Is the best poetry uncategorizable? Over the past month, we have heard many arguments in favor of this particular viewpoint: that, at the risk of being tautological, what's good is good because its good, that truly sterling poetry defies analysis, falls between categories, rests on its own peculiar merits, and confounds us with the pure genius of its originality. Academia, of course, would never be comfortable with this kind of unruly sensibility; scholarhip is, in large measure, based on systems and categories, on charting the organization and distinguishing characteristics of distinct, discrete movements, and on the orderly functioning of the intellect given reign over the perpetual movements of the literary realm. One thing this quarrel has done is to force me to come to terms with my status as a nascent academician. I'm not thrilled about it, because I also happen to be a practicing artist, so cognitive dissonance has been percolating in my skull. Then, out of nowhere, a book arrived in the mail that answered perfectly to my quandary. The book, published by Blazevox, is String Parade by Jordan Stempleman. Those who know a bit about my work know that I have written about Stempleman before; I reviewed his Facings in Jacket #35. I was delighted to find, when I opened this book, a confirmation that Jordan is a poet worth having faith in. Even better, for me, is the acknowledgement that the best poems in String Parade are, in fact, uncategorizable: they walk a fine line between openness and closure, abstraction and concreteness, intellect and emotion. My Jacket review compared Facings to John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror; String Parade might stand this comparison even better than Facings did. I would defy anyone to come up with a comfortable niche for Stempleman's work; post-avant works, to an extent, but these poems have an edge, a soul, that extends their appeal so that you could see his poems in APR, Poetry, or even the Harvard Review. As has become standard here, I will choose two poems to gloss, one from the beginning and one from the end of the book. This is called Double as Bed:
I am not featuring pessimism
as a function. I am not a member of a trade
union, although I was invited to a lunch
or two I meant to attend, but didn't.
The heroic, are the overlapping
voices found wandering the streets,
since they all came to the neighborhood too early
and the restaurant doesn't open
until noon. The city-life is back to
evolving. I know it's a central force to my reasoning
and order. There are times to go in.
This is one of those times. I am not
imagining we'll ever be together, although we
could, and so I may now begin thinking
in this sense, since taught early enough: never waste a being-
based aesthetic. That's me--
reminding myself to work, live, and then
speak, in that order. They are closest to my biological
likeness, they too have accidents as well.
It would be impossible to do justice to a poem this layered, this nuanced, in a paragraph. I only want to point out some surface characteristics that suffice (in my mind) to make this poem uncategorizable. This is a personal poem, a poem about an "I". However, look how the poem stays personal without falling into any epiphanic traps: the poet is wandering the urban milieu, looking for objective correlatives to an inward state of ambivalence and heightened, if unresolved, intellection. Yet we get the wonderfully pungent detail of the trade union and its lunches, which puts the protagonist into a world both social and immediate, unusual for a poem that rests so much on thought. Stempleman, like Ashbery and Eliot before him, has a knack for aphorism; we get that here (There are times to go in./ This is one of those times.) yet the context of the aphorism does not link it to a too-obvious circumstance or a too-ready sentiment. I love the little twists and turns that Stempleman throws in, so that even though the feeling (of ambivalence and looking for solid "personal" ground to stand on) remains consistent, we are never quite sure what the next line will hold or where it will take us. The emotional aspect of the poem is heightened by Stempleman's inclusion of a "we" (and an implicit "you" behind it), and the posited impossibility of this "I" and "you" meeting. The incredible, deft way that Stempleman weaves this into the poem, without making it a central conceit, is ultimately (to me) what separates him from most of his more mainstream contemporaries. However, the inclusion of this relationship, ambiguous and inchoate as it is, also serves to separate Stempleman from most post-avantists, who have trouble representing affect and relationship in their poems. Stempleman's ability to be human without being corny or hackneyed is unique, in Facings as here. The poem's concluding note, of self-chastisement and self-deprecation, puts this poem in a genealogical line that starts with Prufrock (perhaps Fra Lippo Lipi) and continues into the Lunch Poems, not to mention Ashbery. This, that Stempleman presents, is a character, a genuine protagonist, and a unique one. A variant of these virtues is found later in this book, in Narrow Release:
The arrest came in the reappearance.
A motion that was caught briefly, touched off
by the briefest of reflections and then,
seemingly driven impatient and founded back to grounds.
The harsh master the uselessness
of tonguing the onion, the rhythm imprudent
and detailing a single source: a wash that paints
a shoebox or the outline of a fallen body.
Inches are restless. Patience, the smoke that extends
well-framed and toughened for the wait.
There are boundaries which hold the smaller
words, as even the relaxed incline from rivers
become too good for their own towns.
The same words that look just right tacked to plywood.
A mutable grazing of the outer dream leans on
this frame, calls this behavior: breathing
the edgy and still materials to sleep.
What's brilliant to me about this poem is (among other things) the way a set of abstractions, perhaps of little interest in and of themselves, lead to "a shoebox or the outline of a fallen body," with all the myriad associations that these two concrete signifiers conjure up. Between the abstractions and just the "outline of a fallen body," a story can be construed; how some interior state (that we have to guess at, which feels here like a provocation rather than a deprivation) of some implicit protagonist lead to a death that may be literal or proverbial, but is (willy-nilly) made concrete in the poem. In combining abstractions with concrete images, Stempleman has demonstrated a remarkable capacity; this poem gives us a 40%/60% ratio in favor of abstractions, but the balance allows us a requisite amount of both openness and closure. That boudaries "hold the smaller words" may signify that this poem, as the Mark Young poems I presented earlier, has something to do with its own creation, and with the creative process in general: a meta-poem. However, it could just as easily be about attempting to reach another person in language, attempting to forge a connection, trying and not quite being able to. The intriguing simile ("as even the relaxed incline from rivers/ become too good for their own towns") puts us in touch with a natural world, seldom visited in post-avant. It is part and parcel of Stempleman's unusual reach that Nature gets a nod, at the very least, and even the rustic ("tacked to plywood") gets a little attention. This heightens the impression that Stempleman in interested in creating durable poetry, poetry that is meant to last. It is tremendously exciting for me to have found a poet in my age range with this much reach and with this kind of scope. Stempleman's ability to balance binaries, for me, puts him in close touch with Keatsian Negative Capability, and makes him, to me, much more than just promising. To call a poet or a poem uncategorizable implies that, if necessary, a new category must be made for he/she, or it; I believe that Jordan Stempleman has, indeed, achieved "uncategorizable" status, and it is both to his credit and to and for the general gain of all of us.
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