Regarding Ai

Ai, author of Cruelty, Killing Floor, Sin, Fate, and other collections, died Sunday at the age of 62.

I first came across her work in a seminar on contemporary American poetry. The poems were shocking. A couple lines in and you were inhabiting the consciousness of a suicide, a masturbator, a serial killer, a child-beating parent, a kid (in “The Kid”) who calmly, almost sweetly, murders his family. I'm haunted to this day by "The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981," in which, after disposing of the body of the boy he's just murdered, the speaker sits down to a nice cup of cocoa:

After the last sweet mouthful of chocolate
burns its way down my throat,
I open the library book,
the one on mythology,
and begin to read.
Saturn, it says, devours his children.
Yes, it's true, I know it.
An ordinary man, though, a man like me
eats and is full.
Only God is never satisfied.

At public readings and on recordings, Ai read in an exaggerated chant, an aural iambic that elongated almost every second syllable and that, with the scenes she set, the characters she created, created intense estrangement effects.

We spent a lot of time in that seminar on the fact of Ai’s complicated ancestry (her father was Japanese and her mother was of African American and Native American descent), though as I reread the poems now I’m not sure why. The poems are not about the poet’s ancestry, not, really, about the poet herself, at least in the immediate ways we’ve come, during the long reign of first-person, free-verse autobiographism in American poetry, to expect. The real fascination in these poems is with power – the power of the desired over the one who desires, of the one who is willing to undertake violence over those who hesitate, of our compulsions over our compassion.

Sin is especially interested in power, and perhaps the dominant sin in the book is the pride that drives such speakers as the Kennedys, Joseph McCarthy, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. For this reason, among others, it stands out for me as a favorite among Ai’s seven collections.

Here’s the thing, though. There’s been, and there will continue to be, a lot of ink and bytes thrown around about the voices of outsiders and the politics of outrage in Ai’s work (partly because there will be a lot of talk, as in that seminar, about who she was, and partly because there will be a lot of talk about her activism around Native American identity), and while these are not insignificant aspects of the life or the poems, the focus on them will mean a lot of readers miss what might be the real point of Ai's work. “I feel,” Ai has been recorded as saying, “that the dramatic monologue was the form in which I was born to write and I love it as passionately, or perhaps more passionately, than I have ever loved a man.”

The dramatic monologue. Remember that fusty old thing, relic of Victorianism, first envied then dissed and dismissed by Pound in his experiments with personae, reduced in our time to a couple of Browning poems in anthologies? Ah, but Ai, along with Frank Bidart, renovated that generic furniture in ways that not only brought the monologue back to life but also showed how interesting we’d forgotten it to be. Both Bidart and Ai built their poems around some sick speakers, but do you remember what Browning’s characters get up to?! (Hint: the speaker in "Porphyria's Lover" strangles his beloved with her hair and then enjoys a cozy moment recumbent besider her on the couch.)

Like Browning, Bidart and Ai offer characters in extremis. But also like Browning, and maybe more important for poetry and poetics than the sick and the criminal who inhabit the poems, they use these outsider consciousnesses to say something about poetry itself. I can't read "Porphyria's Lover" without seeing it as calling our attention to the necrophilia inherent in a certain ambition for literary immortality (the ambition we see at the end of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 -- "So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.") by literalizing its metaphors (I'll make the living woman into something that will be lasting and unchanging). There is, in Ai's best poems, a similarly searching critique of creative ambition, an examination of the ethics of doing things with words. Here she is on "Immortality":

I dreamed I was digging a grave
that kept filling with water.
The next day, you died.
I dressed you in a wool skirt
and jacket,
because you were always cold
and I had promised to do tha much for you.
Then I took a potato to eat, went outside,
and started to dig.

It goes on, and gets even creepier, and that's right, I think, for a poem about how the breath of the living is captured and stilled in the interest of defeating sluttish time, achieving stasis over mutability. And this is why it seems to me such a loss, this week's silencing of a voice that kept changing and kept breathing change.

