Poetry Microreviews
The Violence of the Morning
Cal Bedient
University of Georgia Press, $16.95 (paper)
In many ways Cal Bedient’s second
collection resembles his first, Candy Necklace (1997).
Both books exhibit a wide range of subject matter, share considerable
stylistic and formal diversity, and find their roving, centrifugal
impulses kept in check by the poet’s erudition and fine-tuned
ear. However, an impression of variety is not what most seizes the
reader. For even as Bedient’s poems yoke together drastically
different poetic strategies, his propensity to reach for the highest
attainable tonal register makes for a consistent, unifying loudness.
If anything, Bedient’s rhetorical and affective superabundance
has only intensified since Candy Necklace, and it is
this quality that dominates the reading experience. The following
lines from “What Was William Painting?” offer a sense
of what these poems do: “You appetizing you, / burning point
of the shadows. / Love me like a log roughly quoted by the flames.
/ Love me roughly now. With your flames.” These lines capture
Bedient’s knack for writing sonically appealing, rhythmically
compelling verse, yet they also reveal the verbal and stylistic
“violence” that serves as the collection’s organizing
principle. While the speaker’s self-conscious attention to
language as language does call to mind various postmodern poetic
projects, the dominant note is a darkly romantic one, the overall
effect recalling Baudelaire’s spleen more than Bernstein’s
vaudeville: “And you, all my dying loves, how can I touch /
the bark of your drowned lemon groves?” As a result, The
Violence of the Morning seems to have conflict—sometimes
brilliantly productive, sometimes frustratingly indecisive—at
its core. While many readers will appreciate the vigorous work Bedient
does towards finding a middle ground between poetries of older and
new guards, others will wish that he had found an easier, less frenetic
place to rest between modernist and postmodernist modes, or as the
title of one poem suggests, between “Jove’s Thunder”
and “a Murmur in the Leaves.”
—Aaron McCollough
Hymns of St. Bridget & Other Writings
Bill Berkson and Frank O’Hara
The Owl Press, $14 (paper)
From 1960 to ’64 poets Bill
Berkson and Frank O’Hara collaborated occasionally and in various
forms. A curve in the left-hand steeple of St. Bridget’s Church
across from O’Hara’s apartment instigated one such collaboration:
“It is to you, bending limp and ridiculous, on Ninth / Street,
that I turn, colder than usual after a summer / of lime and smoke.”
Originally published as a pamphlet by Adventures in Poetry in 1974,
their nine hymns for “the first of Ireland’s / saints”
are collected here with a miscellany of other Berkson/O’Hara
writings including poems, an unfinished novel, and a series of letters
and postcards sent between the two in the personae of brothers Angelicus
and Fidelio Fobb. In the hymns the poets’ voices become indistinguishable;
details of the project’s framework fade and the poems that
emerge could sit alongside the best work of either poet. Beneath
the steeple they succinctly catalogue a time, locale, and relationship
to a neighborhood and to each other, with St. Bridget acting as
the unassuming maypole that enables them to move beyond the “I
do this or I do that” and the “I Remember” schema
of verse. Evidenced throughout is the quick-witted pen and range
of both men, but the later games (epistolary and otherwise) are
largely hollow punches. As the book progresses, lines spiral towards
a hermetically sealed cancan of personal references—a stronger
book would have limited this edition to the hymns and a handful
of work from the “Miscellaneous Writings.” Berkson’s
endnotes are helpful in detailing subsequent collaborations, but
a majority of the book requires a more scholarly apparatus, such
as might be found in a critical biography of their collective work.
As archival material the book is an indispensable facet of both
oeuvres, but the pranks strewn throughout the later sections are
far outshone by the hymns themselves, whose erudite and tender lines
not only commemorate the now-removed steeple but also mark a pinnacle
of collaborative poetics.
