I usually have no sympathy for readers (suddenly tempted to end the sentence right there) who voice their objections to poetry they don’t like by fretting about how the poems don’t seem to care about the reader, or serve the reader, or give the reader a happy ending and a box of chocolates. One of the reasons I reject these plaintive moans of readerly victimhood is because I find it at least as oppressive to have a poem smother me with its concern for the sugar-fine fragility of my intelligence or the bloated sensitivity of my sentiments. Who’s a good reader? You are! Yes you are!

Is it too much to ask that the poem just shut up and play?

And yet, I do understand how a reader could grow irritated at the poem that pretends the reader isn’t there, all the while conducting itself with the kind of icy deliberation that gives the lie to the posture of disinterest. Ignoring someone is the most conspicuous way of paying attention to them. Miles Davis never did, exactly, turn his back on an audience while playing, but when the audience suspected he was, they turned on him.

Of course, once you are aware of this dilemma, you’ve snapped it into being, since management of awareness is, itself, the problem. The ideal solution would be the poem that cannot betray awareness of a reader because it was never actually written, which is the pleasure of found poetry. A poor name, that: found poetry really should be called not-poetry, to be read as if it were.

What this little device of the imagination circumvents is the writer. Anyone who has ever met a writer knows that writers deserve circumvention, even though – like snakes – they are more afraid of you, reader, than you are of them. But in the formulations I make above, it’s logically impossible to spurn and berate the poem for its neglect of your welfare; it is really the writer you resent. You cannot quite come out and say so, however, because you know that the writer doesn’t exactly exist the way a person does. Even the most preening narcissist might have a hard time vocalizing a complaint about a writer in terms selfish enough to suggest that any given writer has a personal obligation to any given reader. You can fuss about the writing, then, or you can expand the trembling membrane of your selfhood to include, a la The Blob or communism, all readers.

(The stalking horse of the writing as ridden by the writer = the illusion of a you as a proxy for the act of reading: yes, got it.)

Personhood, on either end of the equation, thus presents a problem. A great jolly big dumb exhausting problem.

Liam Agrani, whose Volume One is so anxiously personless as to forego photo, substantial bio, blurb and justifying note, understands the appeal of not-poetry so well that he doesn’t even identify himself as the author of the book, but rather its editor. A sweetly ironic gesture: he isn’t claiming to have written these not-poems, but by claiming editorship he slyly admits that his method (he collects marginalia, just as the title indicates) suggests a more self-conscious authorship on the part of the writers of the marginalia than is perhaps appropriate. But what his “editorial” choices reveal is that marginalia itself is a kind of dress rehearsal for authorship. Whoever writes in the margin does so with at least as many motivations as whoever writes for publication, but obviously without the limitation of presuming readership (however, pardon me, “marginal” it might be). Whatever motivates the note-taking thus influences the adoption of whatever tone or function corresponds to that motivation. Reading these not-poems is like watching someone try on different outfits and practice their flirt, or listening to someone try multiple vocal registers to find out just which sound induces what effect. Because they presume no one is there, they can commit to the imagination of otherhood more freely, and in some ways more effectively, than can the writer who must either solemnly pretend readership or ignore its possibility.

In “Transcription of Selected Marginalia Found in a Copy of Dante’s Inferno…” the marginaliaist or marginaliaista notes

p 31the
moral
death

p 37Instrument of grace, elevation of beauty

p 60embarrassment
of oneself

and in this we hear an approximation of a certain critical tone and rhetoric, a version of literary criticism redolent of the classroom. Yet later on in the same not-poem the marginaliaist writes

p 210Bad news
for
Dante

This takes the question of authenticity and authorship and pulls it inside-out, a twisty taffy knot of how impossible, and possibly how stupid, it is to invest unduly in the aura of the writer and wonder about what the writer wants. Bad news for Dante: it’s unlikely this matches the diction of the classroom, and it doesn’t much “go” with Dante, but it does create a sweet immediacy in terms of our fabrication of the margin-writer, who seems to have let a little concern for Dante into this rehearsal for a clinical analysis of his work – a care pleasingly and confusingly doubled, since there’s no way to distinguish the fiction of Dante the poet from that of Dante the protagonist, two illusions equidistant from the auctorial “fact” of Dante.

