A Craving for “Poemness”

I’ve been reading Andrei Codrescu’s A Craving for Swan, specifically, a short piece of lyrical prose called “Bear with Me” that questions how much “bearness” remains within the black fur and red sinews of the twentieth century bear. Codrescu expands upon Soviet writer Andrei Bitov’s question: “Isn’t It strange that we make more and more books with fairy tales and pictures about wild rabbits and wolves and foxes, and that we make fish and reindeer and teddy bears out of rubber . . . [that our] children already live in a world where there are thousands of times more toy animals than there are animal animals.” It all makes me wonder how much “poemness” the twenty-first century poem delivers.

At the risk of sounding reactionary, sometimes late at night, plagued equally by fatigue and restlessness, I worry that there’s not much poem left to our poems. I long for that encounter with a stanza that arrives dressed in its blue collared oil-change shirt or even its Walmart smock, a stanza that has watched Jerry Springer once too often, that might share a place in our collective consciousness with some jive Avengers sequel, but a stanza that somehow, in its own unique post-post modern way sings, Oh “Westron wind, when wilt thou blow / The small raine down can raine.”

An unrepentant Platonist at heart, I have to admit that I feature poetry as being out there, out with the wind and rain. In a 1976 interview in Skywriting, the late Russell Edson gets at where poetry just might be: “If the image can stand on its own, then you’ve externalized it. But there are poets, I’m not going to mention any names now, whose very painful poetry seems to depend on their existence.” I like how complex the notion is, what might stand, who might notice, and that process only hinted at by the verb “to externalize.”

                               – G.F.A.

                                             

“This Year I Mean to Be an Elephant”

I have several favorites from Wendy Xu’s collection You Are Not Dead, one of them being “This Year I Mean to Be an Elephant.”  I am taken by the direct talk.  “I don’t know if you understand me when / I say hopefully there is a future and we / are both allowed in it.”  We’re chatting, damn seriously, over what could be a kitchen bar, about what’s been and what’s to be.  Or over the telephone, long distance.

                 …I mean last year it 
      was OK just to be flattened by our ideas. 
      I sat in so many rooms and eventually felt
      interesting and not like a chair.

She worries, expects, thinks, forgets, one by one what’s rushing to mind now.  But these commonplace mental activities take on precise emotional resonance when we find out what she’s worrying about, expecting, etcetera.  “I worry that when I turn on / the radio this morning it sounds just like / I expect.”

Throughout I get simultaneously the sense of deadpan, of being bowled over, and of taking off to someplace unexpected.  “Last year I forgot really / embarrassing secrets like how I am allergic / to regular soap.”  After a catalogue of telling me where she’s at, she sets the mood for “this year”, the year she is “to be an elephant”:

              …Cue all the different kinds
      of light and what music makes you feel
      not dead. Last night I dreamt about sand.


-bbc

“The Cabinet of Simplicity”

“The Cabinet of Simplicity”

Awhile back, Glen Armstrong pointed me in the direction of Weldon Kees and Kenneth Fearing, two essentials that never made it into my literary education.  There’s an uncanny familiarity about them, especially reading back to them through the New York School and others.  A favorite for me of Fearing’s selected poems is “The Cabinet of Simplicity”, which begins as a kind of manifesto, the kind of manifesto that might actually be acceptable.

    It will be known as Doctor Barky’s cabinet, a new magic
        Something for which there can be no substitute.
        May be used as an ornament or worn like a hat.
        Neat.  Genteel.
        Doctor Barky’s patented magic cabinet of strict, strict
             simplicity.

If others might hold the whole universe in the palms of their hands, Doc Barky, rather, shoves it all into his drawers, these special drawers as a part of this special cabinet.

What is this cabinet?  Could be his “order of things”.  But whatever it is it’s more magical than scientific.  Yet whimsy gives way to “discords struck from violent streets” and “death” and then, more convincing, to a dark dreamland where “he cut off his head and gave it to / a girl with stone lips”, her body “burned from within.” Later he’s “dining on her lips.”  Somehow there appears to be a connection between cannibalizing stone lips by way of a decapitated head and Barky’s need: “a need to arrange the / world so that he can understand it, / And still more, to create a fixed world.”  I start off liking Barky from the start with his magic cabinet and supposed naiveté, but by this point I become horrified by what might happen as he imposes this “fixed world” if it extends much beyond this cabinet.

