Year-End Top-Five (plus one)

Little as the Pill believes in universal or non-contingent standards of “quality,” this list could not, in good conscience, bear the title “Best of 2010.” Instead, because I like top-five lists, here are my five favorite poetry reads of the past year, with little commentary because it’s hard to type while holding this champagne flute, and with a bonus because I liked six books enough to include here, and with best wishes to poets and their readers for the coming year.

Kathleen Graber, The Eternal City
Smart is so very, very cool.

Anne Carson, Nox
A rare case in which contents matched up to the promise of compelling packaging.

Paul Muldoon, Maggot
I've said before, and I'll say again, how good a poet I think Muldoon is.

Don Paterson, Rain
Renovation of formal conventions on every page.

Derek Walcott, White Egrets
The sonnet has rarely had it so good.

C.D. Wright, One with Others
Simply broke my heart.

Now go buy these up and read.

A Brief Tour of The Eternal City

As promised, at long last, a few words about Kathleen Graber’s The Eternal City. The first few of which have to do not with the book itself but with the promising start it gives the re-launched Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. I’m pretty sure I’ve indicated before on this blog my opinion of Paul Muldoon (he’s the shit, Gentle Reader, seriously). As poetry editor of the New Yorker, he makes some choices I just don’t understand, but his choice in this instance – his first as series editor for Princeton – is solid.

Here are a few more words, again not yet about the book itself but about the period style exemplified by some of its poems. You are as familiar as I am with the currently, and for a couple of decades now, popular structure in which an anecdote narrated in first-person is juxtaposed to an event in the life of a figure with world-historical importance. Often the anecdote gets a strophe or verse paragraph, then the juxtaposed figure gets one, and then, in the last, the two are brought together, the relationship of the moments and the persons sometimes made explicit and sometimes left for the reader to understand. Graber’s “The Third Day” works pretty much this way: the speaker locks herself out of her apartment while preoccupied with some current political language and is reminded, as she chats with the neighbor who lends her a key, of St. Augustine’s thoughts on evil. Augustine’s own remembered experience is then recounted, along with his distillation from it of a definition of evil, and then, finally, Augustine is implicitly brought to bear on the speaker’s memories and present experience. As I read “The Third Day,” I recognized the formula, to be sure. This is, after all, a prominent period style. I also recognized, though, and this is part of what makes Graber’s book so impressive, that the fact of the formula does not in any way diminish the depth of insight or the persuasiveness of the portrayals (of the speaker, of the neighbor, of Augustine or a thoughtful reader’s relationship with his thought).

There’s a recipe for poems like this, but there’s a recipe behind my mother’s lasagna too, and I will eat a pan of that stuff any time I can. Because what makes a dish great is the way it at once conforms to and transcends the recipe, and where a lot of the run of this particular mill simply shapes a moment of self-expression, Graber’s poem is working out a problem whose importance lies well beyond the expressed self (which, in her poems, is a vehicle for the problem, rather than, as is so often the case elsewhere, a tenor riding the vehicle like a kid on a stolen moped):

What would we do without our fellows? Adam,
the Saint argues, took the apple even thought he knew
the serpent had deceived her, for he could not bear imagining
Eve lost in the wilderness alone. A small child is beating a tree
with a baseball bat trying to knock more ammunition loose,
& the prickly spheres, which horticulturalists call fruit,
dance & dangle – like the thurible the Monsignor swung
sometimes as mass.

I’m struck by the lamination in this passage of significances established earlier in the poem. The fruit of the tree in Eden and the fruit the kid knocks from the tree are both related to the fruit – unripe, inedible, worthless – Augustine remembers stealing. This is sin. But it’s also community, and as apt a metonym for it as the climatically dissatisfied neighbor lending a key to the apartment complex laundry room in which the speaker has locked her own. If the fruit sought as ammo is “like the thurible,” then it sanctifies the air through which it swings. Like language, sometimes.


Two sequences make up the bulk of this book’s contents, the long title sequence at the heart of the volume and a three-part sequence of “Poems for Walter Benjamin.” The “Eternal City” sequence is presided over by the spirit of Marcus Aurelius, whose meditations provide epigraphs for its twelve “books” and provide the framework through which the speaker works her difficulty with stuff. That last word’s chosen deliberately, Gentle Reader, for what’s juxtaposed to Aurelius’s stoic renunciations of worldly goods and trappings is the all-too-familiar difficulty many of us have letting go of anything. I am giving nothing away, so to speak, by calling your attention to the way the form of the sequence, in which each poem’s last line becomes the first of the next poem, performs precisely this difficulty. More than that, “Book Twelve,” which has confronted the speaker’s mother’s death (and her resignation before it, her act of letting go), ends with an echo of the first line of “Book One” (“From my mother’s sister, Peg, I failed to learn frugality”):

I have failed to learn frugality from a tin of salvaged buttons,
but learned instead collection: horn toggles, bright Bakelite
domes. Nearly countless, the year’s cast of soiled buttons,
as though each had been snipped from the cuff of a saint.

Detritus becomes relic through the manner in which we keep it. This sequence is a great demonstration of that manner, an enactment of the transformation of junk to heirloom.

It’s also, and this is part of what I like about the Benjamin poems, too, evidence that Graber’s not afraid to look like she knows things, that she’s read things. These are smart poems that don’t pretend to be less smart than they are (when did poetry become a place where knowledge, especially knowledge having to do with books, with language, had to be disowned?). Look at the way the intellect dances through experience, allusion, and argument in this passage from the second Benjamin poem, “The Telephone”:

For Benjamin, the technology is heroic.
For it has prevailed, he says, like those unfortunate infants of myth,
who, cast out into the shadowy wilderness of the back halls, surrounded

by bins of soiled linens & gas meters, emerge . . . a consolation for loneliness . . . the light of a last hope. The home’s benevolent king.
In a novel by George Konrád, a man attempts to explain to his daughter

why he has had so many lovers: when the clothes come off, he tells her,
everything is discovered. And, he goes on, it is, in the end, discovery
we want. Though wouldn’t even the most inventive among us find –

after so much disrobing – simply more of what we already know?
Shall I celebrate the counterpoint? The nearly infinite revelatory potential
of a bolt of heavy silk run through the fingers of the able seamstress

or the sensuous curves of the first desktop telephone . . .

We’re still in the land of detritus and relic (here, an Austrian telephone museum), of collection as transformation. But these are the problem with which the verbally manifest mind struggles. On one hand, the old phones are fragments like those Benjamin writes of in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” bits of wreckage that, if grasped, we can see “shot through with chips of messianic time.” And this particular technology has everything to do with connection (through the switchboard), with communication. On the other hand, another way we attempt connection, if not communication, is fraught with an estranging familiarity (that might be my best phrase for characterizing these poems), a quality Graber herself achieves as she slips, almost unnoticeably, from clothes coming off to discovery (as uncovering), from disrobing to revelation (the moving of the veil, like the shedding of the robe, or is it?), so that we at last see the sexiness of the old phone in a way that holds Benjamin in a sort of suspension and that suggests, against the character in Konrád, the real intimacy in what comes between us.

