77. Holding Hands

I’ve been trying to look through the sun

at something under the sun or within the sun

(here are the sunny days: 280 a year!), been trying to measure the sun –

taste the sun. But I cannot

break into the sun.

Looking through the sun: the very definition of dangerous futility. The first problem, the obvious problem, is that the sun, gazed upon, blinds all who view it. The second, more sublime problem is that the sun also provides the means by which it can be seen. If you want to see the sun, you must dim it, but if you dim it, you cannot see.

Julie Carr’s inclusion of this paradox—one that tempts all children and against which we warn them—metaphorically predicts one of the book’s anxieties, the efforts to inform children of the risk of violence while also shielding them from it. It also suggests that one way to consider 100 Notes on Violence is to believe that here is a book whose author knows it must fail. Yet she persists, not in the hope that it will succeed, but in the knowledge that the thing she is attempting cannot be done; “success” at such an effort is categorically inapt. The effort is the achievement.

This interpretation rests on the corollary belief that Carr’s subject—violence—prohibits any full accounting. Violence corrupts the distinction between abstraction and practice, and even if we define it so loosely as to claim that violence is simply a category of human behavior, we’ve still done a kind of violence to our use of the term. Via adjectival and adverbial attribution, we’ve left very little that cannot be the subject or agent of violence. Like light or time, violence has become so much a referential familiar that we all know what it is, though we cannot quite articulate what it is we know.

The danger here, of course, is that the combination of great frequency and a lack of explicit meaning render violence a kind of social wallpaper; we notice it less as a feature than as a rhetorical surface against which we can project matching claims. How often do we refer to someone as having a violent outburst, as if one’s outburst could be calm; if we measure the violence of the outburst with the performance of violent acts, what does it mean to say the temper itself was violent, relative to what it predicts?

And yet as anyone who has been the object of violence can tell you, this gets things exactly backwards. The experience of violence is of an interruption of a previously granted norm, an exception, a breach. It distorts by clarification, by bringing what is violent and what is not into sharp relief: the sun, set against a sky its illumination blackens.

While it may seem as if these two apprehensions of violence are exclusive, it’s the degree to which they collaborate that makes Carr’s task apparently unrealizable. To speak of a culture of violence is to define violence as ambient, when its very essence is its particularity. On the other hand, it would be foolish to deny the profound saturation of both conceptual and material violence that characterizes our shared history and our daily experiences.

So what we end up with, perversely, is a condition whereby the abnormal distinguishes itself by virtue of its near-ubiquity. How to think about such a thing? As soon as you establish terms with which to think about it, the subject disappears, leaving evidence of its wake. The wake and the evidence, in fact, become the only aspects of violence stable enough to consider. Sometimes we gauge a property by its opposite, but the opposite of violence is simply the absence of violence, which is an impoverished and astringent definition of peace.

Carr is sharply aware of these problems, and indeed sometimes addresses them directly:

64. From General to Specific

First, the premise: When people feel their freedoms encroached upon, they will hurt whoever seems to be encroaching. Upon.

For instance, when there is too much laundry, the clothes seem to be eating me. My arms and my hands are not my own, I cannot move from the spot. In this moment I begin to grow hot. And once, twice, more times, I lifted my hand to hit, I threw the phone, a book, a shoe.

But, some argue, there is no real and unbreachable boundary between people. When we finally recognize the absence of boundaries, we will, in fact, no longer hurt one another, because to do so would hurt ourselves, they say.

Quite the opposite seems to be true. A lack of boundaries means I can do just exactly what I want to you. Just as Stephen cut a grid into his arm, I can cut one into yours. I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man.

If it is profitable to burn/kiss my own hand/your hand, how do I measure this profit?

In the last two sections of this note, Carr interrupts the relatively straightforward logic the title promises to include examples and referents that don’t bear any direct relationship to the terms of the premise itself. Her refutations discount the theoretical by shifting terms to the personal, a transference doubled by the embedding within that personal customized symbols (Stephen, the burns, the first person quotes from Dostoevsky) which act as contrary evidence only within her hermetic imaginary. This suits her method, for the 100 notes do not culminate in philosophical argument; rather, as the book progresses, Carr increasingly draws upon the content of prior notes to complicate the effect of the later ones, making reductive argument impossible.

For instance, Stephen first appears in Note 42, titled “Two Narrative Poems.” The poet speaks of the aforementioned grid-shaped scar, which as a younger woman she found compelling and attractive, but then mentions that Stephen has also been raped by his uncle, a fact the disclosure of which is complicated both in the story itself and in the poem’s reproduction of it: “This I forgot to say. Various ways of writing that.”

The second of the two narratives describes the poet, now fully adult, meeting with an undergraduate (close to the age of the poet in the first narrative) whose hands are scarred with fresh burn marks. Their subsequent conversation, then, must occur “over the burns. Above the burns.” As with the struggle to see through or under or within the sun, this emphasis on position and perspective indicates Carr’s acknowledgment that a direct approach would elide important aspects of how violence operates. All approaches are prepositional: you can draw various vectors around, but you can never get in, so a direct assessment would be a false one. She could have used fragments to reduce this truism to fairly predictable compositions: fragments (because a true unity is illusory), which together create a mosaic, whose approximation of unity forces multiple considerations of its components. Carr also knows that this method will work better with a more tightly defined violence:

23

The idea to write a book “about” violence. “What kind?” “The close-up kind.”

Because I cannot write the words “school shooting” into the little search box.

Later I hear that whatever you write into the little search box will somewhere

be recorded as data in order to better sell you.

What does the person searching school shootings want to buy?

I keyed “guns” instead, but I don’t want to buy a gun.

I could buy a gun.

This technique—one of distracted elaboration on aspects of preceding lines, each of which substantially changes the register and the mood—is useful as far as it goes, but the ease with which its complexity is achieved undermines the diagnostic discomfort Carr rightly hopes to create. So rather than simply rely on the logical consequence of the fragmentary, she seeks to complicate the process by abstracting from each fragment phrases, symbols and rhetorical eddies, which she then re-inserts into subsequent notes in ways that compromise their tonal integrity. By the book’s conclusion, then, the discrete parts have been sewn together, though Carr makes certain that integrity, too, disconcerts. Parts A and B of 92 are conventionally suggestive, but B then becomes something else, summoned by but not elucidating of what precedes it. 93 and 94 only further this.

92.

Mother and Daughter 3

A.

“If mother love is, as some bioevolutionary and developmental psychologists

as well as some cultural feminists believe, a natural,’ or at least expectable,

womanly script, what does it mean for women for whom scarcity and death

has made that love frantic?” (Scheper-Hughes)

B.

The National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS) lists Colorado as third in the

U.S. for deaths from child abuse.

In 2006, 40,000 child abuse cases were investigated in Colorado. Of those, 8,700 were confirmed.

In all, 24 children died of abuse and neglect.

Launced

“secure in

(Research: to about seeking)

(Every researcher a predator)

safe and permanent families.”

93.

Of men: Walked through the dark: jogger behind me: “overcoat of clay”

(Dickinson)

Of gravity: And if I were to release my hold.

Of mirrors: The enigma of looking into one’s eyes as if the eyes of

another: the “sudden appearance of the unavailable.” (Nancy)

Of insanity: “The rhythmic range of words fills me with horror” (Roubaud)

94.

Of home: Majesty and Amber

Of the sun: I cannot break into it, its daily resurrection, daily assault.

If a reader is familiar with the preceding 91 notes, these potentially cryptic fragments (what does “launced” mean? How does Dickinson function here?) recall their original, less scattered contexts, but this satisfaction shouldn’t be mistaken for argumentative clarity. Carr isn’t making assertions; the more tightly she weaves the lattice of her sources and structures, the less that basket can hold, which is, I think, as close as she’s willing to come to having a point. Anything that tapers to sharpness—sharpness of intent, sharpness of interpretation—approaches singularity, which Carr rejects. And a point, of course, can also be a weapon.

