The Discrete Charm of Ke$a

Or, really, of Paul Muldoon's erudite analysis of "Tik Tok."

Because the party don't start 'til he
walks in.

Review: Ursu's Poetic Prayer (or Prayerful Poems)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that poetic language differs somehow from the stuff we use in ordinary daily conversation. The latter derives from early hominid needs to communicate (“Orf, look out for that mastodon!”) or coordinate (“Orf, look out for that mastodon!”), or, according to more recent theories, from early hominid social grooming practices (hence so much of our current conversation as either empty -- “How ya doin’?” -- or nitpicking). The former bears a whiff of incense or altar fire or the irruption of the divine into the mundane. So much depends, of course, on how one or another poet or theorist glosses the “somehow” in my first sentence, but that’s the topic of another post.

For Romanian poet Liliana Ursu, the analogy between poetry and prayer is sometimes a theme and sometimes a practice. In the best poems gathered in Lightwall, a new collection translated by Sean Cotter and brought to you in a beautifully designed volume by the fine folks at Zephyr Press, Ursu unites theme and practice, essaying the ineffable by weaving webs of image, allusion, and figurative language.

Ritual language is most obviously thematized in poems that either are about or that invoke “spiritual athletes” – saints, ascetics, and contemplatives. The results are mixed. In “Concerto for Vasile the Monk,” Ursu narrates herself listening to Beethoven’s “Imperial Concerto” (I’ve typically seen the Piano Concerto Number Five in E Major, Opus 73, referred to as the “Emperor Concerto”) and, as she works, communing with the composer, telling him the story of the monk, Vasile, who saved a Coptic brother from the Ottomans by hiding him and carrying him to safety in a burlap bag. Beethoven announces a re-titling of this concerto, from “Imperial” to “Concerto for Vasile the Monk.” The poem links composer, poet, and Coptic monk in resistance to the authorities represented by empires and Ottomans. It is Beethoven’s presence, his assistance, as the poet prepares to write that positions him for this episode “from the lives of the monks," and Vasile claims that the monk he carried to safety was as light as the quill with which the brother wrote. Nothing in the poem’s own language, though, indicates where this kind of power might lie in the action of the pen. A mystical moment from the Lives of the Monks on the Holy Mountain of Athos feels more earned in “From the Lives of the Birds,” whose stanzas catalogue the conditions of possibility for different birds’ songs (clearly a figure for the song that is poetry itself):

Canaries only sing when caged.
The sky is far off,
an enigmatic safe.

But if you cage the tomtit
-- the anonymous
the ignored –
it wraps its claws around its throat
and chokes to death.

This attention to the birds rather than to the figure of the poet rhymes nicely with the anecdote that closes the poem: an elder apprenticed to a monastery but prevented by his humility from becoming a monk, covers himself with crumbs on snowy days and feeds the birds from his hands and shoulders and face, eliciting their songs with this offering of himself.

I wish more of the poems in Lightwall followed the model of the Elder of Elisa and subordinated the poet to the poem. I’m not a fan of poems about being a poet (it takes a lot to rise above that topic’s inherent limitations and produce a “Sleep and Poetry” or “Circus Animals’ Desertion” ) and there are here, especially in the section called “One Hundred Days, One Hundred Nights in Lewisburg” (where Ursu was a visiting poet at Bucknell University), many such poems. The powers of ritual language just aren’t convincing in a poem about reading poems in a former church:

Here, in America, in another church, turned into a theater
I read poem after poem
as though I were building
a cross out of words
With great care
with unending motion
But with peace, too, in my soul
climbing humbly
the ladder of prayer
Until all the walls of the theater
fill with icons
and burning candles.

I’m not sure I can quite buy “humbly” in this scene of transformation, especially when the stanza I quote is juxtaposed to the story of Cosma, the monk, who built crosses in the wake of Ottoman destruction of churches in the Balkans. More crucially, though, is the absence in the poem’s own language of anything that hints at the transformative power the language narrates. There’s no music, no metaphoric magic, that enacts what the poem attempts to describe. (This might be a matter of translation; I don’t read Romanian and can’t say how much the original might sing in ways that don’t make it over the barrier into English.)