—Christopher
Mattison
A Border Comedy
Lyn Hejinian
Granary Books, $15.95 (paper)
While much contemporary verse deploys
discontinuity to perpetrate the elusion of argument and statement,
Lyn Hejinian’s recent book-length work of incongruity
proposes a happy (hence “hazardous”) resolve. Its allotment
of affinities between elements of the various world plots an emergent
continuity, emotional rather than rhetorical in kind. A
Border Comedy’s compositional process stems from Hejinian’s
enduring interest in the way memory determines pattern (i.e., in
pattern’s “psychical ‘pastness’”), and
accounts for the work’s disjunction: She adds lines sequentially
across the poem’s fifteen books—all simultaneously “underway”—in
order to tap the lapses generated by time’s passage. The
ensuing (sometimes hilarious) alienation of narrative and discursive
contexts—cited and invented historical landscapes, selves,
bodies, and biases—drives precedence as well as consequence
into recurrent metamorphosis. All of the poem’s outcomes
are “intermediary,” headed toward re-placement, “at
large.” The book’s appendix (citing Apuleius’s Golden
Ass through Deleuze and Guattari’s What is
Philosophy?) attests that Hejinian’s speculation advances according
to craving and accretion rather than the cropping that pattern-making
seems to require. From cowboys or ogres to horizons playing
Husserl, no strange agent is kept out of bounds; horizontal arrangements
elicit each being’s contingent kinship to others. The ruminations
cobbled by contiguous lines keep us “laughing / In research.”
Laughter is “a lesson in linkage then or in overlapping and
belief,” with the comedian a stranger at the border between
discrete periods, sexes, idiolects, species, winds, waters,
performing the critical labor of rupture and re-synthesis:
“Comedians (being foreigners) often break local laws /
Even those of probability / And the syntax of events /
They proceed as if in bed / Lying between laws / Which
suffer lapses for them.” The volume presents logic as the flexible
host of transitory things that can choreograph these shocking proximities.
Yet the poet/comedian also recalls that host and guest derive from
common genealogical and social ground. Such alliances could only
be made palpable by an investigation this adamant to defamiliarize
our distinctions.
—Jennifer Scappettone
The Captain Lands in Paradise
Sarah Manguso
Alice James Books, $12.95 (paper)
Rarely does a first book resolve
itself so assuredly to such a singly consistent and instructive
rhetoric as The Captain Lands in Paradise, in which the
continuous return to either/or constructions (“it’s either
an orange or cancer”; “either a thing will happen or it
won’t”; “either great dignity or the lack of it”)
reveals a sensibility committed simultaneously to streamlining logical
naiveté and embracing indeterminacy and possibility. Our expectations
of the lyrical particular are modified everywhere and undercut by
a sly, abstracting instinct. The poet nods to this tendency in “It’s
a Fine Thing to Walk through the Allegory,” where she writes
that “sometimes the real meaning moves from the specific /
to the general,” the phrase reverberating like a koan, its
wisdom in evidence throughout the collection, often assaying a tragicomic
belatedness. Manguso sacrifices “the low prairie of beginnings
and endings” for an altogether different geography and geometry,
part rigid mise-en-scène (think Velázquez’s Las
Meninas), part heart-struck melodrama; she is drawn at once to mediation,
point-blank declaration, and reflected sightlines: “Innocent
as eggs, the sheep look at me looking at them. / Each one blinks
as if trying to remember my face.” “All love’s sighs,”
she declares, “are this, simply: an inhalation, an exhalation,
something between that is imagined,” and it is that “beautiful
fiction,” those “names you don’t have things for,”
which seem to attract Manguso most deeply. There’s a deep and
dark humor to nearly every poem, the deadpan gallows humor of a
true ironist caught in the midst of failed reconciliations: “Very
large objects remind us of the possibility of the infinite, which
has no size at all,” she writes knowingly, sympathetically.
“But we understand it as something very, very large.”
—Spencer Short
The Red Bird
Joyelle McSweeney
Fence Books, $12 (paper)
This startling debut collection establishes
a secure foothold for Joyelle McSweeney in the world of contemporary
poetry. Chief among her gifts is the ability to consider everyday
language as if entirely from outside of it. Her poems are not so
much depictions and descriptions as they are estrangements from
experience—the experience of possessing (and being possessed
by) a native tongue, a culture, a body, a sensibility. While their
surfaces can be obdurate, elusive, and at times occult, these poems,
in their very intractable nature, approach the reader not as objects
of comprehension or persuasion but as objects of sensuous apprehension.