Carr’s reluctance to editorialize, her general unwillingness to represent quotidian violence without due deference to complexity and texture of the daily lives in which it occurs, is both astute and admirable. And the form she’s chosen (borrowed partially from C.D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining, a debt Carr frankly acknowledges, as she does all her sources) serves this rectitude. But there’s also a risk to it, which isn’t that 100 Notes on Violence might deny readers the satisfaction of didactic purity. The danger is that while Carr reflects the way violence warps and shatters efforts to contain it, she also isolates violence from the very arena of the commonplace she wishes to place it in, because she cannot guess as to how violence originates in persons the equivalent of those who receive it.

Stephen’s elliptical and elusive articulation of the violence he’s received (and done to himself) finds a persuasive poetic analogue here, but the same can’t be said for Stephen’s uncle. We don’t know, and Carr doesn’t suggest, that the uncle is any way equivalent to people who have endured violence as opposed to inflicting it. Likewise, when Carr writes of the malice and emotional abuse her own mother visited upon her (in the harm it causes, Carr uses this as a poignant counterpoint to the more graphic violence she has faced), we meet the mother as a figure of profound curiosity, but one who remains opaque.

Carr certainly isn’t required to imagine the inhabitation of behaviors she finds appalling, the throwing of phones and shoes notwithstanding. The confusion between incomprehension, reluctance and refusal when confronted with violence could very well further the meditation she wants to make. But as long as the agents of violence remain mysterious, violence itself becomes opaque, and that opacity in turns creates a strange placidity, an evenhandedness that sometimes undermines the conditions that violence can provoke. If violence is both regular and irregular, an examination of it might likewise allow various registers, and not just multiple types of evidence.

While the sun cannot be seen through, it is not exactly opaque; if one could see past the blaze, the substance would reveal itself not as substance but agitated gas, flares and loops and roiling cataracts of light: an effect, not an object. Yet even if Carr’s silence about the common origins of common violence (a paradox she manifests beautifully) is like Perseus gazing into his mirrored shield to approach Medusa indirectly only to find himself struck to stone by his own reflection, his own intent, her necessary failure is clearly chosen and bravely made. She’s looked at the sun, and still sees.

This book performs one of my favorite miracles, a classic because it’s a repeater, a novelty that never fades: it demonstrates that the impossible (poetry) is also inevitable (poems). Though it seems as if the latter must inevitably result from the former, this isn’t quite true; the relationship between them is more of a reversal. Abstract expectations of what poetry should be are both proven and invalidated by actual poems, which are composed of lack as much as surfeit. Here, the agent of this haphazard divine comes in a slightly disheveled persona of Graham Foust, who is (in the poem “My Graham Foust”) a presence declared by absences, a shirt stitched from holes:

Gone’s the bite of you he spit. Gone’s
his vague sense of what’s to be done.
Gone’s the dream that likely scraped at him
for more and more and more and gone’s his walk.

Gone’s his crass commiseration. Gone’s
his lack of gauze and ice. Gone’s
his tiny fountain. And gone
is his glutinous light

Gone’s his want-to-need basis. Gone’s his happy
plastic stain. Gone’s his glass wolf, his lazy sperm,
his pack of exactness. Gone’s his played-through lack
of played-through games of pain.

Liberation by abdication: well, okay then. He can’t go on, he’ll go on. The speaker memorializes the ingredients and strategies by which the poem we’re reading won’t be made, though of course without this litany there’s no poem at all. While this poem doesn’t fully represent the style of A Mouth in California (most of the poems are a bit more ad hoc, though Foust does thrown in the occasional sonnet or the like) it does contain something of a mission statement; a missing statement better describes his method and spirit. That “pack of exactness” could easily refer to the precision, or the tonal unity, required by the kinds of poems Foust is disinclined to write. And to often sly effect, this disinclination often masquerades as incapacity. Many of Foust’s poems suggest their more pristine alternatives; it’s as if they are being spoken by a man who is struggling to recite a poem he’s memorized, but cannot perfectly recall. Into the lacunae rush approximations, summaries, tatters of popular song, gluey rhymes, ill-fitting aphorisms, and often the relaxed rhetorical annotations of a speaker perfectly comfortable making editorial comments on his own perpetually collapsing project.

The irony here, of course, is that this jumble should—both in terms of tone and form—result in chaos, and yet Foust’s poems maintain a weird, wobbly integrity: he’s managed to set a failing ship on a recursive journey, so that he can sail it, sink it, and narrate its pending submergence all at the same time. If the effort’s initially jarring, by the book’s end I was fairly convinced that Foust’s ramshackle structures might be some of the most stable shelters around.

One of the ways to achieve something like this elegant clumsiness is to explicitly turn the poems inside out, but the danger of that strategy is that it preserves the mastery of the speaker, and thus risks a toxic cleverness: see, it’s the poem that’s faulty, but I, the poet, remain unsullied by those deficiencies; its failures announce my success. To his credit, Foust avoids this trap, usually via the application of tiny syntactical choices that destabilize the very possibility of masterful authorship. Tiny things, really, but they make a difference: in this stanza from “The Sun Also Fizzles” consider the lines

I’ve come covered in arena dust,
my mouth’s a sleeve’s end,
meatless.

and those that immediately follow:

I’ve come somewhat up,
and I’m here to lick
the static from the ground.

The parallel structure here certainly prepares the reader for “I’ve come somewhat up, / I’m here to lick / the static from the ground” but that wee little conjunction changes everything, shifts the stanza from obscure grandiosity to the self-parodying bombast of stadium rock. The “and” transforms the gnomic to the comic—I cannot help but hear Jon Bon Jovi intone those lines, though to be fair the modest anglophiliac “somewhat” sets up the joke quite nicely as well.

Some of the poems are so loose, in fact, that they seem more like preambles or postscripts to poems that don’t exist. Take, for example, the truly wonderful “Poem with Fear, As Half-Awakened,” which I want to take the liberty of quoting in its entirety:

See, I might return—the car’s gassed,
the map flat and likely accurate—
to where I’m clear to me to you.
This’d be autumn, let’s say, like late
October, mid-November. By then
the road’ll be choked with leaves
and other ruins, the trees with wind
and smoke and dark (or not).
I’ll make records of these facts,
these other shores. My song’ll be a nail
and yours, a mouthful of mirror.
Seconds before we sing, I’ll be reading
that wading pool’s dismal little slaps
to mean trouble. You’ll punch an animal,
any animal; I’ll touch a small bell;
the moon’ll turn everything lurid.
But what good is said moon
if neither song’ll fit the room?
Come with platitudes, love,
come whatever doesn’t move.

This is a plan for a poem that achieves more than could its execution, and what I mean by “loose” isn’t just the preponderance of contractions usually found in hasty conversation, though the word “moon’ll” alone gladdened my heart. Looseness here refers to a spirit in which almost anything might do, and often does; it’s the exact tonal opposite of the poem that insists these words, in this order, are hard-won and therefore explicitly suited for appreciation that brooks no interruption.

Thus, it intrigues me that some of Foust’s poems are exceptionally tight: for instance, see how in a poem like “Their Early Twenties” the moon recurs quite differently.

Another thirst begun, they had their beer
in cans, in bags; their hands, their feet
in frigid sand; their eardrums—make that
their headaches—sewn with ocean.
They’d never seen a moon so willful,
so scissory, never heard the dark water
rearrange so clumsily.

Despite nods to a more cavalier composition—”they’d” and “scissory”—the maker of this poem is far more resolutely the commander of the act than is the reckless engineer of “Poem with Fear.” That “sewn with ocean” doesn’t abide interference, even from itself.

While I appreciate both poems, the correspondent risk is that once I grow accustomed to the self-limiting scatter of poems like “Poem with Fear,” I grow proportionately suspicious of those poems that strike me as less artful in their disguised artfulness, so that paradoxically the more authoritative Foust becomes, the less I trust him. These from the latter category include good poems, but they don’t operate the way they would in a book less concerned with futility. A poem like “Morality and Temporal Sequence,” which after its one-word sentence of an introductory gambit (“Funny.”) follows swiftly and cleanly to its logical conclusion, creates greater unease than what occurs a few pages later. “Poem for Jack Spicer” begins with a set of pleas for reassurance that are both funny and impossible to gratify:

The more I pull it all to pixels
the more to sleep the radio goes,
right? And to be dead would be to be
modern?