The better poems in this book, to my mind, are those whose claims for poetic power are implicit and performed rather than explicitly named. “Gingerbread with a Mirror and Sibiu,” for example, allegorizes city towers, mapping a surreal city and a moral universe at once. In this poem, Ursu’s imagery and juxtapositions, the unexpected turns of her lines and sentences, effect a new and renovating vision:

The person who builds the shadow before the house
gave us his rope knotted
once for each of time’s hearts
then asked us to forget him.
Just like the cellist who kissed my ear
He told me he could hear the sea inside its shell
‘A place unspoiled by noise and kisses may your ear be,’ my grandmother said
while she chopped parsley and let it shower
our family’s soup.

Other poems, like “Poem with Birch Gate” and “Letter to My Son, Mihnea-Dan,” turn that vision on the histories – recent and more distant – of the poet’s Balkan home (the section of the book is titled “Balkan Golgotha)” while a series of poems on and addressed to Ovid exemplify the strong bonds of sympathy and influence Ursu shares with important predecessors (not only the Roman poet exiled to Constanta on the Black Sea, but also Cavafy, Elytis, and others). While I’m not sure (the Pill’s expertise on this score is, alas, limited) whether she is, as Matthew Zapruder has called her, “one of Central Europe’s foremost living poets,” I certainly see the basis in these strongest among Ursu's new poems for the judgment of Tomaz Salamun (my own favorite living Central European poet) that she “makes the Black Sea again” and “expands the places of myth.”

I'm not gonna make that lame barbaric AWP joke

The Pill is back from Denver, where this year’s AWP was held, and glad to be breathing once more the heavily oxygenated sea-level air of home.

It took a day there not only to acclimate to the thin air but also to get into the groove of the unheimlich. The uncanny, you know, is when something’s familiar but off. In this case, your correspondent, a long-time academic, noted the structural familiarity of the conference setting (I have measured out my life in partitioned hotel ballrooms) filled with content whose texture, taste, and odor were just different enough to bring about estrangement. E.g.: a panel on poets reading Keats, in which Stanley Plumly presented a smart, thoroughly researched paper on the form and structure of the odes (the Pill settles into the Spartan comfort of the straight-backed chair, set just too close for comfort to the rank in front of it, feeling right at home). Could still have been at home when Ann Townsend glossed “visionary” through the poet’s near-sightedness and medical education, but felt the shape of the room shift when one after another potentially suggestive connection or insight was tossed out but left undeveloped, so many intellectual larvae squirming on the thinly carpeted floor (along the with the unpronounced “ed” syllables that regularize Keats’s iambic verse). Ah, back in Kansas when David Baker took the podium and performed a deftly deconstructive analysis of Keats’s habit of correspondence and manner of corresponding (though the bright colors of Oz flashed through from time to time, as when Baker, abjuring the word “discourse” because it was too redolent of “our theory-soaked departments back home,” cast a weird aspersion over his own scrupulous reading).

“Theory,” it turns out, is a noxious substance in which many departments, critics, readers, and institutions are soaked, steeped, stewed, brined, or drowned. It was with something like alarm that I realized, at a panel on “Flarf and Conceptual Poetry” the next day, that I am equipped with those gills enabling one to breathe the stuff. I kept them out of sight. Well, except for the hour and a quarter of Flarfers duking it out against Conceptualists in “papers” that were really performances, and that included some of the best poetry – juxtaposition, lacuna, music – read in the panel sessions, from the opening gambit of K. Silem Mohammad, the moderator, who wondered whether Flarf (the intentionally bad) and Conceptual (the intentionally boring) might be “the poetry of our time because they are the poetry we deserve” to Vanessa Place’s lines “flarf still loves poetry; conceptualism loves poetry enough to put it out of its misery” and “the best flarf is virtuosic; the best conceptualism is failure.” I find myself confirmed by this stuff, both on the page and in the room, in my taste for modernist rather than postmodernist experiments, for surrealism, say, over and against dada. And, look, this stuff is indeed masturbatory. But let us remember, Gentle Reader, that masturbation is quite pleasurable, and, as play with the erotics of language, these performances are too. And don’t even get me started on the ethical gains possible in this Levinasian unsaying of the said . . .

