Dear two lit-crit geeks up late at night who found this by googling John Barth—

Dear three writers of well-written poems who care very much about your craft (Apologies, but I think the only craft we’ll be talking about here is a ship)—

Dear Matt Hart—

Dear Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. I can see that, though fictional you be, you’d be very interested in Mr. Young, Dean—

Dear Alexis Orgera—

Dear people who ♥ consistency. Out upon your guarded lips! Sew them up with pockthread, do—

Dear, anxious-looking taller woman whose t-shirt says “Insouciance by any other means…”: I wish you would turn around in your seat to let me see the punchline—

***

Once upon a time, Walt Whitman yawped his semen into a conch shell…

One of the Demoiselles d’Avignon later happened along, picked up that shell, and used it as a vibrator. Coming, she cried out, Ceci n’est pas une pipe! Some months after, while in a boat, she went into labor. It was a little boat, harbored within a rocky cave, the very one that Wordsworth rowed in “The Prelude.” There was just time enough, before she stepped back into her painting, for her to kiss the baby and name Gertrude Stein his godmother.

This is the story of Dean Young’s birth. And our time on earth, mythological characters or not, is short. So go read his work.

***

But if you already have and are curious about this new book—

Or if you haven’t but want some convincing—

Or if you just love to read anything by and about D. Young—

I will try to give you a review of The Art of Recklessness, a book of prose about poetry. I will try but here is why I am and am not qualified:

Once, I was teaching a poetry class. I began the semester by declaring that no one could teach poetry. I mumbled mysterious and recipeless and sweated a lot. That instilled just about zero confidence in the students.

Maybe one or two persons were mildly appreciative of my total lack of direction.

I had an attendance policy. But then I felt compelled to tell them a story about Gertrude Stein. About how she was taking a philosophy class at Harvard from William James. William James! And she was excelling, of course. And then it was time for the final exam, and it was a beautiful spring day, and she’d just been to the opera or something the night before—and it was spring! Which in Boston is really something. So she sat down and looked at the exam and wrote, “I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today” and left. And William James later sent her a postcard saying I completely understand and here’s your A.

But back to my intellectual laziness:

When people say critical framework, I get shudders… something feels like it’s about to be a lot of work.

I confuse John Barth with Roland Barthes.

But in terms of being qualified to give The Art of Recklessness at least an unbiased reading… Well, I could no more view this poet objectively than I could my own children.

Still, in my lifetime, I have dated not one but two men with haircuts à la Robert Lowell.

So…

There is an excellent series on craft and literary criticism published by Graywolf. Other books in the series include The Art of the Poetic Line and The Art of Syntax, both sharp investigations of poetic technique. I have used the latter when teaching and very much recommend it.

However, Dean Young’s is not a Lemon-Pledged text on craft. He explains: “The emphasis on craft, on a series of procedures and techniques, is too much like the creation of perfectly safe nuclear reactors without acknowledging the necessity of radioactive matter for the core.”

Rather than studying it, you’d do better to tear out its pages, eat them, and let Dean Young’s excited ink stimulate your spleen into writing poems…

Don’t worry though. If you read this book, your poems won’t turn into Dean Young poems afterwards. Unfortunately for you, that’s not a germ you can catch.

The Art of Recklessness is more about joy and empathy and imagination—about why we write in the first place. It doesn’t champion a style of poetry as much as a spirit. It is an invitation—issued via DADA, André Breton, Wordsworth, Hamlet, second graders, and Whitman—to invention, exuberance, and risk-taking.

Donald Barthelme once wrote, “I’d rather have a wreck than a ship that fails.”

The oceans are rising! The streets will soon become canals. And before us we see a nice cruise ship,

and the first raft a human ever built,

and a dinghy,

and my daughter’s imaginary red boat,

and a banana peel,

Who’s to say which is the best craft?

Darcie Dennigan

And who among us Peter Pan fans wouldn’t select a captain who is silly and contradictory and easily tear-drowned and tremendously accident prone, and who gives great hugs to barrier reefs, and who sets sail every day though he has no compass, and though he is landlocked, and though he, upon hearing someone call him Captain, readily jumps overboard?

Exuberance is Beauty! There’s not a better Blakean proverb.

That one proverb alone might suffice for Dean Young. But for anyone desperate to sink & drown soon, here, plucked from the fabulous wreckage of The Art of Recklessness, are 27 more:

Originality is not the denial of origins.

