There were a few years in the mid-nineties when it looked like the poets gathering in New York might fuse a thousand disparate styles and beliefs and wishes into a single beam of classical beauty, rude comedy and what can only be called zen clarity (New York School, Beat, and Black Mountain)—the Newer (American) Poetry. If you have a copy of New Mannerist Tricycle lying around the house, I don’t need to persuade you that this is a true statement, and yes I know one third of that chapbook was and is D.C. based—in the mid-nineties D.C. was part of New York.

I was a baby poet and therefore an unreliable witness, but it seemed to me that of all the stoned geniuses circulating in the time before the hanging chads and falling bodies, Bill Luoma gave off this glow most consistently. His chapbook My Trip to New York City (collected in Works and Days) recounted a series of buddy movie misadventures pitched somewhere between Kerouac and South Park (this was before South Park) that like Ted Berrigan’s masterpiece “Tambourine Life” changes suddenly from picaresque to elegy. It beaned me. A few other chapbooks of roughly the same vintage struck me as similarly serious—Katy Lederer’s Music No Staves, Anselm Berrigan’s They Beat Me Over the Head with a Sack, Lisa Jarnot’s Sea Lyrics. Thinking back on them now (without actually getting hold of my copies of them) I imagine what they had in common was a Jules et Jim light-heartedness, with hard-earned awareness of the effects of gravity.

What most of those poets also had in common, at that point anyway, was a devout commitment to incantation, to a more or less regular, hypnotic cadence. Jarnot went for anaphora (or was it epistrophe?), Berrigan seemed to match up the prose rhythms of sentences, and Luoma headed straight into doggerel:

leafy muncher big time lurk
green belt cincher revlon quirk
darkie matter massive dwarf
blasted bright star mr worf

(from “Swoon Rocket”)

If you’re not hearing these words aloud, are only processing the meanings, you’ve probably already decided to spend your time on something else. I happen to find it enjoyable to follow this exposition of latent racism in Star Trek makeup, but probably only because I start feeling like chanting along to these seven-syllable lines as I read.

Poetry has been mistaken so long for an all-or-nothing proposition that it sometimes feels like more of a hierarchy than the A.P. College poll. If a poet isn’t ranked in the top twenty-five, the feeling goes, why read him or her. Maybe I’m imagining it, this consensus-seeking chasing after the current number one with a bullet; maybe it’s real but also only a reflection of the larger culture. Most of the time I remember to forget it. When I do get that itch to compare compare compare, Bill Luoma’s second full-length collection Some Math reminds me not to care:

A waffle doesn’t mind
when the apparatus is moved
from one location to another.
Hulse 2-3 tonight on a pair of singles.
If I arrange my local effects
in shells of equal energy
like a saddle mounted by a rider
whose boots were made for Tony Danza
in the tap dance extravaganza
then I’ll be humming all day
stuck inside the large hardon collider
with one higgs boson whose primary concern
is facetime on the linoleum.

(from “The Concept of Mass”)

There are readers for whom this mix of broadcast-announced baseball, particle physics and popular culture will read like uncompiled code. I also know from experience that it’s possible to pretend to a “negative capability” poetic license for readers, with which it doesn’t much matter what the poet is saying—or even really how the poet is saying it—as much as whether there are plenty of sudden unforeseeable pleasures hidden in the slurry. As the passage quoted above suggests, “The Concept of Mass” may be about that patient, interested seeking; testing for an unaccountable blip that, if found, will verify the Standard Model, whatever that is. Luoma is unlike most poets who wander into the science terminology shop (myself included) in that he doesn’t much strain to convert learning to a design for moral improvement. He seems to just throw it together, then if something happens, he goes with the results. Something usually happens.

Sometimes what happens is nearly untainted by lexical semantics (that incomplete Standard Model again). “Gobi” and “Swoon Rocket” are collections of quatrains, the lines of which vary in length from nine syllables to five. I’ve read them a few dozen times since they first appeared in 1996, and while I hear the undercurrent of sex and inebriation in the phrases (the title “Swoon Rocket,” for example, sounds to me like a riff on the name of the grimy Providence suburb Woonsocket—a romantic, sexual, aeronautic riff), I’m prepared to accept that the point here is to notice the different physical effects on the reader of these variations in line length. Take this passage from “Swoon Rocket”:

tonset factor enter sten
burns in coma cluster bend
segreganset librium
ripon jessup swansea rum

smoothie wafer produce nox
event  radox bap  sinclair
two point seven degrees kevin
tunnel quantum lamb shift hertz

masker furbo visby ort
gas clouds fronton bilda fort
bright blue knotsa lemming furs
faint arm spoker smedvik kurs

I jump at the one line not like the others, which features the signature Luoma trope of the misheard science term, Kevin for Kelvin here, and the profane version of the Large Hadron Collider in the excerpt from “The Concept of Mass” above. (The line with a difference also mentions what I believe to be the temperature closest to absolute zero recorded under laboratory conditions on earth—writing degree zero, you say.) I notice now that the line comes in the middle of one of the few stanzas in the poem not to deploy end rhymes, and that with nox/radox, the internal rhyme seven/kevin also moves me sideways. But since most of “Swoon Rocket” is in sevens, I think what I’m reacting to here is simple variation from a regular pattern. The term for it from both the visual arts and music is caprice.

The variations come more frequently in “Gobi,” which comes close to Amazing Grace’s 8-6-8-6  a few times, then veers off toward measures I’m relatively unused to, for example, 8-8-7-7:

trawl en horta mey first snapple
raleigh winkle voza baffle
wofat shingle drugga skoun
baler frickle mosie mink

This isn’t subverting the expectation of a pattern, it’s just changing the pattern, revealing how the pattern changes when the unstressed syllable at the end of the line is omitted. The effect turns out to be consistent with that produced by Shakespeare’s witches: double trouble.

I hear a lot of names of poets and sport figures flying by (“clark,” “nada,” “blanche… ricky,” “shula”), and the jujube-like quality of the desert name in the title nudges me toward a reading of the poem as latter-day Ram Dass: GO BE indeed. But I keep coming back to the feeling that this poem demands not a reading, but a hearing.

Despite the title’s hint, he doesn’t lead with trochees every time:

big yeska anna billet
clare voler gringa
lunch docket oui blinker ato
cran nowheres un off

It’s easy to hear why this 7-5-8-5 might be a one-off (un off). Luoma leads lines in other stanzas with one-syllable words, but usually to make a trochee, and not, as here, a spondee (e.g. BIG YESka, CLARE VOler). The spondees bring the rhythm a little closer to the traditional four-feet three-feet of ballad meter, but you have to work to hear it (and parse that second line in three languages, maybe), and then when you do work, you have to work again in line three to get any kind of rhythm back—maybe that’s an anapest after LUNCH DOCK?

If you’re still reading, thanks. And if not, well, that’s the risk involved in stretching a phrase out to notate the simplest vector in a poem’s sound, the pulse. Imagine a review that discusses vowel color and length, consonant places of articulation. Go ahead, imagine it. What did you see? A page of logic symbols, a plage on the Riviera, maybe. Luckily, the rest of the poem goes back to more familiar patterns (8-7-8-7, 7-6-7-6, 7-7-7-7) that prepare the ear for their variations.

I have a weakness for three lines the same length, one line a beat (or two) shorter or longer:

hootie pylon flimsey nylon
border patches volvo ken
klute digiorno salvo falg
lost overno opal calm

There are a couple other prosodically engineered works here, 4-3-4-3 “Nogo,” which doesn’t diverge from the pattern, and “Alystyre Julian Certified Orient Minimal Clothing,” which is entertaining but doesn’t upend the truism that alexandrines are better left to the French. I like them, but as I say it may be nostalgia doing the liking.

I haven’t spent as much time with the other pieces in the book: “Dear Filesystem Panic,” “When the Pathogenic Wind Comes,” and “Some Math.” I recognize “Dear Filesystem Panic” as a new instance of the form peculiar to New York in the 90s in which rapidly shifting identifications and profane connections bombard the reader with semi-familiar sounds:

to the closed out kiln of the north bay
to the last invasions of the new cult
to the nat of dayquill calling out the hordes of bar bar
to the pitted bas-relief of jenna and the optional au-jus of barb
to the mighty singing system doing the tuffa twist
in the blue sea of opoyaz
to the yahtzee of
I saw wings.

It’s a fun instance, in which the horrible routines and jargon of work, their repetition itself provides the means of escape, which leads right back to the horror:

I’m calling the destructor on an iroq layer of inodes
by inserting into the sidebodies of the multiplex of molly
a handsfree ipod wired to the hooded electrodes
/* your wires and my electrodes */

About the other long sequences (about a third of the book) I admit I’m less sanguine. When confronted by several lines beginning “the un the un” I start to wonder if I’ve wandered into the wrong book, despite the familiar variables:

the un the un the disposition of Linus
the un the un of that of it given she of infinite UN of branch
of outside of employee of in the house of pain
the un the un explaining a bursty traforo

(from “Some Math”)

As I recall, this was pretty much the reaction I had to “Gobi” and “Swoon Rocket” fifteen years ago. Given how much I hear in those poems now, I’m prepared to believe I’ll find out fifteen years from now exactly what Luoma is doing in these poems. As for what he means in them, maybe it’ll matter and maybe it won’t. We’ll see.

The less I think I know about a poet, the better the chance I’ll take to the book, as long as I can work out what I’m looking at and sail between oh that and I don’t get it.

(Sometimes I like the comforts of recognition, and sometimes I enjoy getting a little disoriented, sure. Odysseus versus Goldilocks.)

This may be why many longtime readers of poetry perk up at the possibility of something new or different. It’s like meeting someone, without the burden of actually having to know them.

(As opposed to why new readers are likelier to like the new—they don’t know yet how much better they’re going to like what was already there.)

Meet Annette Basalyga.

Somebody’s done a bad job cutting my throat.
Under my jaw a sling of fire wants action at half-past three.
In hours when murder, love, and childbirth send up their balloons,
I cringe to entertain my talent for the miniature.
I need cotton. I need aspirin.
I need to get to the hospital ten miles away.