Composed in large measure from found language, eliding syntactic
and rhetorical transitions, jumping with little warning between
discordant registers of speech (corporate, journalistic, oracular,
slangy), McSweeney’s poems assert the eclectic, artless, willful
beauty of collage. What she achieves through this dizzying, bracing
technique is an almost unbearable freshness of perception, even
while forgoing familiar claims to simplicity or objective clarity.
The stakes, of course, are high. In the least successful passages—those
that dither with the accidental phonological similarities between
unlike words—the governing consciousness of the poems threatens
to retreat into an autistic, self-stimulating isolation. These moments,
however, are rare, and if they are the price to pay at this moment
in McSweeney’s career for the frequent jolts of marvel and
invigoration her poems relay, then the reader’s expenditure
of patience will be richly rewarded. The poem “Roman”
concludes with a rhetorical chord assembled, characteristically,
from the jaunty and the grave, the lofty and the demotic: “It
took the Discordia Concourse. / It took the trompettes-de-la-mort
/ and the world as a vast divine system of metaphors / to keep me
operating. / to keep me a going concern.” One can hope that
the high, clear, protected sources of McSweeney’s inspiration
keep her a going concern for many books to come.
—DeSales
Harrison
A Summer Evening
Geoffrey Nutter
The Center for Literary Publishing/University Press of Colorado,
$14.95 (paper)
Each poem in Geoffrey Nutter’s
book-length sequence transcribes one minute of a summer evening.
Each minute transmits a 10-line poem, and often the minutes are
sequentially scrambled so that toward the beginning of the book,
for example, “8:29” comes directly after “9:42.”
This deliberate disorder may leave the reader feeling that the time
is “out of joint” or even that he or she has been thrust
“out of time” to experience the ecstasies and boredoms
of something like eternity. But more fundamentally it serves to
keep us more deeply aware of being inside time, more sympathetic
to time’s autonomous movement, sensitive to the temporal distension
one would feel, for example, on a long summer evening, from the
earliest dusk to the latest dawn. Perhaps all good lyric poetry
has this effect—if so, to what extent is Nutter’s organizing
principle unnecessary? It may be a flourish, but it’s not an
entirely regrettable one, because the book itself (the poet’s
first) is nothing short of dazzling. Nutter has an arsenal of iridescent
poetics; pantheism and synesthesia are his visionary rules, and
they lead him into culs-de-sac of severe, contagious fun: “Like
an octopus or flower, I relaxed. / The night turned its computer
on . . . I drank the golden Spanish milk, floated into
night’s green blades / Automated omnium gatherum spun, the
claws of an automaton. / O, hit me in the face with your long hair
while fucking. / Like a flower in the rain.” This playfulness
often abuts metaphysical seriousness, providing Nutter’s speaker
with the opportunity and power to trump the book’s divine addressee:
“I have touched the part of you that never felt me / I have
touched you all the way to untouchability.” What I like best
about these poems is how they maintain the sensual precision and
poise of Chinese court poetry while perverting its solemnity—as
if perversion, because it is still in the service of transcendence,
were also an act of reverence.
—Tanya Larkin
You Never Know
Ron Padgett
Coffee House Press, $14.95 (paper)
Ron Padgett has built a career out
of tender exuberance. To some extent the poems in his seventh collection
continue in that vein, but in many of them the poet takes a somber
turn as he muses over old age and death. In “Listening to Joe
Read” he writes, “I’m reminded that what made him
great / was not that he was a great reader (he wasn’t) / but
that he was Joe.” What makes Padgett great is that the reader
of his poems can never predict what will come next (as the title
says, “you never know”); the poet himself observes that
“it’s interesting that / no matter how one starts / a
poem, the poem can lead / to something else.” Each poem has
an identifiable, emotive catalyst—“The older I get, the
more I like hugging” or “A second ago my heart thump went
/ and I thought, ‘This would be a bad time / to have a heart
attack and die, in the / middle of the poem’”—but
there’s no telling where the associative process will end up
taking you. Along the way, as ever, Padgett immortalizes the everyday
and pokes fun at the decidedly humble nature of his work, but in
doing so he inversely affirms the importance of his project. The
members of his pantheon (Whitman, O’Hara, et al.) all make
brief cameos, but if any one figure dominates the book it is the
figure of the bird that flutters throughout, always in another guise,
but always the same bird. (“This morning on the
windowsill a bird,” were Blaise Cendrars’s final written
words, Padgett recalls.) “I am forty-nine years old and surrounded
by death. Does writing help? Probably not,” he writes in one
of the book’s many elegies. And yet it does help, actually—it
helps us.