And sometimes, of course, the marginalia doesn’t match a traditional diagnosis of the text at all. Even better! “Transcription of Writing Found on the Inside Cover of a Copy of The Trial by Franz Kafka…” begins with an annotation of an assignment:

(inside front cover)

Write an essay exploring the underlying
meaning of the weird relationship between
Huld and Block

But this rapidly shifts to a more conversational exchange.

(title page)

Now the school thinks Sarah Clark was the 3rd person last night they want to drug test all of them Sarah should go to Shauna and tell her that she should confess because of Sarah is tested well you know

(back cover)

I’m really surprised Shauna
didn’t do this. She thinks
she has a really
good voice

This fits more elegantly with “The Trial” than intent could ever allow. You simply cannot make shit like this up, though I don’t know if that is because you don’t exist or because making prohibits serendipity. Chance may favor the prepared mind, but a prepared mind chases all chance into contrivance.

Most of the pieces in Volume One, however, hew more closely to the kinds of notes meant to keep track of thoughts about the text, perhaps because their, uh, authors will have to write about it later – for the audience of an instructor, maybe – or perhaps because they want to explain what they are reading to themselves, for themselves. Sometimes these purposes intertwine in ways that are both charming and insightful, and I can only assume that Agrani edits to accentuates those relationships. For instance, “Transcription of Marginalia Found in Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir…” includes more or less conventional notes, such as

p 34Mrs. Wilkes’ distress at her portrait

and

p 111on his qualities as a reviewer

but the writer also admits more raw and uncritical responses:

p176C. on sex is painful.
impossible—

and

p 254famous encounter w/
V. Woolf – nobody can
outdo the English in this

p 296wonderful
fantasy monologue

No matter how well-conceived the contrivance of auctorial invention, an idea for a poem cannot replicate this, I think. Yes, there are many things that sustained, self-conscious and reader-directed can do that these kinds of assemblages cannot, but there’s tremendous value in the presence of the private, even if by the irony of acquisition (or the agent of textual accident that is Agrani himself) they have become public.

Flarf, recently institutionalized in our newspapers of record, does recognize the vitality of these energies. And Conceptualism excels in designed contraptions for harnessing them. But Flarf, wonderful as it can be, is like a little brother who tells knock-knock jokes ad nauseam and then farts on you when you tell him to scram, and Conceptualism is like a big sister who sits on your chest and pummels you with your own fists, all the while asking why you keep hitting yourself. Both siblings are dear to my heart, but sometimes I just want! To be left! Alone! – a desire equivalent to wondering whether the poem can just shut up and play.

Unfortunately, we cannot actually achieve a sense of solitude by pretending to be alone when we know we are not. And that’s exactly what “immersion” in poetry, particularly lyric poetry, asks us to do. To circumvent the artificiality of this request, we would have to secret a recording device under our sibling’s bed to catch whatever they mumbled to themselves. These mumblings, mundane as the may seem, can compete (on some levels, at least) with the most powerfully articulated and thoroughly buffed poems. To demonstrate this, consider the whole of “Transcription of Marginalia Found in a 1963 Copy of Robert Henryson’s Poems…”

p 2Nonsense

You know you’re in for human
degredation, perversion through ignorance’s
human perversity.

p 4waxes, lyric,
carried away
by his own
logic.

p 5science
likened
learn
gets nervous

p 7arm in arm
pilferers
manner
womb
stomach

p 10again, negative humor

p 11the extra dishes
bring on trouble

p 13lusty?
sexy?
courageous?
proud?

p 15In Chaucer there
is a great animal
chase at this point

p 16No great
lover is ever
jealous
who

p 90dismal
full of care

caused
to fall

p 91sexual desire

p 93in haste
outcast

p 94oh Blasphemy!

p 95down
shows off
hope vs. despair
one eyelaughs
one weeps

to comb your golden hair
a sign of idleness

p 97the moon closest
to the earth is the
most fickle of
planets.