(from “Earache in Cape Cod”)

This is a little like the sign at the farmer’s market advertising the new crop of apples as “hard as cement, tastes like grass.” Unpromising. A poem about an unpleasant experience, rendered in plain end-stopped lines, the physical sensations clear enough for a moderately empathic reader to start feeling claustrophobic from the pain.

It isn’t pretty but it’s real, which would be the end of the story if poetry were identical with rhetoric, which it isn’t.

This is the opposite of confessional poetry, the retailing of glamorous past awkwardnesses as proof one’s made it through the chrysalis stage. An earache is pure non-symbolic emergency that confers no status other than the ones they give out in triage. No claim is made for the speaker, and no claim is made on the reader other than: identify. Empathize. Let’s get through this.

Critics don’t talk about prosody much these days—it tends to break up the rhythm of the review. That’s ok. Music critics don’t talk much about how particular beats or chord changes work either. They write little poems about what the music is like.

(My guesses why critics avoid discussing prosody: a) the incomprehensible impertinent quality of all previous discussions of prosody, b) the tyrannical prescriptive quality of all previous discussions of prosody, c) a combination of the two leading to the diffuse superstition that describing the rhythm of a poem is a step away from decreeing that all poems will henceforth be written in the rhythm just described.)

I’ve been rereading this poem this whole book not out of morbid curiosity but for the pleasure of the prose rhythm; the lengthening declaratives culminating in a string of polysyllables that remind me of Marianne Moore (“to entertain my talent for the miniature”), two short sentences that interrupt the gathering rhythm, then another longer one, which the rhythm makes sound all the more sensible, if tantalizing. Ten miles hasn’t sounded that far to me since I tried to run it.

Basalyga does brisk business in homebound physical extremity. On the facing page from “Earache” is “Going Blind,” a little graphic novel of ostranenie:

Each day he wakes to catch a different scene.
The patterns are landscapes, unpeopled and remote,
places he has never seen. These are the hills of Samarkand,
he thinks, the Costa Brava, Patagonia.
There is so much to see.
He can easily ignore three whiskers, thick as broomsticks,
and his own life-sized reflection in the closing,
green ellipse pleading, Feed me. Feed me.

This isn’t quite Bishop’s deny deny deny, but I get some of the same charge from the rhythmic change that last repeated phrase brings. And it’s nowhere near Schuyler’s compression or impossible urbanity (he’d use a gazetteer or more likely memory to come up with place names less infradig than ones in circulation as clothing brands), but it’s in the same region, if not the same zip code. The failures of the senses in Basalyga’s work lead to tensions of recognition, feeling, and basic need, the inverse of falling in love, say. The magnified portrait of the cat’s face at the end of the poem is a brittle, brutal reminder—when you get lost in your perceptions (in art or otherwise) there is someplace you are lost from.

Basalyga’s best qualities can be mistaken for merely pithy, sensible or contrarian; I read her as memorable, level and contrary:

On Saturday, all afternoon
a gardener kills by appointment
a tree I’ve known since childhood.
Its roots endanger water lines.
The allegory’s there, but I’m more interested
in how the work is done
and if I’ll like the view.

(from “Postcards”)

She builds her poems around opportunities for sentimentality, which are after all occasions for feeling. (If you want to drive a poet crazy, and isn’t that the goal of our whole culture, ask about feeling in his or her work. It’s even better than asking “So, what’s your work about?”) She doesn’t always sidestep false moves. Even in a poem about the childhood psychology of poverty as reflected in the requirement to wear slippers around the house, though, the affect and the embodied sense data (“sliding over the yellow linoleum, over the rag rugs”) combine and come through to the reader. There’s a person here, not a hash of ideas.

At her most intense she’s as good as the movies:

1955. Over Oregon, an accident.
What he was doing, when the door opened,
wasn’t reported. Whatever happened,
when the copilot was sucked from the plane
he caught the stair cables and held on. Never mind
the winds at two hundred and ninety mph
changing his face into a star, his eyes singing
and another sound in his head like hammered light,
he held on.

(from “How Love Lasts”)

Frank O’Hara reserved the status of “better than the movies” for just three American poets: Whitman, Crane and Williams, and as punishment has been added posthumously to his own list. Movies were different then, I think; now it’s mainly an art of instilling pain, awe, and dazed identification, and anyway I’m only saying Basalyga has kept up: she knows how to maximize the tension and release in every death-defying (and -seeking) scene. And like a time traveler from poetryland circa the early seventies, she feels no inhibition about turning it to an epiphanic ta da:

When the ground crew got to him,
they cut away the icy rags that were his clothes,
they cut the cables from his hands that wouldn’t open.
He was alive.

I’m the copilot, the pilot, and Portland.

I doubt such a nervy rhetorical gesture would have made much of an impact forty years ago, but coming into print as it does now in a time of intentionally colorless lyric, the charm of it stands a chance. Lifer’s blurb from Marvin Bell indicates that Basalyga may have narrowly missed a first crack at destiny as a household name: Basalyga “probably never knew that her classmates in the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop of the sixties thought her the most graceful writer in the room.”

The title strikes me as a weary, cheerful ironic nod to her tortoise-of-the-fable quality. The only explicit acknowledgement in the text that she’s playing a long game is unobjectionable enough: “Give up the small notebook you carry; / get a large folder or a bushel basket. These histories / arrive in their own time” (from “Comfort”). Good advice, if what you want from poetryland is poems, and not a career. Basalyga clearly wants poems. It’s a practical choice, not a moral high ground, and she cheerfully caricatures the grimness of it:

Head for a house inland, a clearing in the woods, not gingerbread
but Unabomber mode, a cabin, curtainless and filthy, windows
plastered with the classifieds, and inside, a table
with an odd triangular stain, bare mattress, stone for a pillow,
a clutch of poultry waiting to be eaten, needing care.

(from “In Seclusion”)

The mixed consequences, in this case, of a life with the poems mainly to the exclusion of peers, are that the poems are splendidly rereadable testaments to isolation and relationships ranging from fraught to winsome. Well, Alfred Kazin said something to the effect of loneliness being the American theme, so there’s that.

Dozens of these poems have stayed in my mind since I first picked up the book in March or April. That doesn’t happen to me very often. A few poems are on the inconsequential side, a few I think I’ve seen done elsewhere. Mostly, though, she’s a weird original, even as she makes a sonnet from an offhand remark taken increasingly seriously:

NOW YOU SEE IT

Any kind of animal might come out of these woods.
From as far back as you can see
or remember, out from the openings
between the trees,
winking and lolling, upright
or on all fours,
it comes to share a honeycomb or bone.

It has been growing all the while,
battening on the damp, green years.
Now it makes for the clearing where you are.
Its perfectly round eyes glow.
Its mouth appraises what you have become.
It has come to claim you.

It is saying the word master.

A terrific debut, and one that like every other book ever printed suggests more poets might do well to delay publication until they have 77 pages or so every one of which they can live with. The poems may end up looking old-fashioned, but poems always do. What is rarer, they may end up worth looking at.

Testing. Palmer Barresi review, Akron to Woodstock to Ossining, April 2011.


Michael Palmer’s new book Thread like all of his books since the three book cycle collected in Codes Appearing (Notes, First Figure, Sun) attempts to do for paraphrasable meaning what he did in those books for polysemic / endless turn and surprise. Those books are beautiful. And also, it’s a kind of beauty that vanishes when you look at it. There is prose meaning (I’m driving into a thunderstorm!) and those are beautiful books, and I read them so many times when I was in college that I had to step away from them for a while. I always saw him as the west coast version of David Shapiro, sort of a doppelganger, the same Wittgensteinian lyricism, same mournful eroticism…There’s some overlap also with John Yau and Paul Auster, but really the closest match is David.



Michael Palmer né George famously roomed with Clark Coolidge in quote unquote The Sixties and they edited the magazine Joglars. And that is my potted history of Michael Palmer’s early days. That reminds me to reread Peter Gizzi’s very perfect interview with him in the one and only Exact Change Yearbook. Very perfect a little bit pregnant a little bit anxious it’s perfect his early chapbooks are perfect. They’re not really paraphrasable, or at least they don’t reside in memory the same way that lines like "splendidly bogus" from Notes for Echo Lake do.


There’s a tendency in poetry of the last forty years, a decrease in paraphrasable substance, a diminution of affect and increase in aesthetic polish. This tendency leads straight to a hyperaestheticized (and campy if you ask me) kind of work that the popular kids wrote and liked five or ten years ago. The popular kids go to the moon. A very spare kind of mournful almost meaning-free kind of work. Almost—there are referents, something is being talked about—but usually it’s a break-up poem, a renunciation, a history of gardening. There’s a line at the end of one of the sections of Notes for Echo Lake, “In the poem he learns to turn and turn, and prose seems always a sentence long.” Not in my experience, it doesn’t—if anything, prose seems always to claim to be getting to a point that takes another sentence, while making sure you feel like you’re getting there each time. Some of it is beautiful and some of it leads to what the critic John Palattella calls the cul de sac, a safety aesthetic in which there’s no (these cliches are mine) risk no engagement with anything other than other aesthetics.


This is something we have endured permitted celebrated in our major poets for a long time, an increasing aestheticization. Even Wallace Stevens especially Wallace Stevens. (Adam Phillips says in Side Effects that compared with psychoanalysis poetry is pretty peaceful, you don’t see poets writing books called Wallace Stevens Was Wrong. Well actually…) 
In one sense you want the poets to get more beautiful as they go along. You want there to be a point to what they’re doing otherwise they’re just repeating. You don’t want the poets to repeat you want them to make more and more beautiful poems. Problem is, what is beautiful and what is pretty? Aestheticization tends not to engage the emotions the entire attention, it leads the poet to focus on any given response the poet is very good at eliciting. In Palmer’s case he’s very good at eliciting an intellectual erotic thrill, a sexy sadness involving knowing about art. This is far from the worst thing a poet can do. It’s pretty good. It would be nice if he weren’t sad about it, but you know life is sad. As you go on, if you keep going, you have a lot to be sad about. A lot to be happy about too, but it’s almost disrespectful not to stop and think about everything that’s lost, and Palmer is a deeply respectful poet. Respectful of the reader: he hopes not to waste the reader’s time. 