A Plea to the Moaners

The Pill goes to a lot of poetry readings. This is a fact about which one feels some ambivalence. On the one hand, it’s sometimes interesting to hear how a poet vocalizes the verbiage on the page (“interesting,” itself is a quality about which one feels some ambivalence; look out, gentle readers, for a post soon about the sing-song delivery? in which every line? ends on an upward inflection?), and it can be fun to see how a poet has changed since that jacket photo (or to see that clearly a model was hired for the jacket photo). On the other hand, sometimes a poet’s reading wrecks a poem, or the patter between poems drains the enlivening mystery from a poem.

And then there are the moaners.

You’ve heard them if you’ve gone to many readings at all. The poet (all too often with a rising inflection? or a heightened . . . breathiness . . . during . . . the . . . exaggerated . . . pauses . . . between . . . words) delivers an image, a metaphor, a turn of phrase that either really or, in the flawed judgment of both poet and audience, is striking, and a few in attendance “hmmm” with approval or almost erotic satisfaction. (It’s not that the Pill is never similarly moved; the sound I’m describing is like the one that involuntarily escapes me when, after a couple of meatless months, I bite into, say, an Arthur Bryant’s sliced beef sandwich.)

I once spent some time unscientifically surveying the moany terrain, trying to determine during readings which, whether, and why. Alas, this loose cartesianism, this unsystematic empirical study, produced no conclusive findings, and what can you expect when the phenomenon occurred not only among the couple thousand at one of Gwendolyn Brooks’s last readings or the hundreds at one of Stanley Kunitz’s – at that one, your correspondent felt as if surrounded by a flock of cooing doves, indeed felt this so strongly that he checked his shoulders afterwards for dabs of bird shit – and also among the dozens enduring (too many with pleasure, at which the Pill despaired) Marie Howe or Spencer Reese or a Dickman.

One hesitates to ascribe motives to the moaners, and one assumes there are in fact a multiplicity thereof. Some, surely, moan out of authentic emotional experience. Others, perhaps, assume the position of respondents in a sort of amen corner (“Preach it, brother!”) and see it as their duty to take up an antiphonal role, confirming the poet in his or her sense of being filled by the spirit. Many, though, I am convinced, are simply conducting their own performance, letting those around them know that yes, they had the proper emotional experience (like the guy who laughs at the just smile-worthy joke so everybody knows he gets it).

To each, regardless of a given moaner’s etiology, the Pill politely asks “Can you please f*cking stop that?!” I promise on behalf of those of us enjoying the silence at the ends of lines and phrases (whether because the silence lets us absorb the power of what precedes it or because we’re just glad the poet stopped) that we will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you get it. I promise the poets are sufficiently confident in the movement of the muse within their words that they’ll get by without your cooing confirmation. And if you’re simply moved involuntarily, I’m working on a patentable nose plug that will convert the moaning exhalation into just enough electricity to administer a mild shock so we can condition you to keep it to yourself.

Listen to the silence, people, please. Let it ring on.

Review: Assuming Bill Berkson

All right, people: the Pill is pissed. Off. Where have you all been hiding Bill Berkson for all these years and why the hell didn’t anybody tell me about this guy? I mean, he’s published 18 collections of poetry since 1961 (the first through the Tibor de Nagy Gallery), as well as collaborations with the likes of Joe Brainard (among other artists) and Anne Waldman and Bernadette Mayer (among other poets), plus writings on and editions of works by and about Frank O’Hara.

OK. So maybe the oversight was mine. It ain’t like the man was hiding. Still, though, all you poetry pals of mine: why did you bogart the Berkson?!


Thanks to Coffeehouse Press, however, the secret’s out and I’m glad, at last, to meet this poet through the poems he’s been producing since the late 1950s.

That gets it kind of wrong, though, because Berkson’s poems, like the best poems in the humble opinion of this ever so ‘umble blog, are much less about Bill Berkson than they are about how language determines our perceptions. Our perceptions of Bill Berkson, sure, but also, and more importantly (not just to me but also, I think, on the basis of these poems, to Berkson), of everything else.

But that’s not quite right, either, because it’s not just language in all its languageyness (which is, of course, a very good thing for poems to emphasize, and even enact), but also language in, on, around, interacting with the physical space of the page. Not for nothing did Berkson collaborate with a collagist and detourneur like Brainard and spend attention on an artistically inclined poet like O’Hara (who engaged in his own collaborations with visual artists – e.g. the wonderful Stones series of lithographs he produced with Larry Rivers).