But my gills are showing.

There is a lot of poetry to experience at the AWP, from readings by big names in big rooms to readings by groups of poets (western poets, alumni of various creative writing program poets, African Diasporic poets, this or that Press poets). What, then, to make of the fact that the poetry that most captured your humble correspondent, that, really, grabbed him by the lapels and shoved him up against the wall and demanded his lunch money, was read “offsite,” at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, by the winner of the Wick Poetry Center’s first book award, Edward Micus. Micus read from The Infirmary, and these are poems that needed to be written, that need to be read. The feet of Micus’s ladder are firmly planted in the foul rag and bone shop, but we’re not talking about unmediated cri du coeur. These poems are worked, and they gain intensity from the carefully constructed frames that enclose, the painstakingly built fires that energize, their already potent contents (war, illness, torture, suffering). I was scarred for a day or more (hell, I might still be) by Micus’s prose poem, “In a Room Somewhere in the North of Nicaragua,” and moved by the resigned humanity, couched in unexpected developments of the image of a soldier’s marijuana smoke, that concludes “Robertson”:

A hot shrapnel scrap
kissed his kneecap
sent him back to Burlington.

Jesus – what a war –
to leave him hanging here

back in the world
his brain uncured
still smoking in its skin.

The poetry on offer in Denver was not confined to the panels and readings. Indeed, the heart of the conference is the book fair, a fluorescent-lit warehouse of an exhibit hall (the Pill overheard someone say that s/he had overheard Poet Laureate Kay Ryan say the book fair was like a Costco for the small press world, and, you know, once PLKR puts an image like that in your head, it’s there to stay). It’s overwhelming and a little disheartening: so many poets writing so many poems and publishing them in so many finely produced books and smartly edited literary magazines (and, Reader o' Mine, there are so many finely produced books and smartly edited literary magazines) for so few readers. It feels like a closed loop, a universe whose contraction mirrors the expansion of the bigger one in which we’re all spinning entropically toward heat death.


The book fair is not only chock full of books, many of them looking pretty good on a quick flip-through (though many others look as though it were more important to the author that the book existed than that it might be a book someone would want to read). It’s also a Costco stocked to the rafters with metonyms for the contemporary po-biz. Item: MFA student poets in last year’s Brooklyn chic – porkpie hats topping off faux-thrift-store tweed over untucked old-skool striped business shirt – picking up skads of Xeroxed submission guidelines, deaf to the offers of half-price copies of the mags they hope to publish in or cut-rate copies of books published by the presses they hope will invest $20K to bring out their slim volume. You don’t gotta be Derrida and Lacan, you don’t gotta be Wimsatt and Beardsley, you don’t gotta be Brooks and Warren to explicate that text. It’s a bad sign in the system, a bad sign for the system, because where I worried a paragraph ago that nobody was reading these writers except each other, what becomes apparent after a few hours in the AWP book fair is that too many of them are not even reading each other.

Review: To grow tired of London is to grow tired of life

Is it a problem that friends reviewing friends is business as usual in the po-biz? The Pill thinks it probably is. Nevertheless, here is a review of my friend Sara London’s new book, The Tyranny of Milk (Four Ways, 2010). At least I’m telling you this is a review of a friend’s book (I'm thanked in the acknowledgements, and I'm happy to admit to having encouraged the poet), which is more than you’ll often get elsewhere in this racket.

Is it a problem that friends blurb friends’ books? Oh yes, Gentle Reader, it is indeed. (I should say that I don’t know whether the blurbers of this book are friends of the poet.) But where we often think of the blurb problem in terms of nepotism or mutual back-scratching, it seems to me that the problem is just as frequently a matter of misrepresentation. And here, I think, on the back cover of London’s book, I’m provoked to wonder whether the poems are well served by the blurbs. Terrance Hayes emphasizes the poems’ verisimilitude, writing that London “recollects, recovers, recounts,” and characterizing her work as “clear-eyed utterance” (we’ll leave to one side the distinctly mixed character of that metaphor). This downplays the way London’s poems effect estrangement through her games with language and line. Cleopatra Mathis is closer to the mark; she captures the defamiliarization in the poems – “odd subjects are adroitly turned in the light of the familiar, while the common and ordinary are rendered strange.” This suggests, though, the surreal meeting of umbrella and sewing machine on dissecting table, that is to say a matter of content or topical strangeness, where what London really gets the weirdness from is the turn of a phrase, typically around the bend of a line.

