contents of new issue of Verse

Anselm Berrigan (excerpts from two long poems)

Garrett Caples (poems plus part of Philip Lamantia's Tau)

Lidija Dimkovska (novel excerpt plus poems)

Rachel Blau DuPlessis (long poem)

Landis Everson (23 of his last poems)

Kathleen Fraser (nonfiction, poetry, letter, translations)

Pierre Joris (interview, poems, translations)

Gerard Mace (photographs, essay)

Nathaniel Mackey (poems)

Bernadette Mayer (poems)

Jennifer Moxley (essays)

Michael Palmer (essay)

Ron Padgett (poems)

Susan Stewart (poems)

Catherine Wagner (excerpt from verse drama)


456 pages / 15 contributors

$15 (postage paid)

Verse
English Department
University of Richmond
Richmond, VA 23173

NEW! Review of David Lau

Virgil and the Mountain Cat by David Lau. University of California Press, $16.95.

Reviewed by Douglas Piccinnini

“[M]ost not alive, I wasn’t afraid to die,” affirms the speaker in “Civil War,” from David Lau’s first book, Virgil and the Mountain Cat. “Civil War,” like many poems in this collection, maneuvers with razored precision through contemporary and historical dramas. Lau approaches his subjects with quick, lean, gestures and offers portraits of civilization doubled over, brought on by what seems to be the effects of late Capitalism. “Civil War” begins:

I read, I write, I hate my life word after word.
Telescoping Mercury remains
a Septembrist in burglary,
eyebrows an overthrow

spring, snaky splinter
signal to another season, oppositional
turn back on the first day of the new?
The more mortal each jealous mischief/

All men are murderers the more the uneaten
fell out of charge as poems without words
(& i.e. etc. / CSPN e.g. Enron
found in the anthology of aging aleatory broadsides),

Lau’s syntactical constructions and deconstructions surprise and deliver meaning in parts equally fresh and astringent. The enjambed second line of “Civil War” carries on for six lines and, while failing the needs of more conventional grammar and syntax, this movement achieves a kind linguistic acrobatics. In the first stanza, the interplay of the repetition of “I” in the long “i” sounds found in “I read, I write, I hate my life” shifts in the second stanza to the short “i” sounds and consonance of “spring, snaky splinter / signal.” This type of craftsmanship endures throughout Virgil and the Mountain Cat, and the result is an often-jarring collection of poems that resist ah-ha! moments and succeed in their ability to enlarge the dimensions of expressive language and communicate complex and elusive swatches of reality.

In “Going Out,” a runway of visions magnifies a pre-apocalyptic age, yet the speaker does not seem to exist on the precipitous edge of doom, but instead merely accepts the dysfunctional as a surrogate for normalcy.

You say nuclear; I say nuclear.
What kind of word is together?
On Cadmium dunes we treasure our Celts.
A plane to parachute from, a city: you want the radio:
if you want the radio for free charge the living: you have to,
ladies and dental plans. Sprig of mint
on the bib ineffective against further
spread of contagion.
In pain like a blouse,
this period is a peacock
in our history: drive the continent apart:
one lung left in the window
display of the BBQ restaurant.

Despite the loaded-gun feel of “nuclear” appearing twice in the first line, Lau manages a bit of humor in homophonically translating the formal address of “ladies and gentlemen” to “ladies and dental plans” and in doing so swings the mood of the poem (though the tone never achieves lightheartedness). Beyond the casual critique of “this period is a peacock / in our history,” “Going Out” continues to scrutinize what it means to exist in the 21st century. The poem’s later mention of the “[c]ity at the growth spurts of a city” and “your interior tangle of wires” suggests an imbalance between internal and external features of existence.

Perhaps, the burden of generation after generation of artists and writers is to feel as if civilization is at its most critical moment, a world wanting to snap off the orbital grid shot perilously into space. And though the end is perpetually near, Lau seems all too familiar with this burden, and successfully shrugs off the what-happens-after features of human egotism and instead navigates the ceaseless traumas of existence.

The book’s penultimate and title poem, “Virgil and the Mountain Cat,” points toward an empire at its twilight, flickering in however long its dusk may last,

I was thinking I would like to own this house. Then I fell. Under
hat, stone, cent, moss. Cranberry season into black smoke
season. Plus a knife in the branchy flophouse.

She was coming at certain daytime, with interest. We were getting
ready. Carried dishes that smelled like a hoax candle in the
empty room. Nighttime followed the switch the guards used to
guard everywhere it went on the mountain. As she, this changed.

And:

Knew. Knew alert. Those alarums her boy had bargained to us.
The glow would lightbulb around his head as the sun banged
down the western slope. The newspaper headline reported foreign
container ships’ rust flakes profuse in the harbor. So we were
telling. It hadn’t happened yet.

As the shore sounded.

The portentous feeling, which lurks throughout “Virgil and the Mountain Cat,” is delayed in its fruition as the speaker notes, “It hadn’t happened yet.” However the final poem, “Jellyfish,” formally address the ostensible source of this feeling, and begins “Dear XX century,” and goes on to condemn the spineless 20th Century as an age that has burned in a kind of hellfire. “Jellyfish” continues,

no one can darken skies like,

have you even been in meaning?

the forest on fire grows and glows
with sediment gorges hauled by

the clinking antiquated chain gaff:
words are worms more than what it’s not:

“The Unnamable” “The H Age”

a fucking sick hello, hymeneal subjoinder
from the whole fire and the sick

Colorfully dense, Virgil and the Mountain Cat is a rewarding book that demands rigorous attention as Lau constructs and deconstructs his subjects. Much like an Abstract Expressionist painter, Lau uses a kind of mark-making to engage with the materiality of language, and explores the semantic and sonic possibilities of verbal and ideological expression, while avoiding non-representational babble.

A detail of Cy Twombly’s Tiznit (1953) aptly adorns the cover of Virgil and the Mountain Cat, and subsequent images of Tiznit act as gateways to the book’s three sections. In a rare, published statement, Cy Twombly once proclaimed, “one must desire the ultimate essence even if it is ‘contaminated.’” Lau neither insists on nor resists presenting “contaminated” or dystopic visions in his poems. The presence of Twombly’s visual cues reminds a reader of Virgil and the Mountain Cat of not only the gestural intimacy and immediacy of art but also its ability to provoke and disturb. Twombly’s graffiti-like scratches on the canvas convey the limits of the application of his materials. The effect in Tiznit is that of raw (though intentional) rakes of color, which question not only the formal elements of painting as a medium, but the medium itself. And Lau, like Twombly, achieves a heightened connection to his subjects in an almost violent application/presentation of his materials. And for both Twombly and Lau, this complicates their authorial connection to creation, as the act of creation involves a condemnation and/or a potential dismantling of their subjects, the medium and its history.

NEW! Review of Jennifer Moss

Beast, to Be Your Friend by Jennifer Moss. New Michigan Press, $8.

Reviewed by Sara Lockery

Jennifer Moss’ Beast, to Be Your Friend is a collection of dense, kaleidoscopic poems whose dynamic energy propels the reader through a world in which trapdoors hallucinate, clouds are “arranged by pain,” and “smoke rises like seraphim.” Sharp, burnished, and fiercely original, Moss’ poetic voice animates the static and grants precision to the most intangible and abstract of concepts. In fact, the atmosphere is oftentimes just as (if not more) alive than the poem’s subject. Skies “noose” horses and “rush over startled skins,” sentences and voices “uncoil over the square acres,” “fasten down the land,” and “twist in the air.” Tension and contrast are alive, not only in the form, which fluctuates between narrative past and the lyrical present, but also in style and tone, which alter from mythological and detached to distinct and personalized.

One staple of Moss’ poetry is the ambiguity of the speaker’s attitude toward her subject. For example, in “Ducking in and out of Shadows,” the goat is initially portrayed in a sympathetic, humane manner. “I felt a debt to the goat,” the speaker confesses, her “womanish head bobbed up and down, one yellow eye turned toward the sun.” However, the tone darkens as the speaker almost immediately goes on to describe the unsightly gash in the side of the goat, which she then hits “with a switch.” Similarly, in “Beasts Framed the Field IV,” the speaker gallantly declares, “Beast to be your friend I’d gather the clouds swarming / over the river,” after which she goes on to threaten/propose, “I’d like to feed you…the suffering inborn / disease of my blood.” In each case, the tonal transition occurs in such a way that it almost suggests manipulation on the part of the speaker. By initially personifying the animal subject, a sense of connection with and sympathy for the animal is established. Therefore, when the animal is ostensibly hurt or threatened by the speaker, the reader almost feels deceived. At once menacing and inviting, coolly detached and warmly humane, Moss has generated a daunting atmosphere of unpredictability in which the reader is left susceptible to her whims.

Throughout the book there looms a general sense of interconnectedness. In “Making the Centaur,” the will of the horse is “fiercely tangled” with our own. “Portrait” creates a similar situation, in which the speaker unites the isolated man waiting atop a building to commit suicide with every other living thing with the statement, “You know he is going to die sometime…everything does.” “The Storm” displays signs of cerebral interconnectivity in its opening statement, “Where one mind stops, another begins,” as well as in the speaker’s portrayal of the sky as a giant, cohesive spider web in which “the dead bees of memory” of all living beings are housed. Related to a sense of multiplicity and interdependence is the recurring phenomenon of projection; internal emotions are often transferred into external entities. “I fill his body with my mind / to give my thought a shape,” the speaker informs us of the zebra in her poem “In Mammal Hall.” Such cohesiveness and interaction between subjects not only blurs the line between individual humans and all other humans, but also between humans and animals, calling forth a surreal landscape in which animals take on human characteristics; beasts and centaurs speak, and octopi are depicted as “aristocratic.”

Moss’ stylistic treatment is equally as compelling. Throughout the book, the speaker intentionally universalizes, or lends abstraction to, a particular image. For example, in “Making the Centaur,” the atmosphere is portrayed as “earth’s symbols.” All elements of nature, presumably sun, sky, and other natural manifestations, are grouped together under a single blanket term, thus blurring distinctions between them. Likewise, in “Beasts Framed the Field II,” the speaker equates the beast’s act of digging a hole to digging back in time to his “red and black birth.” Moss’ generalization of these images establishes an atmosphere of mystery, opening up limitless possibilities as to the precise visual representation they will form in the reader’s mind. Additionally, the act of symbolizing grants these poems the weight and feel of legend. The use of the phrase “earth’s symbols” harks back to ancient Greek and Roman mythology, and the act of digging has become a universal emblem for reaching an earlier, more primordial state.