This functions much the way “Funny.” does, by securing a resolutely insecure position at the start, but whereas “Morality” never again reminds us of its logical contingency, very nearly every floating balloon of a “poetical” claim in “Poem for Jack Spicer” comes with its own needle to assist requisite puncturing. Thus, the lines “Its poem’s shape’s itself, / and its waves come off as contagious” are preceded by the sublimely goofy observation that “This ocean, I just assumed it would / look bigger.” Likewise, tucked between “It’s not a thicket if I can’t get / me and whoever else into it—” and “We’re al limited by the plumb line, / that imperative that collapses / in the direction of egg and ash” occurs the salvific “let’s call what I’m on a moon of hurt.” Absent moments like these, the persona Foust has created actually does seem to lapse into perfect recall of the poem in question, and while the results are sometimes impressive in their own right, they leave me wondering where went the dude whose trustworthiness depended upon evidence of his instability. His presence is always an interruption, but familiar with the staccato rhythm of interruption, his absence is even more unnerving.

I don’t know how Foust could avoid this kind of tension, and there’s a way of reading the book that reconciles it to the effect the emblematic poems generate (even if it doesn’t, and can’t, resolve that tension). If I read the book entire as macrocosmic of the technique employed in the poems that best balance “success” and “failure” then I can see how those poems more discrete, more possessed of seamless ease, act as do the lines in individual poems that Foust often strives to undermine as soon as he erects them. But this way of reading works less well for the book than it does for single poems, because Foust seems preoccupied (rightly, smartly, I think) with our ambiguous desire for the pleasures once assumed the province of the lone poem. As many others have noted, the pendulum has begun to swing away from poetry operative wholly at the level of the book, a move that itself marked a certain generational disenchantment with poems as bite-sized universes resplendent with guaranteed but perhaps cheap and certainly suspect pleasures and meanings. Foust knows we can’t go back, even if we wanted to—but many of “us” (a term I invoke with the necessary shudder, as if I were summoning a Lovecraftian anti-god, a divinity plural, singular and unquestionably grotesque) do, and many “us” never left. For those who did, however, Foust offers a way forward, half-stride and half-stumble.  I don’t think he knows where he’s going, but I wouldn’t want to follow him if he did.

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, the umbrella term for that collection of psychotherapeutic techniques designed to diminish undesirable feelings by consciously modifying the idea from which those feelings derive, is both the title and the modus operandi of Tao Lin’s second book of poetry. Lin does a good job of describing the principles of CBT in his characteristically blunt prose sentences:

we have our undesirable situations whether we are upset about them 

            or not

if we are upset about our problems we have two problems: the problem

and our being upset about it; with thoughts as the cause of emotions

rather than the out come the causal order is reversed

the benefit of this is that we can change our thoughts

to feel or act differently regardless of the situation

i need to win a major prize to shove in people’s faces

note the similarities with buddhism

As those last two lines suggest, Lin’s genuine commitment to b-mod ethics also leaves plenty of room for his sense of the ridiculous. More to the point, his sense of the ridiculous is consonant with his ethical intuitions and the disjunction in scale between what he knows (for he’s seen that the world is a vast machine designed in its every element to produce evil and folly) and what he can do (steal from Whole Foods) and what he feels (sad). So what we have here is the logical inversion of concept art; what we can call concept life. If Lin’s ideas are not enacted, they lose ethical traction, to the cost of both the world and his emotional wellbeing. Enacting them, however, makes no discernible difference in the suffering of others, and thus embodies a kind of narcissism, a narcissism Lin has already identified as elemental to the machinery of the world that he finds so ethically objectionable and personally dispiriting. Not quite a paradox, but mighty close.

The structure of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy reflects this tail-swallowing impossibility. In terms of subject, Lin constantly references objects, moods and end-points that have no independent justification for his focus upon them other than the degree to which their randomness documents the relatively ineffectual nature of the poet’s efforts to seize control of his own mind. Taco Bell, headbutts, the shit of the world, Richard Yates, a small army of other things: Lin returns to them across the whole of the book, creating a kind of thematic mega-villanelle, in which every circuit brings a new perspective, the novelty of which suffers as a result of the poet’s – and the reader’s – conviction that new perspectives will not and cannot alter the ingredients themselves. This books reminds of nothing so much as the efforts of Number Six to escape The Village in Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, except instead of a big white semi-sentient gelatinous blob, Lin keeps falling into the gap between what he knows and what he can do.

Regardless of his final ability to escape, Lin cannot be faulted for lack of effort. Although they don’t perfectly match the sections of the book, Lin organizes the poem/poems into a sequence that shifts from relatively straightforward (if cloistered) self-reportage to a long sequence in which the poet and all his social interlocutors are, suddenly and without logical preamble, hamsters. This works better than you think it might:

it had stacks of stolen books. the hamster had organic green tea extract that was stolen.

 the hamster’s toothpaste was stolen and it used stolen flaxseed lemon soap on its hair, which it cut itself. the hamster had an eleven-dollar toothbrush.

*    *    * 

one night the hamster read a book that said HIV probably wasn’t the cause of AIDS. The hamster told three other hamsters that HIV probably wasn’t the cause of AIDS and two of the hamsters got angry at it.

The advantages of transposing one’s experiences onto those of a proxy-hamster are clear. The gesture first comes at the moment when self-analysis begins to become self-regard; it clears the contemplative space of the narcissism that doesn’t dare admit its own name. But it’s also ridiculous, and funny, and an effective means by which to admit the absurdity of the individual without forcing applause for making such a recognition. Lin follows the first hamster interlude with another sequence of principled claims and episodes of reportage, many of which cite the hamster-episodes:

it was cruel

to leave the homeless man

‘there’s no such thing,’

i mumbled

‘as good or bad’; something about being

in the center of my philosophy

i walked through someone’s vision

and it was a vegan walking through someone’s vision

something about the way I felt kind of abstract

These interludes give the impression that the narrator may be using the capital accrued via the hamster-poems to purchase a larger or more resolute set of observations, but a few pages later, the hamster are back, only this time in Florida and with greater emphasis on email (I don’t think any poet has ever written so poignantly and un-self consciously about the emotional utility of his blog. A watershed moment.) The hamster redux poems lead in turn to my favorite sequence in the book, the ugly fish poems, in which an ugly fishes commits a kind of Song of Solomon Whitmanesque O’Hara-inflected aqua-flaneur jubilate:

from afar i have appreciated the manatee for its round body

 

from within i have appreciated the manatee for its veganism

 

my favorite poets include mary oliver and alice notley

 

i am a playful companion, a tactful friend

 

and compassionate lover; i have seen a mutant sturgeon sniff a seahorse

 

with a nose located on its stomach

 

i have lain alone on the ocean floor

 

at night on my birthday

The last section of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy takes an epistolary turn, and the poem reveals itself as one long justification, or preparation for, an intimate confession, one at which Lin hints in the title of the very first poem in the collection, “I will learn how to love a person and then I will teach you and then we will know”. And I amazed at how persuasive and frankly moving a case Lin makes here, for all the focus on Bruce Lee and the hamster antics.

Much hay has made in many of our more fantastically fey periodicals about the significance of Tao Lin’s age, which is not very much age at all: to the best of my ability to determine, he was 23 at the time of C-B T’s composition. My impulse is thus to dismiss his age as a genuine factor in considering his work, but I cannot quite bring myself to do so, because I’m so impressed with the way Lin articulates an enormous problem at just the moment in life when it is possible to recognize all the wrongness in which one is complicit without having to account for the consequence of a lifetime’s complicity. For all the simplicity of Lin’s objection, say, to publicly traded companies, there’s nothing logically or ethically flawed in his criticism. He’s right. And so the only way to resist the implication of his correctness – which we must reject, lest we all agree that we are indeed the human shit Lin berates himself for naming and judging – is to fault him for imagining that being right is of any relevance or importance whatsoever. That, we could sigh, is a young person’s error.