I’m getting all cranky about the blurbs because they threaten to blur the real achievement of vision and voice in this book. Or maybe it’s just that they don’t quite articulate what I really admire about these poems: the bait-and-switch game they play with confessional conventions, and the way that game replaces the prurient interest in intimate revelations with the purposeful satisfactions of linguistic and prosodic play. To put it another way: while these poems might seem to be about the plight of a bed-wetter, say, or the sting of a mother’s tongue, or the tensions within a marriage, they are more properly seen as about how these things are filtered through, or, better, constructed in language. The vision is the voice, and these poems press the point that we see as we speak.

London's mechanics of estrangement are worth dwelling on a little. She sometimes achieves her effects by taking up the point of view of the naïve child or outsider, as when, in “Terra Incognita: As Butch Thunder Hawk Tells It,” she narrates a Lewis and Clark party member’s nose-blowing from the perspective of perplexed Lakota, or when, in “Tell Me,” a cultural alien sketches the mysteries of love and loss. In these poems, and in others whose speakers are not so distinctly estranged or estranging, London also exploits the inherent weirdness imposed by line-breaks in a loose counted verse (three or four words per line):

In my country
you might over-
hear the story
of the woman
with eleven children,
who never once
achieved orgasm
(“Tell Me”)

“But what
I remember most
are the polished
solid arms
of a dark chair
I was told
to sit quietly in,
the blond eyes
open
in the cold wood
(“First Wake”).

Elsewhere, London brings linguistic compression and indirection to bear, transforming embarrassment and awkwardness into the strange riches of insight. Here is “Mother,” one of twelve sections in a long poem entitled “Wetter”:

When she pinched
the plastic-headed
Safeway safeties,
pinning me into
lipoids of lemon
terry, she
sometimes pricked
her thumb,
sometimes
my thigh
fast with
blood toward
some destiny
of desert or sea.
No, I said, diapers
are not for me.

Notice the suspensions wrought by line-breaks (to what are those plastic heads attached?). Notice the foregrounding of sound by the densely packed alliteration both intralinear (“lipoids of lemon”) and interlinear (“thumb . . . thigh”), and assonance (“sometimes,” “thigh”), and, especially, combinations of sound repetition (“Safeway safeties”). Notice the quick shift from the literal blood of a pinprick to a figurative blood attached to destiny, the shift from the most intimately domestic space of a diapering to the symbolic vastness of desert and sea. Now, we can see this as a poem about the social difficulties of incontinence, or we can, as I think we should, see it as a poem about the transformations and control enabled by verbal craft and attention. The concluding utterance (the disavowal of diapers) is earned by the demonstration of continence that leads up to it.

When I got my copy of this book, I flipped through first of all looking for a poem I heard Sara London read some time ago. I have to confess that the poem stuck in my head partly for reasons that had little to do with it; I was sitting, at that reading, beside a woman with whom I was falling in love, and as I listened to the poem I couldn’t help noticing the way this woman was methodically unraveling the sleeve of her ragged hoodie. These two things had been joined in my head for years, and I figured, all that time, this was just a matter of simultaneity and the strange salience details take on in the context of a crush. What a revelation it was, then, to see that maybe they’d been intertwined for reasons having to do with the poem itself, or with its epigraph, for “The Odds” begins with a quotation from Cato: “There are [those] that fayneth it to hange / by an heere or twynned threde.” The poem is an eloquent apostrophe to a dead squirrel and a meditation (here’s where the title comes in) on the odds of missing the grasp in the midst of our play, our “lunging for love.” The odds, it turns out, are pretty good. Or bad, depending on how you look at it. The poem is also a fit metonym for the book as a whole, an exemplary instance of London’s own play (“A snapping branch this noon / snagged my skyward glance”), the vision synthesized by a voice modulated, channeled, engineered even, to provide something like, as the speaker in “Bad Manners” imagines, “a shadow lyric // sounding on the far side / of our carefully cantilevered love.”

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.