Why yes, I think I will have another Cosmopolitan

You see, the thing is, the Pill has had trouble getting around to the prose he’s meant to write for this here review-type blog, the problem being not only that he’s producing a whole lot of other prose for other, less bloggy, purposes (though is he ever), but also that, while he’s been meaning to sit right down and compose a review of Kathleen Graber’s excellent The Eternal City (an intention he continues to hold because that book is good and you should all be told so in no uncertain terms), he just can’t quit going back to Donna Stonecipher.

“No,” I kept telling myself. “This here blog’s supposed to be about new stuff and that there Cosmopolitan book’s a good two years old.”

“But, Self,” it finally occurred to me to reply, “it’s my blog. It can have whatever I want on it.”

And, Gentle Reader, I want some prose about The Cosmopolitan.

This is not to say that I don’t want to write about the poems in Stonecipher’s earlier volumes, The Reservoir and Souvenir de Constantinople, but The Cosmopolitan’s prose poems are the texts that keep drawing me back – to reread, to think about, to copy out in my notebook (there is not much higher praise than that last, I think). Why? Well, because, G.R., they are smart and compelling and memorable. The book’s “Note to the Reader” links the poems to what Stonecipher calls her “generation’s relationship to quotation and collage,” and she name-checks Joseph Cornell along with inlaid furniture as analogies for these poems. The “Note” seems intended to account in this way for the quotations that appear in the poems, but it also suggests both the paratactic relationships among the sentences and numbered sections that make up the poems and the indirect eliciting of an emotional response through correlatives that might be objective but are also redolent of intimate symbolism.

Which is to say, well, here, look at these two consecutive sections of “Inlay 14 (Walter Benjamin)”:

4.
Oh yes, she liked the opera, she said, sure – but only the arias. What would life be like, we wondered under the Prussian-blue dome adorned with stars, with only the best parts left in – aria after aria? In 1874, the book said, a Danish mathematician proved that not all infinities are of equal size.

5.
The relics are safe in their gold reliquaries. The roses in the botanical drawings aren’t going anywhere, exposed and in the throes of cross-section like beauty submitting to the torture it does call forth of its own accord. Nor is the bee going to get very far, dead on the edge of the windowsill like a spent hedonist.

Set aside the “Prussian-blue” of the dome (not because it isn’t lovely, but just because it’s the most obviously Cornellian touch) and see how the carefully selected bits are juxtaposed. What, on the surface, does the proof of unequal infinities have to do with opera composed only of arias, life composed only of heights? Nothing. But each of these calls out from the other a sympathetic resonance. Intensity of experience or emotion feels as though it opens onto infinity; the stars in that dome represent massive fireballs whose distant light lasts effectively forever. At the same time, though, cue Cornell, the blue of the dome is perhaps the standout fragment in the section, and what it emphasizes is the inarticulable loveliness of the spaces between, spaces much vaster than the stars themselves, dwarfing both astronomical dwarves and giants. Not all infinities are of equal size.

Now look at the three examples of containment in the next section. They build, from precious objects in their cases to objects fixed in representation to the stillness of death (itself figured as the exhaustion of pleasure). The continuity within the section is discernible, but what’s it got to do with those infinities? Well, everything, we sense from the shimmer set off by their proximity. The infinity of death, the infinity of art, the infinity of holiness; all infinite, but unequal.

The whole poem works through these processes of association, indirect affinity, the occasional suggestion of narrative. It also (like the other poems, like the volume as a whole) sketches a city, traverses that space, invokes the spirit of the writer whose quotation is “inlaid” in the poem, and follows the titular “Cosmopolitan” through adventures of body, mind, and spirit.

I’ve been trying for months now to get over this book (another great one brought to you by the fine folks at Coffee House, by the way), to get on to newer and more current or more pressing things. I can’t. And it’s Donna Stonecipher’s fault.

Now That's What I'm Talking About

So here I was all set to start a post about the exhaustion, enervation, etc., of the confessional tradition and a recommendation that poets declare a moratorium on use of the first-person singular pronoun, when over the transom drops Lisa Robertson’s new volume, R’s Boat. Gentle Reader, this book saves the first-person singular pronoun for contemporary lyric poetry. How, you ask? Why, I say, let me paraphrase T.S. Eliot’s characterization of the Tube commuters in the third part of "Burnt Norton": exhausted from exhaustion by exhaustion.

Which is to say that Robertson renders the “I” without any discernible confessional content by repeating it as the subject of sentence after sentence whose existence seems predicated less on a speaking self than on a sort of emanation from the rules of transformational grammar:

I’m talking about weird morphing catalogues and fugitive glances.
I could have been wrong.
I subsist by these glances.
I desire nothing humble or abridged.
I’m using the words of humans to say what I want to know.
I did not sigh.
I confined my thievery to perishable items.
I do not want to speak partially.
I loosened across landscape.
I doubt that I am original.
I’ve been lucky and I’m thankful.
I dreamt I lied.
I stole butter and I studied love.
(Face/)

Now, some of the interesting work here is done by the simple anaphora; repeating that diphthong over and over at the beginnings of lines makes it just another phoneme rather than the locus of identity or affect. But this is enhanced by the (mostly) paratactic relation among the lines/sentences; absent narrative or logical conjunctions, they could all be spoken by different speakers (the alternation of Roman and italic type suggests at last two), but the notion of “speakers” itself seems not quite right. Instead, the lines might simply show how sentences are formed of subjects and predicates. Our attention is shifted from expectations of confessional revelation or narrative resolution to an almost musical play of “themes” embedded in the predicates’ diction and the ghost of allusion. While the “fugitive glances” are picked up in “these glances,” most of the lines in either typeface lack this kind of linkage. Instead, we can focus on other ways the lines might connect. For example, the italicized sentences here tend towards negation and a lack of efficacy; the Roman lines emphasize positive agency. These themes are developed by the typographically marked “voices” throughout the poem (certain sentences recur from time to time, switching from Roman to italics and back), and, along with the background harmonies of sound repetition, they achieve a disembodied emotional intensity. Or not quite disembodied, because Robertson sneaks the heart in (“Here I make delicate reference to the Italian goddess Cardea who shuts what is open and opens what is shut”). Like the resolution in the tonic after a spirited spell of dissonance, the emotional tension satisfyingly climaxes when the voices synch up:

I made my way to London.
I made my way to London.



Robertson’s practice here reminds us that “text” comes from the craft of weaving. She shows the threads of certain sentences against a variety of other threads, so that small irregularities of weight or color are discernible, so that the different ways a thread can look are displayed and explored. The poem enacts emotion arising from language and the grammatical relation among parts of speech as much as it describes emotion arising from interpersonal drama and the frustration of desire, so when we get to “This is emotional truth. / I’m crying love me more.” our sympathy has been earned by not being asked for. “Such,” Robertson writes at the end of this poem, “is passivity. / I will not remember, only transcribe.” And that’s ambition enough.