It’s hard to say who is responsible for this. Agrani, to a certain extent, certainly, and of course one Mr. John Collins (well, presumably), one-time owner of the book. And we shouldn’t neglect Robert Henryson. Or maybe we should neglect all of them.

Hard to say, and irrelevant. Not quite found, not quite made. A mechanistic theology states that a god or divinity acts as a watch-winder or domino-pusher; this precludes the void of the random and preserves the comfort of authorship, without making the author or god sit through the humiliating trial of our preferences and judgments. Of course, what good is a god we cannot judge? It is easy enough to claim that all writing is conceptual, and that the only distinction is between those who confess to merely selecting which domino to tumble and those who insist they are the actors and the actions, the inventors of the tiles, the lines they describe, gravity itself. What you gain if you believe this is someone to blame or praise, but what you lose is control. Why should a poem erase the reader in the idolatry or demonization of the author? Marginaliaist, writer, editor, poet. I would rather surrender my idea of each and all, of poetry itself, if I thereby gain the action of the not-poem above. Indeed! One of my favorite not-poems of the year.

Poetry’s just fine, as long as we don’t ask after it. As long as we can continue to find cures for poets, remedies for absentee gods. I think I’ll call them readers. I think I’ll call them you.

I get a lot of books of poetry in the mail. Since I know how hard it is for poetry presses to stay in the black, how hard it is for poets to get their books reviewed, how hard it is to realize how very few people will read one’s poetry even if it gets widely noticed, I read each book that arrives (even though many of them come to me from people who have clearly never read a review I’ve written) simply because someone took the trouble to send it to me. I could build a small yet sturdy dwelling out of the books I’ve received, and living inside that edifice would be like inhabiting a little igloo of guilt, for the dismay of not being able to review them all is only compounded by my appreciation of how few of their authors would even want my attention if only they knew how unpleasant it might be.

Don’t get me wrong: it isn’t that I dislike most of these books. I just have no use for them. That has everything to do with my experiences as a reader and very little do with the work itself. I can usually identify what aspects of any individual book might appeal to a certain subset of readers, which means that I can engineer what preferences and convictions a reader would need to have in order to extract that value. While that might seem like useful skill for a reviewer to have, it actually complicates the act of reviewing immeasurably, because it enables the reviewer to at least attempt an occupation of the mind of both the writer and the reader, and set them up on a kind of aesthetic date. This is a complication because Jesus, God, why would anyone want to spend a Sunday night doing that?

Of course, some reviewers just settle for using those skills as a kind of targeting mechanism, and savage books that they wish hadn’t been written as a way of punishing readers who they wish didn’t exist. While it might be understandable, if not excusable, to do this every once in awhile, anyone who makes a career out of it is simply an ass. They may claim to be serving the greater good, but since there is not and never can be agreement as to of what the greater good obtains, they are simply serving their own delight in being an ass, a creature that brays its love of itself loudly, with no tonal variety, at extraordinary length.

Unfortunately, it’s equally indulgent to write only about those books with which you share notions of that indeterminate good, not least because the books which you consider are likely to make the case for their arguments and preoccupations via the poems they contain more effectively than can your prosaic assessment of them.

Thus, many critics find themselves working the margins, waiting for books that represent an interesting trend, or pose a provocative question, even as they ignore the reality that with a little attention and ingenuity, any book can be made to represent any trend or ask any question the reviewer wants.

Of what use is the reviewer? What is the reviewer for? How is it possible that this review can be 550 words in without having once mentioned the title of the book under review?

Every now and again a book arrives in the mail that so perfectly concentrates the reviewer’s dilemma that it deserves scrutiny, even as that scrutiny must inevitably suffer either one of the problems listed above or else result in claims of such competitive and exclusionary provenance that the review will offer no direction whatsoever. Well, I warned you.

Elyse Fenton’s Clamor is a primer on the temptations of lyricism. You want the poet to surrender to those temptations, you see beauty; you want the poet to resist, you see beautification. Too mechanistic? Let’s take a look, then: “Outside, light // and snow clung to the windows like the paper / edges of a hive crushed in” and “(…) frost whittles the grass // to shards, the pear tree breathes / beneath a shroud of ice” and “Ice cauls our windows. Snow / paraffins the trees.”