In the new book, this mournful search for the lost masters leads him to invoke poets composers painters sculptors dancers, the arts. There’s a sense of lineage engagement and absence, that there’s been a major defeat a major crisis in our society. 

   

Little 
   
left of

   

us here
   
on this

   

mountain
   
of gold



There’s a consistency to his work that reminds me of W.S. Merwin, actually. At this point there’s much less in common with Shapiro’s work than with certain aesthetes of the sixties—James Wright, say, or W.S. Merwin. He’s diverged from Shapiro, who is increasingly twisty and turny in his work. If you come to Thread cold, if this is your first Palmer book, you might say this is brilliant, a mournful old master. If you come to it after the three major books, you might wonder shouldn’t he be finishing the Divine Comedy about now? A skeptic could point to the diminished scope of the work since Sun to say this was an aesthetics that does not lead to greater more generative possibilities, it leads to sadness. But you know, everything in life leads to sadness, if you’re paying attention. There’s always loss. I am wary of a wish to mark Palmer down for not living up to the promise of the earlier work—we have the earlier work, and this is something else, and it’s still in his voice, still has his signature. I don’t think you judge poets students anybody that way. To say, well you did that so now you’ve got to do something better. Level up, buddy. You can, you can say “level up, buddy,” but what would a more grandiose version of Sun do for anybody? He achieved a monumental quality in Sun, then he backed away from it. He wanted to approach recognizable subjects, the real, didn’t want to lead people to think he was on the side of the bogus in the phrase “splendidly bogus.” I think that’s a real danger in his work, that one might as some serious readers of poetry I’ve known have done, decide he’s not actually saying anything. He gives the impression of seriousness, for these readers, and that’s all they get, is an impression. I don’t think that’s fair—he’s too funny, too aware of how he sounds—listen to this:

Say that a spider with a death’s-head

crawls into your bed

and offers to make love.
How explain

that you are done with love?

And what of death?
Poem, don’t be so strange.

So, I get feelings of beauty from his work. I get feelings of beauty from most highways, though, so perhaps my feelings aren’t the measure of all things. Maybe they are. (Yawn.)



There’s a piece in Thread where he talks about killing a man in New York mistakenly.

I do not mean that I killed him by mistake, since I killed him intentionally. I mean that it was a mistake to kill him… I thought he had called me “little dago boy,” though in fact, as others later attested, he had called out, “Hey, little day-glo boy,” in playful reference to the bright color of my shirt.


Death, killing: At the end of Sun, Palmer’s done all he can with the aesthetics of turning; there’s a real limit to the emotional engagement of the reader with the work. No matter how good it may feel to read that work, if you can’t hold it in your mind as a whole, if you can’t remember it all—part of the effect is shaking the work—if you can’t hold it in your head as an experience that you see the shape of, and feel all the way around, you come up against a limit. A sublime limit, but a limit. He’s a real poet, possibly a great one. It seems to me that after Sun there’s something he’s been trying to accomplish—to get out of the cul de sac, this aesthetics of turning without giving the reader something at the end of it. Not what Pavement called a “summary act,” but a real feeling of having begun at one place, and having modulated to something else. In time, if he persists, he’ll get there, or I’ll learn how to read his effort as its own reward. In the meantime I still get this feeling of not yet.



I’m passing a fair at Newburgh. Newburgh is a difficult town but this fair, it’s a cold April night and this fair is still going. They’ve had a big thunderstorm, and it’s blown over. Bless their hearts.



So what do we mean by beautiful. Punt. Okay, is it satisfying. Is an individual Michael Palmer poem satisfying. Do you want a poem to set up an inscribed Stevens-y lyrical situation and end like a cartoon. There’s a cartoonish quality to the work that comes after Stevens that makes it slightly difficult in one sense to take seriously. They’re talking to you in a singsongy overstated simplified way, even when they’re disclosing insights into death, beauty, meaning—as in Stevens, Ashbery, Palmer, Shapiro, for example. White men, by the way. Is putting on the Wallace Stevens mask a way to absolutely conceal or efface or assimilate one’s ethnic or racial or psychosexual identity? (Is that what Stevens was doing for himself?) Stevens comes up for Terrance Hayes, for Thomas Sayers Ellis. He doesn’t seem to be quite as popular a totem animal among women writers.



You can do quite well as a fourth generation Stevensian, but eventually you and everybody else will know where you live: The cul de sac. The repetition of previous aethstetics, polishing, of previous aesthetics. There really has to be something new. The cul de sac and the problem of bringing something new into poetry. The problem is, there are also received ways of bringing something new into poetry. One is to work with a different lyric tradition than the one everyone else is working in. Palmer translates Portuguese poetry from Brazil, works with dancers, but again this is a path that is like ones that have already been taken. This is the complicated art-historical side of this. Where the poem is not a poem, it’s a move in the construction of an artistic identity. That’s the cul de sac that visual art has settled into, equally deadly; not deadly, cozy. When I say deadly I mean cozy. Well that’s messed up. But I think art has been in a cul de sac of overconcern with constructing an artistic identity, a brand, from which position you generate masterpieces. This is not very interesting unless you’re the one actually making the money from it, to be interesting to everybody you have to make something that moves the room. It’s got to do something. I remain unconvinced that the artists on the covers of the magazines are actually moving the room. Palmer moves the room. But. But. But. Chantilly lace… There’s a cross on a mountain. I’m in New York state and there’s a cross on a mountain. Heading off toward 9A. 9W, something. Anyway. What. What do I think about it.



I think Dorothy Barresi is an instructive counterpoint to the problem of the cul de sac. I know there’s been real tension between the avant-garde of which Palmer is a chancellor—he may have parted company with the language poets a while back, probably with the publication of Sun, which as far as I can tell is an attempt to reconcile language poetry with post-surrealist even post-Negritude poetry. There’s been a tension between that avant-garde and what’s been called the mainstream which I don’t believe exists that way blah blah unmarked case okay fine but I think there are a hundred mainstreams, or at least a dozen which comes to the same thing.



Dorothy Barresi, from her poems, I don’t know her just as I don’t know Michael Palmer, really rejects aestheticization, I think from this perspective we might call it prettification, as a move. Outright. Is about being messy, loud, difficult, not disagreeable but embarrassing and embarrassed. And this is a strategy too, again, a performance of and effacement of ethnicity, a kind of concealment of—in her first three books there’s an alternation between this embarrassed and embarrassing voice and a sincere and tender voice. In the new book she’s tried to fuse these two voices and the tender voice is mostly lost. The poems are written in a brash stereotypically aggressive argumentative tone. She talks about the wild animal eating the neighbor’s dog, and she talks about what to do with the pieces of the dog, bury them? give them back? And it’s shocking but it’s not that shocking, and it’s real but it’s not that real either. If it happened, and I have no reason to doubt that it did, but if it happened, is that something you make into a poem? It could be, and for her it is, that’s what you make into a poem, that’s the subject. I was not following her work, and then I read in West Branch a few years back her poem “Something in the House Is Beeping.” A two-page narrative of overturning and breaking open everything in the house, more situation than narrative. Situation comedy, situation poetry. There’s a situation, which is that something in the house is beeping.

A beep is a germ, a wink, a ticking intimacy, an auditory
pill to take for nerves
if you can take it—nerves ending and nerves beginning

all over again.
Where are you? I shouted at the air.
I’m in the backyard, my husband called. You should see the stars!

A truck in my brain backed up, beeping.

The situation poem, when it’s spoken in front of an audience, on the radio, when you read it, you get something from it. You get to carry something away from it. There is a sense in which this is a more ambitious form of art than a polished, prettified, intellectual Stevensian meditation. I have come around to the idea that it is more ambitious to create two or three page situation slash anecdote that has a shape as a poem that you the reader hold in your mind and recall and want to share with people. It is just fundamentally more ambitious than to repolish the Stevensian lyric. And to the idea that a deliberately unpleasant narrator, while just the flipside of a deliberately impressive narrator, may in fact be as worthy an outcome in the pachinko machine of who do you get to listen to any given hour.



I’m willing to put up with what I also see as deliberately unpleasant, unaesthetic subjects like the ripped-apart dog. I’ll take the good with the off-putting and as far as I can tell so will most. The problem is you can’t have a book that’s a two-page poem. I wish you could. I wish people read magazines. They don’t. I don’t, anymore. I did for a few years, but you know, life. Life. And there are so many magazines. Which is wonderful but a real difficulty for the art. It’s impossible to read them all. If you just read the ones you already know, diminishing returns! And if you just read The Best American Poetry, to return to financial metaphors, that isn’t really an index fund, that’s a managed fund, managed by stockpickers, and the fact that there’s a series editor means there’s some consistency, you know some of what you’re going to get each time, a quarter to a third of it holds steady, and the rest is the guest editor. That poets of some note would sign onto a project like that is fascinating, and the social experiment of what they’ll respond to, how they’ll behave at court, is always entertaining. It’s excellent for civilians. If you’re a poet and that’s your exposure to work that’s outside your aesthetic comfort zone every year, though, you’re not working hard enough. Your poems will show it. I think we used to look at reading for the same quality in a poet as confirming the development of a major style. When looking at a poet who had published many books. And when looking at a poet who has not published many books, we call that being in a rut. I don’t think we allow poets to get into ruts the same way anymore. People still get into ruts but it’s labeled that. A brave face is not put on senescent repetition.



I don’t know if I can recommend American Fanatics or Thread to people who aren’t already reading these poets. If you’re already a reader of Michael Palmer there’s much to enjoy in Thread—his efforts to get out of this cul de sac, for example. Many partisans of his work would not view it as a cul de sac, they would view it as the achievement of a major style. I believe he is capable of more. I’m going to read it of course, and I’m going to say to people who don’t read his work, read everything, go back to Notes for Echo Lake, First Figure, Sun, and the ones that follow, then read this one. It’s probably the best of the post-Sun books, but you have to read those books first, just as with David Shapiro you have to read To an Idea and the three after first. Really, just memorize those books.