Furthermore, the use of such generalized language provides a counterpoint to Moss’ equally consistent use of precise, pared down imagery. In fact, the same objects Moss lends abstraction to are elsewhere sculpted into sharp, specific images. Several lines up, the same beast who is portrayed as a distant figure of mythology, “digging back to [his] red and black birth,” is perceived so clearly by the speaker that she can “see the vein jump in [his] neck / and the salt shimmering over his lip.” Likewise, at the end of the poem, the same horse who is situated in the legendary position of being chased by the “earth’s symbols” is so real that the “foam smeared over his flanks” is visible and the “tingle in his nerves” can be sensed. This sense of clarity and immediacy directly contradicts the formerly vague, allegorical treatment of these subjects. The effect of this is twofold; by pairing mythology side by side with realism, each acts as a foil to the other, emphasizing their differences. At the same time, however, portraying the subject of the poem in manifold ways blurs the distinction between them and suggests the possibility of their interrelatedness.

Beast, to Be Your Friend masterfully balances surrealism with minimalism, violence with humanity, and past tense narrative with the first person lyrical. Just like the “silver thread blowing in and out of visibility” in “Fields,” the seamless movement of Moss’ poems explores the discrepancies as well as the connections between these disparate elements, reflecting the larger theme of an underlying connectivity and multiplicity. “The signs sit in everything / They are true, but untranslatable,” the speaker tells us. Indeed, delivered in a detached, elusive voice and peppered with furtive allusions, one could say the same of Moss’ poems themselves.

NEW! Review of Katy Lederer

The Heaven-Sent Leaf by Katy Lederer. BOA Editions, $16.

Reviewed by Sara Lockery

Katy Lederer’s The Heaven-Sent Leaf probes the conflicting yet interrelated concepts of art and commerce, establishing a fruitful tension between the technical and the emotional in contemporary society. At the heart of this tension lies the startling observation that the spirit of money occupies the core of such timeless institutions as poetry and love. “There is, in the heart,” Lederer reminds us, “the hard-rendering profit.” Likewise, the threat of art continually rebels against the order of city life, voicing a recurring plea for its emancipation from the doldrums of industry. Behind every facade of society, we are told, the artist is “waiting, like an animal, / for poetry.” The dynamic quality of Lederer’s language further exemplifies this tension; alternating between observational narrative and lyrical rhapsody, it is at once detached and intimate, tentative and insistent.

One of the most apparent themes in The Heaven-Sent Leaf is the interaction of the external world of business (money, capital, trade) with the internal, primal state of passion (love, art, nature). Such association becomes evident in the second “Brainworker” poem, in which the narrator begins by expressing the need to “keep drear managerial impulse away from the animal mind.” Located along the borders of logic within the mind, however, is a “silky white cat. / Howling,” an image soon interrupted by the narrator’s anxiety over her “year-end review.” The poem finally closes with “The moon… settl[ing] into its shadow” and the narrator “howling.” The reference to the cat howling within the “mind’s little prison” gives the impression of entrapment and suppressed desire, which reflects Lederer’s recurring assertion that the expression of the artist is stifled by the monotony of the business world. Additionally, the perpetual oscillation from the dreariness of office life to the unruliness of the creative intellect establishes a tumultuous dialogue between these two opposing forces, exemplifying the state of constant flux that pervades much of the book.

Another way in which Lederer creates tension between opposites is by structuring her poems as quasi-sonnets that simultaneously transcend and adhere to form. Such experimentation with the sonnet is evident in “Heavenly Body.” For example, in the second to last line, the formerly detailed depiction of vast distances (“Between these mountains runs a pass blasted through by the / movements of water and indebted plateaus. / Imagine it widening, eternally, as the owl will fly or flower bloom”) is solidified into “Long silences between us.” Likewise, the previously elaborate reference to the serenity of the moon* is compacted into “Imagine, Love, the patience of the moon.” In clear, sparse language, the ending thus operates as a kind of condensed summary of the fundamental elements of the poem, a technique characteristic of the sonnet. And by breaking the poem into thirteen lines, Lederer roughly recalls the sonnet form. But the odd number of lines defeats the possibility of consistent couplets and the poems do not regularly follow iambic pentameter, thus distinguishing Lederer's work from the sonnet by upsetting its symmetry. In this way, the structure of Lederer’s poems provides an additional example of the interaction between order and chaos.

Aside from the continual fluctuation of subject and style, Lederer’s technique is further distinguished by her ability to grant physical, tangible properties to the abstract. For example, in “The Rose, The Ring,” thoughts are depicted as diamonds falling to the floor. The genius of this portrayal lies in the fact that something as theoretical and intangible as thought is successfully embodied in the distinct, concrete form of a jewel. Furthermore, such characterization resonates with the larger theme of commerce; the narrator has in effect transformed the act of thinking into a commodity: “We sweep them up, the little jewels,/ The little bastard trinkets.” By illustrating human thought as a token of sorts, Lederer has raised the possibility that anything of value, even ideological value, has the potential to be channeled into a form of capital and used to obtain power. The seeming disparity between the timeless, psychological value usually associated with mental reasoning and the temporary, mechanical value Lederer assigns to it reflects the general atmosphere of tension that characterizes her work.

An additional trademark of Lederer’s technique includes a distinctive kind of repetition that involves a refocusing or development of particular concepts. Take, for example, these lines from “Heaven-Sent Leaf”: “To imagine oneself as a river. / To imagine oneself as a stretch of cool water, / Pouring into basin or brain.” The repetition here is both linguistic (the reusing of the phrase “to imagine oneself”) and conceptual (the recurrence of the idea of water). However, in the first line the tone is dry, fragmentary, and abstract, whereas in the following lines it is lyrical, rhythmic and precise. The idea of a river has thus been extended and developed into something entirely different. The effect of this particular kind of repetition at once ties the images together through shared wording and conceptual grounding and isolates them by splitting them up into two tonally and stylistically separate contexts. The interaction between the opposing ideas of variation and repetition and between unification and differentiation reflects Lederer’s larger theme of the interrelation of conflicting concepts (money and love, business and nature).

Lederer’s adeptness of execution, including the way in which rhythm, alliteration, and repetition perpetuate the mood of the concept at hand, further demonstrates the strengths of The Heaven-Sent Leaf. The phrase “The legs are mimetic of the mind’s locomotion” is a particularly effective instance of such cohesion between style and content. The aural similarity between “legs” and “mimetic,” as well as the alliteration established by the words “mimetic” and “mind,” suggest the repetition and circularity involved in the act of imitation. Moreover, the gradual widening exemplified by the transition of sound (‘eh’—‘eye’—‘oh’) mimics the regulated motion that characterizes the functioning of machinery. Together, these linguistic factors both aurally and mentally enhance the motion and circularity inherent in the concept of moving legs, cycling machinery, and imitation. The fusion of the technical and conceptual aspects of writing amplifies the impact and intricacy of Lederer’s poems by generating an alternate layer of complexity and cohesion.

With panoramic scope and fluidity, The Heaven-Sent Leaf depicts contemporary society in a way that at once criticizes and embraces its materialistic impulses, artfully balancing the conflicting extremes of art and office life. The title itself effectively embodies the core tension of Lederer’s poetry: a symbol of nature as well as materialism, of temptation as well as salvation, the heaven-sent leaf can take the shape of either a leaf from a tree or a paper money to be used for barter. The perpetual flux of its tone mimics the natural rhythm of human thought, and the conceptual variation of the collection as a whole masterfully articulates the dual nature of reality.



* The sarcasm inherent in the lines, “Is she angry? Is she edified? / Does the moon crawl into bed at night, drunk and restless as any kept woman…?” suggests the outrageousness of the moon acting in such a way, thus intimating, by reverse logic, that the moon is normally associated with calmness and serenity.

NEW! Review of L.S. Klatt

Interloper by L.S. Klatt. University of Massachusetts Press, $15.

Reviewed by Daniel Shoemaker

Interloper begins with the inscription (attributed to Walt Whitman) “The day wore on, and the sun went down in the west; still the interloper, gloomy and taciturn, made no signs of departing.” Klatt, like his hero Whitman, is the interloper, the poet. He is the unsolicited prompter of questions. His voice is deliberate and wise, making no dogmatic claims, preferring to elicit meditations on the “indefinite. Infinite,” though rarely succumbing to it, as his poem “The Ominous Cross” suggests.

“Provincetown,” the book’s opening poem, establishes many of the motifs and stylistic trademarks that Klatt returns to throughout Interloper. It is a characteristically brief poem (none is more than a page long) about a model glider. In it, the innocence and ignorance of a child is undermined by the implicit violence of his war fantasies:

Yokefellow, how steep our swoop,
what coastline what distance?

As if we travel well,
as if potentate

The hinge of the engine-less rudder

Solarized
It sing-songs

A plane alone does not know what to do, or towards what shore to fly. It, like Klatt’s poetry, needs a helmsman, someone to interpret the scenes and posit advice.

“What can be salvaged?” “How then do we prophesy?” If Klatt asks, it is because he does not know. His poetry is steeped with humility before the vastness of space and the harshness of reality. Klatt invokes Jesus, Darwin and the purple of the cosmos to situate civilization as near a microscopic molecule in some greater eternal body. All his questions do not speak to such sanctuaries of thought. Klatt also asks, “when do these canned meats expire?” His subtle humor carries the book from beginning to end in one sitting, and linguistic cocktails like “forlornographic” make palatable the self-pleasure of misery.