Well, it’s a young person’s privilege. And as such, it is usually exercise with bathos, malice, hyperbolic vanity or romantic melodrama. I like Tao Lin because he is weird and sad and a little cranky, but I admire Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy because it finds a tone that perfectly accommodates the experience of an untenable moral position, one in which knowledge of one’s power necessitates a powerlessness. If it’s a difficult way to live, it’s an immeasurably more difficult thing to describe. I’m curious as to whether Lin’s powers of description will persist as he continues in that state, but I’m committed to checking in on how things look to him. He continually writes I’ll be right back; like a hamster on a wheel, he has to be right back because he isn’t really going anywhere. I’m impressed with how he’s made the paradox of his situation as compelling to read as he is compelled to live it.

1. Psychology
2. What passes for “the domestic” in the contemporary imagination
3. Gerunds and participles
4. The word “it”

The first instance of distaste leads neatly into the second, of course, since one of the signature crimes of psychology (at least in its dumbest, and therefore most common, applications) is to reduce experience to a series shared dynamics that explain meaning with all the subtlety of placing pegs into their geometrically appropriate slots. Thus, if you are “sad” or “anxious” you should look to your “relationship” with your parents to interpret how you express “love” or what have you.

Admittedly, I’ve made a crude reduction here, but not much more crude than the reductionism of psychology itself. And the problem is that I’m not even talking about psychology proper, but the lowest denominator of our misuse of the field. Nevertheless, we can’t dismiss the fact that psychologically-determined rhetoric does refer to a host of legitimate concerns, objects and occasions. It’s the thoughtless indeterminacy of generalist categories that kills me, not the actual things of which the categories are made. It’s as perverse to avoid this stuff as it is to represent it in terms that fold, spindle and mutilate its complexity.

If all poetry offers inevitable if not explicit commentary on the culture that produces it, then it’s worth evaluating the means by which poets do or do not manage the ways in which their work participates in this process. For instance, let’s say you have a commonly recognizable (and thus vulnerable to psychological attention) subject: marriage. Your options here are sadly limited. You likely know the other received frames of reference (theoretical, artifactual, historical) by which readers could consider your “subject”: likewise, you know that for as much as you might like to dismiss any concern for or presumed fidelity to your readers, you cannot really do that, because you are yourself of the same population to which your readers belong. Duh.

So here’s the problem: since you can escape neither the influence of these frames of reference nor your consciousness of their particulars, what do you do? If you make your beef with them known in the poems themselves, then that engagement pulls focus from whatever you may have intended the poem to consider; if you pretend they don’t exist, then you hermeticize the work to such a degree that you risk ostentatious world-building, a curse whereby the thing you seek to replace is necessarily more complex than the thing with which you replace it. Why? Because the context has room for you, but you – artificer! – have no room for it.

Of course, not all poets face this problem. But some do, and I’m particularly interested in those who neither ignore nor collapse under the baggage that accompanies their subject. And of these poets, Laura Kasischke is among the most accomplished and the most perpetually fascinating. In her most recent collection, Lilies Without, she takes subjects (motherhood, daughter-hood, childhood, death, memory, guilt) and strategies (dream narrative, confessional report, surrealist interjection) that, because of their very familiarity, present the greatest risks of misuse, and she makes of them something unique and lovely that nevertheless preserves their generalist appeal. It’s difficult to identify exactly how she does it, but I’ve come to the conclusion that however she achieves her poetic ends, it has something to do with her courage, which she proves repeatedly to be the very opposite of fearlessness.

So Lilies Without is a brave book, but brave mainly in the poet’s resolute discomfiture. We’re dealing here with a tremendous confidence, but one the subject of which is often uncertainty itself. Consider these lines from “Miss Congeniality,” one of several poems in the book about various Miss-es:

They praised my feet, the shoes
on my feet, my feet
on the floor, the floor –
and then

the sense of despair
I evoked with my smile, the song

I sang. the speech

I gave

about peace, in praise of the war. O,

they could not grant me the title I wanted

so they gave me the title I bore,

and stubbornly refused
to believe I was dead
long after my bloody mattress
had washed up on the shore.

What, to put the question pointedly, is the attitude here? It isn’t bitter or resentful, those the circumstances of the poem certainly would allow these. It isn’t ironic, despite the dark comedy of the conceit. And the kind of comedy Kasischke builds towards culminates in the perpetual delay and return of the rhyme ( floor, war, bore, shore) which suggests that even the speaker is astonished by the position in which she finds herself. Astonishment, without ever being struck dumb: this, is think, is one of the ways Kasischke manages uncertainty, and the effect allows her to enter the most treacherous territory and emerge with something new.

For instance, the first poem in the collection, “New Dress,” clearly manipulates smart but fairly obvious observations about the perils of femininity in all its paradoxical constructions, but it also does something truly bold with the word it, which is to call it out for the deranged rhetorical placeholder it is:

The feminine

maelstrom
of it, I wore. (How

quiet, at the edge of it, the riot. How

tiny, the police. The Sturm

und Drang of it. The crypt
and mystery. The knife
in fog of it. The haunted
city of my enemy.
(And as always
the green, floating, open
book of the sea.) That

dress, like

an era of deafness and imminent error, ending
even as I wore it, even as I dragged the damp

hem of it
everywhere
I wore it.

I love this last line, which I do not think it would have occurred to any other poet to append. The conventionally satisfying option would have been to conclude with the speaker dragging the damp hem of the dress everywhere: good summary gesture, nice intimation of the infinite. But by adding the phrase “I wore it” Kasischke shifts the poem into a far more uncomfortable zone, by reminding the reader of two easily-neglected points. The first, of course, is to repeatedly note the persistent thingness of the dress, and then to ask us, once again, to figure out what is the it to which the poet refers. The dress, yes, and the dress, no. This goes far beyond use of symbol, metaphor or conceit; as the speaker’s enumerations account, the object has properties that cannot be contained or perfectly articulated.

Now, as I’ve stated, I normally hate it, for the way in which we shove all those things we cannot be bothered to specify into its dimensionally transcendental clown car. But Kasischke makes me adore it, not by making a pristine list of all the things she wants it to stand for, but rather pointing to the impulse itself, and asking what kind of a thing is that it? That there’s no answer to this question is of far less importance than the effect of asking it at all, which is to open the poems not to mysteries themselves, but to the consequences of living with them. It’s this quality of indeterminacy, one that understands that to be uncertain is not to be confused, that I so admire in Kasischke’s work, for the idea finds its way into her most intimate uses of syntax and grammar. And thus I sympathize with her completely when she writes

Enough of industry, enough
of goals and troubles, looking ahead, grooming, and dreaming
and anything that ended
in i-n-g in this
life ever again

But I also understand that i-n-g is a vice that that poet knows we cannot but help but indulge. Much like it, i-n-g gives us a chance to be many things simultaneously; once again, Kasishcke takes this impulse and wrests from it a genuine ethic. The i-n-g creeps into a few of the very many versions of the word scream that appear in Lilies Without:

“the wet ashes of some loved one’s screams”

“cargo full of screamers”

“gulls screamed over those gold afternoons”

“without needing to scream, or eat, or breathe”

“a branch of involuntary, perennial, screaming light”

“the debt birds screaming over the gravestone”

“I was trying, simply, to take the garbage out, but screamed when I saw it and slammed the cupboard shut”

“Sex: Kiss me screaming. Death completely forgot about me.”

“your coat to blaze screaming through the vast north”

“and when I screamed she walked away”

“all those years, all that peace, you could barely repress this scream”

Can you think of a more dangerous word to use in a poem, in that the word must invite implications of excess and non-specificity and, yes, hysteria? Can you imagine how keenly you must be focused on the base, brutal and true use of the act, to not only use it but to make it one of the default actions of the text? By the time I finished the book, I knew that Kasischke had done the impossible, and not only “gotten away” with it (a phrase I hate) but snatched the word from the jaws of infinite misuse. For while some of the screams here are literal and contextual, their cumulative effect mirrors exactly the prior question: what is the it to which you refer? What is the scream, if not the mechanism of speech (which chooses, which discriminates, which thus suggests mastery and which therefore lies) subject to a pressure greater than speech can accommodate?