Barresi. So, the poem is an account of being driven mad by something electronic in the house, possibly belonging to her son, possibly belonging to her husband, possibly belonging to her. Possibly a prank, there are such things, if you read the electronics catalogs, you can get a little electronic device to leave someplace and drive people mad, beep erratically, beep for quite a while and then stop, and start again later. It’s an idea. I like the poem. It made an impression on me. I’ll read her work; I went and read all her books and will continue to read her books to see if she’ll do anything like that again.

There are some poems in the earlier books about growing up in the Midwest, in Akron in the seventies and eighties, going to clubs, doing drugs. It’s a somewhat cautionary tale for poets in a developing cul de sac: would you want, when you’re fifty, to have this be the material you look back on. That’s too harsh a statement, and this harshness is probably why I’ve been avoiding writing this review. Too harsh to say. But I think there’s a reason people pursue aestheticization or the development of an aesthetics by taking the safe route. When you risk embarrassment in your work, you will often be embarrassed, and if your sense of embarrassment at yourself breaks, that may be a marvelous thing or it may be delayed onset of a social adjustment issue. There’s a tradition of confessing in literature, lately somewhat degraded but going back to Augustine; Augustine’s confessions don’t look all that embarrassing now but maybe we’re just far enough away from them. Confessional poetry does not have a great reputation at the moment partly because there is a threshold you can cross with the reader where the reader doesn’t want to know anymore about you. Barresi’s nowhere near that point, but there is a reason confessionalism stopped being the main mode of what we agree to call mainstream poetry. There’s something to be said for relieving yourself of the burden of the ego-ideal, of always having to put the best possible face on all your actions. To always mean well, to always try to think for everyone—“I thought hard for us all”—it’s not healthy to think for other people. Let other people think for themselves. Again, to pursue this dubious parallel between investing and creating an artistic persona, an aesthetic—I always loathed the term poetics, because it seemed to me what was articulated was actually an aesthetic, not how the poem achieves a physical effect on the reader, what is the structure of what provokes that effect—that would be a poetics—really what people are talking about is an aesthetic, which even if you wanted it to accomplish a social aim, it would still be an aesthetic.



Barresi. She’s a real poet. If you’re going to read poetry, why not read all the real poets. Why not see when they hit it, which she does at least once here. And many of the poems are memorable. People when they find out I write about poetry (when they don’t abruptly change the subject) ask me who to read, who’s worth reading now. I usually say pick up any book of poems, chances are there’s something good in it. You may have to read a lot of it, there may be a lot of it that doesn’t look any good, you may get discouraged. You may think I don’t get why this is good, why did someone print this. That’s true about pretty much all poetry. What did anybody on earth see in this book to go to the effort and expense of memorializing it in cellulose. But. Also, if you just read it, and see what you respond to, and aren’t in the market for being told that you’re having an experience, but actually are in the market for your own experience, and a companionable mind, then why not read everybody. If you’re going to read everybody, why aren’t you doing that yet? 



The funny thing about reviewing—″Oh no, this has to be your priority, you have to read this book.” Which happens to be by a friend, or teacher, or a student of my teacher or someone else I want to do something for me, or published by people I want to publish me, et-cetera. In the absence of independent auditors, in a totality where everybody who reviews is an interested party, what are you going to do? You’re going to read what you read and look to see who’s an ally of what you were taught and what you are comfortable reading. Confirmation bias. This must be poetry because it’s what I’ve been taught. And so forth. Everybody commits this, including me. And everybody thinks, “but the difference is I’m right,” and I think that too. But you have to stay alive to it. Just read everybody, and not be told, oh you can’t read that person or you have to read this person. You have to read everybody. And that’s a horrible burden, just as bad as the ego-ideal, so just read what you want to read. But how do you know what you want to read? How do you know?

A poet who’s served that need for me a few times is Ed Sanders. I’ve seen Sanders sing at the Church a few times (ashamed to say I can’t remember whether I ever saw him with the rest of the Fugs), and I’ve dipped into his prose accounts of sixties craziness, but it’s always been his poems that send me the clear signal that he takes the intelligence of his readers seriously. The poems aren’t that different from the songs and the prose—his persona, part public investigator part literary journalist part hippie Mark Twain, is pretty much the same—but in his clear post-Olson verse he mixes sweetness, righteousness and just enough smart-ass to make the mix a delicacy.

I thought of Sanders often while reading the selected poems of Polish poet Tadeusz Rozewicz, and wondered why there hadn’t been a new big selection of Sanders’s work since 1987’s Thirsting for Peace in A Raging Century. At that moment I happened to look over at some heaps of review copies, and noticed several things with Sanders’ name on them: a little book called Revs of the Morrow (with a great Red Grooms cover), and then two big books from Coffee House: a reprint of Thirsting, and a sequel, titled after a line from Simone Weil: Let’s Not Keep Fighting the Trojan War.

A little intimidated by the heft of the two selecteds, I started with Revs of the Morrow. If you’ve never read Sanders’s Tales of Beatnik Glory, or if you have only vague pleasant memories of classics such as “Sheep-fuck Poem,” “Poem from Jail,” or “Yiddish Speaking Socialists of the Lower East Side,” start with Revs, as in revolutionaries, a possibly mythical people who obsess Sanders’s cheerful imagination. Take “To the Revolutionaries Not Yet Born”:

I & all my comrades
will falter, fail, fall
with the task unfin’d

but I call out to all the Workers of the Rose
to you, o Revs of the Morrow
Take it onward!

Declare it! Name it! Work it!

That last phrase, delivered as it is here by someone not named Tyra Banks, disorients me enough to set aside the poignant start to enjoy the prospect of a future in which the commands to “Work in extra dimensions / Think 100 years ahead” are recognized as clearly saner than the current mantras of business: “Do more with less” and “Embrace creative destruction.”

It’s a dream, but like all dreams it transforms real residues of the day, and Sanders has hundreds of years of worthy days and exemplary characters on file. In eulogies for Jacob Boehme, Rachel Carson, Charles Olson and others, Sanders reiterates the consolations and miseries of dedication to the ideal. If there’s a shadow on the delight I feel reading these poems, it’s only that I have to remain wary that his true stories of genuinely amusing famous people might infect me with hero-worship, that tooth decay of the mind. Sometimes the poems shade into the thrills and despairs of absolute independence, but more typically they fall back to a healthier alternation between delight and caution.

when lonely, when in doubt,
when in anguish, when in metaphysical distress,
when feeling edgy or on the edge,
when feeling like a “Creeping Meatball”

then turn to poesy,
write it, study it, translate it from other languages

(from “Poesy in Lieu of Therapy”)

It will not be for everybody. Poetry never is. But the intense happiness I for one find in unreconstructed sixtiesisms such as “Creeping Meatball” is as consistently present in the larger Let’s Not Keep Fighting as it is in the perfect little book, Revs. I’m not aware of any poet since the passings of Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley who does as much as Sanders does to keep liberty and justice alive as subjects of freewheeling and sacred enthusiasm.

These are probably phrases that would make Tadeusz Rozewicz blush. I read Joanna Trzeciak’s versions of Rozewicz’s anti-dramatic monologues in Sobbing Superpower as distant cousins of Sanders’s poems:

an avalanche of angels
brought on by
inspired poets
painters priests
and American
film directors
is far more silly for heaven’s sake
than the one brought on by
the Romantic poets

The diction isn’t plain American, but the universal iconoclasm of thought and feeling have their counterparts in American poems, no matter what atrocities and glories our film directors may have committed. (Also, Poland? Speaking of silly, have you looked at Kieslowski’s movies lately?)

Rozewicz’s tone is more beleaguered than Sanders, but despite the terrible odds against it it never quite takes on that least pleasant of poetic additives, knowingness. Born in 1921 and publishing his first book, Anxiety, just after the war, right at the beginning of his work he establishes a bass counterpoint of sorrow to his declamatory lightness:

I buy pretzels and fuzzy
peaches that look like baby mice
I read Marx
I don’t understand Bergson
I go out dancing with a redhead
and we laugh
about the A-bomb
the red circle of lips
a long golden straw
my girl in a green blouse
drinks the moon from the sky
a waiter carries foamy beer around
lights glisten on the eyelashes of evening
the memory of you
covered my anxiety with a hand.

(from “To the Dead”)

The rest of his early poems are ok in precisely the same way—I like overhearing this reasonable imperfect person who makes no particular claims on me, is melancholy for clear reasons, yet lets me in on simple pleasures often, and occasionally shows me strange and beautiful things. And so we come to the dreaded question: is that enough? It’s difficult to answer a question with so many unknowns—enough for whom? for what?—it squats on the mind like a demon. I will try to answer it anyway.

In 1983, shortly after his émigré countryman Czeslaw Milosz won the Nobel Prize, Rozewicz published On the Surface and Inside a Poem, a collection of poems about poets and poetry, touching on international limit cases like Ezra Pound and Samuel Beckett but also local figures such as Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, then coming back again and again to poems on pages.

All of a sudden I saw in a newspaper
something resembling a poem

letters words
that reminded me
of some other words
resembling those words

some metaphors
paper entrails
images collected
from the dumpster of history
from the dumpsters of poetry

I don’t know about you, but for me the thought of a 60-some year old poet confessing his disorientation in the face of poetry, that is worth noticing, even with the unpleasant echo of real brutality I hear in entrails and dumpsters. What I value in Rozewicz’s poetry from this midpoint on (and pause to consider, he hits his midpoint in his 60s!), the counterpoint of light and dark is not foreordained to either sorrow or victory. It’s like someone said about baseball, that’s why they play these games. From about 1984 on, the poems really could go anywhere.

In 1991’s “Pig Roast,” what begins as an apparent paean to vegetarianism (“aren’t our Polish pigs / as sensitive / as their Swiss sisters”) takes a strange turn to the topic of pig-to-human transplants, prompting Rozewicz to issue a very sound test of reciprocity:

I ask as a moralist

can we find even one
man who would give his heart brain
or kidney to an ailing pig

In itself, the moralism is not that interesting and besides, it raises a subject no poet should ever encourage—whether the poet is in fact a sterling character (default answer: the poet is human). What’s interesting is the reset, the reframing of the situation. That the poems sometimes go nowhere must be acknowledged. A later poem, “Escape of the Two Piglets,” revisits the theme to less effect.