Yeah. Okay. See? If you think of the pre-lyricized object as inert, you might see these lines as necessary upgrades, activations of the mundane into the poetic: beautiful, striking, strange, rich. But if you don’t think of any language or object as inherently inert, or as inherently anything, you might find these formulations precious, twee, unnecessary, distracting. If the former, your defense could run as follows: what? Ice is ice! Frost is frost and snow is snow! If the latter, your attack could ask what? Ice is ice! Frost is frost! Snow is snow!

Don’t look at me. I can’t help you.

Unless, of course, you find it helpful to know the context from which I’ve extracted those lines. However, you’re only likely to find that helpful if you believe context exists. So for those who do, know that Clamor marks the spot where war poetry meets love poetry at the sub-genre of war bride poetry. If you would prefer that I place those categories in scare quotes, then you don’t believe in the categories at all, and what I tell you next won’t move you an inch, for when I say that its disingenuous of us to refer to “the speaker” of these poems, since it’s damn well obvious that she’s Fenton herself, and that her subject is not a merely a lingual representation of an army medic but her lover and husband, you’ll likely retort that such truths are irrelevant, because the poems must either prove themselves as felt or stand as constructions unfortified by truth-value. Which would make sense, sort of, were it not for my suspicion that the very readers who would insist on the unimportance of real-world context would be those very same readers who would roll their eyes at the ice-cauled windows.

Too mechanistic? Okay, let’s try again. Here’s a lengthy excerpt from “Word from the Front”:

His voice over the wind-strafed line
drops its familiar tone to answer,
Yes, we did a corkscrew landing down
into the lit-up city, and I’m nodding

on my end, a little pleased by my own
insider’s knowledge of the way
planes avert danger by spiraling
deep into the coned center of sky

deemed safe, and I can’t help but savor
the sound of the word – the tracer round
of its pronunciation – and the image –
a plane corkscrewing

down into the verdant green
neck of Baghdad’s bottle-glass night (…)

Let’s assume some suspicion of the lyrical. Note, with that suspicion, of how the professed pleasure of the “insider” (which, were you as cynical as you were suspicious, you might consider a warning sign) quickly gives way to the pleasures of the immediate lyric upgrade. Instead of corkscrewing, they spiral, not down into the lit-up city but down first into the coned center of sky. The speaker, or Fenton, cannot help but return to corkscrew as an occasion for poetry: she savors its sound, and even goes so far as to characterize its tracer round (another bit of “insider” knowledge?) sound, though it might be odd even to the generous to liken an optical effect to a word’s sound, even as one mixes one’s military metaphors. In any case, the plane isn’t landing in the lit-up city anymore, anyway; it’s the verdant green neck of Baghdad’s bottle-glass night. A heartless reader might well ponder the effect on military operational language such fancies might have, but if you think a reader heartless for such a speculation, I reckon you don’t even think it’s appropriate to wonder.

So do you regard the translation of the soldier’s report of fact into the war bride’s lyric elaboration of it as a central function of poetry? Or do you read that excerpt and wish fervently that poetry would cease functioning in that way? Beauty, or beautification?

Fenton, or the speaker, nods towards this question in “Refusing Beatrice,” in which she suggests “Maybe it’s time to stop comparing–” though the comparison she refers to isn’t between the experiences and their lyric component but between she and her husband and Beatrice and Dante. But immediately after, she writes

I could never be Beatrice, couldn’t harbor such good faith.

And I won’t be there in the Tigris basin to watch
heat flake cinders of paint from the Chinook’s body
like a rug shook out

or see it hasten to the sky’s surface
like an untethered corpse –

My curse or gift is blindness;
I’ve never read this story before.