But then each drawer of the cabinet is designated by Barky for this and that, and his order of things seems tame again.  “The doctor has finished.  /  He steps back into the shadows forever.”  So Fearing asserts, really as a set up, because candles continue to burn around “the magic box” and “the mechanical heart draws into itself / The veins and arteries of chaos” or perceived chaos in Barky’s universe.  Fearing has been amping us up for a final kicker:

    Comrade, this is no poem,
      Who touches this
      Touches Doctor Barky’s patented magic cabinet of
           certified, strictly guaranteed simplicity and
           truth.


-bbc

"Xantha Street"

"Xantha Street" is what gets me.  Kees has the "angels rise" but it's "on page 289" and even though this is done "splendidly" and "to Heaven", nevertheless "the evening still comes on."  

I go back to that idea again and again of the odd detail or the minor or mundane particular that in a moment takes over the whole scene.  Roland Barthes described this as the punctum and Mieke Bal as the navel, among others.  

"The climate of murder hastens newer weeds" and death's all around, you're "frantic, but proud of penmanship.  Beasts howl outside; / Authorities, however, keep the pavements clean." 

What's that slide that takes place in existence from what's taken to be important to what's not so that what's not entirely trumps the other and then becomes what is?  See page 289.  Feel the evening come on.  Note the penmanship and pavement.  Ponder the bellybutton and laugh, or get the point.  Your own point as you see it, a Barthian punctum amidst the studium.  -bbc 


 

"The Smiles of the Bathers"

"The Smiles of the Bathers"

I’ve been reading Weldon Kees’ poem, “The Smiles of the Bathers,” and thinking about the line, “Water and wind and flight, remembered words and the act of love." It’s a list with seven stressed syllables. Out of context, and divorced from its perfect pulse, it reads a bit too primal, as if perhaps the poet has allowed himself to be carried too far away from the twentieth century’s grit and tight, sidewalk pivot by bloated universals. But Kees is better than that. The above list is neither – could never be – the poem’s opening or closing line. Instead, it’s the poem’s central metaphor. I think we know, or at least intuit, that any list has a tendency toward litany, invocation and prayer when included in a poem. The string of concepts, however, has to be considered together and, thus, constitutes a type of metaphor.

Kees frames all of the above as “perfect and private things, walling us in” with their “imperfect and public ending.” They are “interruptions.” And the bathers, lovers, scholars and pilots from the first four lines, all solid, tax-paying citizens of the above twentieth century, cannot bank on momentary smiles. They, ironically, cannot even bank on death’s ultimate interruption, for there is “No death for [them.] [They] are 

involved.”

                    - G.F.A.

Self, Variations

Whitman’s expansive self recalls for me what people tell me about atman and Brahman in Hinduism and confirm him as a mystic, in a certain sense.  His “mysticism” is based in “empirical” description but a phenomenon under his description isn’t “just there.”  It’s there as we’ve seen it and experienced it and felt it.  It’s there as it’s run through our brains and been spit out as particular words.  Letting words do their work is simultaneously letting our brains do their work – that’s the entire brain system / body, from head to toe and back again.

I need Whitman’s expansive empirical mysticism, or something like it, from time to time, perhaps often.  However, there can be a disconnect, a bit of the pie in the sky, and this is where I relate sometimes more with some portions of Ashbery, where we have the expanded sense of self but now drastically more finite.  I’ll never get over the first words of his I read years back, the opening of his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), opening poem,

            I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
            Elsewhere we are sitting in a place where sunlight
            Filters down, a little at a time,
            Waiting for someone to come.  Harsh words are spoken….

            (From J.A., “As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat”)

We might start with the air of Icarus before he gets too far, before the emergency, and before a potentially fatal fall and end up sitting right where we are, waiting, in the sun, filtering to a little spot there within eye-shot of a maple, in a squabble.

-bbc

"Love Poem Against the Spring"

I’ve been reading Marianne Boruch’s first book, View from the Gazebo, and thinking about how sentiment may very well simultaneously be the first tool in the poet’s box and the first hurdle a poet is obligated to overcome. It’s kind of the Chuck Berry riff of writing poems; it cannot be denied, but must be applied with care and timing. More specifically, I’ve been reading “Love Poem Against the Spring,” a poem that opens with lines that neither deny nor reverse sentiment:

Spring means nothing but camouflage

so we dare to say these corny things.