But at their best, Rozewicz’s poems go everywhere. And sometimes the re-examination of a familiar subject provides something even more than a contrarian gotcha or a topsy-turvy exposition of human frailty. As luck has it, the first poem of Rozewicz’s I remember reading turns out to be the masterpiece of the collection, “The Professor’s Knife.” An eighteen-page account of conversations with an old friend, comparing notes on boiling an egg, visiting wives’ graves, noticing a rudimentary knife on a desk, remembering naïve moments with newspaper interviews and a girl on a train, “The Professor’s Knife” is a complete and satisfying work that answers almost all the questions it raises, Rozewicz taking a circuitous path there while speaking absolutely directly and clearly the whole way. Each section takes a little too long to get to the horizon to quote for more than effect here, but a bit dialogue will give some of the flavor:

I slice bread on a cutting board
spread butter on it
add a pinch of salt

“Tadeusz, you eat too much bread…”

I smile I like bread
“you know”—I say—
“a slice of fresh bread
a slice, a heel
buttered
or with bacon bits in lard
with a dash of ground pepper”

Mieczyslaw rolls his eyes

I take a bite of crust
I know! salt isn’t healthy
bread isn’t healthy
(white bread!)
and sugar! That’s death…

do you remember “sugar makes you strong”?!
that was probably a Wankowicz slogan

Wankowicz… Wankowicz
we were a “superpower” then
but sugar no longer makes you strong

Rozewicz was 80 when this poem appeared. It’s the kind of poem that deceives me into resetting my understanding of the work of everyone writing now—hoping that every poet who writes passably in his or her twenties and thirties will hold on long enough, keep paying attention, and when there are no more senseless ambitions to fulfill, or concepts of “enough” to submit to, just to put everything together in excitement, delight and okay regret.

I don’t know whether other readers will turn to Sanders’s and Rozewicz’s work for the same reasons I do, but I can dream.

When the books are closed, I have the idea Terrance Hayes’s more memorable poems use lust as an engine; when I actually look at his poems, though, something weirder and shyer is animated there. “Woofer (When I Consider the African American),” from 2006’s Wind in a Box, relates a bus stop seduction completed in “the basement of her father’s four story Victorian,” with her father upstairs and the whole place covered with “feathers left after the Thanksgiving slaughter / executed by a 3-D witchdoctor houseguest.” The removal of clothes is exciting, but the obliteration of expectations is what really gets his poems moving; “Woofer” ends with the image of the human race as “linked by a blood filled baton in one great historical relay.” And though it’s set at a gay bar and it ends with the question, “How could I not find them / beautiful, the way they dive & spill / into each other, // the way the dance floor / takes them, wet & holy in its mouth,” his 1999 poem “At Pegasus” has only one line of dialogue, and that’s to tell a man hitting on him that he’s “just here for the music.” This bait and counter maneuver figures in one of the better poems in Lighthead, “A House Is Not a Home,” which shades into his other major mode, situation-comic:

It was the night I embraced Ron’s wife a bit too long
because he’d refused to kiss me good-bye
that I realized the essential nature of sound.
When she slapped me across one ear
and he punched me in the other, I recalled,
almost instantly, the purr of liquor sliding
along the neck of the bottle a few hours earlier
as the three of us took turns imitating the croon
of the recently deceased Luther Vandross.

One theory of poetry has it that a poet tells an audience a story about a recognizable subject, starting from the familiar then switching back and forth between the known and the unknown. You don’t have to live by that theory to enjoy reading poets who appear to do so. Hayes has a commanding sense of character and narrative, and if the trouble his narrators get into ever feels formulaic, it’s usually a tell that he’s about to switch codes. In “Not a Home,” the broad set-up fades to the speaker revealing that he’s actually applying for a job at “the African-American Acoustic and Audiological Accident Insurance Institute.” AAA AAII, pronounced “aaaaah aieeee.” It’s on the cute side, but there’s a sharp edge; the high-sounding culture rescue reasons he gives for wanting to work for the institute boil down to capturing “the sound particular to one / returning to his feet after a friend has knocked him down.”

The poets who come to mind while I’m reading Hayes’s best work share his antic sense of situation and his edgy decency: Tony Hoagland, for example, or Paul Beatty. They don’t fritter the reader’s attention with extra examples of whatever, and when Hayes is on point, neither does he. In “The Avocado,” the speaker is at a black history month event playing along while another speaker retails the names of Martin Luther King Jr., Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman:

“In 1971, drunk on the sweet, sweet juice of revolution,
a crew of us marched into the president’s office with a list
of demands,” the black man tells us at the February luncheon,
and I’m pretending I haven’t heard this one before as I eye
black tortillas on a red plate beside a big green bowl
of guacamole made from the whipped, battered remains
of several harmless former avocados. If abolitionists had a flag
it would no doubt feature the avocado, also known as the alligator
pear, for obvious reasons. “Number one, reparations!”

If you think this is prose, maybe you’ve heard avocados called alligator pears before; I haven’t. I also haven’t heard this particular mixture of reverence for and irritation and identification with a historical figure; the poem ends with neither the lecturer nor the eating speaker, but with Tubman:

pointing a finger black enough to be her pistol barrel
toward the future or pointing a pistol barrel black enough
to be her finger at the mouth of some starved, stammering slave
and then lifting her head to listen for something no one but her could hear.

The critical question with this book isn’t is it good or should you read it (yes and of course), the question is: how do we praise work when it works, without accidentally ruining the promise of future good work. I like his poems best when they only risk being silly or direct to the brink of cruelty, but this probably falls under the heading of criticism of limited practical value. Perhaps it’s enough to express a curiosity about what the reserved character who keeps turning up would do if he weren’t a character. Maybe nothing.

The usual way a poet comes to nothing, of course, is being ignored. Hayes is safe from this danger. Sometimes he’s part of the brigade of poets offering therapy for survivors of the trenches of stupidity of American race relations, and sometimes he’s on a one-man mission to rescue desire for its place at the heart of poetry. His first book was so good that every book of his since has had to live through comparisons to its elder brother. His fourth book, Lighthead, is no different, except that it won the National Book Award. As with his other books, it’s a mixture of anthology pieces and exercises performed with high spirits, nerve, and indifference to the usual categories.

I’m not wild about his formal innovations; the book includes several twenty-section pieces, a form he calls pecha kucha after an updated chalk-circle format. Invented by architects to defeat an occupational tendency toward long-windedness, pecha kucha has speakers improvise twenty-second long speeches about twenty slides one after the other. It might be a good fit for a plodder, or someone in need of Wallace Stevens’s kaleidoscope, minus Stevens’s unfortunate interest in cemetery decorations. Hayes is not a plodder, and the form encourages a miscellaneous show-offiness in him. His homages to Gwendolyn Brooks and James Dickey, too, strike me more as signals to potential constituencies than as poems where he shows up. I’d be surprised to see them in a future selection of his work. There hasn’t been a moment since I’ve first read him when I’ve doubted that there would be a future selection of his work, though, or that I would look forward to reading that book.

In my despair at not getting published, not getting a good job, not getting anywhere with the inert poems I was writing, I asked myself for the first time if I would bother to read the poems I was writing if I hadn’t written them. The answer was no. After I recovered from the shock of that answer—and it took a couple of not very pleasant months—I asked myself what were the characteristics of the poems I liked to read. The answer was poems with very strong rhythms, usually in meter, with a clean, quick, tight movement, often narrative, with the complexities in the tone, drama, and psychology, not in the syntax or allusions.

Would that every other poet in America—not only the despairing ones but the well- and over-published as well—undertake that exercise, and often. Not to come up with the same answers, but to get the ear, the hand and the heartbeat in solidarity, on the same page as it were. In Hudgins’s case, it was a step on the way to a publication history that begins with the Pulitzer-finalist Saints and Strangers and leads to the present collection, a new and selected poems that shows him to good effect all along the way, the strongest of the new poems as memorable as the best of his books so far.

A dove erupts from the brush. The hunter
swings, fires. In the glare,
a bluebird sweeping past the dove
crumples in midair,

while the dove beats on, undeviating.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
his son grumbles. “An easy kill!”
His father tells him the blue

bird’s magic blood splashed on the dove.
In the brief sinking glide
between the beating of its wings
the dove died and un-died,

and, not knowing it had died, flew on.
The boy snickers. He doesn’t
believe this crap. Who would?

(from “The Bluebird, Singing, Leaps into the Sky”)

Who would indeed. Violence, improbable events, and did-he-really-do-that symbolism are everywhere in his work from the beginning, not to mention a sense of meter not always as relaxed as the variations on common time above might suggest. The title sequence of his first collection is told in pretty good blank verse from the perspective of a revival preacher’s daughter:

They propped their guns against the center pole,
rolled up their sleeves as Daddy stood and preached
about the desecration of God’s house.
They punched him down, took turns kicking his ribs,
while thirty old women and sixteen men
sat slack-jawed in their folding chairs and watched.
Just twelve, not knowing what to do, I launched
into “Amazing Grace”—the only hymn
I knew by heart—and everybody sang.

Poetry ought to be at least as good at made-you-look as television. Hudgins mentions that the watchword when he was in graduate school was to “simplify the action, complicate the motivation,” but it’s not clear to me that’s actually his method. It seems to me that his work is best when the action is brutal, the motivations either clear or incomprehensible, and an algebraic sense of justice does the math; “They got three years’ suspended sentence each / and Daddy got another tale of how / Christians are saints and strangers in the world.” I suppose brutality is simple in art, but all the actions in Hudgins’s poems have ramifications that echo across his books, as when the “thought of us as nails / God drives into the oak floor of this world” in one book is connected with the love of a mother for her sleeping daughter in the next book, “dark / circle of drool surround[ing] her head,” loves her with

the tenderness we save
for something that will ruin
our lives, break us, nail
us irretrievably
into this world, which we,
like good philosophers,
had meant to hate. This world,
this world is home. But it
will never feel like home.

(from “How Shall We Sing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land?”)