All those systems shoehorned into psychological determinants, all those descriptors squeezed into it, all those vacillations between past, present and future compressed into the i-n-g: they’re all here, set free by Kasischke’s skittish, inexhaustible courage. The results only resemble chaos if you’re the type of person who finds that the bars of a cage nicely set off the stripes of a tiger. Elsewhere in “Miss Congeniality,” the poet refers to her

heart (which was a Boy Scout

lost for years in a forest.) And my

soul (although the judges said
it weighed almost nothing
for goodness had devoured it.)

Loose, maybe, but not lost. Even though she’s wise enough never to believe she knows where she may next be going, I think Kasischke knows, with the kind of baffled precision available to the bravest among us, exactly where she is.

So a love affair (only partially the real title of Jenny Boully’s latest: the asterisk refers to A million wallowing anemones, a thousand eyes peeping through, a thousand spies shivering, unmovable endless flowerings, countless empty bottles, twelve flowers, eleven trees, eight fruits, four vegetables, two enemas, two kidnappings, one accident, one suicide, one soothsayer, one drowning, one night club called Juicy) isn’t something you can participate it so much as observe and comment upon; in fact, the observation and commentary constitute the affair itself. The exchange of narratives and reciprocal consciousness is something Boully identifies almost immediately as elemental to the project of love:

She remembers the story he told her, about taking a walk with his former lover during one of the first days of spring, a spring which soured then ripened then soured then ripened before beginning again, a spring which kept swelling out of winter in a way that Chaucer’s spring would never do. During this walk which her present lover took with his former lover, her present lover reached up into a tree and broke off a flowering branch, of which he did not know the name, but which the former lover accepted as the grandest of all romantic gestures. She asked her present lover to describe the flowering branch that he had plucked for his former lover.

This initial passage alone establishes the importance of recollection as invention of the thing recollected, an idea essential to Boully’s argument. Likewise, her emphasis here on gesture, an act that gains significance only in relation to previously-established meanings, tells us something about her attitude regarding the affair, of the story to which she is superficially committed. What it tells us is that even the second-person speaker is aware (perhaps at the moment detailed itself, but certainly in its recollection) of the entire enterprise as characterized by a set of baffles. There are two ways to regard these baffles: the proxy-narrator can view them as obstructions, meta-afflictions brought on by the uncontrolled referential impulse that telescopes the relationship between the narrator and the feeling or the action, or she can regard them as constitutive of the feeling itself. If the latter, then the baffles don’t exist between anything; the baffles are the thing.It is this conviction that Boully uses [one love affair]*to explore. For those readers familiar with her first book, The Body, this should come as no surprise. Boully famously constructed that book from a set of footnotes to a non-existent text, so her inclination to attend to reference without regard to referent is already established. Obviously, and beyond its formal affinities, this is a highly literary attitude to take, but its concern isn’t wholly academic. It’s true that Boully still uses books as her generative source; her observation that her spring deviates from Chaucer’s originates in Boully’s familiarity with Roberto Belano’s By Night in Chile, from which she plucks his observation that clouds in Chilean skies scatter as, he imagines, Baudelaire’s clouds would never do. And so begat, forever and ever, amen.

But just because she sticks to literary (in?)(re?)spiration doesn’t mean that the dynamic she describes is limited to literature. For all her reliance of the ordination of texts, the patterns Boully describes persist in every form of endeavor or expression. The book is replete with all the usual and familiar associations with a love affair more traditionally understood: travel, domestic torpor, sexual betrayal, caretaking, reconciliation, love tokens, madness (in this case, clinical madness: as a partner speaks of the relationship, “It was called You Fucking Suck or Perhaps It Was, After All, Because You Are Schizophrenic.” ) but Boully pays no greater attention to her clinical descriptions of the affair than she does to her more “heart-wrenching” or “naked” admissions. All are equal, in that each is merely a datum in the recursive cascade. The action obtains whether the details are theoretical or material. grand or pedestrian. In “He Wrote in Code,” the second of the three linked essay-poems in [one love affair]*, the speaker identifies a moment during which

The waiter, confused by our choices—2 Sprites, 2 Cokes, 2 coffees, 2 waters, and 2 beers—was even more perplexed by how he might place all the beverages, along with the pizza, on the table-for-two.

and this tic, pages later, reappears asTwo sangrias, two coffees, two Sprites, two waters, something to set us to rights again.

How is this couple’s reliance upon such rituals, which become deliberate as soon as they are utilized as authentic, fundamentally different from Boully’s reliance on literature to mimic and predict the particulars of her experience? Her experience, his experience, theirs: possession here is beside the point, since the forces in operation are organic, inevitable, impersonal. But even though your feelings and experiences fundamentally have nothing to do with you, that doesn’t make your experience of them any less intimate. As Boully notes, “… there is something quite frightening when the body, against its knowing, begins to slither, begins its slide against a greater anemone in the sky” — to which I would only add the mind of knowing offers no greater resistance or effective intelligence than does the body itself.

Aside from the value of her incidental observations and asides, which are as sharp and well-made here as they are in The Body, the greatest virtue of [one love affair]* is Boully’s willingness to admit the personal and the narrative in such a way that doesn’t reinforce those very errors that make heartbreak in actual (if there is such a thing) love affairs inevitable. Some might avoid these topics altogether, as if there were an alternative set of subjects which might be exempt from the forces Boully describes here. Whether subject to literarily-determined templates or those drawn from more free-form ideologies, we perpetually mistake our capacity for description and comprehension for the kind of tool that might make intervention possible. But commentary is not mastery, and we are subordinate to the medium that moves us. Physics, witless, always wins.

So despite the fact that the subsequent criticism doesn’t even really require Rocket Science Powers and can be more graphically appreciated via the brutally, brilliantly maladaptive cartoons of Jim Behrle, I’m going to criticize anyway, because I want to clarify the distinction between judgment and taste and demonstrate the potentially degrading consequences of pretending that the latter can ever replace the former, even if the former does in part depend on the latter. Be thus forewarned that I’m going be paying more attention to BAP 06 as an artifact that bullies and violates the poems or ’singles’ of which it is made, and offering only a brief peek at the poems themselves. You can get that review somewhere else. You can likely get it everywhere else.

Here’s what Collins has to say for himself in his introduction to this year’s volume, after beginning by noting, in his patently genial-abrasive way, that most poetry (he even estimates a literal percentage) is crap, and hoping against hope that those from whom such crap issues will take it upon themselves to shut the fuck up. He reports that he found his editorial process fairly easy, and sets himself an avuncular antagonist of all those who might find such a task challenging: “… literary judges typically complain about the difficulty of making up their minds when faced with such an abundance of good work, but I found it fairly easy to man the pearly gates of this annual collection.” It is here, of course, that Collins lays the scene for the argument the introduction surreptitiously advances. Admission of difficulty unnecessarily muddies the waters, and thus smacks of the fuzzy-headed intransigence of academicians and ” poets” for whom anything but a clear window – a polished window — an open window — is proof of the most willful opacity. In defending his freedom to resist apology for his tastes (and who could deny a man his tastes, after all?) Collins acknowledges that the most reductive form of taste-making could easily describe his editorial process: “In one way “best” meant I could simply pick what I liked…”

Well, yeah. That’s one way of looking at what you’ve done here; the task is to convince us that there is any other intelligible way to make sense of your selection process. Even Collins senses that it might be wise to justify his selections with something other that his fancy (“surely,” he writes, “judgmental was not always a term of condemnation”), but before doing so hearkens back to the glory years of bare-knuckled criticism, when titans of mind strode the landscape, swatting away the inconsequential with one hand and tossing off the occasional bon mot with the other: “When personal taste was a legitimate basis for literary criticism, readers looked to critics to guide and deepen their literary experience by pointing them toward works of value and saving them from wasting time on dross.” I find the mild appeal for pity that follows this stunning misapprehension of the golden years especially telling — “I admit to feeling nostalgic for those days,” Collins writes, and I’m sure he does. He might also miss the days when kids did what they were told, American cars were the best in the world, and anything that smacked of difficulty or discontent was likely engineered by ideologically-crazed Stalinist scientists, whose only agenda was to fatally disrupt the placid surface of democratic lives, well-lived. And turn down that noise, that jungle music!