Not all the poems in R’s Boat work in exactly the same way. All are longish (they run from six or seven to twelve or so pages), and all explore the construction of self and world in language. Some, though, perform reference and description, suggest narrative and action, more than others do. “A Cuff,” which originally appeared as a chapbook, achieves its effects of estrangement by mingling argumentative and descriptive registers. Here’s an early example of the latter:

The room runs to swags
And popular flower pornography
The house amplifies the trembling as if its inhabitants are lodged in an ear
To make something from what I am
From proximity, bitterness
Is just brutal
So I turned to syllables

The last three lines there put as effectively as it can be put the agony of the poem as expression of self and the ecstasy of the poem as experience of language. And here’s a nice bit of the argumentative:

If females lick
Language, death, economy
Cold sky with flat grey stormclouds
The seaport at sunset
Tubes of yellow light
This suture is a form of will
Furthermore the paradise is only ever indexical.

Proper nouns appear from time to time; cities and philosophers and artists are named. A couple of dates and times are given, though they only pretend to locate us in a world outside the text. Logical constructions give way to and then co-exist with details that might, but don't necessarily, point to a space beyond the page . And still, when Robertson writes “Now we run our fingers / Quick and innocuous / In the proper order and sequence and from the beginning,” I hear keyboards of both typewriting and musical kinds and sense, too, something (perhaps simply the lingering notion of reference) being tickled. The grammar of this sentence’s end -- “Because of my body / In the absence of a system / (It is both in ruins and still under construction)” – leaves it productively unclear whether the antecedent of the last line’s pronoun is “body” or “system.” Productively, because it’s good to be reminded, especially to be so hauntingly and musically and provocatively reminded, that even our bodies we know through codes and combinatorics. We come to our senses, or perhaps our senses come to us, through syntax.

Full Irish

The Pill is back from two busy and pleasurable weeks in Ireland and glad to see that you’ve all entertained yourselves and each other in the comments. Truly glad, because it is, I think, a GOOD THING when people vigorously air their disagreements and debate issues of aesthetics, ethics, politics, etc. I especially value some of the substantial comments that take issue with my arguments and analyses; these will send me back to the poems to see whether, in the different light cast by the critiques, the poems themselves look different. For those comments, thank you. This is how the language game of critique is supposed to work, isn’t it? I report on the nature of my experience of the work. Your experience is like or not like mine and you say so and describe your own. Might mine be misguided somehow? Maybe. So I test my experience against your account of yours. And so on. To forcefully articulate a position but to hold the position aware that it is not unassailable is, it seems to me, one of the prerequisites of evaluative criticism. I don’t assume that my judgment (that’s all criticism is) is infallible. This is not, of course, to guarantee that a strong counter-argument will persuade me, any more than I assume that my arguments will change anybody else’s mind. I’ve got some ideas of my own about irony and immanent evidence for tone and the renovation (as opposed to the mere repetition) of cliche, after all. I’m just glad we’re talking about this stuff, and at a pretty high volume (in both senses).


I’ve titled this post “Full Irish” in honor of the breakfast that bears this name, which, for the uninitiated, typically includes egg, bacon, sausage, mushrooms, beans, black and white puddings, whiskey, choice of Hansel or Gretel, grilled tomato, toast, tea, and Pepto Bismol. Herewith, some similarly smorgasbordish thoughts inspired by the trip.

In Dublin’s fair city, I took in some Joyce-related sights and was prompted to recall that moment in “The Dead” when Gabriel Conroy is accosted by Miss Ivors. “You’re G.C.,” she says, “outing” him as the author of a book review he published over his initials. This was a gratifying reminder that to publish a review over one’s initials is neither anonymous nor trollish, but is, in fact, simply adherence to a long-standing convention in reviewing, one dating back to the invention of the review in the new periodicals of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. And then, feeling peckish, your faithful correspondent lunched upon a Gorgonzola sandwich and retired to Davy Byrne’s for a one-eyed pint.

As I was driving westward a few days later, two texts kept repeating in my head. Each, in its way, recalls the Famine that devastated the island, and especially the less fertile western areas, in the 1840s. In “That the Science of Cartography Is Limited,” Eavan Boland frames an image of the Famine’s traumatic presence in Irish history with autobiographical intimacy:

When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.

Look down you said: this was once a famine road.

I looked down at the ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in

1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.

The juxtaposition of young lovers and the wound in the land works here, I think, because it’s in the service of exploring the ineffable. Our representational schemes simply don’t enable us to capture or render certain realities. While it’s not the poem’s primary focus, an important reality it registers is the way love is constructed in part by the shared witness of historical suffering (it’s a weird, but apt, kind of courting that the poem recounts but also subtly suggests tends to be missing from our accounts). In Lucky’s amazing speech in Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett literalizes and inverts Hegel’s master and slave relationship as if to ask what love’s got to do with it and to emphasize a starkly chilling and historically resonant memento mori:

. . . I resume the skull fading fading fading and concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons unknown in spite of the tennis on on the beard the flames the tears the stones so blue so calm alas alas on on the skull the skull the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the labors abandoned left unfinished graver still abode of stones in a word I resume alas alas abandoned unfinished the skull the skull in Connemara . . .

Wildly different, not least in their original languages, these passages share not only the Famine as a reference point but also evidence of rigorous thought about the ways that event’s significance figures in the presents of Ireland in the 1990s and Paris in the first postwar decade.

I’ve had good times in Galway in the past, standing in a crowded pub, sipping a pint, listening to a half-dozen musicians playing trad in the corner. What’s most impressive about some of those performances is that the musicians don’t seem to care whether anyone’s listening (and not everyone is). Their attention is on the music, and they seem to be moved by a sense of responsibility to it rather than to the pub full of people. They’ll test each other’s knowledge and, sometimes, the punters’ patience, with esoteric choices and unexpected juxtapositions. This time, though, the center of the city seemed like a sort of Disneyland Ireland, and it was packed with tourists whose guidebooks had clearly told them they should seek out music pubs for some good, old-fashioned craic, and the pubs had drawn musicians happy to turn their backs to the tradition and mug for the crowd. The tourists ate this stuff up, of course. Maybe the musicians went home and congratulated themselves on the way they ironically riffed on the tourists’ desires for accessibly happy or sappy songs performed in broad stage-Paddy stylings. I’d like to think so. But whether they did or not, the experience of watching and hearing them seem simply to perform accessibly happy and sappy songs in broad stage-Paddy stylings left this listener, who loves and values the carefully crafted, expertly innovated, real thing, disappointed.

Poets Per Capita

Are there more poets per capita in Northern Ireland than in most other places? I'm not sure. But the density of quality poetry produced here is impressive, to say the least. Sure, there are the Ulster Renaissance types everybody knows: Heaney, Longley, Mahon, Muldoon, McGuckian. But also an older generation or two who ought to have a wider readership. John Hewitt, for instance, whose house I passed on the way from Dublin to Belfast today. Or Louis MacNeice, for whose "Snow" alone he ought to be more famous (and whose Autumn Journal is one of my favorite poems of the late 1930s). But MacNeice said awful things about Ireland, and I'm having a good time here, so instead I'll give you a sample of Ciaran Carson (whose middle name I would tell you if I knew it, but, alas, I do not), and since I'm about to go enjoy a pint at the Crown, here's a pub poem:

Last Orders

Squeeze the buzzer on the steel mesh gate like a trigger, but
It's someone else who has you in their sights. Click. It opens.
Like electronic
Russian roulette, since you never know for sure who's who, or what
You're walking into. I, for instance, could be anybody. Though I'm told
Taig's written on my face. See me, and would I trust appearances?