As in “Provincetown,” the relationship between innocence and violence is explored in great depth throughout Interloper. Children’s toys and games often become vehicles of dominance and contention. In “I Swallowed a Deck of Cards” spades and clubs act out racial tensions, despite their common origins, culminating in a reenactment of the horrific 1998 lynching of James Byrd. “International Orange” describes a model F16, destined for “moonlight immolation” and piloted by a stick figure who plays “Aces & pick-up sticks.” The poem “Fetus in Orbit” entertains imagery from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick’s indictment of technology and man’s penchant for violence. The movie’s final image of a human fetus floating through space becomes that of an unborn cow, a playmate and a wonder for the narrator, who later unwillingly encounters the violence innate and pervasive in the pursuit of survival,

I was told I would eat a thousand cows,

I lay there, disbeliever, like a figure 8 in milk

As much as Klatt may seek direction, he concedes to the futility of intention: he “[has] no more use for a steering wheel than an 8 ball.” Klatt’s questions spin back upon and bisect themselves, his imagery does “loop-the-loops & figure-8s.” The recurrent use of this reoriented infinity is a mathematic and pictorial tool. Klatt employs both throughout Interloper, balancing his existential inquiries with data and numbers, graphs and graphics. Symbols and charts become non-verbal poetry. A head without a body swings from an un-played game of hangman. The circle that sways from the minimally rendered gallows may also be metronome mid-beat or a hypnotist’s tool or perhaps some lever in the machine the narrator is forced to kiss.

As much as some of the poems in Interloper are verbally irreproducible, many are driven by their percussive cadence. Music is used as a second native language. Its symbols become words and ideas that scope beyond written language. There are “musical rules for the apocalypse” and a “siss-boom skitter beat” for love. Words tumble together into a symphony of images, often correlated only by their context. Together the sounds and their meanings paint a large sonic canvas peppered with explosions of life and stasis, an image to be read over ages.

The poems in Interloper belong to no one time. They contain pork that expired in March 2009 and domestic relics like a washboard. There is a strain of post-industrial mistrust that loosely situates, and runs parallel through, most of these poems. They often chart the evolution of humans away from humanity and leave foreboding hints towards their mutual demise. In a collection of poetry so kinetic and transitory, using literal vehicles as metaphorical vehicles, scenes of atom bombs and the apocalypse offer possible limits to the telescoping path of humanity. In “Body: Rhapsody” a smashed car is a crumpled Coca-Cola can. U.S. recklessness and consumerism collide. There is a distinctly American tone to Klatt’s work: from paranoia to pride, the American ethos is called into constant question.

Interloper is a cohesive body, indicative of many years honing. Its vibrant images of memory and doubt, despite their ambiguous cohesion, foster a common ground between author and reader. Existence is portrayed as equally uninviting and inevitable.

NEW! Review of James Shea

Star in the Eye by James Shea. Fence Books, $15.

Reviewed by Douglas Piccinnini

James Shea’s first collection, Star in the Eye, considers the expanding and shrinking values of experience with vivid strokes of suspicious wit. His poems wander through dreamscapes, retaining their lucidity. And though it seems as if a sudden gridlock of nerves is impending, the speakers of Shea’s poems maintain composure and as “Panoplies” asserts, “[y]ou are not free to enjoy the nostalgia.”

The collection begins with “Turning and Running” and quickly establishes Shea’s shrugging expressions of alienation and peculiar rapport with the natural world— themes which stripe this solid debut.

The sun was backing away from me,
slowly, like one I have betrayed.
So I ran to the river to burn in it.
And they blocked the road with ambulances.

Shea’s compressed narration moves in logical jerks that result in the delightful accretion of visual surprises. The speaker’s relationship to nature evokes a kind of eco-consciousness, which resists slipping into clunky agitprop critique. Instead the speaker of “Turning and Running” insists on a reappraisal of [his] conditional relationship to nature and concludes, “There were at least four things / I should have said. Do not step on the rug / with the live birds sewn into it.”

“Turning and Running” befits an era of uncertainty— the title immediately ushers us out of the nearly chewed-through first decade of the 21st century. Shea’s voice captures an intense perception of the natural world taking us beyond Whitmanesque awe, and instead invokes a Stevens-like suspicion of both the perceiver and the perceived features of nature. Consider the opening of Stevens’ “The Green Plant”:

Silence is a shape that has passed.
Otu-bre’s lion-roses have turned to paper
And the shadows of the trees
Are like wrecked umbrellas.

The effete vocabulary of summer
No longer says anything.

Stevens’ violent image of “wrecked umbrellas” finds the natural world in human terms imagining nature as a kind of failed machine, i.e. a wrecked umbrella is a worthless machine, perhaps abandoned on the street. For Stevens and Shea, human activity and perceptions of nature push and pull on one another.

In the last lines of “Turning and Running,” a human product (a rug) and nature (birds) are unnaturally wed. The speaker’s cautionary closing signals a disturbing hybridization of nature and technology in a seemingly inevitable marriage. Shea’s speaker in “Turning and Running,” like Stevens’ in “The Green Plant,” experiences the “effete vocabulary” of a natural world that “[n]o longer says anything.” Though Stevens’ lament appears to be seasonal, it too, like Shea’s, suggests a betrayal by the natural world. As a result, both poets’ vocabularies shape the natural world into a kind of bio-technological event. Stevens’ bare branches are like twisted metal; Shea’s freakish magic carpet is ineffectual— to step on the rug with “lives birds sewn into it” is to wound or kill the birds: its potential for flight removed. As “Turning and Running” closes, only one of the “four things” the speaker “should have said” is said. In a similar outcome, the final stanza of “The Green Plant” suggests the difficulty in negotiating competing perceptions:

Except that a green plant glares, as you look
At the legend of the maroon and olive forest,
Glares, outside of the legend, with the barbarous green
Of the harsh reality of which it is part.

In Star in the Eye, many of Shea’s poems inhabit a “harsh reality,” which is to say nature corrupted, or co-opted by human experience, and yet these poems contain sensuality. In “Mechanical Foliage” the speaker feels “the rapid turning of the sun in [his] direction” and, like “Turning and Running,” is again faced with a natural encounter that leads to feelings of internal conflict.

A young entrepreneur sold me his business card.
He told me this was one of the beautiful days.

He offered a presentation on my whereabouts:
half of you awake, the other half was not asleep.

He said I would see handsome epiphanies,
a vision unifying the particulars, for example.

The poem ends with this promise fulfilled as the speaker’s senses heighten:

I heard sheets of ice clink over the lake.
I found the extraordinary moment and recorded it.

I wash small trees with my hands, sponging
the trunk and leaves. I live once supposedly.

In a type of cleansing ritual, having found the aforementioned “vision,” the catalytic sun again leads to a moment of insight in the natural world. Perhaps the sun is the “star in the eye” of Shea’s poems.

Shea’s talent for plain-spoken acuity is best laid out in the string of haiku-like segments contained in “The Riverbed,” which is one of two longer sequences in Star in the Eye. Shea’s “The Riverbed” uses “riverbed” as a thematic anchor: “On the Riverbed,” “Autumn Riverbed,” “Family of Riverbeds,” “Riverbed Water,” and so on. These gentle, playful lyrics mark an airy section, not only in its sparseness on the page but like the satisfaction one might feel seeing a box kite sailing in the sky.

In “Dream Trial,” the other long sequence that closes the book, part 12 codifies the interiority of Shea’s voice: “What if only my anxieties keep me alive? / What if only my anxieties transmigrate?” Shea’s speakers experience the bewildering clarity of not an unforgiving world, but one that simply persists in endless renewal. In the final moments of the book the speaker again faces the sun— the star, albeit hidden by cloud cover:

I lie down on the splintery lawn.
Sparrows ’round me like corners.
Above: a small re-release of rain.
No one can stop the Spring from coming.

the panharmonicon

[from an abandoned essay on the panharmonicon]

In one of his many journal entries, Ralph Waldo Emerson envisions a new genre for a new country—the panharmonicon—which builds from oratory (namely the lecture and the sermon) and in which “everything is admissable, philosophy, ethics, divinity, criticism, poetry, humor, fun, mimicry, anecdotes, jokes, ventriloquism.” Aside from its startling inclusiveness, the panharmonicon serves as a salutary example of genre-opening: Emerson seeks to expand the possibilities for poetry by breaking down traditional generic boundaries.

Many of Emerson’s lectures are monologues, proto-performance pieces that, if performed by another, would be as vibrant and dramatic as a traditional dramatic monologue. According to Emerson, “A lecture is a new literature … It is an organ of sublime power, a panharmonicon for variety of note…”

Many of James Tate’s more recent dramatic monologues (see Worshipful Company of Fletchers and Shroud of the Gnome in particular) adopt a didactic tone—the narrators seem half-sane or otherwise under extreme psychological stress, but they do their best to convey their knowledge of the world and the urgency of that knowledge. In their own way, they lecture. The poems parody knowledge or, more specifically, the conveyance of knowledge. Erudition becomes a matter of particulars, not of breadth. While Tate’s dramatic monologues rarely approach or court the sublime, they do attain a “variety of note” that openly autobiographical poems cannot accommodate. This is perhaps even more evident in Tate's last three books, which feature free verse/prose poem hybrids narrated by various personae.

With increasingly porous boundaries between prose and verse, more and more poets seem to be realizing Emerson's vision. Which seems appropriate, since Emerson's poetry was in his prose.

the plain style in poetry

“Innovation does not mean change for the sake of change; experiment does not mean fiddling with a perfectly serviceable tool. Innovation is a necessary response to force of circumstance in which the apparent utility of the medium is insufficient.” --Jed Rasula, introduction to Syncopations


“this importance cannot be seen in what the poem says, since in that case the fact that it is a poem would be a redundancy. The importance lies in what the poem is. Its existence as a poem is of first importance, a technical matter, as with all facts, compelling the recognition of a mechanical structure. A poem which does not arouse respect for the technical requirements of its own mechanics may have anything you please painted all over it or on it in the way of meaning but it will for all that be as empty as a man made of wax or straw.” --William Carlos Williams, 1934 review of George Oppen’s Discrete Series


“I am moved by work that does one or more of the following: includes emotions seldom found in contemporary poetry; unsettles the limitations of genre and convention; subverts cultural complacencies; articulates emotional states for which there is no norm; enacts the reader’s sublime.” --Alice Fulton, “A Poetry of Inconvenient Knowledge,” in Feeling as a Foreign Language

“Simplicity is prized as a symptom of sincerity...” --Alice Fulton


Plain speech, as Marjorie Garber notes in Quotation Marks, is “often a cover for the most successful and duplicitous (or at least manipulative) speech.”


