Steve Halle's Map of the Hydrogen World

Many of the poems in Steve Halle's first full-length collection, Map of the Hydrogen World, are poems I have been acquainted with for years. I did my MFA with Steve, and the poems in this book have been gestating, mutating, and forming a cohesive gestalt since we graduated in 2006. Steve actually sent me this collection, in manuscript form, some time ago. Thus, the central features of Map; playful irreverance, measured absurdity, Pop culture sprezzatura, and a dollop of world-weary angst that lends the construct, as a whole, a hard edge; are not a surprise to me. But now Cracked Slab Books, a Chicago endeavor spearheaded by William Allegrezza and Raymond Bianchi, have packaged Steve's poems in a gorgeous, glossy edition, and it lends an air of formality and permanence to the whole thing, so that I have been able to read the poems again, as if for the first time. The book advertises itself as "shun(ning) the divide between post-avant and Official Verse Culture poetics," and I have no problem with this designation: it fits in to what seems to me to be the endeavor of Chicago poetry. Chicago, as a poetry city, walks a fine line between these realms, and "uncategorizable," in the context of Chicago poetics, is a badge of honor. Of course, this may be a moot point, because Steve is actually located in Bloomington, several hours outside the Windy City. Yet I am able to make the metonymic association, because Map fits in so snugly to an ethos that I locate in Chicago. In any case, labels, appellations, and designations aside, it will be useful to get down to brass tacks with the book, if we want to see what makes it tick, and perhaps derive a clue as to how poetry can do what Steve wants it to do: shun the divides, take the high road, blaze a new trail without an easy categorical assumption to go along with it, and, perhaps most importantly, have a damned good time. I hope my readers will forgive me for taking an editor's prerogative and starting with a poem that I myself published, in Ocho #11. This is an epistolary poem, from what Steve likes to call his "e-mail" series, all of which I have found remarkable for their liveliness, high-wire daring, and intense dedication to expressing the spontaneity of moments. This is called yao:

dear Jackson Pollock's memory,
oh well i tend to agree with the crying/passion/exhuastion argument but you've put me in a tough spot yet again. living with the enemy of our undefined yet common belief sys. don't worry abt being defensive and btw it's molehills but n e ways. what r u signing my year book or something? and this faculty meeting day makes me want to quit my job idealistically like student in Updike short story "A & P" and are we just going to become vagrants? & is that all of "what's left" to do? and and and listen to Brahms 4th like I kno what tha fuck he means? and listen to jazz like I kno wtf? and read like I no wtf? and write things so obscure even me the transparent eyeballed creator doesn't know wtf they it all means? I guess the point was I'm tired right now tired like not go to sleep tired but tired in other ways and ways I can't defend or argue abt but it might just be time to lay low & there are no readily avail. times on any foreseen horizons for such lazy nonsensical endeavors. On the floor I am more at ease, I feel nearer. I'm better at buying books than reading them but they don't and I don't understand why not they don't pay you for that more likely opp. and i know what's-his-name sd steal this book and all that but i don't feel like being cooped up either. I mn either. an epic struggle between man and material might unfold. lots of luck, honey.
love, not chaos,
s