Inside, a sudden lull. The barman lolls his head at us. We order Harp --
Seems safe enough, everybody drinks it. As someone looks
daggers at us
From the Bushmills mirror, a penny drops: how simple it would
be for someone
Like ourselves to walk in and blow the whole place, and
ourselves, to Kingdom Come.

Worst. Book. Ever.

The Pill is, as a rule, averse to superlatives. I have, when pressed, been heard to aver that Ardbeg is the best single malt Scotch whisky and that British Air is the worst airline on which to fly to or from London, but that’s about it. So it is with some hesitation that I tell you that Dorothea Lasky’s Black Life is the worst volume of poetry I have ever read, but tell you that I will. And Gentle Reader, I have read this.

It’s an ugly book, and I don’t just mean the awful and illegible cover, the bizarre trim size or the off-putting Quemadura typeface (though those are all bad enough). I mean the poems themselves.

I’ll get to the ugliness. But first I’ve got to admit to some simple confusion. Are these poems dramatic monologues, with speakers distinct from the poet? I kept hoping so, especially when I came upon a solecism like this (from “Fat”):

I have wandered for six days with no bread, drank lemon water
Went running.

This, my fellow lovers of the language, is incorrect tense usage; the sentence begins with the past participle form of the verb (“have wandered”) but slips, after the comma, to the simple past (keep the "have" in your head when you get to "drank" and you'll hear the problem). A deft and economical way of characterizing a speaker, suggesting sloppiness of thought through intentional sloppiness of language? A moment in which we are subtly invited to join the poet in her ironic distance from this linguistically slovenly speaker? Would that it were so. The same poem includes banal lines about writing poems:

I have written poems about the flesh of scientists
But nothing in their science speaks to me about my art.

Oh dear. But wait. It's worse. Examples abound. Here’s another, from “Ars Poetica”:

Yesterday my boyfriend called me, drunk again
And interspersed between ringing tears and clinginess
He screamed at me with a kind of bitterness
No other human being had before to my ears
And told me that I was no good.

Perhaps he meant her grammar, for the “interspersed” in the second line suggests that what we’ll find between the tears and, ahem, "clinginess" is a noun, not the verb phrase “He screamed.” Something, rather than some action, is interspersed between (or, better, among) other things.

Pedantry? OK. I’ll accept that. But Ezra Pound, who was woefully wrong about many things, was right, I think, when he wrote that poetry should be as well written as well-written prose, and these here Black Life poems are emphatically not.


What they are is chopped-up bad prose about how hard it is to be the poet (and these poems never, ever let the reader forget that they were written by a real, live poet):

I am a great woman, I have the wiles
That make the poet
But I am also gentle
And when I kiss a man I really mean it
Have you felt this too, upon my kisses
That I gave you in the nightsky
As your eyelashes hung over the moon?
Or were you too young to see it too,
My little feverish butterfly

Oh, the cheap cummingsy runtogetherness! Oh the sappy Chagallery! Oh the missing terminal punctuation! Oh, the humanity!

One is embarrassed for Lasky at a moment like this. Or like this here other one, from “Jakob”:

Readers, you read flat words
Inside here are many moments
In which I have screamed in pain
As the flames ate me.

One's critical response is reduced by such lines as these to the head-shaking repetition of "Oh dear." But, OK, these are just run-of-the-mill bad, the sort of awful self-obsessed, craftless crap that smears a thousand workshop tables in creative writing classrooms and MFA programs around the country (and soils, one admits, far more notebooks whose sophomore owners have the decency to keep them out of sight and, perhaps, when the writers come to cast mature eyes on their late-night, wine-fueled drivel, consign them to the cleansing flames). I got halfway through the book just irritated by the fact that this stuff got slapped between those ugly covers instead of being sanitarily flushed.

And then I read “Ever Read a Book Called Awe?”

[Gentle Reader, this humble blogger pauses now to ask you to recognize that, though the following might at first blush feel intemperate, great restraint in fact was brought to bear in the composition and revision of these sentences.]

It's bad enough that we're treated to the navel-gazing bout of self-absorption in which the poet asks if we've read her previous book, in which she goes on to describe, in a sickening faux-naif tone, the publication process, and that this wince-inducing anecdote is made somehow to stand for love as it's juxtaposed to "Some people I love / Don't love me." (Yeah, I threw up in my mouth a little there, too.) What transforms icky to full-on revolting is the next juxtaposition. Sometimes, you see, people love the speaker (I'm going to retain this persona/poet distinction, though there's precious little evidence to support it), and, as the poem has it, "That's good," and then the Big and Important Generalizations appear:

When you sit in a landscape of snow
And you're a bird, that's Awe
When you look over a big green field
And the dead soldiers like all around you, that's Love

And when you shift from your navel and your precious little undeserved career to the Capital-H History figured by those dead soldiers, whose vintage, by way of that "Awe," seems to be in the 2003-present category, that's stealing some unearned gravitas from the fatigue pockets of casualties like a camp follower grabbing wallets. And it's disgusting.

Bad poems, Gentle Reader, are bad enough. This book is worse. It's ugly.

Laugh Line Award?

Clearly I misread. It can't be that the James Laughlin award has been given to the execrable Michael Dickman? The award named for the founder and lifelong director of New Directions, the press that brought real experimental and interesting poetry (and other stuff) to American audiences? Must have been the Laugh Line Award instead. You know, for poems stuffed with knowing moments when the poet looks up from the page and all the hipster kids in the crowd laugh loudly to show they got the joke. Longer post coming soon.

The Unbearable Being of Labels

I like prose poems. Lots of different kinds of them, too, from Paris Spleen to Perelman. And I write what goes by various cutely alliterative names: flash fiction, short short stories (I prefer the assonantal quick fiction). The more I read and the more I write, the more I wonder whether the modifiers in these monikers are really necessary.

If a prose poem is a poem (and I know there are those who will argue that it's not), why can't we just call it a poem? And if a short short is a story (ditto), how about just "story"?

In the case of the latter, I've often invoked a track and field analogy: some stories are sprints, some middle distance races, and some are long, cross-country treks. Length is no real help in discussions of the prose poem (though there are p.p. sprints - the typical Eshelman or Matthea Harvey breaks the tape after a couple-hundred words - and longer distances - I'm looking at you, John Ashbery). But differentiating stories by their length is not the same as taxonomizing poems by length; even when we distinguish epic from lyric, length is only the most obvious (but perhaps not the most important) salient feature. No matter how long a poem is, as long as its right-hand margin is irregular, as long, that is, as it's broken into lines, we call it a poem. A prose poem, whether it's a single sentence or book-length, always has to wear its defensive-sounding adjective, as if admitting that it's somehow not a "real" poem (but if it listens to the blue fairy and the cricket and behaves itself for a long time, it might, someday, . . .).