The assumptions inherent in the plain style: of readerly collusion, of frictionlessness. Poetry is a language art; it contains artifice. To pretend otherwise is to pretend. Poetry written in the plain style is as rhetorical in its colloqualisms and accessible diction as stylized poetry is in its involutions and disjunctions. The difference is in the poet’s assumptions of the reader’s reception. The plain style poet expects the reader to slide with ease across her words in order to focus better on her content, whereas the more resistant poet expects the reader to work at reading, to experience the textures of language as an integral part of the content.

quotation in poetry

“Quotation confesses inferiority.” --Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) describes quotation as occurring when “a writer expresses himself in words that have been used before because they give his meaning better than he can give it himself, … or because he wishes to show that he is learned and well-read. Quotations due to the last motive are invariably ill-advised.”

So Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Derrida, Barthes, Deleuze, Adorno, etc. appear regularly, and often unnecessarily, when a poet is writing about poetry. Always out of context and frequently misunderstood and/or misapplied, these noble figures are used for their weight, to give ballast to the drifting rafts of text the unsure writer is putting into the world.

Like a cliché, a quotation stops thought for a moment, giving the “author” a break from having to put his or her own thoughts into words. Quoting other writers has become such a common, if not automatic, process that most writers who leap to recognize others they admire do not augment themselves but disappear themselves. They get lost behind the figures they conjure through the act of quotation even as they seek to align themselves with what they quote.

Is it possible to cite without citing? To benefit from others without bowing to them? To quote is to simultaneously step aside and assert oneself. But the stepping aside can be a problem, because it is evasive—one’s own ideas are what are being evaded. And asserting oneself in this way can be a problem, because all that is asserted is one’s tastes and reading habits, one’s endorsements and affiliations.

Fortunately, poets are increasingly finding ways around the problem, through collage, graftings, montage, erasure, treatments, compost, palimpsest, documentary and investigational poetries.

The Trouble With Billy Collins [part 3]

from an unfinished essay [see note for part 1]

But Collins was not always so milquetoast. “Hart Crane,” for example, stands out as a well-developed piece that imagines Crane’s body hitting the water and feeling the water around him change from wake to wave. The poem seems perverse in its lack of emotion—Crane is an object, already a corpse in Collins’s hands—but this perversity, being absent elsewhere in Collins’s work, is refreshing. It seems fitting, then, that Collins omits this poem from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems, which includes only the safest poems from his first book. (Of the 45 poems in that book, 15 appear in Sailing Alone Around the Room.) So “Child Development,” in which he refers to Samuel Johnson as a “fatuous Enlightenment hack,” is gone, perhaps because it might offend someone. He also omits “Cancer,” which addresses the difficulty of saying the word and in an unexpected, moving conclusion, applies this difficulty to the poet’s father, who apparently suffers from the disease. Such pain, however genuine, does not earn a place in the Collins canon. And when cancer is allowed into the New and Selected Poems, it’s only through a humorous simile, in “My Number,” in which death is “busy … scattering cancer cells like seeds.” And “Flames,” which portrays Smokey the Bear setting a forest on fire “to show them / how a professional does it” does not make the cut. Though little more than a bad joke, the poem demonstrates a spark, at least. Collins omits even the minor terror of “Hopeless But Not Serious,” in which “every morning begins like a joke” and “trouble is you cannot remember the punch line / which never arrives until very late at night, / … just before you begin laughing in the dark.”

Originally buried on page 50 of The Apple That Astonished Paris, eleven poems from the end of the book, “Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House” is given pole position in the New and Selected Poems. A reader unfamiliar with Collins could not be blamed for expecting a political poem (gun control being an ever-contested issue in the United States), or at least a poem with an edge. That reader, of course, finds something else instead—safe wit, a dog “sitting in the orchestra” to accompany a symphony by Beethoven “as if Beethoven / had included a part for barking dog.” The title, then, remains outside the poem, as a joke framing it, and this indirect relationship emerges as the poem’s primary strength. Given the shallowness of most of Collins’s work, a title that does not comment straightforwardly on the poem seems like an achievement.

It becomes easy to predict which poems from Collins’s earlier books will be chosen for the New and Selected: those that are thoroughly safe, tentatively clever, and aiming to please—or to be less generous: those that are passionless, shallow, and obsequious. It also helps if the poems take place in museums, on vacation in Italy, in libraries, or on college campuses: apparently the favorite haunts of the NPR-listening audience Collins depends on so much for his book sales. To jettison the macabre and the disturbing from one’s New and Selected smacks of self-censorship, and is especially unfortunate given the broadening effects those elements would have on this career- and income-boosting volume.

Charles Simic has noted that “Collins is fun to read” even though “he has absorbed all the modernist techniques and uses them well.” Unfortunately, Simic does not articulate what these techniques are, aside from calling Collins “self-consciously literary” and pointing to his homages to Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, and W.H. Auden. In any event, despite their allusions and occasional self-consciousness, Collins’s poems read nothing like Pound’s, Eliot’s, Stevens’s, Moore’s, Crane’s, Stein’s, or any other poet considered modernist, and the claim seems contradictory, since modernism is apparently what killed the popular audience for poetry.

Simic is more accurate when he points to the Collins persona: “Collins comes across in his poems as a slightly eccentric but friendly neighbor, a professor with a nice wife in some affluent suburb or small town, who walks his dog and does the usual errands and chores associated with that kind of life” (italics mine). In other words, simply SWM. In his poems, Collins is not seriously eccentric or misanthropic, his wife does not make his life difficult, he has no financial worries, he does not beat or otherwise abuse his dog (Collins likes his dog, but not enough to give it a name in his poems, perhaps because he wants his dog to be the NPR ur-dog) or neglect or bemoan his position in the social fabric. Simic adds, “Probably one of the reasons for the success of his books is that he gives the impression to his readers of being like them.” Collins himself claims no ambition to disturb his readers: “I want to establish a kind of sociability or even hospitality at the beginning of a poem. The title and the first few lines are a kind of welcome mat where I am inviting the reader inside.” Given the commercial success of Collins’s books, he must be an accommodating host.

Yet Simic also admits that in Sailing Alone Around the Room “too many poems have predictable conclusions.” And “Collins is so much in control that by the end of a poem I’m left with the feeling that I’ve been told everything that there is to know. … there has to be a countercurrent, a touch of ambiguity and uncertainty” to keep things interesting if not edgy. This gentle criticism coincides with Collins’s own description of his process in his Paris Review interview: “I want to start in a very familiar place and end up in a strange place.” But his poems fail to tell the reader what the reader does not already know. One learns almost nothing from Collins. This is probably why he has become a popular success. Ever palatable, never disturbing, Collins is a poet for everyone. And that is the problem.

I am not arguing for accessibility as an end or cure-all, nor as a mean toward a larger readership. Because poetry is often difficult to write, it can be difficult to read and still be valuable to culture. It is especially difficult to write strong, accessible poetry that does not pander to the reader. Yet when a poet comes along who can gaze outward as powerfully as s/he gazes inward and write poems compelling at the levels of language, perception, and imagination, the virtues of accessibility are realized—at least in the case of David Berman’s Actual Air—and readers will notice.

The Trouble With Billy Collins [part 2]

from an unfinished essay [see note for part 1]

Among American poets who have not become entirely mainstream, David Berman seems particularly adept at bringing a larger audience to poetry. Berman has published one book, Actual Air, which has sold more than 12,000 copies in five printings and received wide notice (in literary magazines as well as major newspapers and magazines like the New York Times, GQ, Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker, and Spin). Berman’s status as the singer/songwriter for The Silver Jews surely helped his sales, but has had little bearing on the literary world's response to his book, which has been mostly positive. Consider the following excerpts from reviews: “Actual Air is one of the funniest, smartest, and sweetest books of the year” [GQ]; “Actual Air is actual poetry. Berman is on a mission to make the world strange, to find in the doo-dads of daily life a profound weirdness” [Spin]; “Berman’s debut announces the discovery of a great American poetic storytelling voice by a new generation” [Publishers Weekly].) As a poet and literary critic, David Kirby, reviewing Actual Air for the New York Times Book Review, would hardly be swayed by Berman’s music career in his assessment of the book. Despite some quibbles, Kirby concludes that Berman’s poetry has “great promise.” And in Boston Review, the poet-critic Ethan Paquin has described Berman as “a master collector of American miscellany.”

Berman’s poems work because of the quality of his imagination, his understated flair with language, his humor, his compassion, and his sense of timing. In his own words, his poems are “psychedelic soap operas” (Redivider interview). Although attracted to the possibilities and textures of language, Berman is less committed to formal innovation than are more challenging lyric poets. Neither disjunctive nor oblique, arcane nor stylized, his poems evince an attractive ease. But they present the alert reader with sufficient resistance to give the reader a sense of progress in moving through the poems. One does not finish a Berman poem wondering what one has just read, as many people do when reading contemporary poetry for the first time. His poems meet the reader halfway without pandering to the reader. Even the title of his book was selected out of a desire to assuage people’s skepticism about poetry. As he explains in an interview, “I wanted to express in the offset, before someone opened up the book, that poetry is speech, which of course is totally dependent on the fact that you can push air through your mouth and that these words are just air filtered in a certain way” (Brett Burton, “Coming Up for Air,” City Paper).

One of Berman’s signature moves is to treat himself as a character, not as an impermeable construct. This is a direct result of his poetic imagination. He mocks his own sensitivity and pretensions to sensitivity, but he can be disarmingly straightforward in the process, as in “Self-Portrait at 28”:

I am trying to get at something
and I want to talk very plainly to you
so that we are both comforted by the honesty.
You see there is a window by my desk
I stare out when I am stuck
though the outdoors has rarely inspired me to write
and I don't know why I keep staring at it.