The first, and perhaps most interesting thing to unpack about this piece is its dedication, to "Jackson Pollock's memory." What I take the privilege of reading in is that Steve's compositional strategy here is an ekphrastic rendering of an Abstract Expressionist, "all-over" composition. It's painterly! The level of intensity is sustained throughout, and evenly distributed, so that there are no focal points and no rhetorical crescendos that stand out: the piece is one long crescendo! The bizarre, jagged grammar heightens the impression of "go on your nerve" spontaneity, and the whole thing practically screams O'Hara! However, the darkling overtones of pessimism and weariness ("I'm tired right now like not go to sleep tired but tired in other ways...") keep this from being a complete joy-ride. What we have here is a companion persona to the standard (and now standardized) O'Hara persona: let's say this is O'Hara's hetero, cynical, bitter-but-bristling-with-feeling first cousin. "Cousin Steve" doesn't quite work; perhaps "Cousin Halle" would do the trick. Notice all the culture-signifiers sprinkled throughout: fist Pollock, then Brahms and Updike (RIP); this is haute poetry. Yet it features an uncertain protagonist who can't come to grips with his own cultural-Mandarin status: "and and and listen to Brahms 4th like I kno what tha fuck he means? and listen to jazz like I kno wtf?" What do I like most about this poem? It is, for want of a better word, fun! It's a rollicking good time, and a helluva good ride. There is a freshness here that cannot be faked, a sense of urgency that can only come in a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. More-than-organic sensibility gets hit with a Po-Mo slice-and-dice, and we travel along the abraded lines of a just-short-of train-wreck. On a more sober note, we do have some concrete clues about "Cousin Halle"; he is a teacher, though at what level the poem does not say. All-in-all, despite the surface jocularity and the dis-ease beneath, this is a strangely complete picture of a comprehensive poetic consciousness, circa early XXI century. "Love, not chaos" is wished, but not provided for the reader, who receives, I would say, equal amounts of both. My other favorite from this series is epistrophic:

dear magellan,
the epistrophic changes. epistrophy is epistrophe. would you rather you were the bull, the matador, the red sheet or the killing spear? would you rather be turning toward diving ground? or on divine ground turning? have you discovered the act of discovery? are you that kind of discovery or circumnavigation? earth-- the shell of the turtle? has the act of discovery helped you to be discovered? has the art of discovering others who have made discoveries been the discovery? is discovery of others in the act of discovering others who discovered others before them, cowering in their own bewilderment, been the discovery you have been seeking? the same melodic material same material, melodic, is repeated is incantatory is repeated is repeated at different pitches at opposing pitches at similar pitches in the pitch of the moment in the pitch of a line of phrase is repeated in the cigarette smell on the black finger on the key the smell of the key is incantatory is repeated in the moment when the pianist who is no pianist who is no piano who has the key but is not the key smells the ivory, chanting, thrumming the key(s) feels the charge of the bull elephant in musth? the increasing tension tense taut taught like piano wire? thrumming tension in the electrical wires over the strata of fields of mind-artist deep in creation madness? do you? feel? that way?
let me know your answer,

s

This poem takes its strength from strategic redundancies that do, in fact, raise it to the level of the "incantatory." Usually, incantatory poems are in service of something, of some great point the poet wants to make: Shelley's grand co-existence with Nature in West Wind, Whitman's elaborate enumeration of individuality in Song of Myself (and use of anaphora, picked up by Ginsberg, among others), even going back to the devotional lyrics Herbert. Here, in very po-mo fashion, the redundancies and repetitions are placed in the poem, and named in the poem, self-consciously (i.e. Steve actually uses the word "incantatory"). This makes for an interesting scenario, perhaps the rough equivalent of John Cage's minutes of silence; poetic music (melopoeia) not in the service of anything, self-consciously presented. Does this make it empty? Not any more empty than Tender Buttons (stick stick sticking, sticking to a chicken). Not if we are happy to replace nouns with adjectives. "Discover," actually appears in a bunch of different forms, and seems to be the primary redundancy. Yet Halle makes the melopoeia issue explicit by bringing in the piano and the pianist at the end. After this, we know (mostly) what the poem is: music for its own sake, and to its own ends, "thrumming" hypnotically so as to put the reader into a trance-like state. This, the poem does, or did for me. Music about music, words over words, a classic case of the meta-poem deconstructing itself before our eyes. Not as much fun as yao, but perhaps more seriously intended, more apt to make an important point; that art (music, poetry) is what we say it is, and nothing more. "Let me know your answer," Steve says, but in this case no answer is necessary; it is written into the poem: art is self-subsistent. Map of the Hydrogen World is filled with these little moments of reckoning, which turns what could be pure fun into something more serious. That, to me, is its importance; it allows us a textual good time, without ever quite letting us off the hook. Is art self-subsistent? Who has to justify works of art? The "transparent eyeballed creator"? The rapt audience? The passionate e-mailer? For breaking down the boundaries of the aesthetic, all the while keeping his eye on the ball of total enjoyment, Steve Halle deserves his very own Jackson Pollock, stolen from MOMA and delivered to his door.