Collins then commences to assemble a shaky approximation of argument as to why his tastes are, in fact, something more than a peevish expression of his own private literary utopia. The term on which his standard seems to hinge is voice, even though he never bothers to qualify or explore what voice is, or how it might operate. Like a biblical seer or pyramid-scheme confidence man, Collins simply trusts that those who have ears to hear will do so, and assumes that for those who do not “speak” to him the fault is theirs alone, and no prejudice or inadequacy on his part. He is thus happy and comfortable to report that he would reject a poem because “he failed to hear a human voice speaking,” all the while knowing that what he describes as a “failure” is in fact a patronizingly polite way of declaring unworthy the poem he’s allegedly failed. Elsewhere, he explicitly pines for “the recognizable sound of a human voice…” and finally defines his “process” as characterized by the following question: “Do I hear a voice that is making reasonable claims for itself—usually a first person voice speaking fallibly but honestly — or does the poem begin with a grandiose pronouncement, a riddle, or an intimate confession foisted on me by a stranger? Tone may be the most elusive aspect of written language, but our ears instantly recognize words that sound authentic and words that ring false.” Would that we had ears of such surpassing precision and wisdom! Our poetry might be as bland as Collins hopes, but our political culture would be much improved. Fortunately and un-, the belief is false.

And yet, despite narrowing the range of his taste to admit what is, essentially, only one kind of poem, Collins insists that the poems he’s chosen represent the art as a “wild hodgepodge of verbal activity” and reassures us that he is … “bored by poems that are transparent from beginning to end…”, thereby implying that we won’t find any of those poems in the following pages, no sirree, only wildness of the varieties both hodge and podge.

Let’s sum up.

Billy likes poems that talk to him, like one dude talks to another dude, just like it says in the introduction to the Lyrical Ballads, that signature document of dudes talking. But he doesn’t want the talk to be too grand, or adopt too complex a diction, lest it lose its dude-ness. And he doesn’t want anything that might not imply personhood, and as for what person the poem ought to imply, well, let’s make the person someone recognizable, and who is Billy most likely to recognize? Anyone who reminds him of himself, I reckon.

As for your humble essayist, if I want to hear a familiar human voice, I’ll listen to my voicemail prompt, and if I want to encounter someone I recognize, I’ll look in the goddamned mirror.

*

Collins’s introduction to the Best American Poetry 2006 is indisputably bullshit; it is bullshit in its Platonic form, the quintessence of bullshit, the mold from which all lesser expressions of bullshit are cast. The gross production of all the cattle in Texas, as well as the fertilizer used to grow the grass to feed them, could not reek more noisomely of bullshit. The problem, however, is not the bullshit itself, but the consequence of the bullshit for the poems unfortunate enough to meet Collins’s criteria, some of which are good, and don’t deserve to be esteemed by Collins, who has once more refused to give us any reason to believe he is something more than an idiot, halfway to an idiot’s best guess at clever.

What I want from an edited volume is this: that the editor apply, in the act of judgment, a set of analytical and evaluative resources that allow her to consider not only the merits of aesthetic choices relative to competitive aesthetics, but relative to that aesthetic itself. In other words, I want to know what the editor finds as the best of everything, not the best of what she likes. She might like monologues written from the point of view of Princess Diana, but I wouldn’t want to read the year’s best of those. Actually, I would, but only for the novelty value, and not as an index of the state of the art.

It’s true that any effort to capture the “state of the art” is inevitably partial and partisan. But that truth is to be struggled against and minimized, not embraced as an excuse to paint the town in seventy-five shades of pink. Even in the apocryphal golden age whose passing Collins disingenuously mourns, the most partisan of critics used their taste to make claims about what in poetry was worthy, essential, possible, true. And they fought. Collins cannot fight, and for two reasons: it’s easier to condescend than fight, and you want to avoid the fight if you don’t have the intellectual (talk about a word now heard with horror) chops to make a real claim and justify it. He’s a traffic cop elected by a fluke of public whimsy to high office, and he judges as if his tastes — vain, easy and self-indulgent—were a tribute to the volk rather than the most hateful underestimation of their dreams and powers.

*

The most powerful presence in the collection is “The Third Hour of the Night” by Frank Bidart, which of course isn’t there. I guess Benvenuto Cellini doesn’t have a recognizable human voice.

But of the poems that are: there are pieces BAP 06 that are goodish, but if you read Collins’s introduction, you run the risk of only seeing their outlines, and not their richer shadow-selves. In fact, you may suffer the same risk if you read the poems at too great a clip, or consume too many of them in a row. Cute blond, cute blond, cute blond: fetish! If you have three cats of differing breeds, you have pets; if you have three black cats, you have an infestation. Read with this psychological dynamic in place, and recall that poets like Reb Livingston and David Kirby can do better than they’ve done here, and in fact did do better, in the very year celebrated, in journals that perhaps did not make it through Lehman’s filter, of whatever substance it might be made.

The following poems succeed despite their accidental conformity to the “standards” Collins applies —

“Please Don’t Sit Like a Frog, Sit Like a Queen” by Denise Duhamel: a poem that, appearing from nowhere, immediately becomes a poem you’ve known your whole life, learned from your mother, who learned it from hers.

“For My Niece Sidney, Age Six” by Amy Gerstler: if you’re going to talk to someboy, don’t talk to them with any less candor, imagination and weird tenderness than this.

“At Gettysburg” by Laura Kasishcke: quotidian, distantly hysterical, distracted in its metaphysics and deeply, unsettlingly creepy. I want this poem to bite Billy Collins in the face.

“The Sharper the Berry” by Mark Pawlak: like an island bird nesting in its weirdly elaborated evolutionary niche, the parts of this piece — which seem easy to discern and even predict — end up performing an act of aggression that seems to surprise even the poem.

*

I’m done for awhile with books that come from on high, manufactured as an act of noblesse oblige by the big kids of the industry in compensation for sins visited against us in the form of books of evil and chicanery. I haven’t enjoyed my visit, and I feel stuffed with creamy froth that has settled into the lard it truly is. Next time, a review of a book from a press run off of someone’s desktop, served with love. In the meantime, if you see Billy Collins, bite him in the face, right in the face, right where it hurts.

Not stone, because she doesn’t shatter, nor does she retain heat. Not ice, because she doesn’t thaw, and while her poems do not radiate heat, neither do they leech it from warmer objects.

A mystery.

Here’s what I admire about Glück’s poetry: it is the least self-flattering record of depression in contemporary letters. I don’t like that word, depression; it’s too technically pathologized, too inevitably linked to APA guidelines and serotonin levels. But I’m using it because sadness won’t work. It is too occasional — something makes you sad, something that isn’t sadness itself. That’s a flaw of English grammar, though. In some languages, you cannot make a claim of feeling a claim of identity; you cannot say I am sad, but can only say I have a sadness, there is a sadness on me. Yet even that won’t do, because it implies that beneath or free of the sadness is happiness, or at least a state less afflicted with woe. Glück’s depression is a fact, not a feeling. For her to leave it, or for it to leave her, would not guarantee a return to a normal state. It would be an error, an ontological mistake, and in order to commit it, the poet would have to disappear from her own mind, and for all that her work superficially concerns mood, it is essentially a record of mindfulness. Any joy that obliterated that mind would be a form of suicide.

Despite its tonal monomania, the poetry isn’t featureless in its imagination of the world, at least not the kind of featurelessness that sees one thing in everything. The poet regularly admits to having felt or imagined things less despairing:

Daybreak. The low hills shine
ochre and fire, even the fields shine.
I know what I see: sun that could be
the August sun, returning
everything that was taken away—

You hear this voice? This is my mind’s voice;
you can’t touch my body now.
It has changed once, it has hardened,
don’t ask it to respond again.

I can verify
that when the sun sets in winter it is
incomparably beautiful and the memory of it
lasts a long time. I think this means

there was no night.
The night was in my head.