My childhood hasn't made good material either
mostly being a mulch of white minutes
with a few stand out moments…

Berman does not evince the “hatred of Identity” (Evans 13) that characterizes the work of an increasing number of contemporary poets, but a distrust of Identity is common in his work. (According to Steve Evans, avant-garde poets reject “the type of identity conferred by the commodity form” in an attempt to respond to the dehumanizing effects of capitalism, imperialism, and their recent offspring, globalization. “Introduction to Writing from the New Coast”, Telling It Slant: Avant-Garde Poetries of the 1990s, edited by Mark Wallace and Steven Marks.) Berman engages in identity politics by questioning the authority traditionally associated with his identity group, the straight white male. By questioning this authority, he undermines his own position in a social hierarchy which the white heterosexual male has historically dominated. One could call this interrogation an identity crisis, but one that, because of its political ramifications, goes beyond the typical Romantic poet’s questioning of the self. The self in Berman’s poems mutates, turns on, agitates, and generally fucks with itself so as to destabilize the lyric tradition in general and SWM privilege in particular. The lyric voice is assaulted through multiplicity and refraction, but it is consistently maintained, which distinguishes this poetry from radical or otherwise avant-garde poetries. He subtly questions the cultural privilege assumed by and ascribed to SWMs. This social aspect pushes Berman’s poetry further into the public sphere.

Berman’s frequent relinquishment of SWM privilege also appears in James Tate’s poetry, as Lee Upton has pointed out: “The actual work of the poems in their demasculinizing of male characters and caricaturing of heterosexual desires, in the voicing of need, weakness, and contingency, boldly counters patriarchal posturings of expertise” (Upton, The Muse of Abandonment). But Tate is a slippery poet, and at Berman’s age he was more preoccupied with the surfaces of language and more inclined to experiment with words than Berman is. Like Tate, Berman knows that humor can be an effective means of simultaneously inviting the reader into the poem and disorienting the reader.

Berman, in some ways, sounds like Billy Collins. An unusually bland poet with an unusually large readership, Collins is accessible without writing doggerel, humorous without being aggressive, self-deprecatory without being anguished, SWM without being particularly virile. He writes in free verse composed according to the phrase; he does not attempt verbal pyrotechnics. Thus, he offers an unthreatening presence on the page. He even wrote one of the two blurbs for Actual Air (Tate wrote the other one), which might signal an aesthetic affinity between Berman and Collins. Yet I find little to like or even enjoy in Collins’s poetry, even after reading all of Collins’s work, from his first book to Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems and The Trouble With Poetry. Why, then, do certain readers embrace one poet and ignore or shun the other?

First consider Collins’s own thoughts on poetry, as expressed in his introduction to his anthology Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry. Here he recycles the well-worn narrative about modernism killing off poetry’s readership: “During the heydey of Pound, Eliot, Stevens, and Crane—that Mount Rushmore of modernism—difficulty became a criterion for appraising poetic value,” and thus “readers fled in droves into the waiting arms of novelists” (I agree with Collins that the “hunt for Meaning” is often the surest way to ruin poetry for a reader. But there are ways of talking about a poem that do not rely on meaning or different interpretations but that can be intellectually engaging and enjoyable. Paying attention to—and trying to understand the effects of—the sounds and moves a poem makes, pretending that one is writing the poem and thus making decisions at every step, can effectively involve readers in a poem.)

For Collins, “clarity is the real risk in poetry. To be clear means opening yourself up to judgment.” Collins’s denouncement of difficulty and embrace of clarity is meant to forward his own poetics of accessibility, where there is no “obscurity for its own sake,” since “the willfully obscure poem is a hiding place where the poet can elude the reader and thus make appraisal impossible, irrelevant.” Collins’s discussion about the public reception of poetry has shifted from aesthetic terms to ethical terms: difficult poetry not only turns off readers, but is a sign of an evasive, untrustworthy author who under no circumstances wants to connect with readers. This shift points to a major problem in Collins’s thinking—and in others like him—since the question of audience for poetry does not need to become a question of the moral, ethical, or social fitness of the poet. But because Collins obviously has a stake in the legitimacy of the accessible poem and the speciousness of the difficult poem, he must attack the authors of difficult poems, not just the poems themselves. The fact is, difficult poems often seek a deeper connection with their readers than most accessible poems (especially Collins’s) do. By virtue of the work—active reading—a difficult poem can require, the reader can join the poet, temporarily, in the act of the creation and interpretation of meaning. The difficult poem can enlist the reader as much as it can shut out the reader, but Collins does not acknowledge that site of possibility because it is not in his best interest to do so.

Poetry 180 arose from the Poetry 180 project, a program that Collins, as Poet Laureate, initiated to bring a daily poem to high school students. The anthology seeks to present “a generous selection of short, clear contemporary poems which any listener could basically ‘get’ on first hearing.” In theory, Poetry 180 is a worthwhile and potentially effective endeavor. By exposing high school students to a poem every day, without quizzes, tests, papers, or even discussions about the poem, the project implies that poetry does not have to be an academic exercise even if it occurs in an academic setting. Even though Poetry 180 is geared toward high schools, the absence of the usual academic activities creates more possibility for enjoyment. But Collins’s tastes are so bland and out-of-touch that I have difficulty imagining many of the poems he selects appealing to teenagers. He admits to including poems in Poetry 180 that would appeal to high school students—thus the presence of poems about sports and cars. But the poems about sports and cars are almost always written from a middle-aged (and SWM) perspective, and thus (in the eyes of a high school student) from Dad’s perspective. Another example: Paul Muldoon, whose poetry I very much admire, is represented by a poem about a sonogram—not exactly the kind of poem the average, or even above-average, teenager will respond to. “Gathering Mushrooms” (or any number of Muldoon’s shorter poems) would have been a more appropriate choice here. Likewise with Joe Wenderoth, represented here by the allegorical (and relatively “difficult”) “My Life” rather than a piece from Letters to Wendy’s. So Poetry 180 is a case of good intentions—and a good idea—but ultimately a missed opportunity.

Collins’s poems, too, represent numerous missed opportunities. His poems are formally unassuming, written in a free verse that rarely acknowledges the line as a site of possibility. Built almost entirely on the prose phrase, Collins’s lines are among the least notable in contemporary poetry because they are the most common. There is nothing singular or distinctive about them. Although sporadically punctuated, Collins’s line breaks demonstrate little enjambment, as if to use line breaks rather than allow them would prove unpopular or otherwise alienating to the reader. Stylistically, Collins is an adept of the McPoem—a phrase coined by Donald Hall and subsequently encapsulated by Reginald Shepherd as “a little reminiscence, a little nature description, a little epiphany.” At first glance, Berman’s relaxed style can resemble that of Collins, but Collins’s poems admit are almost pathologically bent on small epiphanies. For Berman, the failure of epiphany is as important as its arrival.

Collins’s poems are full of redundancies, imprecision of thought, and lame narratives. Even Collins’s concept-driven poems stem from the most banal concepts. Consider the beginning of “Schoolsville”: “Glancing over my shoulder at the past, / I realize the number of students I have taught / is enough to populate a small town.” This would seem trite and poorly written in prose; that it is cast into lines does not help the idea gain substance. Collins’s set pieces—“Advice to Writers” and “Introduction to Poetry”—are really just two innocuously tongue-in-cheek didactic poems that read like watered-down Kenneth Koch. That said, “Introduction to Poetry” is practically the only poem of any imaginative worth or vigor in Collins’s first book.

Because the narratives in the poems themselves are so lightweight, he sometimes puts all of his energy into a poem’s ending, as in “Vanishing Point,” the first poem in The Apple That Astonished Paris: “You have heard of the apple that astonished Paris? / This is the nostril of the ant that inhaled the universe.” Collins would do well to replicate such wit, however modest, more often in his work. What distinguishes Collins from Berman is his complacency. Formally slack, morally unengaged (despite his claims to the contrary), and politically detached, his poems are polite, almost treacly in their determination to please. They never make the reader—or the poet—uncomfortable. The pleasure they give is without risks. Nowhere does Collins seem menacing, misanthropic, distressed, or otherwise unlikeable. A desire for a negative personality can play into the cliched image of the agitated Romantic poet, but negative emotions appear in almost every poet worth reading. Berman, on the other hand, frequently implicates himself in the pain that can accompany pleasure and therefore attains a more difficult—and more human—equilibrium. Collins’s is a white-washed, white-bread poetry designed for mass consumption and easy digestion. No one leaves a Collins poem troubled or otherwise disturbed. Collins’s style is the non-style.

The Trouble With Billy Collins [part 1]

Note: This is essentially an unfinished essay, started in 2000 and abandoned a couple of years later. The essay discusses the idea of accessibility in contemporary poetry, using David Berman and Billy Collins as its primary examples. Originally, the essay was going to cover another 5-6 poets in an attempt to rethink how accessibility can be applied to considerations of poetry.

Accessibility has increasingly become a key ingredient of public discussions of contemporary American poetry, particuarly when those discussions focus on the general reader’s flight from poetry. Those who call for more accessible poetry—for poetry that, like prose, can be paraphrased—frequently want a poetry that can compete with fiction for a readership, demonstrating in the process a tendency to equate poetry’s relevance with its sales volume. On one hand, postmodernism, with its indeterminacy and theoretical apparati, is to be avoided; on the other hand, modernism, with its cultural superiority and white-maleness, is the bugbear. Both modernism and postmodernism, the story goes, have diminished the art’s audience outside the university. Poetry has become a specialized field, and as a result no one reads it, though everyone seems to be writing it.

The issue of accessibility in poetry is largely a matter of comfort zones. By watching many films, American have learned, perhaps unconsciously, the language of film. These same people, if they read just ten books of poetry each year, would learn the language of poetry and would come to enjoy ostensibly “difficult” poets as they enjoy “difficult” films. Poetry is not beyond the average reader, whether she is located on campus or off it. And poetry does not need to be “narrative” poetry to attract a larger readership. As it was practiced before film and modernism, narrative has become less viable aesthetically. To narrate in the mode of the nineteenth-century novel is to pretend modernism and film never occurred, for the narrative strategies introduced, developed, and complicated by modernist and postmodernist fiction have become further developed and complicated by film.