Poem, it is worth remembering from time to time, is at least as much an indication of how we read a given text as of that text's essence or nature. Whether in lines or in paragraphs, if we read it with a special attention to language as a material out of which something is fashioned, if we're on the lookout for its self-referring, self-consuming characteristics, we're reading it as if it's a poem, and if we're doing that, we're making it, by the way we read it, a poem. Just a poem.

Give It Away, Give It Away, Give It Away Now

As promised, thing two of the two things left on the Pill's mind a couple of posts ago. I mentioned there and I've mentioned before the shrinking poetry dollar, or the shriveling part of the discretionary spending pie chart served up for poetry by the reading public. Where one used to complain that only poets were reading poetry, the days when that was the complaint now seem to have been the good old days. Even poets, or poetasters, or would-be, ersatz, erstwhile, proleptic and otherwise possible poets aren't reading the stuff these days.

I overstate, for polemical effect. But here's the thing: a whole lot of poetry books, chapbooks, mags, e-mags, zines, pamphlets, and broadsheets are being produced and marketed by presses large and small, corporate and academic, by indie and mini and micro and happy and sneezy and sleepy and doc. How much, this book-buying, mag-subscribing, screen-reading blogger wonders, is being sold (and, ipso fatso, bought)? Not enough of it, according to the frequent plaints and laments about the shrinking audience for poetry on the page (not the same as the audience for poetry in performance, which will require another post entirely). Which prompts the larger question: why are we bothering to sell the stuff anyway?

There was a time (1720 til 1890, say), and bliss was it in that dawn to be a poet (unless you were John Keats getting beaten up on the pages of the Edinburgh Review), when composers of verses could make an honest living by the sweat of their quills. Though, really, Grub Streeters still either required a wealthy patron or grunted and sweated under a weary weight of hack-work to keep themselves in cheap meat pies and sack. There followed that Golden Age when a strong dollar and inexpensive Euro-digs let some modernists live off their writing, but even then it was the rare poet who could get by without a wealthy spouse, the kindness of friends, a day job, or all of the above. It was, of course, the postwar proliferation of English departments (to soak up G.I. Bill undergraduates) and creative writing programs that provided the sinecures in which poets could secure the means of literary production.

The point of this potted history, and especially of its parentheses, asides, digressions, and qualifications, is that the stuff has never sold well enough to keep more than a small handful of poets in garrets, tallow candles, and patched hose, and the poets who lived most securely while producing some great stuff tended to have (non-literary, non-teaching) day jobs anyway. So if most poets aren't making their living by selling their poetry and are instead making their living by writing other stuff or teaching or selling insurance, if, that is, most poets are producing poems not because it is remunerative but because it is in other (very important) ways fulfilling, and if, as I think is the case, one of the most important of those modes of fulfilling is precisely antithetical to the notions of capitalist production and the forces of the market (poetry as play, as the park rather than the factory), then again I must ask: why bother trying to sell it?

About thirty years ago, the poet Roy Fisher said in an interview that if poets wanted people to read their stuff they should just give it away. And poetry as part of a gift economy makes much more sense than the efforts to make it compete in the marketplace. Giving it away has a long and glorious history (think of all those poets in Tottel's Miscellany and the Egerton Manuscript). OK, those were courtiers (but think of the day jobs Wyatt and Surrey and company held while they wrote all those sonnets and epistles, while they blamed not their lutes and reached out to "Mine Own John Poins"! Would we have to re-think tenure requirements for poets with academic appointments? Sure: poets could list the pamphlets and loose sheets they handed out, the lyrics and eclogues and epics they posted to the blogosphere and their colleagues would have to do what they've let the market do for them all these years and evaluate the stuff themselves.

Give Chance a Chance

Two things from the last post that I want to follow up on in the next week or so: chance and the shrinking poetry-buying dollar. In the spirit of what follows, I flipped a coin to determine the order. So, here are some thoughts on not making shit up.

Maybe it’s all the Flarf and Conceptual stuff I’m reading (and reading about) these days, maybe it’s that I’ve been playing some composition-by-chance games with my students and on my own, but I find myself nostalgic for the good old aleatory poem. Whether a Cagean writing-through, an Oulipian cut-up, a MacLowesque diastic, or even a cool, refreshing Surrealist automatic writing exercise, it’s fun to take a chance on chance both as reader and as writer (if that last noun’s really the right one; I tend to say that poems I’ve produced through these games are ones I’ve made rather than written).

As reader: I’ve been enjoying re-reading Jackson MacLow lately. I picked up (by chance?) a couple of his books a year or two ago at a great used bookstore in my part of the world and they sat on my bookcase until, needing to choose some Susan Howe and Haryette Mullen poems to teach this fall, I saw them and flipped through. Wot larks! Gentle Reader, hie theee hence and read a little MacLow (there are a few poems here, for instance). To tempt you thither, “Call Me Ishmael”:

Circulation. And long long
Mind every
Interest Some how mind and every long

Coffin about little little
Money especially
I shore, having money about especially little

Cato a little little
Me extreme
I sail have me an extreme little

Cherish and left, left,
Myself extremest
It see hypos myself and extremest left,

City a land. Land.
Mouth; east,
Is spleen, hand mouth; an east, land.

But don’t stop there. Even with no French, you can find examples from Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poemes, a do-it-yourself assembly kit from which may be assembled 10-to-the-14th different sonnets. Bev Rowe has a good translation project going on these. Here’s one:

At five o’clock he rests in his marquise
and sleeves are wrapped round horns of buffalo
the chosen fruit is hued a bright cerise
who knows if sharks will feast on bummalo

The Papuan sucks his friend’s apophyses
your mind turns more and more to gloom and woe
going up to visit town is quite a wheeze
most people like to read the words they know

Milord has lisped from Malibar to Swat
you mix with that you’ll find you’ve had your lot
shame gives a colonel’s brow a greasy sheen

Those Latin states spin like a weathercock
one carts off debris marble from the block
but best is grilled black pudding with sardine

As a writer: I suggested some aleatory methods to my first-year poetry students as a way to help them get out of the prison-house of self-expression and to play the language game of poetry as a poetry of gaming with language. The results were mixed (they always are, I think, with these methods, though in that regard the poems produced are not all different from those produced by other means; there are a lot of bad poems in which every word was consciously and intentionally chosen, too). And, though I don’t write poems much, having long ago realized that I’m better at reading the stuff than at writing it, I gave some of the games a try myself.

That’s when things got weird.

The Pill, Gentle Reader, does not believe in magic, but at a certain point it began to feel as though the interplay of rule and found text was generating stuff that spoke to where I was and what I was thinking and feeling. To wit: I tried some varieties of writing through – using the letters of a name or phrase to select from an existing text a bunch of fragments that became lines. Sometimes I looked for words beginning with the letters of the phrase, sometimes words in which those letters simply appeared. I used the letters’ numeric values to choose page numbers on which to search, lines on the page at which to begin searching, and, sometimes, the number of words to include that fell on either side of the one in which the letter appeared. A couple of results from this kind of game played with Thoreau’s Cape Cod can be found in an essay of mine. But the real magic came when, over a Thanksgiving weekend during which I felt particularly low, I worked through Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy with the letters of a significant proper noun. I won’t hazard a comment on the quality of the product, but I will say that, for the first time, I felt what some writers who use such methods have talked about – something was guiding me to bits of language whose relevance to my situation was palpable. I’d read Burton with great pleasure before, but this time it was like the book was talking to me about me.