—Nick Moudry
American Women Poets
in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language
Edited by
Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr
Wesleyan University Press, $24.95
(cloth)
As much a record of the semi-eponymous
conference that took place at Barnard College in 1999 as an academically
packaged, user-friendly compendium of some of the 1990s’ most-talked-about
female poets, American Women Poets in the
21st Century raises far more questions than
it puts to rest. Although any intermittent reader of contemporary
poetry will be familiar with most if not all of the names of the
poets under study—Armantrout, Berssenbrugge, Brock-Broido,
Graham, Guest, Hejinian, Hillman, Howe, Lauterbach, and Mullen—he
or she will almost certainly never have seen all 10 presented as
they are here, as an implicitly feminist united front collected
under the gentle (even genteel) blanket category of the “woman
poet.” In her introduction, coeditor Spahr
states that “the collection presents a variety of ways that modernist techniques are being used within lyric contexts,” but the reader will find a less-than-harmonious conversation taking place within the book’s pages. While the collection does what it can to recuperate the lyric by expanding its compositional purview, it fails to address the most basic philosophical differences among these poets. As Spahr herself puts it, “While there is a clear difference in intent between a poem written for investigating the self and one written for investigating language or community, it is more and more the case that the techniques used might be similar.” In this sense what the book does best is to expose our contemporary moment’s enthrallment to poetic intention (perhaps accounting for the recent proliferation of poetics statements, manifestos, critical investigations, etc.) as the aesthetic forms that such intentions take come to resemble one another to a closer and closer degree. If one were to glance from Graham to Lauterbach to Hillman to Hejinian and so on without the aid of the critical entries that make up the bulk of this book, one would have little idea that the “poetry wars” of the last several decades had ever been waged. —Katy Lederer Guide to the Blue Tongue
Virgil Suárez
University of Illinois Press, $13.95 (paper)
The section titles of poet and novelist Virgil Suárez’s latest collection—“Mascaras/Masks,” “Mythomania Dance,” and “Blue Tongue Poems”—signal the dazzling yet divided play contained therein. In the first of these Suárez breaks down and reassembles Shakespeare’s The Tempest with prodigious ease; Caliban, not Prospero, stars, and rather than command the elements, he participates in an eternally dynamic conversation with both the weather and the island. Suárez renders this relationship in generous, gorgeous lines: “As a child he learned to read sunlight, the way shadows cut / across the sand, a particular hue on the water, a reflection / in the underbellies of clouds, cirrus, purpled like a dead man’s // tongue.” In actualizing the long-conjectured association of Prospero’s island with the poet’s native Cuba Suárez swells Shakespeare’s magical landscape with the heavy, sensual weight of observed and experienced life: “A banyan tree . . . chooses to send out more of its sons / into the ground.” This is an island where every native is laden by the burdens of desire, and where non-natives, including Prospero, pass like papery ghosts. Suárez’s remarkable and flexible vocabulary allows him to move out of his Tempestad and into modern life effortlessly. In “Mythomania Dance” his speaker steps back and forth across boundaries, sometimes speaking like
a local to a would-be tourist (“if clouds burst in a sun-filled day and empty / wallets rain down from the heavens, we call / this suerte”), at other times turning an inquisitive tone back upon his own exiled self. The book’s third section, “Blue Tongue Poems,” stages the wildest spectacles of the volume. Here Shakespeare, Bakhtin, Derrida, de Sade, Neruda, Tiresias, J. Edgar Hoover, and even Godzilla mud-wrestle their way across the slippery terrain not only of Florida and Cuba but also of nativeness, tourism, exile, desire, age, sex, and real and imagined returns. This surfeit of possibilities delivers and re-delivers on the promises of escape and arrival extended by Suárez’s dizzying guide. —Joyelle McSweeney
Originally published in the Summer 2003 issue of Boston Review |
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