When Dana Gioia writes of “the inability to establish a meaningful aesthetic for new poetic narrative” (in “Notes on the New Formalism”), he does so as one of New Formalism’s most articulate apologists. Although much of Gioia’s critical writing centers on metrical verse, he has called for more narrative in American poetry as a means of regaining some of the lost audience for poetry. That he also calls attention to the absence of powerful narrative strategies among contemporary poets is significant because Gioia, more than most poet-critics, has a vested interest in seeing narrative poetry flourish. If narrative poetry takes off, he can claim (as he does for metrical poetry) to have been one of its staunchest promoters. Despite Gioia’s efforts, however, New Formalism and New Narrative poetry have not put poetry back into “mainstream American culture.” Most of these poets, like other contemporary poets, publish in academic quarterlies, teach for a living, and give readings primarily at universities. (Thus, one of the more disturbing aspects of the New Formalist and New Narrative movements is the common assertion that the practitioners of formal and/or narrative verse are rebels, blasting the status quo of confessional free verse. In his essay “The Other Long Poem,” for example, Frederick Feirstein goes so far as to compare narrative poets like Dick Allen and Frederick Turner to “the formally censored Russian writers.”) This is neither a positive nor a negative reflection on those poets; it just means they’re also vulnerable to the difficulties of marketing a non-lucrative genre.


Whether or not one ascribes to Stevens’s adage “Realism is a corruption of reality,” the realism of narrative poetry is an aesthetic and intellectual limitation. Although a renewed realism has been touted as a primary strength of New Narrative poetry, realism itself is archaic as an artistic mode; and American readers are not looking for literature (or film) that reverts to tired narrative conventions. Those who criticize poetry for becoming too difficult, too narrow in its concerns, seem to ignore the critical and popular success of films, such as “Pulp Fiction” and “Memento,” that demonstrate more formal complexity and aesthetic innovation than most contemporary fiction or poetry. (And some video games in the twenty-first century also employ complex narratives that, because of the medium, are enormously more interactive than film or literature. “Max Payne” and “Max Payne 2,” for example, use graphic novel storyboards as well as the usual cut scenes. And of course there’s the “Grand Theft Auto” series, which provides revolutionary open-ended gameplay as well as a primary narrative and various sub-narratives.) Saying that most poetry is too difficult for the average person is condescending, since ‘the average person’ has enough intelligence and sophistication to decipher and enjoy films that make the plot-line of Infinite Jest seem straightforward.


Despite T.S. Eliot’s elitism, much of the poetry written today would not be possible without at least some of his proscriptions. Even the most populist (in intention if not in reality) identity-centered poetry depends upon Eliot’s (and Pound’s) tenets “that diction should become assimilated to cultivated contemporary speech,” “that the subject-matter and the imagery of poetry should be extended to topics and objects related to the life of a modern man or woman,” and that it is important “to seek the non-poetic, to seek even material refractory to transmutation into poetry, and words and phrases which had not been used in poetry before” (Milton lecture). Of course, Eliot never licensed “free verse as a liberation from form,” which is something “only a bad poet could welcome.” He undoubtedly would consider almost all contemporary poetry, with its near-total ignorance of the formal qualities of poetry, very bad indeed. Eliot’s observation that “a great deal of bad prose has been written under the name of free verse” is even more applicable now than in his time.

Of course, it is one thing to point out a problem, quite another to prescribe a solution. Stopping at identifying this impasse—between the possibilities of film and of poetry—would imply that movie-goers should not and will not read poetry: it is out of their comfort zone. Some of those championing the New Formalism or the New Narrative think reintroducing narrative into poetry will help it regain some of the audience it has lost in recent decades. But too often the narrative strategies employed by these poets are far behind contemporary fiction and even farther behind film. These poets inadvertently pander to their potential audience by implying that it cannot handle complexity in poetry. This is why most narrative poetry fails to enlarge the audience for poetry. And the most enduring recent book of narrative verse to reach a large audience, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red (1997), is one of the last books that proponents of the New Narrative would champion.

There are poets writing now who write accessible poetry without conforming to outdated narrative strategies, condescending to their readers by exploiting identity politics, or reciting domestic anecdotes that culminate in trite epiphanies. (Another major problem with contemporary poetry is the prevalance of poets who present one-sided, often self-serving views of their life experiences, a tendency that results in a dull cacophony: with so many poets writing so unimaginatively about their lives, it is no wonder the average literate person steers clear of contemporary American poetry.) The work itself, not the public relations surrounding it (television appearances by the Poet Laureate, poems read at Presidential inaugurations, poetry sound bytes on NPR, inflammatory remarks and condemnation from the Anti-Defammation League—such public spectacles, while good for individual careers, do little for poetry) is what will help poetry gain a wider audience, if not the mythical huge general audience of yesteryear. Poetry is an art form distinct from fiction, music, film, and television. While it can, and does, incorporate elements from each of the other art forms, poetry is something else. Adding narrative to poetry—making it more like conventional fiction—only makes poetry more like fiction; it does not expand the audience—actual or potential—for poetry.

Why not? Because those who read poetry do so because they want to read poetry—not fiction in an alternative form, but an alternative to fiction. This is where accessibility can benefit poetry and its readers. A poetry written with the rare (and difficult) combination of accessibility and close attention to the possibilities of language and imagination has a great capacity to draw readers—not poetry that tells stories, not poetry built on predetermined identity, not poetry that requires a PhD reading list to decode, but a poetry that presents enough of a challenge to make its readers feel sufficiently engaged in and by the work, that provides readers with adequate entry points for that engagement, that privileges medium as well as message, that evinces a poetic imagination that can transcend, or at least side-step, the morasses of identity politics and therapeutic self-expression. In other words, a poetry blending difficulty, accessibility, artfulness, and imagination.

NEW! Review of Jane Mead

The Usable Field by Jane Mead. Alice James Books, $14.95.

Reviewed by Christina Pugh

Read in its entirety, Jane Mead's new collection The Usable Field has a texture that is reminiscent of both unbroken dream and the perceptual field experienced by a person who is almost too awake: a life lived, incidentally, on a vineyard in northern California. It is on the cusp of such a distinction that this book's considerable value resides; and Mead’s voice, with its sometimes impoverished and always ravishing frequencies, reveals this liminal place as home.

The Usable Field is not quite a dream book, not quite a landscape book, nor exactly a book of elegies -- though in another sense it is all of these. It is first and foremost a book about the phenomenology of personhood finding its integrity and often its literal bearings in a world that, though familiar, feels perennially unmapped -- a place in which persons must search not only for the content of the soul, but also for the delineation of its very boundaries. There is thus a certain sort of phenomenological, not to say philosophical, motion sickness at the core of Mead’s work; and it invariably governs the way in which the poet perceives the world, whether as landscape or as human relation. The insistence (and morphology) of her search for boundary and delineation may be found in two passages from two different poems:

--your
deer-colored dog

is loping in the
deer-colored grass
in the morning. Nowhere

are you where we are not.

And:

In grief the pilot knows you--
no need to say take me to my so-called soul--
she is your so-called soul: she knows
you will be waiting when she lands--she wants
you to be with her if you drown.

In the first passage, the metonymic spillage of deer color creates a Gestalt wherein the observed animal – the dog -- becomes indistinguishable from its surroundings. This collapse of figure and ground is emotionally borne out by the authority of the italicized insight that follows: any geographic or conceptual distinction between the “you” and the “we” has dissolved. In the second quotation – so eerily reminiscent of Adrienne Rich’s “Twenty-One Love Poems,” in which the pilot keeps “keeps / on steering headlong into the waves, on purpose” (The Dream of a Common Language) -- the female pilot not only “knows you" but “is” your so-called soul,” as proximity becomes a disquieting transitivity-as-intimacy: “she wants / you to be with her if you drown.” In both of these instances, the self, even while on the verge of dissolution, retains its strange perspicuity and indeed its skepticism (“so-called soul”) in the face of the categories which define both itself and its relation to others, whether human or nonhuman. Indeed, this is a voice that, as we are told elsewhere, was given "to believe in nothing / before [it] believed / in the jay.”

In the preceding passages, we can also hear the plain style sounded out in dissonant notes. With her paradoxical combination of stuttering and oracular sureness, Mead is echoing and yet resisting the musics of several women poets before her: Dickinson, the H.D. of Trilogy, and even Louise Bogan (Mead’s “High Cliff Coming,” for example, is reminiscent of Bogan’s later “Night” and “Morning” poems). It is most gratifying to hear the poet listening so intently to this aspect of her voice. The pitch of this book is consequently higher than in some of her previous work, which sometimes erred on the side of flatness; but I also sense that her visceral distrust of high lyricism abides. Such distrust reveals itself most often on the micro-level – for example, in the occasional obstreperous diction choice such as “bleep,” which “ruins” a higher and more musical pitch of declaration. Though these moments can jar, I am convinced that this infinitesimal ruination is what keeps Mead’s poetry in an authentic relation to itself. So much contemporary poetry lacks precisely this sense that the line, and the poem itself, must function apotropaically (as a formal and materialized defense against other possibilities of verbal incarnation). Helen Vendler makes the point succinctly when she writes the following of Whitman: “…one ought to mention as well the temptations that the poet’s mind encounters along the way….and how these are staved off or (in some cases) yielded to” (Poets Thinking). In Mead’s own words, we may discern in her work “a cavern of darkness / where the phrase is missing / at the bottom of music.” The traces of the unwritten, even (or especially) as resolved in the often harmonic surfaces of high lyricism, are what make poems worth reading; otherwise, they become simply machines or verbal exercise.

It is also unusual to find a book of poetry that is not explicitly “themed,” narratively or otherwise, that exhibits the degree of tonal cohesion found in The Usable Field. In this way, Mead finds her model in Louise Glück, who has always known how to materialize a mental state most symphonically in a succession of poems. The poems in The Usable Field unapologetically reflect emotional extremes (Mead addresses the heart directly, in a poem titled after it) as well as the slow deliberation attendant upon and constituting ratiocination. Mead heightens this effect by using a consciously anachronistic use of doubled punctuation such as a comma coupled with a dash; even the poems’ titles incorporate this strategy at times. “Same Audit, Same Sacrifice” is how one poem’s title encapsulates the book’s characteristic duality of shrewdness and lyric drama. In short, the impression we get is of something driven, something true: not “true” in a confessional sense, but true in the sense of Glück’s own argument “against sincerity.” The poems are not worked up; they give the impression of having emanated directly from a particular insistence of thought and -- much rarer -- of emotion as well, no matter how alloyed the nature of that emotion might be. It need hardly be said again that the effect here is often Dickinsonian.

