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.