My response to this is to suspect that however heat flakes cinders off a Chinook, it is almost exactly not like shaking out a rug, just as I think it hastens to the sky’s surface in a fashion that almost but not quite fails to resemble that of an untethered corpse. To which you may reply: Yes! Exactly! The power of poetry! Ha ha! Or perhaps you may simply wonder, as does the speaker, or Fenton, whether the blindness those lines accidentally describe is, indeed, a gift or a curse. It isn’t hard at all to decide which you believe is the case, but it’s hard to prove, if the evidence you muster for the defense is indistinguishable from that of the prosecution.

A few years ago I noticed that people had begun to terminate conversations about upsetting or uncertain matters by claiming “It is what it is.” I noticed shortly thereafter the rage this inspired. Really? It is what it is? There’s a work of fucking deductive genius. Neither point can be disputed. I can see the ways in which Clamor is a deeply serious book as well as a silly one. It is what it is, even when it isn’t.

Fate considered as represented by the eyebrow of Ignatz Mouse

Cruel fate, kind fate, indifferent fate. Cruel can’t be right, can it? The cruel have their reasons, however selfish or misguided they may be. Kindness is a shield held in defense of those fate ill-fortunes; fate itself can’t wield it. And indifference—fate that cares neither one way or ‘nother—well, that contradicts the idea of fate altogether. Random fate is an oxymoron. So what’s left? Ignatz is.

[...] the way Ignatz now feels his anger

dissipating in that self-same gap between

the trigger and the smack between his anger

and its object the way one eyebrow

can never meet the other in a true unbroken v

no matter how doomy how dour

how darksome his invariable frown.

—”On Ignatz’s Eyebrow”

Maybe fate is neither cruel nor kind nor indifferent. Maybe fate is simply cranky.

Kat and Mouse

For those of you loitering in the numinous state of unfamiliarity, Ignatz is one third of a heartbreaking and upsettingly comic love triangle, the other two points of which are held by Krazy Kat, a feline of indeterminate gender and the gift of a chronic inability to take a hint, and Offisa Pupp, a dog who represents both moral and legal order. Pupp loves Krazy (or at least hates to see Krazy suffer), but Krazy only has eyes for Ignatz, which is krazy indeed, since Ignatz cannot abide Krazy, and often registers his contempt with a brick flung to the head of our already-addled hero/ine, who doesn’t mind in the least. For what signifies love more clearly than obsessively repeated gestures of violent disregard?

If tragedy and comedy depend equally on misunderstandings and accidents of meaning, then American arts knows no greater bard than George Herriman, who graphically realized and idiomatically expressed thousands of permutations of this formula in his Krazy Kat comic strips, which ran from 1913 to 1944, largely due to the beneficence of William Randolph Hearst. Set in a fantastical version of Coconino County, Arizona, the strip is widely celebrated as one of the most inventive and influential expressions of American cartooning and popular culture. It’s magnificent, and Youn does it justice largely by resisting the most tempting forms of tribute. Herriman’s language is wildly idiosyncratic, though it bears some resemblance to the hodgepodge phrasing and enunciation of his native New Orleans. Youn makes no effort to reproduce it, not does she attempt to summarize the “plot” of the strip. She assumes no real knowledge of Krazy Kat on the part of the reader at all, though she does make some truly beautiful concessions to the lurid, mutable landscape of Herriman’s Coconino, as in “Ignatz Invoked:”

A gauze bandage wraps the land
and is unwound, stained orange with sulfates.

A series of slaps molds a mountain,
a fear uncoils itself, testing its long

cool limbs. A passing cloud
seizes up like a carburetor

and falls to earth, lies broken-
backed and lidless in the scree.

Likewise, she captures well how the phantasmagorical desert can be both aesthetically fluid and instantly, consistently recognizable:

Landscape with Ignatz

The rawhide thighs of the canyon straddling the knobbed blue spine of the sky.

The bone-spurred heels of the canyon prodding the gaunt blue ribs of the sky.

The sunburnt mouth of the canyon biting the swollen blue tongue of the sky.

[...]

Much as she correctly intuits the key features of that landscape, Youn understands that its value is symbolic; because a self-transforming environment need not actually be anywhere, she doesn’t limit her poems solely to that one arid frame of reference. Ignatz the book is geographically and stylistically peripatetic, which only highlights the persistence of what Youn sees in Herriman’s work: the endlessly inventive impossibility of Ignatz the object of love.