“This is some chant I’m working at--” writes Mead in her book’s first line after its proem. Chant and work: two words that don’t necessarily dovetail in the mind of the reader. Yet Mead has coupled them in order to make a truer trajectory. I would also suggest that Mead “trues,” as carpentry, in the material, emotional, and intellectual senses. How beautifully she has inaugurated a collection that is so infused with the combined and paradoxical virtues of simplicity, lyricism, and unstinting thought.

NEW! Review of Travis MacDonald

The O Mission Repo by Travis MacDonald. Fact-Simile Editions, $12.

Various American poets have taken on other texts with an eye toward doctoring, treating, or otherwise erasing most of the original. Ronald Johnson’s RADI OS is something of a touchstone in this area, with other notable contributions by Stephen Ratcliffe, Jen Bervin, and Mary Ruefle, among others.

Whether the source text is canonical (Milton for Johnson, Shakespeare for Ratcliffe and Bervin) or not, the linguistic possibilities afforded by the source ultimately shape any later treatments of it. RADI OS, for example, is often as intense and intensely lyrical as its source text, Paradise Lost. And as Guy Davenport has noted, the book conjures “an image of America as a paradise lost,” thus demonstrating how a treatment can seem both intriguing and necessary, even inevitable.

This connection between past and present has been a central element of most erasure projects. So it’s curious that Travis MacDonald reworks a contemporary document in The O Mission Repo, and that his source is not literary but entirely worldly—functional, political, commission-y. In re-working The 9/11 Commission Report, MacDonald demonstrates how poetry can reside, or hide, within the most utilitarian of language, inside the most public of documents.

MacDonald transforms the report’s “Preface” to “reface” and the chapters “We Have Some Planes,” “The Foundation of the New Terrorism,” “Counterterrorism Evolves,” and “Responses to Al Qaeda’s Initial Assaults” to “We Ave Plan,” “The Found Error,” “Errorism Evolves,” and “Re Po in A,” respectively. Throughout the text, some common replacements include “light” for “flight,” “Unit” for “United,” “Lad” for “Bin Laden,” “error” and “errorism” for “terror” and “terrorism,” and “opera” for “operation.” These changes end up exerting a powerful force on the new text.

Each chapter employs a different erasure technique and thus retains, or effaces, the original text to varying degrees. Most of the original preface has been covered with a thick black line, bearing some resemblance to the “censorial dash” in Bob Brown’s Gems. The book’s opening announces its own project: “We the narrative of / America / present this repo / as a / history of the / how.” Within the field of serviceable communal prose, MacDonald isolates and retains the communal while locating the profound by (and at) the end of his “reface”: “We / have searched / past / sight // and witness / for // This final / fraction of / light. // We emerge from this / or / into this / as / other.”

In “We Ave Plan,” MacDonald crosses through most of the existing text, but because his lines are not quite letter-height, we can make out the original text, albeit with some eye strain. However closely we examine the stricken words, we are not allowed to entirely ignore the presence of the original. By treating the timeline of the hijacking of the airplanes on 9/11, MacDonald fashions a shadow narrative—one that’s both strange and poignant:

At 8:54, the craft was lost. At 9:00, lines had been lost to Unit. At 9:12, the point was cut off after the first call. At 9:29, the Dull east light. At 9:34, vice pointed toward the Pen and advanced the throttles. At 9:37, Liberty was delayed at the gate. When it left America.

(In the original, of course, the words are scattered across several pages, in their positions in the original document.)

In “The Found Error” chapter, MacDonald blurs the original and maintains the legibility of the words he wants to retain. Again, the original remains legible, with some effort, its presence unmistakeable. He even carries this technique over to a photograph of Osama Bin Laden, blurring out the face and thus turning the focus of the photograph to the palm of his hand. Similarly, in a map of Afghanistan, the country itself has been blurred out, and only the map’s legend remains legible—a visual commentary, perhaps, on the myopia of the War on Terror.

The format of the “Errorism Evolves” chapter resembles that of RADI OS, in that the original text not retained by MacDonald is simply absent. But unlike in RADI OS, the language here is workaday, at least initially: “In Chapter 2, we described a new kind of error / In this / chapter we trace the parallel evolution of / Unit…” Some passages manage to approach the high lyrical (“o form / aging form”) or revel in the bawdy: “the enlightened hand of self-interest // demands // a hardened cock // a vault of / cock // locked in / cement.”

The book’s last chapter, “Re Po in A,” nods to Zukofsky while positioning the non-erased text on a scaffolding of musical staffs. These emerge as frequently operatic and dramatic, particularly when we recall the catalyst for the book’s source: “O / maker— / O / man / O / mission / o / found ember of / old / vision…” The performance ends when “Unit finally found Lad as this opera ground to a close.”

Of course, Unit has not really found Lad, and MacDonald’s treatment remains an imaginative and physical reworking of both reality and The 9/11 Commission Report. For taking on such a document with such incisiveness, and for allowing himself to move beyond the usual pieties associated with that day, MacDonald has performed his own act of public (and poetic) service.

NEW! Review of Oni Buchanan

Spring by Oni Buchanan. University of Illinois Press, $17.95.

Reviewed by Eric Crapo

Oni Buchanan’s second poetry collection, Spring, is an exercise in language as vessel for spiritual experience and reverence for nature. As a musician and a poet, she puts more emphasis on sound than on syntax, and her poems are driven more by harmony and assonance than by grammar. Just as music hides melodies inside harmonies and accompaniments, Buchanan hides poetry within poetry, and she seeks out the physical representation of these layers throughout the collection. The culmination of this technique can be seen in “The Mandrake Vehicles,” the final section of the collection (which is also presented as a flash animation on an accompanying CD), but she introduces her reader to hidden poetry as early as the collection’s supernumerary prologue poem.

Five poems--“The Smallest Plant,” “Amaryllis,” “Vespers,” “(A)Version,” and “Still-Life with Interior”--make use of a poetic axis. The bulk of these are shuffled among the first section of Spring, while the first acts as the collection’s gateway. Each of these poems is arranged on the page so that a handful of letters in each line are stacked atop one another to show a second poem, an epigram, beneath the first; she sets off these secondary poems by graying out the necessary text, as in "Amaryllis." The amaryllis is a flower that grows in barren, rocky terrain, which Buchanan describes as “… stones: room / for water, room for air…” The stems of the plant are naked, having no leaves, and the species itself is the only one of its genus. Already drawing a parallel between the plant and the human condition, she stresses the loneliness of the plant by highlighting the text that lies at the poem’s physical core. The poem and epigram combinations throughout the first section read as calls and responses. But Buchanan is careful not to over-use the epigrams; the bulk of the poems in the first section do not use them, and she does not use them in later sections of the collection.

Even without the hidden epigrams, Buchanan's voice remains consistent throughout the book. Consider the following lines from “The Word,” from the second movement of the collection:

And to burst would give voice
in bit, the cacophonous pieces
breaching the surface, a tangle,
a flooded exhumation of limbs.

The language iis airy and fluid. Sound takes precedence over meaning, though the meaning is not lost. Buchanan uses more Latinate words in “The Word” than in “Amaryllis”--cacophonous and exhumation versus wayward and leeches--but the words she chooses still carry the meaning of their respective poems. When read aloud, cacophonous becomes an example of itself, while the root exhume has an upward motion as a body must feel being taken out of the ground. Likewise, the core vowels of leeches draw the word out, as the awe of the amaryllis does light. Buchanan is conscious of sounds--of the percussion of consonants and the airy or brassy qualities of vowels--in every poem in Spring.

Each section of the book has its own, unique device. The second section makes use of origami in its final poem, “Or Portals to another world,” which incorporates photographs of objects--a crane, a frog, and a box--constructed of folded paper filled with lettering, fragmented in a way similar to the epigrams from section one. One drawback to origami poetry is that it is hard to read: a single line reads across a fold, and a high spatial intelligence is needed to mentally reconstruct the object. Each page of this poem is a new form, and that fluidity serves to alter the reader’s perception as often as possible. Buchanan keeps the poem in flux, introducing her readers to a concept that will dominate the end of the collection.

Though untitled, the book’s third section is a series of poems addressed to the “lonely animal,” a zoomorphic reflection of humanity. Six out of the seven poems in this section bear the title “Dear Lonely Animal,” and talks directly to the “animal” as if to a love or a child. The opening poem, “The Lonely Animal,” is more detached from the subject, treating it in the third person rather than the second, and acting as a prologue that allows the reader to meet the animal before reading the poet’s more personal communications with it. The lonely animal is as much a reflection of the narrator’s self as it is an object of devotion.

The fourth section contains two less mundane poems, “Text Message” and “Maroon Canoe,” but they are made weaker by their device-based composition. Consider the opening lines of “Text Message”:

oni, u rancorous scam, u r no rare ace.
no common sense. no sure win.
no amour. no sex. no career.
no suave swimwear, size six.
no Amazonian eminence.
no renaissance in consciousness.
mere ire is over asinine nuance.
u r so mesozoic era.

Buchanan continues to use her sound-based composition, as shown in “Amaryllis” and “The Word,” but here she uses text-messaging grammar to draw particular attention to the sounds u and r. The assonance and alliteration of these words throughout the stanza are already plain without truncating you are this way--by doing so, she draws a neon arrow to the simple poetic devices in the poem. In fact, other than the lack of capital letter and the use of + for “and,” Buchanan’s txt-speech is incomplete. She knows that if she presents a poem entirely in truncations, even the common reader would have difficulty. She could have gone so far as to title the poem “Txt Msg,” but she does not.