Here’s number 3, of 12:

They beget one another and tread in a ring.
If it takes root once, it ends in despair,
perturbation, misery. Torment
hinders concoction,
causes men to be red.
Conceive what it lists,
broken with reproach,
forsaking country and dear friends.

Mischances misaffect the body:
almost natural,
being barren,
some quarrel or grudge, some contention.


I know, I know. There’s an explanatory circularity here: feeling melancholy, one applies the source of the feeling to a text about the feeling and, voila, poems addressing the feeling emerge. But it felt like something more, and for that reason alone I’d recommend giving such games a shot.

Some (P)Arts of the Sonnet

Every generation seems to need a new rehearsal of the sonnet’s history, a new compendium of exemplars, a new set of two-page commentaries. Our age, it seems, demanded its version and so we have, courtesy of Stephen Burt and David Mikics, The Art of the Sonnet.

Sigh.

I suppose it hurts no one to be reminded, again, of the sonnet’s origins in 13th-century Italy, of its importation into English verse by 16th-century diplomats and noblemen, of its enormous popularity among Elizabethan courtiers, its resurgence among the Romantics, and its position as a favorite occasion for experiment (or rabid resistance to experimentalism) among modern and contemporary poets. And yet another volume that takes us from “Whoso list to hount” through Sidney, Spenser, a couple of the best-known Shakespeares, Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Millay, Frost, and Heaney is as good a way as any for the small and shrinking poetry-buying public to spend their few discretionary dollars (though I'd much rather they bought new volumes by living poets, like this one or this here other one). The mini-essays on the sonnets here are fine. Burt is a prolific and deft book-reviewer and his skill is evident (disclosure: we were colleagues a few years ago). But I’ve never been quite sure of the purpose served by commentaries in volumes like this. If the book is for students, the commentaries perform some of the work students ought to do themselves as they play with the poems. If it’s for scholars, the commentaries add little to ongoing critical conversations (we'll read Roland Greene on post-Petrarchanism, thanks). And if the book is, as I suspect it will be, picked up mostly by the sort of well-off professional who would like to add a little literary knowledge as a mark of Bourdieuian distinction (the audience for recorded lectures on, say, music appreciation or classics in translation), the commentaries will too often stand in for, rather than lead into, the poems themselves (it is, after all, much easier to derive cocktail party tidbits from prose about a poem than from the poem itself).

The contents attempt historical comprehensiveness (not just the big three Renaissance sonneteers, but also Fulke Greville and George Gascoigne, not just the major Romantics but also the eccentric American, Jones Very, etc). Likewise, the later periods (the book tilts toward the recent) show at least an awareness of the desirability of aesthetic diversity (a Ted Berrigan sonnet here, a Tony Lopez sonnet there). But it’s precisely here that I find the book most irritating. Take the 30 sonnets included here published after 1960 (please). Among them appear sonnets by May Swenson, Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, Tony Harrison, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Amy Clampitt, John Hollander, Rosanna Warren, Rita Dove, and Alison Brackenbury. Sure, these poets offer certain kinds of diversity. Harrison fills the form with political dissatisfaction, Dove with racial consciousness. Lowell is caught amidst his long experiment with the blank verse sonnet as a journalistic form and Bishop halves the lengths of the lines from their usual pentameter. But these, and most of the others here, exemplify one or another version of the familiar form doing familiar things with fairly familiar themes. (By the way, while two of the great recent experimenters with the sonnet – Geoffrey Hill and Paul Muldoon – are present and accounted for, I find myself wishing, in one of those inescapable critical cavils, that they were represented by some of their more searching experiments; “Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings,” say, or “Quoof”).

Here’s the thing. There are more fun and interesting adventures in the sonnet since 1950 than are dreamt of in this book’s philosophy. The form was a favorite among writers on the political Left during the Fifties (not surprising, given the prominence of politics among the oft-treated themes in the form’s history). One might imagine, to give Harrison some company, an example from Walter Lowenfels’s Sonnets of Love and Liberty, or one of the tart, taut 14-line pokes at pop culture published by Eve Merriam. I’ve acknowledged the welcome presence of Berrigan and Lopez, but here, too, they might have been given a bit more sympathetic company in the form of a section from Lopez’s fellow Cambridge-schooler Drew Milne’s "Garden of Tears," say, or from Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets or Alice Notley’s 165 Meeting House Lane. Indeed, the really interesting riches among experimental sonneteers is something this volume would never lead you to suspect. Here’s half a dozen examples off the top of my head, in no particular order: Ken Edwards’s Eight + Six, Adrian Clarke’s 25 Sonnets, Sean Bonney’s Astrophil and Stella, Allen Fisher’s Apocalyptic Sonnets, Edwin Denby’s In Public, In Private, and Geraldine Monk’s “Ghosts.” (You can find some of these, or parts thereof, in The Reality Street Book of Sonnets.) And this is to say nothing of the great Oulipian games with the form; they’d have to be included in translation, but this didn’t stop Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo wandering leglessly in.

And this, I think, is what fuels my crankiness about another Wyatt-to-Walcott slog through the history of the sonnet. There are plenty of anthologies, with and without commentary, in which a student, a scholar, or a would-be sophisticate can find the familiar sonnets included here, from “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” to “Bluebeard,” and the exemplars better than those included here (Frost’s “Design,” for instance, instead of “Mowing”). Which leaves me, once more, wondering just what purpose is served by this partial (in both senses) survey.

Question Time

Tooling around on Ron Silliman’s blog a couple weeks ago, the Pill discovered a bunch of new poets to check out. Familiar with (indeed, a fan of) Graham Foust, and on nodding acquaintance with poems by a couple of the others Silliman mentioned as exemplars of the “New Precision” (or is it “New Precisionism”?), here was a half dozen or so poets utterly new to me: Joseph Massey, Michael Heller, Donna Stonecipher, and others). It’s a great thing to be introduced to new work (or work unknown to one). But in the last week or so, as part of my work on a writing project, I’ve been having to reread some poems I know pretty well, and there’s no denying the rich pleasure of rereading (hell, according to Roland Barthes, it’s the only real reading).

Most of what I’ve been rereading is distant not only from the Newly Precise, but also from the varieties of poetic experiment typically catalogued on Silliman’s blog. Today, for example, it’s been R. S. Thomas’s “Welsh Landscape,” Seamus Heaney’s “Bruagh,” and Ted Hughes’s Moortown, while yesterday was David Dabydeen’s Turner, and last week was Douglas Dunn’s Elegies. More than that, even the twentieth-century poems I’ve been writing about I’ve been writing about in light of much older and still more familiar ones (the elegiac ones in light of Milton’s “Lycidas,” the others in light of Virgil, Marvell, and Jonson). But between my daily 300-500 words on the book-in-progress and the World Cup semi-final between Uruguay and the Netherlands, I stole an hour to reread something Sillimanesque, since it’d been a while since I’d reread that kind of thing.