Images return throughout Hudgins’s work, sometimes as here in a further state of development, sometimes as with the carrion flies or airborne fires, as echoes of earlier mentions. I enjoy finding them in his work (along with his em-dashed addresses to the reader) the way a gardener or naturalist notes the first arrival each year of some migratory bird or insect. Not all the feeling in his poems is at quite this abject an intensity, but enough of it is that his calmer moments fall a little flat.

He’s best, then, when engrossed in a project, especially if that project absolves him of the duty to be a good Christian. Of his collections my two favorite are After the Lost War, a mini-series-esque account of the Civil War and reconstruction told from the perspective of the poet and flautist Sidney Lanier, and especially The Glass Hammer, a memoir of child- and young adulthood in the south. Given their publication dates in the 80s and 90s, they’re candid, well-meaning and fairly hot on the subjects of race and sex. As a fellow white male protestant, I’m uneasy about evaluating whether his account of Alabama in the 60s and 70s would pass as recognizable and just to any and every witness to those scenes. All the same, I’d put The Glass Hammer with Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses and Kenneth Koch’s New Addresses as one of my favorite autobiographies in verse of the last twenty years. I’d say I’m disappointed that the shortest section of American Rendering comes from The Glass Hammer, except that I keep a few copies of Hammer around so that when I feel like rereading it, which is often, I don’t have to go looking for it for long.

The problem with the lyric I, and there are a lot of problems, but the main one is that most writers forget that I is a character, and that the special relationship between the writer and this character does not relieve the writer of the obligation to tell the reader something worth hearing. Hudgins remembers this obligation clearly in The Glass Hammer. I can imagine a severer critic turning a nose skyward at these poems, which typically begin in medias res, with a grabby quote or an immediately recognizable physical sensation or ideally both, as in “Somebody’d yell, ‘Dog pile on Andrew!’” I think, though, that if you concede that Mark Twain had something, or Charles Schultz, you have to see something in a poem about karate lessons that goes from this:

Because I’d seen a man
thrust his straight fingers through
a melon, I spent childhood
stalking a long hall, punching
the air in front of me.

To this:

I punched pure air and tried
to shatter it—the air,
which simply opened, fell back,
gave way as my hands slashed through.
The air! I can’t believe
how much I hated it.

I’m sorry “The Air” didn’t make it into the selected, but then I wouldn’t have left many from Hammer out.

When he hasn’t organized his work around a person not exactly him, Hudgins has struggled to keep reticence at bay with jokes, ekphrasis, odes to objects and other diversions. It works more or less, especially in later poems such as “Beneath the Apple” where the meter approximates protestant hymnals but the subject matter is the emotional counterpoint of what the speaker sees as he steps away from a party to take a leak on a tree. The new poems are encouraging. He appears to be pulling together all his powers, dramatic self-interruption, intense physicality, good-natured almost immature mischief, and a charming impatience that wears a lot better with experience. More importantly, he is turning all his energies toward life as well as death, toward uncertain conclusions as often as foregone ones. I wouldn’t want to be part of the couple receiving this “Epithalamium”:

Friends, we stood in church for you
as you knelt before the priest,
your faces glowing. Ours glowed too,
and our love for you increased

as we glanced at one another, and thought
“It isn’t going to last.”

And for that matter, I’m relieved never to have heard in life anything like “Lorraine’s Song”:

Mouth or knife,
mouth or knife at
the knothole – which, which, which?

I do like, and find it therapeutic, to read things like that, though. It may be like the thrill some people find in zombie movies, or the feelings of life others get from the smell of coal or gasoline; it may just be a textbook experience of the return of the repressed. I think there’s something more to it, though. And though I wouldn’t know where to begin to write poems like these, I doubt I’m alone in looking forward to seeing where his next poems will go, or in hoping that they’ll be as pleasurably rereadable as his best.

Michael Gottlieb’s Memoir and Essay is equal parts love letter to New York and knifetwisting account of how underground writing gets made. The thing about love letters to New York, though, is that New York doesn’t read anymore, and if it did, it wouldn’t pay attention to a love letter, unless it happened to be from someone young and pretty, or failing that, a rich friend from school. And the thing about writers’ memoirs is that what people really want to hear about underground writers is nothing at all, unless they themselves happen to be underground writers, in which case, why the knife?

Gottlieb’s poetry, if you’re not familiar it, is worth a look. Of the six collections in stock at Small Press Distribution, I prefer the 1993 book from The Figures, New York, and of that, I’d recommend taking more time with the first, longer sequence “The Great Pavement” than with “The Ulterior Parkways.” The signature of Gottlieb’s line accommodates both friendly shared allusion and sidelong quip. “It’s not colloquial, it’s ungrammatical.” He has a taste for obsolescent words and befuddled know-it-alls, and his stated resistance to prose sequence has never really camouflaged a love of narrative. As with the work of Armantrout, his west coast counterpart, or for that matter as with their true modernist model the satirist Pound, I don’t quite feel I’ve had the complete experience of the poems unless there’s a bitter finish:

You want to say,
“Yes, I was looking forward
to this abyss.”

Always believing
this was the just reward.

You realize then
no one ever puts it quite that way.

For good reason.

*

The problem
is not with the emotion,
or the recollecting.

It’s the tranquility.

(from “The Night Book” Gorgeous Plunge, 1999)

For whatever followers the Language writers may have left, Memoir and Essay confirms what anyone who has spent time among them knew instantly: Charles Bernstein acts superior and is a master delegator, Bruce Andrews is a born salesman, Ted Greenwald is not above revenge, the late Hannah Weiner defaulted to anger, Alan Davies is fragile. Gottlieb’s line drawings are true to life, and while it is likely some of his subjects are irritated by their portraits here, the person who comes off worst is Gottlieb himself. His continual comparisons to these other figures leave himself on the short side, and yet his confessions are self-praise by faint damns. He is a companionable narrator in the Ford Madox Ford mold, witty and oblivious by turns. At bottom, there is a fundamental belief in the value of the work he and his colleagues were writing, and below that, a conviction that what gives that work its value is the hostility and indifference of the world. The belief is debatable; the conviction is a laugh.

Gottlieb embraces self-doubt and carries on. He narrates transitions: how he left Union College for Bennington; how he left the US for Czechoslovakia to work as a conscientious objector; how he left painting for poetry; how he left conventional poetry for writing free of residual narrativism (his phrase); how he met his first publisher (co-publisher of the present volume); how he met his wife when she was fifteen; how he left everywhere else to live and work in New York; how New York left him; how, despite being present at the creation of Language writing, he’s been a minor character in the story so far.

If M&E follows any literary example from the American avant-garde, besides his colleagues’ group autobiography, The Grand Piano, it’s William Carlos Williams’s talkative, unreliable Autobiography. Of the memoirs of Gottlieb’s near-contemporaries, there’s a slight family resemblance to Rae Armantrout’s memoir True, and a fainter still connection to Ron Padgett’s Ted. Armantrout and Padgett are extremely economical prose writers, though. More than once in Gottlieb’s memoir, the sight of his Penguin paperbacks of Balzac novels serves notice that more is more. Take for example this representative passage from the 19th section, “Bulk Rate Permit”:

The job I remember in particular involved a number of tedious steps: there was a letter, or appeal, which had to be folded, and perhaps an envelope, and maybe there was a return envelope and an order slip too. All of the collated pieces had to be labeled and arranged, that is rubber banded, sorted, and bagged by ascending order of zip code so that the four or five mail bags that all of these dozens of man-hours, actually poet-hours, which stand against man-hours in the way that dog-years stand against people-years, so that each of them could be sent to a different quadrant of the country, to some super-mail sorting facility.

Having prepared a few larger-scale bulk mailings myself some years later, I can vouch for the tedium, not to mention the pathos and arrogance of the resentment that calculates poet-hours as dog-years. And all too believable, the scene that follows:

Everyone had shown up and at least was going through the motions—almost everyone, that is. [...] Charles never showed up on Saturday, which excited a certain amount of comment. By the time he did stroll in on Sunday half of the work day, however that had been defined, was over already, and when he sat down and joined the work circle it quickly became clear that he had no intention whatsoever of actually making much physical contribution to this effort. He was treating it as a social event, making barely a sketch at the sorting or folding or collating or stuffing that the rest of us were busily engaged in, more or less; all the while chatting away a mile a minute, giving every appearance of being simply delighted to be in this company and having the opportunity to see all of us at once. In short, he was negotiating the situation no differently than, say, an after-reading dinner.

There are times I wish my generation hadn’t had its aggression neutralized; observing Gottlieb’s rage and Bernstein’s self-importance, though, I cringed. Why should either of them have taken this volunteer work so seriously, when as Gottlieb points out earlier in the essay, it would eventually be rendered unnecessary by technological advances? To anybody who’s sort of been paying attention the irony is clear: the work Gottlieb labored physically and tediously to promote would lead to a major trade publisher producing a selected poems for Bernstein, with Gottlieb left to settle the score by means of this prose account published by the same fragile individual who first brought his work into print.

Here, by the way, is what Bernstein’s publisher has to say about printing him: “I thought it would be fun to have FSG publish something from the Language-poetry school. But you know, when you read his book, it’s not very different from a lot of other folks.” If you don’t already feel empathy for Bernstein, that interview will take care of it.

The late Richard Rorty was occupied with the conflict between authors “in whom the desire for self-creation, for private autonomy, dominates,” and those driven by “desire for a more just and free human community”:

One sort of writer lets us realize that the social virtues are not the only virtues, that some people have actually succeeded in re-creating themselves. We thereby become aware of our own half-articulate need to become a new person, one whom we as yet lack words to describe. The other sort reminds us of the failure of our institutions and practices to live up to the conviction to which we are already committed by the public, shared vocabulary we use in daily life. …Both are right, but there is no way to make both speak a single language. (Contingency, irony and solidarity, xv)

Who falls into which category should not be prejudged. Neither should Gottlieb’s book be read as the history of a community built around a shared interest in putting words to odd uses. Gottlieb makes some gestures toward the reasons behind those uses (aesthetic satisfaction, chance, perversity) but his larger purpose in writing the book, aside from staving off the terrifying insecurity that confronts every writer, is to remember what it was like to want to be a poet only to become one.