Solving for Ignatz in the Equation of Love

Since it’s impossible for me to have the experience of reading Ignatz without knowledge of the strip, I’m curious as to how readers might approach this book cold. While I believe familiarity with Krazy Kat certainly enriches one’s experience of the poems, I don’t think that they require that knowledge—all they hope of the reader, I think, is curiosity. Even the basic question of “What’s an Ignatz, and what’s it doing in every title of every poem in this eponymously-titled book?” would serve perfectly well, for that question alone would result in all the answer the book requires. Ignatz is whatever captures your attention; Ignatz is whatever compels you. Sometimes Youn writes of Ignatz in a narrative prose; sometimes she writes of Ignatz in the most diffuse and indeterminately lyric terms. Each style affords her the chance to show off her considerable poetic gifts, but more importantly, the diversity of approaches proves the point that interest, attraction, compulsion, love are all both highly specific and totally impersonal. Everyone has an Ignatz. All the reader has to know is the rich complications of the act of paying attention to something, and if that’s too much of a barrier to achieving a useful context, then, well, poetry is doomed, I guess.

Ignatz as Direct and Indirect Object

In a fantasy of reversal (or a simple act of self-justification), “Ignatz Pursuer,” Youn writes of running from Ignatz:

[...] the night
like a drumskin and her heart like someone

locked in the trunk of a car and if there were
only time god she would spit it out

into her palm she would pry out the mortar
between two bricks and wedge it in there

but, as the poem continues, there isn’t enough time, for the inexorable force that is Ignatz follows hot on her heels. This panicky account actually serves the poem’s protagonist, for it projects onto the thing pursued the responsibility for pursuance. An irredeemable and unrealizable desire, even if elected, feels more like an inheritance—an affliction—than a choice. In this, Ignatz can be blamed, but the majority of the poems speak to a more disconcerting truth: “Springes to Catch Ignatz,” for example, which makes of every natural and cast-off element in a pastoral a device for entrapment; “Ignatz Recidivist” (“to blush / to blame / to blame / to bleed / to bless // helpless / helpless / helplessness”), which marks Ignatz as provoked as much as much as provocateur, and “Invisible Ignatz,” which simply reads

I would forget you were it not that unseen flutes
keep whistling the curving phrases of your body.

A love triangle is still a triangle, a closed shape, and all closed shapes resemble circles, which we cite as having no beginning and no end, no fault and no flaw, no cause that can ever be divorced from what its effect causes in turn. In Herriman’s strip, of course, the triangle involves three characters; Youn knows that you only need two for a triangle, for desire of all kinds is always the third party, the node through which electricity—deadly, animating—arcs.

Eyebrow Redux

Of Herriman’s trio, Ignatz is the least expressive; he is, after all, the smallest (despite his disproportionate upper body strength). His temper is usually telegraphed through his eyebrows, which usually take the shape of feigned innocence or furrowed rage. But sometimes, usually in the act of flinging a brick at poor, infinitely optimistic Krazy, his eyebrows form a kind of bisected infinity symbol, at once inquisitive and judgmental. What is your goddamned problem, that countenance seems to ask. Why do you keep putting me in this position?

I don’t think the universe, which would be the origin of fate if fate had one, has a point of view. But if it did, and we had to believe in fate, I reckon the look on Ignatz’s face would summarize it. Call it irritated fate, irritated because our love and our hope are inappropriate in the face of what would otherwise be indifference. The brickbats are more discouragements than punishments, fate warning us to stop, to not ask for too much, to not see things that aren’t there. And to that extent, the illusion that aggression is affection is actually true. Krazy won’t walk away, and Ignatz can’t. As Youn writes in “Letter to Ignatz,”

O bring me
my ordinary:

my trays
of soot
and sand

*

For tonight I am a window
in a cottage by the sea.

*

O mia paloma blanca
O my desert dune

my dove,

who now will
sing the praises

of a natural love?