Averno, as does much of Glück’s poetry, relies on mythology, in this case the story of Persephone, which Glück uses to mediate on daughterhood, motherhood, the nature of asymmetrical desire, and of course seasonal change. Where it fails, it fails by conflating the mythology Glück has made of her own experience with these older and sturdier mythologies. As pretentious and un-ironically retro as reliance on classical references may be, I appreciate the impulse — if you want to depersonalize a state or a condition, yoking it to stories so old as to defeat the mincing details of modern human scale isn’t a half-bad compromise. But this technique cohabits somewhat uncomfortably with lines like

Riddle:
Why was my mother happy?

Answer: she married my father.

“You girls,” my mother said, “should marry
someone like your father.”

That was one remark. Another was,
“There is no one like your father.”

Of course, one of the reasons it becomes so difficult to avoid the conflict between tempests and teapots points to another admirable property of Glück’s poetry, how consistently unmistakable she makes her meaning. For all those who insist a poem should rather be, her writing may seem intransigently dull. In selecting which of her phrases or lines to excerpt, it is far easier to find an assertion or idea worth considering than a thrilling image or compelling sound. For instance, “The girl who disappears from the pool / will never return. A woman will return, / looking for the girl she was” is a nicely encapsulation of theme, but as language, it’s merely a serviceable sentence. The most you can say about it is that it gets the job done without ostentatious effort. To be fair, though, I cannot imagine a book by Louise Glück that loses itself in lyric pleasure. That kind of artifice would compromise the distinction she draws between mystery and fate. Mystery is dynamic; it creates constant motion between cause and effect, and derives perpetual energy from the indeterminate relationship between the two. But in a trait she shares with most depressive imaginations, Glück is a fatalist: the details of what goes wrong may prove fascinating in their execution, but the physics behind despair are never in doubt. Happiness decays with the certainty of gravity, and its decay only ever illustrates that it was only true happiness when we did not know it would decay, which is to say it was only happiness when we were ignorant of its true nature, and therefore was never really happiness at all.

With an ounce less clarity, that idea would degrade to a miasma of ill-feeling, maudlin at best. And while I resist the possibility that the details of one’s personal life can ever really support the weight of so severe a conception of the world — disappointment is a minor sentiment, after all — I do respect the sharp edge of Glück’s commitment to it. For her, spring can only ever mean that winter is on its way, and ice held in perpetual winter might as well be stone indeed. An unforgiving medium, but it builds a strong house, though perhaps not one always fit for human habitation.

This strikes me as thrillingly unfashionable. The book is Heise’s first; I’m used to seeing first books that spin but slightly the postures of the day, and I cannot really imagine anything less respectful of current fashions for an inventive and imaginative poet in his thirties to pursue than a set of poems that contend exclusively with the effect of his father’s death. I hope this proves inspirational in that it demonstrates that one of the ways to arrive at the “new” is simply to commit to whatever compels you. But regardless of its happy deviation from a set of norms of which I’ve grown heartily sick, Horror Vacu offers an often vertiginous account of how death imposes irresistible fact on minds bent on both accommodating and resisting this one inevitable yet impossible truth. The poems often create the same unease they describe, often by the careful, progressive outlay of symbol-rich ‘fact events’ that do not, in the aggregate, achieve an intelligible story. Rather than introduce a symbol to return to it later to reach clarity, Heise just keeps piling them on, one sentence very much like the next, each establishing an action or scene and then abandoning it. It doesn’t take too long for the reader to feel as if they are in dialogue with someone who has just emerged from trauma so severe it’s taken an immediate existential toll. Consider the title poem, which progresses from

These charred acres you have

created: your hermitage I will

inherit in the pages of my most

secret book. A train writes its way

like a dotted line through the white

valley. There is ash in the air, as I go

forth in daylight, as I wade home

at evensong. The moon vibrant

as a rung bell releases birds

from my mouth. In my hand I hold

a tuning fork and clang the weather

vane, I strike my hand on the garden

wall and am returned a dull sound.

to conclude with this:

What shelter shall I assemble against

this? Could I hammer a narrow boat

from this old barn’s frame. Could I

assemble an empty boat from this

old hammered frame? Could I frame

an empty boat for this old body’s

frame? I could frame an empty body

in this old broken frame? Shall I

break an old body to fit this narrow

old frame?

While I’m impatient with the limited arsenal of symbols (what I’ve come to think of as the Ingmar Bergman Box Set) and the light surrealism, I do appreciate the way this poem allows itself to fall apart, to witness its own undoing. I also see how the perfect monotypic columns (a device Heise uses repeatedly) suggest a firm line drawn around a language impulse that clearly requires strictly applied control, lest the fact events slip into endless, futile self-replication, forever trudging up the hill of the uncanny only to fall back down again, before any evaluative vantage can be reached.

Formally, Heise doesn’t wander too far from the pattern set here, which for a project like this is a wise choice. His style is consistently anaphoristic, with one syntax tending to dominate each poem, and a somewhat understated fondness for assonance drawing the lines through the conclusion of each. When he makes this work to a degree that surpasses the requirements of the syntax, the results can astonish, as in “My Pieta,” a catalogue of the ways in which the son has been held by his father:

He held me bone-tight. He held me backward.
He held me high with the bellows
to smoke the beehive, hanging delicate
as a lung in the branches and bleeding
a half-gallon of honey while he held me. He held me
in the bathtub, scrubbed ashes from my small tongue.
He held me in the pond of his hand,
as if I were a tadpole, and wouldn’t let go.

When it doesn’t work, however (as in “Wreckage,” which likewise catalogues, though here those things that refuse to surface from an intimacy metaphorically dashed to the ocean’s floor: “No boots. / No wigs. / Not your best dress. / Not your nail polish. / Not my worst mood.”) the results are merely distracting, not catastrophic. And while a mid-sized volume by today’s standards — 82 pages — the poems in Horror Vacu that do succeed, do so with such spooky, fevered conviction that the lesser efforts become redundant. Which, I suppose, is the risk of monotony, even monotony redeemed by obsessive attention.

The two poems that best manifest the weird energy of this book distinguish themselves by their interruption of the book’s larger syntactical habits. “Rosary,” a quasi-epistolary in seven sections, occurs in broadly-dispersed fragments that allow the somewhat hermetic symbolism of the other poems a respite from the rhythmic insistence of their earlier incarnations. And in “The Orchard of Orange Trees,” an extraordinary mood piece set in the middle of the book, Heise does what he refuses to do in any of the other poems: he tells a story. Though drunk and doubtful of the animal’s survival, the poet helps a neighbor look for his missing dog, and promptly succumbs the viscerally transfixing conflation of living matter and dead matter characteristic of the near-tropics:

The air smelled of musk, of leaves decaying.
The earth was full of August. We were lost

and the ground was so dark, it was like wading
through water. My legs heavy, completely immersed,
and a noise traveled over the surface.

It was only an irrigation pump in the distance,
flooding one field and draining another.
Though I did not know this, I was there,

so I can say one or two things. The alligators sink
to the bottom, and the current washes them
downstream. Though in the morning you can find

large bands of blood in the water.
And the grass turns red by noon. But it’s gone
after a few days. Especially if it storms.

Stunned by torpor and heat and dread, the narrator summons what he can. It isn’t much, but it’s what keeps him together, if barely. And it’s this property of being barely held together that makes Horror Vacui so striking. Glibness is one kind of control, but it’s a pretty cheap kind, since it is easy enough to keep a chatty distance from something that has no real purchase on your mind. Formal discipline, compulsive repetition: these are other kinds of control, more disturbing ones, disturbing because to whoever exercises them, they represent a line with self-possession one on side and, well, something else on the other. Horror Vacui may concern itself with death, but its sound is that of the poet holding on for dear life.