In Gottlieb’s exemplary case, becoming a poet meant inhabiting that terrifying insecurity. Throughout “The Empire City,” the memoir of the book’s title, Gottlieb constantly compares himself to everyone else while also recounting the unchallenging jobs he took to be free to think and write. When the objects of comparison are legends of art history, it’s entertaining writing, as when the man in the street with an interesting walk turns out to be Merce Cunningham, or when the basement at the Warhol opening turns out to be Gottlieb’s uncle’s industrial space where he used to store his books. There’s no actual interaction with these larger-than-life figures, though there is a remarkable moment on the subway when he realizes he’s wearing the same shoes as… but to say more would be to spoil it.

Memoir and Essay comes very close to being required reading for new recruits scanning Craigslist for a share someplace no more than a fifteen minute walk from a subway an hour from the temp agency. The greener grass is the last thing the underground has going for it, and this book pretty much demolishes whatever romance might be left for the life of a poet without credential. Perhaps some survivor of the writing camps will do the same hatchet work for that side of the world some day.

In the meantime, better to let Gottlieb continue to attempt to justify himself:

Was it all those bad choices, mine as much as any other’s, that are, more or less, called out in the memoir, which shaped the argument that appears in the essay? Or, was it surviving—to the extent I have—my bad choices and watching others, survive or fall beneath the wheels of their own, that gave form to The Jobs of the Poets?

Perhaps the natural course of the diseases, or the oppressions, if that is what they were, which fell and befell, which continue to afflict so many of us, may not appear so to those coming afresh upon the events and individuals populating this memoir.

I couldn’t put it down.

Books of selected poems, especially if the writer isn’t overbearingly well-known, have a lucky feeling to them. As it happens, Christopher Howell’s first collection is called The Crime of Luck; the title refers to the coming of winter, when “Soon cold will step from hiding, / the bears stagger comically to sleep, poor / beggars die out the crime of luck.”

A typical Christopher Howell poem—but it’s not clear there is any such thing. There is a genial, self-incriminating persona, and it would be unlikely for Howell to publish random lists of words, truly embarrassing personal stories or confrontational talk poems. He might be called a metaphysical poet for all his mention of the soul, his favored emblems for which are boats, birds and kites—free to travel but needing to come back to land. There are stable frames of reference in his poems, but he’s good for a substantial surprise almost every time. There is an intractable need in Howell’s poems to appeal to the reader’s tender feelings, as he says in 1997’s “The Cry,” to implore the reader to “come to me / because I cannot come to you.”

Episodes from his Vietnam-era stint in the Navy recur in his poems, in particular the job of writing letters to the families of soldiers killed in action. The first such poem, “Dear Mrs. Terry” (1976), recounts the awkwardness, tedium, and frustration of the sailors on a ship

in the lead-hot
Gulf into which Cadet Pilot Terry shot
his plane, the impact of the catapult
socking him forward, his gear
snagging the stick. “I don’t know, Captain,
he cleared the flight deck and went down
like a goose, sir.” Fifty fathoms. Enough
oxygen for half an hour.

The poem ends with another sailor sleeping, “book / over his face, the writing of that next-of-kin letter / making a wide slow approach through the dead / chain of command.” The intense sitting-duck feeling of the metaphor of the letter approaching its writer might seem a little callous; the enjambment, though not as epochal as Donne’s lines about the bells, gets, as we all do, to the point.

Death often looms over Howell’s poems. His 1991 collection Sweet Afton speaks of the last days of an imaginary Pennsylvania town before the power company flooded it for a reservoir. (It is typical of Howell’s imagination both that the town has been named by a lover of Burns’s poems as well as that no mention of Burns appears in the work.) His early poems show the strong, sometimes overpowering influence of James Wright, and even in his later poems he sometimes drops Wright’s words like keys: blossoms are everywhere, and even iron bars threaten to burst into song. He seems to be aware of the issue; in his direct nod to Wright’s best-known line, “I Have Wasted My Life,” he counters that in his case, “I hope I haven’t wasted it.”

What else might a Howell poem be. He invented a classical Chinese poet given to parables, and his fabulist streak continues in later poems about various encounters with animals. It’s not as hokey as that sounds—what, after all, is “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” but a poem about an encounter with an animal—and in fact his 2003 poem “The Dove” is a level-headed nautical tale contemplating eating a bird that “flopped out of the sky, exhausted, onto the fantail” of a boat lost at sea for weeks. It’s no “Rime,” but it is an attractive and memorable poem, both for its modest loathing for the bird’s “scorched white plastic-seeming shit” as well as the mildly crazed fantasy that during a squall, the bird, “below in an orange crate / where he would plummet immediately into the pigeon unconscious,” might watch over and protect the ship, “fly / the entire vessel then, soar high over the spume and pitching moil,” from inside his dream. Most poets would give you one or the other, the fouling of the decks or the “darkly joyous bird asleep / and dreaming of a bird.” For Howell, the real and the ideal both appear to be necessary conditions for poetry.

A reader can be forgiven for thinking his 1997 book, Memory and Heaven, my favorite of his single collections, bears a resemblance to the quirky investigations of Dean Young, Mary Ruefle and others. Like Young and Ruefle, Howell has always grounded lightness with heavy facts. Those who seek Howell’s book out will find a poet who over time has grown more and more comfortable with surprising word choices, comparisons, and lists. He’s so sure the force of his narratives will carry the reader through to the end, so sure the feelings that come through in his poems are real and undeniable, he can risk what looks at first like irrelevance, as toward the end of the elegy “You Sailed Away, Oh Yes You Did”

Like a proton parking meter filled with mischief and stars,
like a fig bar the rain disapproves of,
like a window becoming a zip-lock bag when no one is listening.

I’d prefer that series without the clause beginning with filled, but I’ll take it as a package deal with the fig bar, token of an outright Ashberyan tendency I wouldn’t mind seeing him develop further, if it might mean more poems like 2004’s “He Writes to the Soul.” There, his native impulse to hold the reader’s attention somehow coexists with his other great will, to daydream: “Anyway, / at every crossing I kneel and say ‘Excelsior!’ / and light a little fire in a jar and drink it down, / hoping if fire’s a prayer no one will answer it just yet.” The close of the poem makes me want to encourage this fluent silliness in Howell and almost nobody else on the planet:

Don’t fret about my safety; if the weather
doesn’t suck its trigger finger while it hunts for time,
or if something huge and golden lets me have its keys,
I’ll be ok. Lake or no lake, some days I feel
perfectly disguised in front of you, like intention
around an iceberg or sunlight on the skin of the rain.
And I’m happy now, happy as a jungle, happy as a wisp
of dreaming melon and I cry only on your days off.

In a dramatic monologue from 1991’s Sweet Afton, Christopher Howell ends the speech of the town painter with what might serve as a motto for his art:

The few things I do sell
I sell for no great golden fee.
Most of my sad companions here will never know
the single object of the work
is joy.

While that’s a reasonable mission statement for small town painter and well-published poet alike, I think it puts too low a price on Howell’s inventions. Reading back through Howell’s books for this review, and prompted by his new poem, “Time Travel,” I noticed several anticipatory borrowings from popular culture in poems not included here. For example: His “monster that ate Sandusky,” included in a science-fiction anthology in 1977, was at the very least likely something in the air breathed by the creators of “The Creature that Ate Sheboygan,” a 1979 computer game. The poem “Chance,” with its weasel “rattling the stargate of an infant’s sleep,” is from the 1985 collection Sea Change, and therefore only predicts what most men think of James Spader. And as for his appalling 1997 pun title “Christian Science Minotaur”—the band of the same name that began recording in 2002, it turns out, may be able to plead that their use of the name is merely a literary reference.

Dreamless and Possible is Howell’s ninth volume. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Eastern Washington University, and most of his books have been published in the northwest; by his current press, University of Washington, by Eastern Washington U’s now-closed press, by Idaho’s Lost Horse Press, and by L’Epervier, then of Seattle. He’s no more a regional writer than his fellow northwesterner the late William Stafford was, though. I first came across his work in The Gettysburg Review; his near-annual appearances justify a subscription.

Howell writes as if he believes both that art cannot be willed, and that it never comes without a sacrifice. This refusal of the will sometimes gives his work a self-diminishing quality, and it is not always clear that his best, most characteristic poems are on offer here. For example, of the 25 poems he’s published in The Gettysburg Review in the last decade, by my count he’s only collected ten in books so far. My favorite poem of 2006 is one of those uncollected poems: “Rachel,” a psychological thriller monologue in the voice of a patient of Freud’s who’d lost her child. Maybe he’ll put it in the next book. In this book there are nine or ten poems at least as good as that one, one of which, “The New Orpheus,” is an elegy for his daughter Emma. The poem is both beautiful and excerptible, but it would be irresponsible to just pull a quote. It’s worth getting to the end of the book to read the last three lines in context.

As devastated and clear as Howell can be, singer of sad songs is not exactly the writer I see when I look at his work in the round. That character I see more clearly in one of the new poems. “Letting Things Go” relates a trip the poet took in his baby-poet pre-first-book days to the annual conference of John Muir Publications, a press run by an engineer-hippie carrying on the family name of the legendary environmentalist. (JMP’s best-known book remains How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive.) Ever the ambitious poet, Howell secures an invitation to read for the “principal mavens of the group”:

We gathered around a huge table out
under the stars
and I opened my manuscript…
but first, Muir said, we should “get into the mood”
and began to load his pipe with a weed
and Psilocybe Mexicana mixture which everyone
smoked until their eyes were huge, pulsing zeros.

Then I read. It was like hollering
into a vat of butter, like singing to Martians
about the stock exchange.

When, after three hundred years, I finished,
they nodded into themselves, looked around
and went off toward the beach.
Two days later the managing editor collared me
and said, “Well, they thought I should talk to you
because we’re about the same height. So,
it’s like this, we know you’re a good poet
and we’d really like to help you out, but
you’re into holding onto things

and we’re into letting things go.