In a fairly early poem like “Still Earth,” for example, Berkson uses the space of the page (intralinear space, interlinear space, setting strophes off to one side or another rather than stacking everything out from the left-hand margin) in ways reminiscent of the Mina Loy of "Songs to Joannes," isolating bits and pieces of language not only to emphasize their lexical meanings but also to call attention to their look and sound. And in "Four Great Songs," we get upside-down lines so that, on first reading anyway, we encounter the unpronounceable and incomprehensible so that all the lines present is their appearance.

Given all that, though, I still find myself preferring here the poems in complete sentences, even when the relationship between subject and predicate is not immediately sensible. Or sensical. “What would the new fork bring me?” he asks in “Saturday Afternoon, “and why / are porticos assuming sulfur?” I’m not sure what either of these questions “means,” and while I could go on for a while about substitution along the syntagmatic axis (couldn't we all?), I’d rather just enjoy the way each twists, and by twisting renews, simple (or not so simple) words and concepts. The carrying of food on a fork, seen as “bringing,” so that the fork has agency, estranges eating, and the assumption of the capacity of assumption for architectural elements, and of the capacity for being assumed to a suggestive element like sulfur makes sitting on my porch and sensing the aromas carried there by the breeze suddenly rich and strange.

Let's say every poet publishes, from time to time, an ars poetica. Berkson's early stuff might be encapsulated in "History" (or these lines therefrom): "Trying to understand what it is actually like / on a balcony with one's hat off / though distinguishing between actual despair / and trickery / a certain passivity of habit . . . // History itches." Indeed. With their non sequitirs, strange adjectives (especially strangely adjectival forms of nouns -- "arsenical"), suggestions of narrative without narrative development or clear reference, these poems are up to both the attempt to understand what it's like and the attempt to inhabit the sentient subjectivity of that capitalized abstraction in its attempt (like Benjamin's version of Klee's angel) to understand.

Phew.

But then there's a poem like "East End," which captures pure and straightforward heartache like no other poem I've recently read (the very idea of a nearest consolation is rendered accurately in all its unhelpfulness):

Sometimes I think it's here too,
which is to say the joy your dress
drags in with it.
To go from that to the nearest consolation
is enough to tear my soul apart.
So stay.
The mystery has been proven.

Berkson's forms and rhetorics change over the ensuing decades. The poems get shorter for a while in the 60s, more prose poems show up in the late 70s, more dedications and epigraphs in the 90s. His preoccupations remain consistent, but not in a way that would suggest any Mirandized arrest of development, artistic or philsophical. Instead, a layered richness characterizes many of the later poems, a sense of familiar reference behind the witty, slip-slidy wordplay. I love the punning fun in, say, two poems titled "Parts of the Body" from the mid-70s, poems that shift the terrain of the blazon from the body of an individual person to what might be the embodiment in language and culture of what Eliot called the "mind of Europe." Berkson quotes a couple of prose sentences about Scriabin at one point, shortly thereafter renovates the cliche of aging ("over the hill") by imagining what we imagine we'll see when we get there, across the page glosses the gall bladder with the fact that deer have none, figures the "Phenomenology of Perception" in the bubbles that form in spit, quotes Tommy Edwards's "All in the Game," but rescues the pop song's falling tear from worthlessness by capturing its cleanness and clarity, and on and on.

And in the most recent poems, that itch of History, that attempt to get at what it's really like, that drive to renew language and perception by renovating the cliches into which we fall like ditches full of shit, all are directed at the violence done to our ways of speaking and seeing under the recent and current debased forms of our culture and politics. We live, "Without Penalty" suggests, during a time when "Traffic School becomes the ruling / Paradigm of higher learning," "Careening en route / To regime change, permanent and without end."

And given that, it's impossible to read a poem titled "Rendition," which explicitly complains about the song played at Willem de Kooning's funeral ("Aida -- fucking Aida," the angels mutter), without hearing in both the title and the narrative of bait and switch, subjects bagged and secretly sent off to black sites where they will endure torture to keep our freedoms safe.