Of course, anyone who has ever actually endured a formal liturgical pause (via either or any of the identities of St.Marks or an equivalent venue of Awesomeness) knows perfectly well that it’s just as likely that pausing will allow consideration of what is the success rate of the diaphragm in preventing pregnancy or how are the colonists going to get off New Caprica in the next season of Battlestar Galactica as it is to inspire greater appreciations of wisdom, beauty and truth. Much of what makes Maureen Owen’s most recent book such good company is that her poems, which consistently valorize the pause as it serves human minds still in human heads, don’t pay much tribute to solemn reflection. What they do, however, is display the discursiveness of a mind operating at 33, 45 and 78 RPM, sometimes all in the same poem. And while Erosion’s Pull contains just over 100 pages of such discursion, the variety of Owen’s use of the pause is as apparent in any one of her poems as it is in all of them. So take a look at the first stanza (and then all the subsequent ones) of “A History of the English Speaking Peoples or tea in the shape of a kite”:

the moon was scraping across the sky
what about the river recognizable psyches should
have floated barely under the surface
water in a bizarre reflection of leaky foliage

The first unit is mildly poeticized — it takes a second to replace with scraping — but once the scene is set, the second unit introduces an obviously disaffected colloquial diction. The third unit responds to this bluntness with a checkpoint charlie of a lyric claim, one that has the authority of declaration but doesn’t quite add up. And then the break. Surface… water? Water in foliage? Bizarre is pleasingly off-the-cuff, unashamedly generic, and leaky closely resembles leafy, summoned into being by the presence of foliage. These units don’t work as does “fragmentary” poetry, which tosses out dots and requests or hopes that the surface blandishments of the dots themselves will seduce the reader into the act of assembly. Owen’s strategy is more personal; this is a single consciousness evaluating dots on the fly, figuring out what to keep, what to discard, guesstimating but never getting to commit to the appropriate connection and the tone it might require.

This combination platter of discrete observations and claims, each in somewhat fractious communication with the other, is reminiscent of mental operations that don’t usually result in poetry, or at least not in that kind of poetry that makes a point of brushing away the steel of its welding seams and embedding level its screws. These poems? sometimes remind me? of that rhetorical habit? often found in teenager-speak? whereby they turn every divisible accumulation of syntax? into a prompt for query? Which can be irritating in its own right, but is also charming in that it acknowledges, however witlessly, that One that doesn’t follow Another, at least not absolutely, not necessarily.

suspicious of their hands they
held each other’s noses &
spun the colors didn’t move or slip out of joint
leaves were everywhere

When the eldest daughter lost control of
the diesel tractor with front loader &
came through the wall of the dark living room they
said hmmmmmm put in a big picture window

Here you can also see how Owen tells a sort of story that communicates narrative detail while also leaving room for mimetic, apparently impromptu theorization as to how stories get told: fits and starts, asides, attempts at beautification and interpretation and much dead air besides. This isn’t flarftacular in the way that flarf exalts the ostentatiously wrong, but it does share a disinterest in the locking up a poem’s perimeters with a fatally satisfying click. At its worst, Owen’s technique approximates poetry as transmitted through a badly compromised cell phone, but at its best, it possesses a hypnotic daffiness:

Along this stream they demand more than a passing notice
Southward and eastward along a terror
they who entered on a window night vanished
into deforested shapes

When the runaway pickupwith their 3 year old at
the wheel took out one of the two hefty columns
holding up the porch they shook at the impact

Teen-speak, cell phone: this could also sound like an accounting made to the police after an accident, or the erratic grace of hyper-articulation leavened with distraction and simplicity as one fights mightily to sound more sober than one really is. It also suggests an interesting compromise between those conceptions of poetry that view it as regular stuff, fit for daily consumption and production, and those that want to reserve poetry for Very Special Episodes. The daily use ethos does free poetry from the burden of conceptual high collars and starch, but it also breeds poetry like Philly breeds Rolling Rock and Yuengling: cheap, dangerously abundant, likely to get you full before it gets you drunk. Very Special Episode poetry, though, is like absinthe, of which you do not want more than an infrequent taste. It also often smacks of the liturgical, which returns us to the very function of pause as escape from the liturgical with which we began. Between these options, Owen creates room for a poetry that is attentive to the bells and whistles of lyric possibility, but no more attentive to them than would be a mind preoccupied with the rest of the world and the words we use in it. Neither a poet who ejects escape pods of polished perfection built to neither admit or release oxygen, nor one who places one homiletic pie after another on the windowsill of her folksy farmhouse, Owen becomes a more human alternative, the poet of wandering attention, the poet under citizen’s duress:

not knowing what to look for light sheer as
white heat large bundles of
straw creamcolored & cut straight &
added as a sun deck

a spreading ink stain followed their sunsets
they were bigger than their chairs

Do I like that first line? No, sir, I do not. Do I like the second? Yes’m I do. And I know that the second — it’s tone of wait! I forgot! — and its loyalty to the fact at hand buys much of its charm and trustworthiness from the presence of the first. Erosion’s Pull is often as scattered as an open mind must be, and its moments of truth, beauty and wisdom come as pauses, not between them. That’s a daily poetry I can live with, and happily. It’s also a seriously bemused book. Bemusement without condescension: this is a mighty and christlike gift! There are plenty of misuses of language these days, the chicanery of which stuns the right and the good, and we best reserve both our small reserve of exaltation and our ordnance of contempt for that fight. In the meanwhile, however, feast on the good humor and good spirit of Maureen Owen, who brings in the dirt with the flowers and tends them both and equally. Pause, y’all, and consider.

Those fancy production values matter here, because the photo-quality reproduction of the disfigured document brings both its primary tone and Ruefle’s subsequent shadings into mutually sharpened relief. Whatever function the book once served (Ruefle leaves unmolested the whole of its nominal purpose — ‘Published for the Benefit of a Summer Home for Working Girls’ — and the date of publication, 1889) its prim milieu declares itself in the color and texture of its age-burnt and mildly tea-stained pages, as well as through the preservation of the font, characterized by archaically bold punctuation type. But just as necessary, of course, is the evidence of Ruefle’s desecrations, hiding in plain sight, row after row of mercilessly if haphazardly applied Wite-Out. To see the proof of her literal obfuscations and not just their result changes the pace at which you read the poems thereby made; given the dualized temporal contexts (the book of the past forced into the present) it becomes easy to envision the poet glancing briefly at each page, finding a choice phrase or serendipitous juxtaposition, and hastily erasing her way to it before moving on. Book, painting, performance, all in one.

Unlike Radi os, however, A Little White Shadow doesn’t carve one coherent text out of the meat of another. Ruefle’s results are pleasingly polyglot, as if she’s found in this single document an occasion to abstract a dozen poetries, each with its signature poems. There are poems in the cryptic-epigrammatic mode, such as

I think what will always lin-
ger longest in our memories of her

we never would any of us miss

and

artists
and their quarrels

a barbarity worthy of the Goths themselves.

There are also poems that make the exercise of the book seem like nothing more than chemical imperialism, a coy brutalization that offers a glimpse into how one Ruefle turns the words of another writer into Even More Ruefle:

We really did

like Bohemia

and the little
winds blowing

on rainy days

and art was and would always

be
and her hair, well it might grow

This is a poem that could easily appear anywhere in Ruefle’s canon. And while it’s periodically charming to see her established personae appear here, the more weirdly compelling poems are those that somehow participate in Bizarro-world versions of the ghosted text’s enfleshed intentions:

It
was my duty to keep
the piano filled with roses.

Coming as it does as the last four lines of a page otherwise utterly erased, the lines immediately beg questions of what else, relative to the speaker’s ‘duty,’ that finds itself corseted into that remaining statement, especially considering the Summer Home for Working Girls, the ‘true’ nature of which Ruefle denies us. Inevitable reverse-engineering of meaning thus makes a micro-context, a wispily attenuated narrative. Thus I link the poem above to the two following:

the servant

seemed to be a

lady in quaint
de Medici costume,

resting on soft
red cushions, partially
covered with hands

*

the view from the window
stopped

and said, “Here I lie day after
day and

and the only things I possess
which can travel, can go no farther,

It’s easy to dismiss this project as slight; it looks like a gimmick (though what poetry isn’t?) and one minor enough to tuck in your back pocket. And while in performing this old trick Ruefle does do her source material a deliberate disservice, in slighting it she also makes something substantial and new.