Missing brother
Her child’s late father
Recurring name
(A city they made a movie about as a joke)
Carnivals
Blood oranges
Winter as the unmentionable omnipresent (like skyscrapers and hostility in New York)
Vanished sea
Chuckling, disgusted
“Gods are so cool”

I’ve been trying to put my finger on what in Paula Cisewski’s Ghost Fargo keeps getting to me. I make lists, but the lists are subjects, and names of subjects are more like paint chips than the eventual mood of a room, and besides, lists are overrated. I reread the book from back to front to see if any unresolved drama in the work (such as the first few lines of the list above) is leading me to read warmth where what might equally be there is what Roland Barthes called writing degree zero. The vibe (what is it) is still there. I turn to other readers for help. She loves language, one says, and she is unsentimental. Ok. Another, a poet I read, says: fate (yes) and that, in her first book, when she makes an interesting leap, she doesn’t always give the reader time and space to understand it. Another critic sees jumps too. I don’t see jumps, though. I show her work to my friends, but my friends don’t want to hear about poetry not by them. Fuck ‘em.

You think everyone knows
all about a thing so you don’t

write it down, don’t say.
Everybody does know

about it. It is difficult.
In the backs of our minds,

while several separate
groups of humans try

to entertain one another,
to be novel or bright,

a similar thought spider crouches.

(beginning of “Vintage Blue Anywhere”)

I can tell you what I don’t like: now and then she mixes up transitives and intransitives, uses an adjective as a noun (“his foolish heroic”), overdoes it with the praise of disappointment and thrift stores, or commits an asinine bout of all over the page a la cummings. And then, just as I’m ready to set the book aside, she issues an apology in the form of telling a truth, not a great one, only so-so, but recognizably true all the same:

O good parents of Fargo!

How you fret, and yes!

Your teens are smoking weed

in the Taco John’s parking lot,

all the windows rolled and fogging.

(The dusk is not funny, Paula. Don’t be an ass.)

(from “the poor choruses”)

Everybody wants the credibility that comes with being real, but very few people put up with all the crap being real requires. Incidentally, I learned recently that the Wikipedia munchkins monitor articles there for “peacock words”—unsubstantiated terms of praise. I bring it up because the word true as I’m using it is sounding more like a peacock word to me than best or greatest usually do. It probably embarrasses the poet, who is quick to give away any truth-gotten gains: “Oh, sincerity. Let’s not / train our grief to resemble a parlor trick.” A sincere person would say that, wouldn’t she. Yes, but only an awesome writer would change the subject like so:

Recall The Loverboy girls.

The Loverboy girls! A triumvirate
Strut through the mezzanine
in their groupie band T-shirts,
festooned with bandanas!
Now, I am happy again.

(from “the poor choruses”)

It would be an achievement along the lines of widening the frame on Larry Clark photographs or following the interview subjects of “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” home if Cisewski simply stacked up 90 pages of the happy and unhappy dumb things kids do in small Midwestern cities, and it would probably sell a lot of copies. This would be a hypothetical book. The book Cisewski actually wrote does something else.

Are all mothers headless
like mine?
How she hated
to see her face
in a photo. It never
turned out right.
She Exacto knifed it.
She made a neat box
of nothing there.
Sometimes hair rollers
floated above the void,
sometimes a spoon aimed at it.
Mother, we are new in Fargo
and cannot show this album
to prospective friends.

(from “Ode to Tethers”)

Cisewski has the fun and horror of telling the truth about herself and the city and everyone around her, and at the same time she reconciles herself to the good and the bad, at some cost. It doesn’t look easy. It reminds me of some writers I usually think of as inimitable: Bishop, Schuyler, Wright (fils).

Consider: the artist who was famously ironic

about being ironic. By each show’s end,
the whole audience felt stupid. We loved it!

But some of the crowd was only pretending,
you find out much later. It’s no wonder,

when even the family cat’s on
Prozac, we’re tired of emotion in art.

(middle of “Vintage Blue Anywhere”)

Speaking of the good and the bad: that bit about the cat is probably not immortal poetry. I accept it because by this point in the book I’m conditioned to expect something likely. As when she suddenly discloses some kind of medical intervention, then lets the inland sea of her discretion close over it: “The nurse who has to read the journal I have to keep / tells me I am a good writer and I begin to like her some.” As when, in a poem about visitors to the zoo providing orangutans with lit cigarettes, she pays homage to Russell Edson’s primates inadvertently or on purpose, and then backs away from the experience. As when she follows the apparent platitude “Sometimes dusk / is just a day’s punch line” with a few lines that feel strong as a punch:

In the darkening I lie beside my love.
Steeped in separate pasts,

we muster together one
good, deep laugh.

(from “the poor choruses”)

I’m resigned to the fact that for now I don’t know what makes me want to reread this book. Maybe it’s just one of the best books of a very good year not over yet, one in which there’s about as much time to reflect as Cisewski gives at the end of “Vintage Blue Anywhere”:

That antique sadness is the new
inside joke. It’s irrevocable, like when driving home

one night, the stranger who pulls up to the red light
next to you is weeping, both your windows

rolled up. You just begin to have a human reaction,
and then the light’s green.

Louise Glück’s poems are really good at feeling bad. In “Retreating Figure,” the best poem in her Pulitzer-winning collection The Wild Iris, Glück imagines what God might say about His absence. Her best known poem remains “Mock Orange,” a one-page lyric in which she says of the flowers in the title, “I hate them. / I hate them as I hate sex.” Ararat, the book she wrote between those two strange intensities, is my favorite work of hers. The plainspoken tendency in American poetry is never sharper nor darker:

My sister and I reached
the same conclusion: the best way
to love us was to not
spend time with us.

(from “Animals,” Ararat)

Ararat centers around mourning the death of the father; I intentionally don’t say Glück’s father. Glück always means the definite article and the declaration of importance the word the implies. In a Glück poem, you feel what you’re told to feel, on the double. I mean that as praise. Glück can be amazing, a catharsis machine, the true minimalist who gives not as little as possible but as little as necessary.

Where I start qualifying my praise is where she cuts short investigating what prompts all the depressing rage:

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was—
for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.

(from “First Memory,” Ararat)

It might have meant both those things, actually. There’s no room in Glück’s decisive poetics for ambivalence, though—especially when it comes to emotion—and that puts a limit on how profoundly she can affect readers. 


A Village Life is Glück’s eleventh book. The anxious insistence on isolation has achieved its aim. The conflicts at the heart of her best work are dormant here. The speakers of these poems are wistful, detached, not overpowering or freaked out. This passage from “Before the Storm” is typical:

No sound. Only cats scuffling in the doorways.
They smell the wind: time to make more cats.
Later, they prowl the streets, but the smell of the wind stalks them.
It’s the same in the fields, confused by the smell of blood,
though for now only the wind rises; stars turn the field silver.

For the longest time I thought Glück stood for everything I couldn’t tolerate in American poetry. What little of her poetry I’d read struck me as not only premeditated, but also arrogant. She clearly rejected joy, happy surprise, I’ve already mentioned sex, not to speak of the small pleasures—unexpected turns of phrase, stray details. Eventually it dawned on me that she might be writing with something other than pleasure in mind. Something greater, to her mind.

One night that summer my mother decided it was time to tell me about
what she referred to as pleasure, though you could see she felt
some sort of unease about this ceremony…
(from “At the River”)

Glück can be seen as part of a broader trend in American culture—the cult of the aspirational insult. You may have heard about it in coverage of Neil Strauss’s dating manual, The Game, in which hapless men are instructed to get the attention of attractive women by insulting them. The more attractive the woman is, the greater the insult has to be. It’s called negging. It works on men too. For that matter, it can work on a whole society at once.

Does negging lead to a close connection, a truer understanding, real love? Is that question for real? What it leads to is power. To some extent, you can see patterns of negging in the work of a lot of writers enjoying critical favor now, especially the poets—what is Frederick Seidel but a walking neg? but there are more than traces of this withholding tendency in less controversial and arguably greater, more successful writers, from to Anne Carson to Franz Wright. This is to say that in itself negging as a literary strategy is neither good nor bad. When it’s the only emotional color available to a writer, though, it’s bullying.

After The Wild Iris, Glück’s work takes a turn for the vague. In The Village Life, she’s still got the will to pass off her brutal streak as candor:

No one really understands
the savagery of this place,
the way it kills people for no reason,
just to keep in practice.

That’s fine. But the commanding tone loses its credibility when she uses it to speak untruths:

But no signal from earth
will ever reach the sun. Thrash
against that fact, you are lost.

If you think signals from earth radiating away from the earth reach the sun constantly, please be assured you are not lost.

The command that we associate with Glück is a product of will and ingenuity. We believe her, when we believe her, even when we have no way to know whether she’s right, because she makes a point of stopping short, of heading off questions. It’s all or nothing, which is great when the bets pay off, disastrous when they don’t. The lines quoted above are among the shortest in the book. It may be that this is her way of signaling that in these poems she’s trying to speak in voices other than her own. It doesn’t work. The price of developing a commanding voice over several books is that now she always sounds exactly like herself.

A few themes recur—moldy produce, men who alternate between complete availability and total withdrawal, adolescent pre-sexual flirtation, disappointed hopes. “In the Café” is the most like her best work, a narrative about a man who “falls in love a little too easy,” a serial monogamist vampire who becomes not what his lovers are, “but what they could be / if they weren’t trapped in their characters.” Afterwards, when the women complain to their next lovers about “how amazing it was, / like living with another woman, but without the spite, the envy,” Gluck’s follow-up is everything we want from her:

And the men tolerate this, they even smile.
They stroke the women’s hair—
they know this man doesn’t exist; it’s hard for them to feel competitive.

And she’s entitled to mourn the loss of youth, as in “Walking at Night,” which begins “Now that she is old, / the young men don’t approach her” and ends recalling “the body she had as a young woman, / glistening under the light summer clothing.” The subject comes back again in “Crossroads,” where the speaker addresses her body, “it is not the earth I will miss / it is you I will miss.” Fair enough. But does she have to be a spoilsport and remark to someone in love, “Just be glad you were in bed, / where the cries of love drown out the screams of the corpses.” Do we still have to listen?

Reading A Village Life, I had the sense that no one had the nerve, or maybe the necessary affection, to say that the problems with this book are not trivial. Surely someone among the advance readers, hearing Gluck’s rhetorical questions, must have said no?