Indeed, I reread something so Sillimanesque it was Silliman; driven by questions, it seemed a good idea to return to a poem composed entirely of interrogatives, Silliman’s “Sunset Debris.” I remember reading it something like twenty years ago, back when the New Sentence was really new, and being guided through it by a group of like-minded grad school friends but also by Marjorie Perloff’s discussion of the poem in Wittgenstein’s Ladder. A serious house on serious earth it was, at that time, a challenge to orthodoxies philosophical, poetic, and political, a darkly aggressive and demanding text the reading of which we would, as we did with various other 30-page chunks of difficulty (e.g. Stein’s “Patriarchal Poetry”) wear as a badge of avant-honor.

What a pleasant surprise, then, to reread the poem (it really is thirty pages, and it really is all questions) and discover how much fun it is. Here’s the beginning:

Can you feel it? Does it hurt? Is this too soft? Do you like it? Is this how you like it? Is it alright? Is he there? Is he breathing? Is it him? Is it near? Is it hard? Is it cold? Does it weigh much? Is it heavy? Do you have to carry it far? Are those hills? Is this where we get off? Which one are you? Are we there yet? Do we need to bring sweaters? Where is the border between blue and green? Has the mail come? Have you come yet?

See what I mean?

OK. On one hand, there really is something avant and aggressive in the insistent repetition of a specific syntactic form. As Silliman said about the poem in an interview, communication inherently involves power relationships (well, what he said was “To write is to fuck. To read is to be fucked.”), and the poem puts its reader in a position sort of like that of a hapless Prime Minister caught on the horns of a back-bench challenge before the House, or like one finds oneself in during a round of that old stand-by drinking game, Questions. Provoked by a wrong-footing question like “Which one are you,” it’s tough to resist answering (which forces you to drink) rather than replying with another question. Once you’re playing the game, you’ve got to submit to its rules.

Still, what really stands out for me in this poem now is its playfulness. Many of the moves among questions are non sequiturs, but often one question seems conditioned (or, better, our range of possible interpretive response seems conditioned) by the preceding one or by earlier ones. The first three quoted here establish a pattern that seems to refer to the physical, and the next three continue in that vein but with an added affective element. Taken together, that half-dozen questions invite erotic imaginings. Things might get sinister with “Is he there,” might go off in a different direction with “Is it near,” but when we get to “Is it hard,” or “Is this where we get off,” or “Have you come yet,” I think our reading is influenced by the opening questions. We can play with this in various ways – who is speaking these questions? What relationships can be imagined among the speakers? – but we’re going to be frustrated (not without pleasure, I think) if we try to impose a straightforward drama on the poem. Instead, it’s fun to follow the shift from a discourse of feeling to one we might characterize as topographical to the cliché of kids on a car trip to the intricate connection between perception and taxonomy, and so on, when all that these sentences really have in common (as if that weren’t either significant or enough) is that they’re all questions. Isn’t that cool? Cool enough for sweaters? Was Van Persie offside?

New Laureate

The best reading of poetry requires deep and sustained attention, it demands a retreat from the noises that surround us and a quieting of the voices within us, and it rewards our concentration with a more finely tuned awareness of truths, an awareness that is affirmative even when the news is bad. Few poetries at once demand and reward this kind of careful listening as richly as does W.S. Merwin’s finest work. For over fifty years now, since his first book (A Mask for Janus) was chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series, Merwin has produced poetry that answers to and embodies the deepest difficulties inherent in language and life. He has also published volumes of translations (from, it seems, half the poets who have ever written in three-quarters of the world’s languages, including, most recently, Dante, the Gawain poet, and Follain), and four books of breathtaking prose. Now, this craftsman is the Poet Laureate of the U.S.

Much has been made of the stylistic shifts that have marked Merwin's career, that have, indeed, demarcated its eras. It is true that Merwin began by mastering the intricate and lapidary forms bequeathed him by the European lyric tradition and then, in the early and middle 1960s, published searing, stripped down, fragmentary poems that read like the eroded remains of lyric inscriptions. It is true that the early poems bear little resemblance to a poem like “Gift,” written twenty years later and including such lines as “I am nameless I am divided / I am invisible I am untouchable,” and that “Gift” is not much like the politically aggressive “Questions to Tourists Stopped By a Pineapple Field” published ten years later and that neither of these poems compares in philosophical density and wealth of historical detail to more recent poems like, say, “The Blind Seer of Ambon,” which is itself different from the thrilling autumnal auroras of The River Sound, which, if we really want to compare apples and oranges, cannot approach the epic sweep and episodic pathos of the brilliant book-length narrative poem on nineteenth-century Hawai’i, The Folding Cliffs.

At the same time, a rereading of this long and varied career yields surprising continuities. Merwin’s has always been a poetry crafted amidst and in the full awareness and acceptance of mortality. It is, as life is, a preparation for those last fires. Moreover, the apocalyptic scenarios of the early books continue in the later work, in, for example, the devastating representation of sandalwood logging and its associated natural and human destruction in The Folding Cliffs. Merwin’s passionate care for the natural environment and his passionate critique of human rapacity have energized his poems throughout his career. So have his convictions about injustice and what he has called “the shamelessness of men,” from 1967’s “The Asians Dying” to 2001’s “The Fence,” dedicated to Matthew Shepard.

More central and enduring even than these specific political energies, though, has been Merwin’s understanding that language is at once what enables and enacts those extinctions and injustices and what might help us to find other, better ways of being in the world. Indeed, Merwin’s famous abandonment of punctuation (about halfway through 1963’s The Moving Target – I like to date it, conveniently, to “The Crossroads of the World, Etc.”) can be read as one of his most powerful strategies for loosening the determining and debilitating hold syntax so often has upon us. His unpunctuated lines, whether the short, almost groaned lines of The Lice or the long and limber lines of Travels, involve us in repeated dramas of resolution, revision, and renewed meaning.

Don't take my word for it. Here is "December Among the Vanished," one of my favorites from The Lice:

The old snow gets up and moves taking its
Birds with it

The beasts hide in the knitted walls
From the winter that lipless man
Hinges echo but nothing opens

A silence before this one
Has left its broken huts facing the pastures
Through their stone roofs the snow
And the darkness walk down

In one of them I sit with a dead shepherd
And watch his lambs

And here is "Cold Spring Morning," from Merwin's 2008 volume, The Shadow of Sirius:

At times it has seemed that when
I first came here it was an old self
I recognized in the silent walls
and the river far below
but the self has no age
as I knew even then and had known
for longer than I could remember
as the sky has no sky
except itself this white morning in May
with fog hiding the barns
that are empty now and hiding the mossed
limbs of gnarled wlanut trees and the green
pastures unfurled along the slope
I know where they are and the birds
that are hidden in their own calls
in the cold morning
I was not born here I come and go

To parse these poems is to engage the rules for sense-making, to admit our own wrong-footedness, to rethink relationships (grammatical and otherwise), and to engage a mind that will shrink neither from conviction nor from complexity. To read Merwin is to become a better reader, and to share his cautious hope that better readers might be better people. This, I think, is perhaps the greatest wisdom we might hope for from a careful communion with the mind embodied in Merwin’s poems: an intertwined distrust of language as that which categorizes and prioritizes and, too often, dehumanizes, and as at the same time, also, always, that with which we might come more tentatively, tenderly, but fully to be human together.