A natural love, the only possible kind, tragic and comic for our invention and occupation of it. I know she means it as a rhetorical question, but she answers it nevertheless, in the whole of Ignatz: Youn will sing the praises, in every sober key and antic register, and this book, wise and lovely, she proves her fitness to record our most subtle and brutal selves. Herriman would be delighted, Krazy would, in hir daffy way, understand, and Ignatz would offer her his highest praise: zip, fling, beware.

In German, to be blue—blau sein—means to be drunk. Delerium tremens used to be called the “blue devils” (Burns, 1787.) In England “the blue hour” is happy hour at the pub. Joan Mitchell—abstract painter of the first order, American expatriate living on Monet’s property in France, dedicated chromophile and drunk, possessor of a famously nasty tongue, and creator of arguably my favorite painting of all time, Les Bluets, which she painted in 1973, the year of my birth—found the green of spring incredibly irritating. She thought it was bad for her work. She would have preferred to live perpetually in “l’heure de bleu.” Her dear friend Frank O’ Hara understood. Ah daddy, I wanna stay drunk many days, he wrote, and did.

What is this passage? An inquiry result from a search engine that relies on algorithms that favor the fascinating? And is there any reason why whatever it is cannot be poetry?

Poetry has been under threat of death for so long, entire generations have labored under the question of its demise, and now the condition itself has acquired permanent scare quotes. It’s no longer the death of poetry, it’s “the death of poetry?”, question mark inevitably included. The persistence of this anxiety betrays our uncertainty about either what constitutes death or what counts as poetry, but in either case, the concern is misdirected. While the cultural value of poetry is perpetually up for debate, its longevity is guaranteed, because poetry is anthropologically determined. In other words, you cannot stop people from doing it; you can only quibble over how to identify what they’re doing.

I mention this because Wave Books doesn’t market Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, a collection of 240… somethings, as poetry. It’s sold as Essay/Literature.  And while Nelson has published poetry “proper” (with Hanging Loose and Soft Skull), she’s also published two hybrid prose works, Jane: A Murder and a book inspired and provoked thereby, The Red Parts. She’s also the author of a critical study: Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions.

It’s tempting but useless to ask which of these genres is Nelson’s home, as if we could track her deviations from a compositional norm and count them as evidence of what kind of writer she truly was. But the fact of the matter isn’t that she proves poetry is inevitable by periodically returning to it; she does so by applying the same aspects that enliven her poetry to whatever she writes. Her art’s in the gradient, not the line.

Poetry, of course, isn’t the only human inevitability. You also cannot eliminate or even retard spiritual inquiry, erotic obsession, or pursuit of beauty, all of which make for spectacular disasters, in which the act of analysis and its object become indistinguishable. And while Bluets is the record of a whole cascade of fruitful ruin, it is no accident that its poetry is prose. Consider entry 19:

Months before this afternoon I had a dream, and in this dream an angel came and said: You must spend more time thinking about the divine, and less time imagining unbuttoning the prince of blue’s pants at the Chelsea Hotel. But what if the prince of blue’s unbuttoned pants are the divine, I pleaded. So be it, she said, and left me to sob with my face against the blue slate floor.

Cast in more traditionally “poetic” form, the degree to which this expresses both the comic and the abject might force a polarizing preference for one or the other: a self-ironizing gag or a plangent plea unaware of the potential for absurdity it contains. When we conceive poetry as sculptural, we begin to think of forced choices that disallow multiplicity; prose, more often imagined as architectural, might let us grow capacious without becoming tumorous.  Sometimes Bluets reads as architectural in a ways that resembles the Winchester House, with its recursive construction, its windows gazing on rooms, its stairways to nowhere. Given the breadth of the book’s conception—its first words are, “Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color,” an introduction that retreats from itself even as it snaps into being—there’s very little that requires exclusion and much that begs exploration. We don’t necessarily need trains of thought sliding into their conclusive stations any more than that house needs a room into which its stairways open; while made of the same materials, and made with the same care, the architectural intent isn’t exactly the same. As blue is one color that is many shades, even a single room is many mansions.