The title-poem of the collection appears at the end of the fourth section, reflecting the last line of the collection’s prologue. At the beginning, spring was a question, and here it becomes a statement: “I guess it’s Spring.” Still, the statement is uncertain, despite the passing of the “Solstice”--the title of a poem in section two. This frames the main movement of the collection, letting what follows be a coda, or an encore. The main movement of Spring is a collection of poetry in four sections, complete without “The Mandrake Vehicles,” the only titled division of the work. By framing the first four divisions the way she does and titling the last, Buchanan clearly indicates that “The Mandrake Vehicles” makes up an entirely independent work--with its own introduction and a CD accompaniment. In “The Mandrake Vehicles,” Buchanan has attempted to create something new. Her attempts to explain what she has done are complicated by a use of cross-words--explaining poetry in terms of music. While the conceit of these “vehicles” is challenging, and the process of reading them difficult, the layering of a poem inside two others, like nesting dolls, is immediately apparent. The best way to experience these poems for the first time is through the flash animation.

Buchanan calls each set of three poems a “vehicle,” from which letters either float away or slide off the page in order to reveal other poems. The letters which appear in the words of all three poems always appear in the same order, except when “shadows” of those letters are used to create additional words that do not otherwise appear in the poems. The poems are even further linked since the first poem of each vehicle can be read, in succession, as stanzas of a longer poem. This long poem is a symphony, and through the process of each vehicle, Buchanan shows us the part played by each instrument. In fact, she identifies this series as being “scored for paper, letters, and imagination…”

To excerpt from one of the Mandrake Vehicles is to quote three poems simultaneously:

not knowing eoungh to shriek when (k=not knowing when) they
were pulled, a root hair, when the tendrils are broken, the network
of unfurling towards, and the long lines connecting them
underground (oh at first they had only grown vertically from
the dirt, a mere)…

becomes

Towing no ghost, no wing, the
well-dart air-enters bent new or
flings a lone scent
under. Gnats hover, till
the dire…

further becomes

Winnowing heart
(stolen tundra
sorting empathies),

In this last section, she pulls letters from lower lines up, and the third line above is constructed from three additional lines not quoted in the first excerpt. With the letters she removes from the text each time, Buchanan arranges them into a collection of other words which she drops at the bottom of a page. These letters do not form words in the order in which they are removed, but they are rearranged as scrabble tiles.

Oni Buchanan’s experience with both music and poetry gives her a unique perspective on composition. Early in Spring this benefits her work. The more complex her conceit becomes, the more difficult her poetry becomes to read. Buchanan does not maintain a single poetic form, and she has arranged the variety in a way that allows her form not to become stale. Spring is a performance, the arrangements of consonants and vowels into sounds, and sounds into words. The collection is a complete symphony and an encore which steadily progresses from concrete to surrealist lyric--though “melody” may be a more appropriate word for Buchanan’s poetic mode.

NEW! Review of Roberto Bolano

The Romantic Dogs by Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Laura Healy. New Directions, $14.95.

Reviewed by Ed Pavlic

I shall tell thee a twofold tale. At one time it grew to be one only out of many; at another, it divided up to be many instead of one. There is a double becoming of perishable things and a double passing away. The coming together of all things brings one generation into being and destroys it; the other grows up and is scattered as things become divided. And these things never cease continually changing places, at one time all uniting in one through Love, at another each borne in different directions by the repulsion of Strife.

—Empedocles of Acragas

And so it goes according to the pre-Socratic thought of Empedocles. The double plot: the elemental smelting and dissolution of water, air, earth and fire into what we do and don’t feel, can and can’t know; and the forces of conserving coherence (Love) and those of propulsive chaos (Strife) that animate the mix. In Empedocles’s thought, there’s a region beyond all of this, an infinite boundlessness where all elements and elemental patterns exist only as potential, everything mixed with everything else so evenly and chaotically that it’s beyond the forms of existence themselves. Reading Roberto Bolaño, one is ever in the mix between propulsion and conservation, back and forth and round and round, until we can almost see him at work in Mexico, in Spain, in France, amidst the galaxy (each star a pantheon) of literary personae that fired his work. We can sit with the formidable evidence of his effort to conserve the propulsive energies of Latin American literary talent that came of age around 1968 in Mexico City after the Latin American “Boom” of Neruda, Borges, Paz and others. The result is nobody’s wax museum. Instead, Roberto Bolaño’s labors have left us a living, elemental cosmos of Love and Strife that simultaneously built and destroyed his generation of artists.

At the beginning of the encyclopedic mid-section of Bolaño’s first magnum compendium (or at least the first one published in English) of interrelated personae, The Savage Detectives, one Perla Aviles recounts a quarrel about quarrels. Upon learning that her friend, a Chilean adolescent poet living in Mexico City, had had a fight with a local theater director about the respective merits of Nicanor Parra and Pablo Neruda, Aviles reports, “of course I could hardly believe that two people would fight about something so unimportant. Where I come from, he said, people fight about things like that all the time. Well, I said, in Mexico people kill each other for no good reason at all, but certainly not educated people. Oh, the ideas I had then about culture.” Aviles, a voracious reader, then doubles back to investigate the argument between the director and the young poet. She doesn’t go back alone, she takes a weapon: “I went to visit the director, armed with a little book by Empedocles.” After a few thousand pages of his prose being released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (The Savage Detectives, 2666) and New Directions (By Night in Chile, Distant Star, Amulet, Last Evenings on Earth, Nazi Literature in the Americas), we can appreciate (if not quite fully fathom) the scale of Empedoclean play of propulsion and conservation in Bolaño’s imagination.

Having read most of the prose record in a kind of Bolaño fever over the summer, I wondered at first what The Romantic Dogs could add. I found that Bolaño’s poems hold the magnifying glass between the sun and his view of reality on the ground. In the prose (this may have to do with the flood of new work available in English), Bolaño ranges wide across countries and continents, conjuring dizzying arrays of voices and personae over hundreds of pages. In the poems, he holds the focal points in view on single pages. We watch the glass focus the light; the poems smoke. The effect of this stillness intensifies and clarifies our sense of the motion. In The Romantic Dogs, readers catch Bolaño’s process as if on a slow succession single slides for the microscope. In “The Frozen Detectives,” Bolaño’s poets (and poems) enact similar evidentiary deceleration, posing as a kind of metaphysical CSI team. The persona informs: “I dreamt of hideous crimes / and of careful guys / who were wary not to step in pools of blood / while taking in the crime scene / with a single glance. / I dreamt of lost detectives . . . / our generation, our perspectives, our models of Terror.” Bolaño’s detectives and perros romanticos refuse to leave the dream, the active zone of love and strife where things and people shift from becoming to unbecoming and back. They refuse the nightmare, the place (that’s no place) where things are (and so, aren’t) what they are. In “The Romantic Dogs,” he writes, “And the dream lived in the void of my spirit. // And sometimes I’d retreat inside myself / and visit the dream: a statue eternalized / in liquid thoughts // A drowning love. / A dream within another dream. / And the nightmare telling me: you’ll grow up. / You’ll leave behind the images . . . // I’m here, I said, with los perros romanticos / and here I’m going to stay.”

Bolaño’s prose visions are multitudinous, ebullient, and fantastic. We read through them as if Velocity is the cousin that sends, like she does in the poem “Rain,” messages to us from “Nature,” who “hides some of her methods / in Mystery, her stepbrother.” His poems are slower. If you’ve ever watched someone die waiting for a last breath, the breath slows, the pace crawls, the time between breaths (as if in small, rehearsal deaths) grows. There’s terror and peace in those spaces. The question is whose is whose and which is which? The poems in The Romantic Dogs expose a similar state of suspended ambiguity. I don’t know how old Bolaño was when these poems were written. It’d be great if they were dated. They’re great anyway. In “Self Portrait at Twenty Years,” he writes, “You either listen or you don’t, and I listened // despite the fear, I set off, I put my cheek / against death’s cheek. / And it was impossible to close my eyes and miss seeing / that strange spectacle, slow and strange, / though fixed in such a swift reality: thousands of guys like me, baby faced // brushing cheeks with death.” There’s bound to be some Duende in a dream deferred. A dream inferred. Infrared. The images are slow and strange, and they take shape in a contemporary world: “Right now you can cry and let your image dissolve / on the windshield of cars parked along the boardwalk. But you can’t disappear.” Grown-up stasis and the fantasies of transcendence that accompany it, alike, foreclosed. Nature’s stepbrother breathes his slow breaths. We watch. In “Atole,” Mario Santiago and Orlando Guillen, “Mexico’s lost poets,” appear “as if in a mural where they lived / velocity and haste did not exist.”

Visions intensified reveal the motion, the play of the infinite, inside things that sit still as time rolls up and down on its way. Permanence not only exists, it recedes. In “X-rays,” Bolaño dissects this angle of (inner) vision: “The X-rays tell us time / is expanding and thinning like the tail of a comet / inside the house . . . // If we look, however, with X-rays inside of the man / we’ll see bones and shadows: ghosts of fiestas / and landscapes in motion as if viewed from an airplane / in a tailspin . . . // and we’ll know that there’s no cure.” As in the Cante Jondo and the blues, there’s a kind of vital sadness in it all. I suppose Empedocles’s “infinite boundless” (non-)exists in its way beneath emotion, language and culture. A permanent receding, as in Empedocles’s thought or in Bolaño’s work, might make exhaust that the human brain converts into sadness. We crave it nonetheless. In Bolaño, an epic sadness is the place where all the basic intensities of experience go when they’re not busy fucking up our lives. The visceral realist poet/archivists flee part one of The Savage Detectives in their patron architect’s (his name is Font) old Chevy, the narrator watches the scene recede as Lupe puts the pedal to the metal and reports, “I saw a shadow in the middle of the street. All the sadness in the world was concentrated in that shadow, framed by the strict rectangle of the Impala’s window.”

Through mind and dust and blood (even through death), the poems in The Romantic Dogs slow the vision down, and usher us up cheek to cheek with a permanent receding, according to the nature (and her stepbrother) of which even Empedocles can help rescue a prostitute and shoot off toward Sonora on a lark. These poems magnify the intricacies in a literary craft of considerable dimension. They fix upon a prose magician’s trickery slowed down and brought up close so we can focus on its hands as they move. Up close, we see they don’t. They don’t begin to move until they’re perfectly still. Stilled in images of motion and fluid. The poems in The Romantic Dogs carry a life toward us as we watch the permanently receding elements of its Will to Strife operate. As in “La Francesa,” they invoke “A love that wasn’t going to last long / But that by dessert would have become unforgettable.”