Uncategorizable Pt.2: Chris McCabe's Zeppelins

I once heard Keith Richards say something intriguing about Mick Jagger. Keith said that as good a frontman as Mick is, and as skillful a lyricist and vocalist, you only get the pure, "unadulterated" Mick Jagger when he "blows harp," i.e. plays harmonica. I have a similar feeling about Chris McCabe, probably my favorite younger U.K. poet. His book Zeppelins, released last year by Salt is full of rich, tangled gems, some so run over with British idiomatic expressions that I have a hard time making them out. Do I only like Chris McCabe when he plays the harmonica? No. The analogy I am making from Mick to Chris transmutes blowing harp into writing sonnets. As readers of this blog know, I have a fetish for sonnets that I have previously explicated. McCabe is a very proficient sonneteer, and so I thought I would start with a sonnet from the series The Transmidland Liverpool to London Express, which fills out the middle of the book. It is first worth noting that I appended "Uncategorizable" to this post, as I did with the last one, because Chris's best poems share in the sort of aesthetic, positive indeterminacy that Jordan Stempleman's do. These are poems that have enough narrative and descriptive action to qualify them for mainstream status, and enough rejection of closure to make them post-avant. As such, I feel that they can answer to more than one set of expectations, prejudices, and predilections: those who want to confine the poems within a set rubric (I would wager that these poems, ultimately, tilt more towards post-avant), and those who want to eschew the academic and "let poems be poems," without imposing the closure of a label. Can a poor Yank gloss the poesy of a proud son of Albion? Not really for me to say. I do know that the humor and joie de vivre of these poems remind me more of Canadian George Bowering and also of Anselm Hollo than they do of any of Chris's UK contemporaries (Chris is a fan of Andrew Duncan, as I am, but Chris and Andrew is apples and oranges.) But perhaps that's neither here nor there. This is my favorite sonnet in the series, entitled Merseybus:

The thing is Janine, when I wear my husband's
dressing gown I strangely don't feel like a man--
I feel like a woman in a grown man's dressing gown.
I mean, it's at least half his life isn't it?
Do you think we could add two letters to the alpha
bet & nobody would notice? Bet a laugh we could.
Her hair's like a split golf ball & her head the wood
to hit it with. What he does is this: takes his whiskey
into the wild woods only to have words & curse
his dead dad. Did I tell you Dolly's going to New York?
The thing is, if you smell the bacteria you can
actually see bad breath. I tell you: it's the place
itself I'm thinking with half the time, and it's closer
to a pair of drainpipes than any actual paradise

Formally, the poem is relatively stable, with each line numbering 11-13 syllables. Only lines six and seven rhyme, and the inclusion of one end rhyme adds a minor note of destabilization. It reminds me of second-Gen Mods Zukofsky and Niedecker, who often used formal devices in irregular ways, that tended to give their poems a jagged edge. The formal semi-edginess of the poem is mirrored by the content. I have to make the admission that, being a Yank, I do not know if this kind of language is endemic to Liverpool (Chris's home town), thus making the title's particularity relevant. What rivets me about this poem is the games being played with perspective: how the poems seems to begin with someone talking (absurdly), and an "I" that clearly does not belong to the poet. Then, an abrupt, astonishing shift at line seven from the first to the third person, which has the optic-like effect of a film camera making a jump-cut. That this move takes place at line seven makes it probably too early to be called a volta, though it does function as a "twist" or "turn." Once the perspective shifts, we are reckoned with a "he" who feels compelled to insult the seemingly working-class woman who dominates the first six lines. Then, we remember from the title that this is all happening on a bus, and the vignette becomes complete, and is bourne out by the rest of the poem. The "he," who seems much more like an actual protagonist than the "I," tells us what he is doing in Liverpool; home to drink, "have words & curse/ his dead dad." His attention was attracted by the absurd woman, goes back to himself, then fixates on the woman a second time to round out the poem. The poem ends without a period, and thus without "closure," suggesting both the woman's seemingly endless volubility and the implicit protagonist's faltering attention. All in all, this is a portrait of connections missed, of loss ("dead dad"), of being numb to one another, not-feeling, deadness-in-life. Chris may hate me for doing this, but I can't help thinking of the Beatles A Day in the Life, particularly the middle, "bus" bit. The quotidian is seen to be a waste land (pun intended), with everyone either annoyed or oblivious, or both. A great sonnet. My other big fave from this collection has a similar theme, and similar overtones, albeit more comic. It is called Existential Clubbing:

Five fingered bars strobe white prisms from brick.
Inversion of God's Ministry. Bouncers are ministers.
Frisks you in a soulsearch. Finds an in-pocket novel,
original Penguin Classic. Considers refusing you entry,
presumes you're no trouble. Drunken bookish one.
You put your soul in the cloakroom, the ticket says 72.
There are only seven other people you can see.
They are so young your face reflects in their eyelids.
The only offer at the bar is being served.
The lager scrapes the outside of the barrel.
The dancefloor is a pelt of purple, unrefuseable.
It is so long since you last danced the baton of the rhythm
remains two seconds ahead of you. Someone faceless
suggests you are not a student you think quick, say you have
more letters after your name than in it. The dancefloor has
doubled in size. The DJ tells you he has lent all of his albums
to a friend. You have no friends you think he blames you
for the dancefloor being empty. Your spit is mote-dust.
The pulse in your temples is the after-audio of a chant
of a ritual. You start to dream in pink wafers. You take
your coat it refuses to talk back. Outside is cold. The
club is called Secrets. You have never heard of the place.

I like how the formal presentation of the poem (some enjambments, mostly short, unmellifluous sentences, with a few brief appearances of parallel structure) mirrors the stark reality that the poem presents: a man out of time, out of place, alien, lacking youth and "club spirit." That, perhaps, is why this clubbing is "existential." There is a bit of allegorical gravy; the fabled club is called Secrets, and the beleaguered narrator "(has) never heard of the place." If we do take this as an (albeit comical) allegory, what is the "secret"? How to maintain youth after youth is gone? How to blend in even when you don't fit in? How to pass for something that you're not? It is interesting that this club, a communal space for youth to meet, dance, and "hook-up," is sparsely inhabited. Either the narrator picked the wrong club or the wrong time to visit. What, implicitly, is the narrator looking for? He is eager to affirm his educated status, says he "(has) more letters after (his) name than in it." I am also intrigued by the fact that the poem is written in the second person singular; this is a consciousness-reflecting-on-itself, or rather a self-conscious narrating watching himself, rather than a narrator experiencing things in an unmediated way. That seems to be the main theme here: self-consciousness. No one in Secrets makes much of an impression on this narrator; he is too occupied with his own discomfort to notice much of anything. That discomfort is "existential" because it signifies irremediable loss; once youth is done, it's done, and that's that. Yet it is impossible not to notice the comic undertones that vivify and redeem the whole thing: "bouncers are ministers," "you put your soul in the cloakroom," "the dancefloor is pelt of purple," "your spit is dust-mote." So the poem becomes tragi-comic, and in the delicate balance between loss and humorous compensation finds its metier. An excellent coming-of-age poem, as detailed and precise as one could hope for. And these two poems are merely the tip of the iceberg. Chris does more than play harmonica; he is as versatile and as resourceful as the Princes and Todd Rundgrens of the music world. Though, as has been previously stated, getting American poets to recognize their UK counterparts can be an onerous task, as long as younger poets like Chris McCabe continue to produce poetry of this quality, I will continue to gladly, willingly, and joyfully push that boulder up the hill.

Uncategorizable: Jordan Stempleman's String Parade

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.