World Cup Poetry

All right, my fellow Americans. The Pill has had it with countrymen and countrywomen dissing what the world (rightly) calls football because it is, as they say, "boring." This is especially rich coming from a) fans of baseball (among whom I count myself), which might with more justice stand in the dock accused of the selfsame offense, and b) fans of things like symphonic or chamber music, avant-garde art, and, ahem, poetry.

Why do I number the latter among this company? Because, Gentle Reader, I have heard the philistines calling each to each when the Superior Genre celebrated on this lyriophilic blog is mentioned (I do not think that they will call to me), and the sound borne on the breeze from where they gather before American Idol is this: "bo-ring, bo-ring, bo-ring."

Here's the thing: "boring" is always code for something else (typically the bovine refusal to engage), and in this case (these cases -- what I'm saying of soccer I'm also saying of poetry) it's code for "I don't get it." And haven't we all, those of us who proselytize for soccer or for poetry (or both), confronted the dismissal of our beloved part of culture as boring by those who simply haven't yet learned the moves? Both matches and poems often offer easy surface pleasures, I think, and a moment spent absorbing those is fun enough all by itself. But both soccer games and sonnets open up in pleasurable and interesting ways when we spend the little time required to learn the basics, when we learn the pattern so that we can see the meaning in a deviation from it.

And what's true of poetry in general, I think, is true of particular kinds of poetry as well. Am I the only one who has heard from readers who claim to enjoy the genre that they simply can't get into, say, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, because, unlike the poems of Shakespeare or Keats or Mary Oliver or Spencer Reese, it's "boring"? Isn't this, though, simply a way of saying (as those who complain about a goalless match full of brilliant midfield play will say) "I don't get it and am unwilling to put any effort into trying to get it"? Any reason why we should listen to such people, to say nothing of making them directors of the NEA or having them edit anthologies for classroom use?

Review: Ross's Vinland

The Pill is willing to admit – can see no shame in it – that he is probably influenced by the opinions of those whose opinions he respects. The whole reviewing racket, after all, is premised on the assumption that one’s opinions might influence someone, somewhere. More concerning to the Pill is the possibility that his opinions are unduly influenced by antagonism to those whose opinions he’s never cared for. Either way, one wants to think one’s mind is one’s own. So as I read a handful of newish books from Four Way, which I can do now that the semester is over, the grades are in, the cap and gown are hung back up until next May, I wonder whether I’d like Monica Youn’s Ignatz better without one of its blurbs (by a grad-school writing group buddy of the poet’s, though of course this, natch, is left unstated), and whether I’d like Jamie Ross’s Vinland less without its endorsement by Brigit Kelly (who judged the competition for the Four Way Books Intro Prize). Kelly is not only a poet gifted with the capacity to cast keen observations into the kind of precise language that etches enzyme pathways through the neural network; she is also a generous reader – in multiple senses: she devotes time during her own readings to the poems of other poets, she takes time to read with care and comment with encouragement, insight, and rigor on the efforts of graduate students who really shouldn’t bother her with such things (I was one such fortunate neophyte), and, it turns out, she gets right to the heart of a project like Ross’s.

Kelly’s citation (it deserves a better name than “blurb,” and is really something like a prose poem itself) repeats terms that, as well as any, give a sense of what Ross is up to in Vinland: dreams, visions, rhythms. A visual artist as well as a poet, Ross is concerned with perception and what warps it, with the representation of the perceived, the rendering of the real into the angles, curves, and intersections that might convey it to a second-hand perceiver. These concerns manifest themselves not only in the subjects of some of these poems (“El Niño,” or “Infinite Physics, Infinite Hand,” or “Flyer” or “Treehouse”), which are about painting or the view from one standpoint or another, but also, and more importantly, in Ross’s handling of language and those units – the word, the phrase, the line – that are poetry’s cognates for the painter’s color, modeling, and plane. Check out, for example, this stanza from the title poem:

I say it is rain, for the rooster. And the fog,
and the dispersion of the small. And I say
it is rain for the sound of despair. For
the clutched breath in a child’s dream
when the mare goes blind and licks
a wound. For the light I cannot reach. For
my father is building his boat.

Note the first line’s insistence on artifice; we don’t see rain, we see the saying that “it is rain.” And this is attached not to a cause (it’s cloudy) or to evidence (there are drops falling from the sky), but to a non sequitur in the form of an adverbial phrase. This is no more about rain than “The Red Wheel Barrow” is about a wheelbarrow. It is, instead, about “rain,” and the ways the word connects – through sound to “rooster,” through the discourse of climate to “fog,” through the family resemblance to other droplet-like things in “the dispersion of the small.” The third sentence then takes sonic resemblance to re-interprets it as affective resemblance. The next sentence elaborates despair through concrete emblems. The repeated “for the” structure establishes a pattern that is broken by the stanza’s concluding sentence, which uses a word that appears to be the same (“for”) in a different grammatical sense (here as a synonym for “because”). What I’m getting at is that Ross is using language here in a way that foregrounds the substance itself rather than the objects, relationships, attitudes, etc., that everyday language (and too much contemporary poetry) is supposed simply to reveal.


Sometimes, the poems work through perception to moments of fairly clear narrative or meditation. In “The Most Handsome Man in America,” the speaker reads a photograph first in terms of objects in space (“We see the bottom of a car, parked / at the top”), then in terms of familial history (the photograph depicts the speaker’s parents), and, finally, in terms of that history’s emotional and thematic significance. These are fine performances of a standard poetic progression. I find myself much more powerfully drawn, though, to the poems in which I’m much less sure about what’s going on, in which the important relationships are those established among phrases and images themselves rather than among those things toward which they are supposed to point. In “Coal Seam,” for instance:

I’m out, the night again. The field. New growth
over September. Some black straw. Some burnt wheat.
Strange sun in a glass-fire.

Olivia was here. No cuts she said, it was your sweater. You
never knew how leaves could smolder. Never broke a slag-heap

for timbers in this cabin. No one asks, weren’t they green –
I chinked them, who would care?

Is there a picture here, a narrative? Sure, and with some interpretive pressure and guess work both can be sketched. But I don’t think either the picture or the story is the locus of the poem’s power (and it’s got power). Instead, phrases are repeated in ways that call out a current of subterranean significance. “No cuts” recurs later, for example, and connects with “two / lines of blood,” itself the third in a series of figures, to lend a violence to what is being described (mining), that then slants the word “blade,” here referring to grass, in the semantic direction of knives or axes. The black straw and burnt wheat of the first lines, the glass-fire and smoldering leaves, similarly exert a linguistic gravitational pull on later words and phrases.

Throughout Vinland, Ross wonderfully plays language against itself, exploits the inherent multiplicity of meanings, through these painterly tricks of juxtaposition and patterned repetition. Dreams, visions, rhythms. Indeed.