Review: Duhamel's Bankruptcy

There are, I suppose, reviewers who like going all Francis Jeffrey on poets and their poems, but I’m not one of them. This scrupulous blog, however, is dedicated to the impartial – or explicitly and admittedly partial but, one hopes, not unfair – reviewing of whatever volumes make it, by whatever means, over the digital transom. So it is not with pleasure that I am saying here that Denise Duhamel’s Ka-ching! (Pitt Poetry Series, 2009; exclamation point in title) is terrible, but that is indeed what I am saying.

I’d like to say that I dislike this book because, like so many others I dislike, its poems are simply autobiography rendered in chopped prose without the tension of formal conventions, without attention to language in its languageyness (self-reference and simultaneous multiple meanings and sound over sense and materiality, for example). I can’t, though, because Duhamel does a lot of things here that, at least when they’re done well, I like. She writes prose poems, for example, and she writes some sestinas, and she sometimes plays precisely with these characteristics of language. This makes things a little tougher. Only a little, though, because the way Duhamel handles the prose poem, the sestina, and the self-referential and material aspects of language is so simple and cheap that the poems are drained of the energy that comes from any sort of challenge to the reader.

The book’s themes are money and chance (two things I think poets might profitably [ahem] explore more often), and the volume opens with “Play Money,” a sequence of prose poems titled in which each successive poem is titled with a higher dollar amount. I say “prose poems” because the book is labeled “Poetry” on the back cover and is published by the Pitt Poetry Series, but there’s nothing about these pieces that foregrounds language-as-language or that warps or estranges the narrated reality as good prose poems do. I might call them very short stories (the kind of thing you can find here), but even that seems to grant them a little more literary status than their structures (straightforwardly anecdotal, with maybe a clunky O. Henry twist) or characters (caricatures) merit. They’re really memoirettes about pretty typical money-related experiences (a heroic penny-pinching CEO pinches a penny, a deadbeat roommate steals and cheats, our hapless heroine doesn’t get a job). That last one is representative in its reliance upon cliché at every level:

I had resisted going to the MLA conference, a meat market for fresh English PhDs who were stiff in their new or borrowed suits, vying like dreary Miss Americas for tenure track lines. The judges were the gray-haired full professors, crinkled, withered – five o’clock shadows on the men, orthopedic shoes on the women. They yawned through candidate presentations and had long lunches paid for by their institutions. But I really wanted the job and going to MLA showed I was serious.

One wishes some of the desire to be taken seriously had led to the invention of fresher images and phrases. “Meat market”? Really? Job interview as beauty pageant? Nobody’s thought of that one before. Boy, she nails the gray eminences of the literary professoriate, though, right down to their metonymic shadows and shoes. Am I motivated to complain about this one because, well, some of my best friends are gray-haired full professors (some, indeed, both “crinkled” and “withered”!)? Probably. But only because my experience of that world does not resemble the clichés with which Duhamel attempts to capture it. (Now, if she'd written about black skirts, black leather jackets, and black-and-white kaffiyeh . . .)

What I find more annoying even than such an “I resemble that remark” moment is the way the poem (“$700,000”), like several others in the book, commits the cardinal sin of complaining in poems about how hard it is to be a poet. Now, I know that poems often include moments of such self-reference (Keats’s fears that he might cease to be, for example, are largely vocational), but there’s a world of difference between the worry that one’s early death is going to prevent him from filling books with all that’s in his head and resentment over how one couldn’t land the tenured sinecure that would have underwritten a poetic career. An analogy, if I might be permitted such a trope: the former is like this, while the latter is like this here.

And even when the poems about poetry and being a poet aren’t complaints, and even when they take the refreshingly estranging form of something like a sestina, they fall flat by taking a simple joke too far and, like your uncle at the wedding after too much champagne, explaining the punch line. Here, exhibits A and B:

from “Delta Flight 659”

I’m writing this on a plane, Sean Penn,
with my black Pilot Razor ballpoint pen.
Ever since 9/11, I’m a nervous flyer. I leave my Pentium
Processor in Florida so TSA can’t x-ray my stanzas, penetrate
my persona. Maybe this should be in iambic pentameter,
rather than this mock sestina, each line ending in a Penn

variant.

And from “I Dreamed I Wrote This Sestina Wearing My Maidenform Bra” (Gentle Reader, nostalgic as you might be for the ads on which it riffs, you and I only wish I were bullshitting you about that title)

In the thirties, A-cup breasts were called nubbins,
B cups snubbins,
C cups droopers, and D cups super droopers.
In the fifties, a bullet bra could make a bombshell
Of most women. Pointy torpedo cups
had every Hollywood starlet hooked.

OK. Credit where it’s due. All the “pen”s took some coming up with, and there’s a pun embedded in the brand name of the speaker’s pen in the first excerpt, and the play of figurative and literal language in the fourth line of the second excerpt refreshes the dead metaphor of “bombshell.” But the “pen”s seem suited more to a parlor game (or a drinking game) than to a poem about the relationship of poetry to politics, and the last line gives away the gimmick with five stanzas still to get through. And one can only wish the poet dreamed of writing in ways that might more effectively delight and instruct.

I mean lift and separate.

But the book is not without some more successful poems, and it’s not surprising that these are the poems in which the poet writes about things other than the poems she’s writing, turns her attention to persons other than her poem-writing self. “Basically,” for instance, separates children into two kinds (the ones who torture and the ones who rescue) and lifts each up in turn to understand how “all children are exhausted by the cruelties / of the world and fight sleep because there is still / so much to do.” Which reminds me just how tired I am right now, tired of the “torture” one feels compelled to undertake (so many infelicities to point out) in order to “rescue” readers from the unconscionable puffery that soils the back cover of this paperback I’m going to put down, now that I’m done putting it down.