It’s spring once more - no irony, no high-modern cruelty. Instead, Boruch acknowledges all the existing green that any new attempt at green blends into. She acknowledges the unavoidable matrix of sentiment that consumes any new declaration of love, the “camouflage,” the “corny things.”

     She concedes spring and its purple flowers, but never denies her own discomfort: “OK, they’re cute. My hunger’s not.” I like that the speaker’s ache stays complex. She is accused of being a computer by a friend, but the calculations here are clearly the necessary (and probably futile) steps to avoid breakdown: “Perhaps the pretty air / exaggerates some things.” These concessions to sentiment nearly mask the anger. The intelligence here just exasperates the sense that the speaker, more alert and alone for defying a mindless vernal camouflage, is utterly disconnected, and by the end of the poem she has earned her take on an image common enough to be cliché but strangely effective in triplicate. She has earned her collapse into a heightened state of emotion that could be “sentiment” if decades of academic poetry workshops had not thrown sentiment out with the bathwater:

Last night I saw three couples, incredible throwbacks,

strolling into the dusk, two so giddy, they’d love anything.

I’m quiet as a brick. But for spring

this far I’d go – glad, I guess, to shed this coat. It’s you

I crave, you who gets more stunning

as we age.

                              -- G.F.A.

What Works?

I keep thinking about what works.  Always depends, of course, but there are some reliables: past reading + experience along with gentle questioning of how it feels, to begin with.  Recently I keep coming back to #132 in Complete Poems of E.D. (T.H. Johnson / Back Bay edition):  “I bring an unaccustomed wine / To lips long parching / Next to mine, / And summon them to drink; / Crackling with fever, they Essay….”  I find this trustworthy, affectively speaking.  And by the time we get to the last bit here my neurons are firing up, too.   

So as I’m reading, I’m implicitly asking Does this feel right? but also Does this contain or expand my intellectual universe?  Am I opened up and strengthened?  Or am I shut down and made even less significant than I already am?  When I get to Whitman’s assertions, I certainly feel the expanse:  “I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise, / Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, / Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man…” (Leaves [1855] in Whitman: Poetry & Prose, Library of America).  

I have to admit that I get a little suspicious and cautious about Whitman’s optimism and romanticism at times.  Feels like we could be set up for a fall, perhaps unnecessary fall.  Still, often the risk seems worth it.  “A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfulest, / A novice beginning experient of myriad of seasons, / Of every hue and trade and rank, of every caste and religion, / Not merely of the New World but of Africa Europe or Asia . . . . a wandering savage, / A farmer, mechanic, or artist . . . . a gentleman, sailor, lover or quaker, / A prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician or priest. / I resist anything better than my own diversity, / And breathe the air and leave plenty after me….”  

-bbc

 

Loneliness in Jersey City

“Loneliness in Jersey City”

I’ve been reading “Loneliness in Jersey City” by Wallace Stevens and thinking about metaphor’s central place when committing acts of poetry. To enter the poem we must consider its unlikely opening equation: “The deer and the dachshund are one.” It’s odd, but far from dismissible, more than passing strange. The stanza continues with a syllogism that never quite resolves: “Well, the gods grow out of the weather. / The people grow out of the weather; / The gods grow out of the people. / Encore, encore, encore les dieux . . .” I imagine Stevens fit to be tied, at the end of his rope, so to speak, stacking the world into probabilities as he did during his day gig as v.p. of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. Nothing adds up. No foothold presents itself. This is not whimsy, but hell for a guy who wrote in “Three Academic Pieces,” (a Harvard lecture,) of the magic that can happen when metaphor bridges “things of adequate dignity.” I feel Steven’s isolation emerging as the poem goes on to surrender its street scene: its darkened steeple and its all-night immigrant serenades.

I remember a creative writing worksheet from my high school days. It was designed to help young people avoid clichéd expressions. Instead of writing “busy as a bee,” it instructed, one should invent a level of business more like, “as busy as a mustard paddle at a picnic.” I, frankly, fear the poetry that grows out of such instruction.

                               - G.F.A.