Thus Bluets argues that not only can you live in an architected dream, there’s great reason to believe that you cannot live in anything else.  In addition to appending echoes to historical and material occasions of blue, she also tells stories, and among Nelson’s recurring narratives is not only her baffled judgment of her own capacity for sexual desire (for that aforementioned prince of blue) but an impeccably tender and moving set of exchanges about a friend who has suffered an accident that has left her quadriparalytic:

Over time my friend’s feet have become blue and smooth from disuse. Their blue is the blue of skim milk, their smoothness that of a baby’s. I think they look and feel very strange and beautiful. She does not agree. How could she—this is her body; its transformations, her grief. Often we examine parts of her body together, as if their paralysis had rendered them objects of inquiry independent of both. But they are still hers. No matter what happens to our bodies in our lifetimes, no matter if they become like “pebbles in water,” they remain ours; us, theirs.

This is a fascinating moment, because it fully capitulates to the lyric without denying the cost the lyric imposes on the occasions that inspire it. Paradoxically, Nelson is both indulging a Romantic solipsism and somehow standing outside it, judging its origins and consequences. There’s something powerfully accurate about this, something disorienting in its accuracy: the poem and its authorship and making, all equi-present. Nelson doesn’t want to leave anything out, as suits a collector’s project. Thus, in the same way that she wanders among blue objects (shards of glass, bottles of ink, stones and tattoos and the nests of bowerbirds) and accidental theorists of color (Goethe and Newton and Duras and Novalis) and the color’s utility in human imagination (blue moods, blues music, the blue divine), she likewise wanders among the positions the orchestrator of these lists must adopt. This results in an admixture of candor, passion and detachment that makes for irresistible intimacy. As Nelson herself notes,

Writing is, in fact, an astonishing equalizer. I could have written half of these propositions drunk or high, for instance, and half sober; I could have written half in agonized tears, and half in a state of clinical detachment. [...] – how could either of us tell the difference?

And this observation predicts a later one:

I suppose I am avoiding writing down to many specific memories of you for similar reasons. The most I will say is “the fucking.” Why else suppress the details? Clearly I am not a private person, and quite possibly I am a fool.

Well, the solution is that she’s made it impossible to tell the difference by disappearing the presumed contradiction between agony and detachment. The speaker who suffers the first is still the analyst of the latter, and to write otherwise is pretense, the condition of, and fatal problem with, choice. The most pernicious expression of this is the implied schism between making and evaluating, between feeling and thought, sentiment and reason, statement and question. Yet only the lucidly wise could wonder, in fact believe and understand, their foolishness.

I don’t think the fact of exponential choice is exclusively the dilemma of contemporary poets, or even modern ones, who famously went to such extravagant and influential lengths to develop forms that mirrored the multiplicity inherent in the freedom and anxiety of the suspicious subjective. The problem continues, but it appears less and less as a conundrum that form can solve and more and more as a conflict between the tones, points of references and correspondent dictions the writer can simultaneously access—or perhaps might feel compelled to suppress. Plenty of our current writing chooses the suppression option, but the competitive clamor of alternate registers has now become potentially complementary and cannot be ignored, since the contemporary reader participates in the same condition as does its writers. Some attempt to remedy this by shuttling between different genres; thus, the difference between, say, Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet and The Beauty of the Husband.

Yet Bluets reads like both at the same time, and many other books besides. Why not? The failure here isn’t Nelson’s (for I think this is a wild, brilliantly successful book) but how it is marketed. And while I cannot blame Wave Books for wanting to expand the readership for such an accomplished and fascinating book, it doesn’t help matters to deny Bluets as poetry. It does what Nelson’s admitted poetry does; it also does what her mixed-genre work does. The differences between Pope’s An Essay on Man and Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and H.D.’s Trilogy aren’t differences that demand a clarification of which is and is not verse; why then should something that tacks between the strategies of each invite that question? Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace, for instance, was not exactly a “book” yet it remains a book of serpentine subtlety and beauty.

Why blue? People ask me this question often. I never know how to respond. We don’t get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don’t get to choose.

When you lose the option of choice, you just have to figure out—as Nelson has, through great pain and great intelligence—how to make do with everything.

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.