My Favorite Things Pt.2

It has come to my attention that, to some members of my community, close reading has become passe and even politically incorrect. I assume that this posited ignobility of close reading has to do with an association with New Critical practices, as the Academy has, indeed, outgrown the New Critics, and they have become generally passed-over. However, a question follows from this: if we are going to gloss poems on our blogs and in our articles, what technique(s) do we use? Deconstructionist and New Historical readings are fine for scholarly journals, and for our own scholarly writing (for those of us engaged in said practice), but I would tend to think that close readings are hard to beat for immediacy and visceral impact. This is especially true because the poems (and songs) I am close reading are experimental (sometimes radically experimental) in nature, and it seems unlikely that close reading a post-avant text will turn me into Cleanth Brooks or Lionel Trilling. What I want to avoid, more than anything else, is grad student posturing, and anyone who has spent a substantial amount of time with graduate students knows what this means. Grad student posturing has everything to do with using literary theory references to bolster one's cred, to demonstrate superiority, and to prove one's intelligence. I do not feel an overwhelming need to do any of these things, and have no use for a Lacanian reading of Alex Chilton (or Mark Young, or Aaron Belz, etc.) Close reading allows me to get swiftly to the point, with no unnecessary dressings, appurtenances, or frills. This blog is meant to express the viewpoints, insights, and quandaries of an artist, not a scholar. I do not mean to suggest that artists cannot be theory-savvy, just that when theory takes the place of genuine, plain-spoken insight, what you have (often) is the work of an eager-beaver grad student, not a well-rounded, mature artist.

So, on to another poet, another poem, another gloss. I do not remember how I discovered the work of UK poet Andrew Duncan; eventually, circumstances converged and I was able to correspond, exchange books with, and publish him. I have found Andrew's work remarkable for its emotional depth. As Quietists from Hutchison to Gilbert have decried the lack of emotion in post-avant poetry, I thought it would be worthwhile to present a Duncan poem with substantial affective weight. Mark Young's poems showed us rejection of closure; Duncan's poems reject closure, while maintaining an engagement with sense and the sensual world that can be traced back to first-Gen Romantics Wordsworth and Coleridge. I have taken Jack Gilbert to task for universalizing; Wordsworth also universalizes (The world is too much with us..), yet the extreme formal rigor of his language, combined with a piercing awareness of suffering, would (for me) raise Wordsworth up above someone like Gilbert, not to mention that Wordsworth was one initiator and definitely a "Big Daddy" of this approach. He did it first; he did it best. Followed largely by two-hundred years of decay, where the collective first person plural is concerned. But back to Duncan. I have chosen a long poem from Anxiety Before Entering a Room: Selected Poems 1977-99, which was released by Salt in 2001. The poem is called The Metallic Autumn, and see if you can spot how Duncan does three things at once: rejects closure, registers the sensuous world as an objective correlative, and relates it to a personal world:

Rain silvers the slate roofs, smoke blows through the rain.
The hawthorn hedges are a red haze.
The hills above the town are blurred by mist.
Beauty is stripped away.
Light is pierced with nostalgia, slow and lax.
Decadent season.
Water forms a haze between light and rain.
Flowers and leaves decaying in the streams
Mix earth and water in slow dispersal.
Blur steals over visible forms,
Smoke and moulder stir in the ash of light.
The pools are sorrowful, the sips of flowers spilt.
I find a single apple whole after all these weeks,
Skin whole and pulp firm as sapwood.

In a slush of softness and excrescence,
Late berries languish on the tendrils,
Lush to dissolution, spoilt with juice,
Blacker than nature with a white tinge like regret.
In the shadow of the sunny fronds,
Where the dew never dries, they drink and rot.
Rain on the leaf, dew on the bine. Mites
Finger the abacus of their flesh.
Rain silvers the roof-slates, smoke blows through the rain.

Season of memory and regret.
Barrels coop up the giddy heats for recollection.
The animals grow lazier and furrier:
Search out shelter and apathy!
The heady noon is gone, the soft inner of the blossoms
And their offer. The rarer veins are frozen in their course.
We waited for the glance of the sun.
The osier of bare birch twigs seems like smoke
Against the red glow of the Apple going down.

