, an
alumnus of several prisons who renders his experiences in tactile language free
of bathos and the sentimentality that often mars work generated by personal
anguish. Betts has a strong sense of the kinetics of individual words, phrases,
and lines. This rhetorical alertness complements his preference for enjambment
in poems like “And What if Every Cuss Word Was a Sin”:
Mouths
would blossom more
thorns & men—shackled to bunk
beds, chow calls and count times,
their tongues touching pain
so rich it crawled inside bruises
and began to beat,--still wouldn’t
give a fuck if God was listening.
Most of his poems describe prison life, and the undertone of
violence generated by his subtle but energetic poetics well suits his subject
matter. His more formal poems—a couple of ghazals, for instance—seem
overdressed, uncomfortable in this crowd. But his best poems seem almost
literally about to burst from the page in a show of muscle and grit:
Do a set
counted out in reps
often, and then do it until
your biceps bulge
with the promise
of an early release, until the weight
if every reason you’re two
felonies short of a life sentence. (“The Secret Art of
Lifting Time”)
Betts most typically wields a short, sharply rhythmic,
consonant-heavy line. Some of his poems extend the line almost into prose
poetry. Although these occasionally slacken, his mastery of his subject and flat,
almost objective voice usually maintain control. Betts resists intimacy in
favor of a calm reserve. The resultant emotional understatement can be highly
effective.
When lyric
intimacy meets dawning sexuality the sentimental backwash can swamp the reader.
That happened to this reviewer in reading Carrie Fountain’s “The Change”:
I swear the year my mother
stopped having her period
was the same year I started
having sex, the year
I spent my evenings
parked by the river, getting good
at revealing my breasts
to my sensitive boyfriend,
my ass, my armpits…..
Male reviewers risk being labeled sexist for asking why so
many women poets seem so narcissistic, so obsessed with body parts and functions.
Arguably this self-obsession reacts against centuries of the fixed male sexual
gaze by reclaiming the woman’s body for the woman; but it feels like another
kind of objectification, one that through the illusion of an intimate voice
enables the reader to participate in some unseemly way in someone else’s life.
Some of us may prefer to stop reading.
Fountain,
like the other poets reviewed here, writes with studied ease, but the voice of
her poems, unalloyed by clear signals of fictionalizing, suggests how generic
the confessional mode has become. It sounds more like memoir than poetry. And
that, finally, may be why so much contemporary poetry, however intelligent and
resourceful, sounds alike. Robert Lowell, although by reputation the mentor of
extreme lyric intimacy, wrote to Elizabeth Bishop about Sylvia Plath, “Whatever
wrecked her life somehow gave an edge, freedom and even control, to her poetry.
There’s a lot of surrealism which relieves the heat of direct memory….” Lyric
poetry can’t simply “say what happened” (as Lowell elsewhere regretted) but has
to call upon more public and more objective voices to crosscut its own and give
it an edge and the freedom to veer from introspection to other places. It’s the
peculiar, individual, and even eccentric crosscutting of private and public iterations,
compressed and transformed by the imagination, that gives the most memorable
poets their personal voices and frees them from aesthetically oppressive selves.