Rain silvers the roof-slates, smoke blows through the rain.
A swirl of leaves like heavy fire
Pours through the tamping of a world on the wane.
The darkened sky withholds the weary forms.
Crepuscule, dissolution of concepts;
Seasons of case-hardening ash,
Season of ferment and thorough steeping.
Fruits infringe their brinks and streams their brims
Overlapping the thick pulp of fallen things.

The principle of ice shall come to judgment
On the lusts of Nature, searching out the flaw.
Bare branches detach pure metre from an obese rhetoric.
Blue glare shall shake out the torpid mist,
Pure axile-crystals shall affirm the morass.

Between the imagery of this poem and its sonic gorgeousness (extensive use of assonance and parallel structure), we have a construct that shares many qualities with someone like Jack Gilbert. What sets this poem apart, and allows me to affix the appellation "post-avant" to it, is the total restraint with which Duncan resists the impulse to put himself into the poem. Yet, I take all the sensual things that Duncan is seeing and registering as Eliotic objective correlatives of an interior state (of ripeness moving into decay) being described. The one universalist moment (We waited for the glance of the sun) suffices to place us in a personal world, but it is world that Duncan merely opens. This poem has a clear spiritual predecessor in Keats' To Autumn, one of the most exquisite of his odes. In a sense, we can also see Duncan exercising Negative Capability here: he is able to hold the binary tension of ripeness and decay in his poetic consciousness without choosing, proclaiming judgment, and with an affirming glance that registers both sides. There is also a clear tie to Four Quartets era Eliot, but sans philosophic discourse and temporal inquiry; this poem works on a level that is mostly sensory, and affect can be read in as something that exists both in the poet and in his perceptions.

If one were to use Iserian reader response theory in glossing this poem, one could say that the Self that Duncan opens must be constructed by us, the reader, from the poem's evidence. A valid case could also be made that, in Barthes' terms, the author has died so that we, the reader, might be born. Or we could pull a Sontag and argue against interpretation of the poem, letting its sonic gorgeousness stand for itself. You could see the poem through any of these lenses but, in the words of Herman Melville, I would prefer not to. At the risk of being tautological, close reading of the poem allows the reader to get close to the poem. I think the real problem of the New Critics was a reliance on hierarchical thinking, a white male canon, and an assumption of superiority. If you take away these foibles, close reading is as good a literary tool as any to generate meaning-creation. I have no intention of dissing theory altogether (especially as I will be using it to craft my dissertation), but I do think that this particular aspect of New Critical practice is ripe for re-integration and re-assimilation. Close reading does not have to be formalist reading; it can work in tandem with theoretical knowledge, they are not mutually exclusive. But, enough self-justification. I believe that this is a maginificent poem, and you all can judge for yourselves whether or not you agree with me.

Karen Volkman's "nomina"

It would seem natural for me to review Karen Volkman's nomina, for a number of reasons: I am a Volkman fan (especially of Spar, which I reviewed here a few months back), I am interested in the sonnet form (as evidenced by my review of Camille Martin's sonnets in moria, and by my own book of sonnets, which came out in September), and Volkman's book is as good an indication as any of where the sonnet-as-form might be headed next. The sonnets in nomina are drained of any direct narrative action: instead, they avoid stasis by intimations, subtle shadings, suggestions, delicate imagery, wordplay, Volkman's wonted exquisite semantic precision, and a resolute rejection of closure which has become standardized in experimental American poetry after Lang-Po. These are sonnets that do, in fact, in large measure conform to my definition of post-avant: closely related to Lang-Po, but infused with a streak of confessional vulnerability and erotic longing. Extreme formal rigor is balanced by an impulse towards candor, which is then transmuted into a mosaic-like stillness. As constructs, these sonnets do not "sing" the way that early Petrarchan sonnets did: rather, they give off blended tones in a chime-like fashion, always a little elusive, a little far-in-the-distance. As such, a reading of nomina must take into account this formidable sense of distance, of a reach that, in this case, is a necessary part of reader response. I would not say that Volkman is pulling punches per se; there are enough candid moments to nullify that proposition; but, we are obliged to cooperate with Volkman, to work with her to fill in the narrative blanks that are left hovering around her constructs, to construct bridges that will allow for readings in which narrative hints and intimations take on flesh. The sonnets in the book are untitled and un-numbered; this is the fourth one in:

Spring's portion, a sweet sifting.
Aggregate spirit, portent or part
a limbic texture, textured heart
effacing the product of its lifting

white conduction in the bolus of a drifting,
as if. As of, apprised, apart,
it really was. It really hurt.
A game ago, a seismic shifting,

a few blocks back, blacked out. Broke in.
Backed off. Spoke more, in wish, said less.
Said this, sad such. Or some dumb grin

encrypted in the crude protection.
Abed a blue bent, dead bless,
the brutal of the person we'd have been.

The "we" in the final line clues us in to the suggestion of a relationship that seems to be the crux of the poem. The poem is so rich, and simultaneously so elusive, that it is hard to know where to start a hermeneutic analysis. I find the phrase "the brutal of the person" intriguing, partly because I have never heard "brutal" used as a noun before, partly because it carries with it a connotative ambiguity: since it is the "brutal of the person we'd have been," and since we are dealing with an "aggregate spirit," are we to assume that Volkman is hinting at a situation that is co-dependent, or mutually destructive, or outwardly destructive, or a little bit of each? Volkman's weird Steinian caesuras ("As of, apprised, apart") could have the effect of trivializing the scenario, or could just as easily signify the too-easy rapture of a casual affair, or a drunken night ("It really hurt," "blacked out"), or something both initiated and ended rapidly. "Crude protection," of course, could refer to emotional armor, conversational gambits, or contraceptives. Yet I take the last line to mean that either the entire thing did not happen, or it was begun and ended in a flash. It is also important to note that Volkman's use of a Petrarchan rhyme-scheme is skillful enough so that the form becomes invisible. As one who has been writing sonnets for quite some time, I find this remarkable, especially in America in 2008, where genuine formal rigor is hard to come by. Were this poem straightforwardly narrative and not elliptical, it would be easy to call Volkman a formalist; as it stands, the moves she makes (expressed in semantic games and bizarre curlicues) make her uncategorizable, unless you fit her into my post-avant rubric (which I do not mean to privilege, perhaps there are other rubrics under which she fits as well.) I want to take a look at a second sonnet in nomina, that stands out in the book as atypical (being more compressed, more rhythmic, and more directly Steinian):

Dull wheel
shall stall
ordeal
appall

still peal
whole wall
or rill
a call

a keel
will hull
until

a rule
a cruel
annul

This is a tremendously forceful, economical, ingenious poem. The essential metaphor I see in it (relationships likened to being "at sea," or "sailing," people as "wheels" or "keels") is not new, but is expressed with force and compelling brevity. The brevity of this poem does, in fact, stand out in nomina, and expresses a primitivism which is appropriate for the gut-level feelings and situations being evoked. "Annul," of course, has marriage associations; "cruel" suggests that it is not the protagonist who is ending things. The form is not strictly Petrarchan, or Shakespearean; it seems to be a unique composite. Line eleven, "until," seems to serve as a mini-volta, drawing us to the "annul," the turn of events that ends things. There is also the intimation that is a "rule" that somehow ends things; the associations are rather endless, and lead down a bunch of different hermeneutic paths. It is enough to say that this is a deceptively simple poem (formally and content-wise), and that it repays close reading and attention to detail, in its miniaturized complexity. It is something of an anomoly in nomina, but, to my eyes and ears, stands as good a chance as any other poem in the book of having an elongated life-span. "Life-span" is, in fact, often an issue for me, where Volkman is concerned. I see in her work the possibility of something enduring, such is not often seen in modern American poetry. Her themes are not novel; her ability to create new forms around and involving old themes is, in fact, extraordinary. As such, nomina stands as a worthy addition to her oeuvre, and should be required reading for anyone who thinks that old forms are dead, and that the possibilities of formal poetry have been exhausted.