Some things must be opaque to be seen.

We are making birds not birdcages.

“Put your trust in the inexhaustible nature of the murmur.” Breton said that and know when to shut up, I’m saying that.

What I know about form could fill a thimble. What form knows about me will be my end.

Poets are excellent students of blizzards and salt and broken statuary, but they are always somewhere else for the test.

Purposelessness is not meaninglessness.

Your genius is your error.

Mistakes aren’t contaminants any more than conception is an infection.

Let us get better at not knowing what we’re doing.

Let us laugh so hard we disrupt the tragedy!

Self-consuming is Self-generation.

Just open your thieving, feral heart to the mortal stars.

The proper use of a hammer is to stand fifteen feet away and throw it at a nail.

If you’re the hammer in the beginning, you’ve got to be the nail by the end.

The song is always instruction in how to sing.

The way in is to go out.

After a while even train wrecks become tedious.

The Liberty Bell is more convincing with the crack!

I know my poems are autobiographical, I just don’t know who they are about!

Just because a thing can’t be done doesn’t mean it can’t be did.

Our error is our Eros.

Poetry can’t be harmed by people trying to write it!

Some impurities can make water clearer.

The blood may be fake but the bleeding must be real.

The primitive breaks through logic like a foxglove through asphalt.

I am wrong, what a relief.

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**

I was maybe getting a divorce. “You think you’ve got problems?” said Tony Hoagland. “I’m getting excommunicated from America.”

(He did not actually say this. We’ve never actually met.)

The email Tony got from the State Department had mumbo-jumboed something about his “ambivalent patriotism” being “unsupportably oxymoronic.”

He spent a week hoping it was a gag. Then he started to pack. He was not depressed. Only one man had ever understood him, and that man didn’t understand him either.

He made plans to move to the United Arab Emirates. It would take, he announced, “but a small needlepointing effort” to alter his TEAM USA sweatshirts and visors to TEAM UAE.

(He did not actually say this either.)

Dubai was a natural choice. It has the largest shopping mall in the world, and ten more malls within that mall, and every January the entire emirate converts itself into one gigantic mall—and Tony, Tony loves malls. That is to say, they depress him profoundly. “I have,” he announced often, “the dilated condition of sensitivity of the kind known only to certain poets and more or less everybody else.”

(He did say that—and more or less everything else that I attribute to him below is from his latest poetry collection, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty.)

Tony took up residence in Dubai’s Burj Khalifa—then the tallest building in the world. It was designed and engineered by Chicagoans. It was slave-labor-built by South Asians.

“I am complicit with everything,” Tony said.

At the base of the tower was a park designed by architects to mimic the symmetries of a desert flower. Soothing were the sound effects of rain manufactured in the park’s water room. “The birds here,” gloried Tony, in letters home to friends, “have a cry like a cell phone.”

Tony Hoagland

Lines from George Oppen’s poem “The Building of the Skyscraper” begin Unincorporated Persons: “There are words that mean nothing / But there is something to mean.” A skyscraper is a very good metaphor for the way Hoagland’s poems work. And so, in Hoaglandesque manner, I am doing that metaphor to death for you here. Because this is a review, albeit not a description or light lecture. As smart as those are, give me digestion, oh digestion! Through four stomachs, if possible. Oh to emulate cow-dom. Dear Rumpus readers, I am writing this from my fourth stomach, my abomasum. And if this ends up a shitty review, well, is shit not digestion’s final goal?)

Back to the Burj Khalifa and its attendant malls, where Tony began an expat writerly movement. Over milkshakes at Johnny Rockets Dubai, the group developed the doctrine of Dialectical Americanism. “Contentment,” said Tony, “is thick and creamy.” He was not exactly condemning. Those shakes, let’s admit it, taste pretty freaking great.

It was a lot like Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, with talk of writing, bohemian sex, and an existential sadness in autumn. Instead of café crèmes and little oranges, ours was a feast of corn chips and sterilized sushi. We moved from food court to food court.

But the salaam couldn’t last forever. Tony sought (re)union with the beloved: America. Also, by extension, with his ex-girlfriends. And suddenly, in November, thanks to the ambition of the Saudi monarchy, he got his chance.

What happened was, Britney Spears’s manager was planning her “for realz” (fourth) comeback tour. It would kick-off on the observation deck of the Burj Khalifa. World’s tallest building, please meet world’s biggest star. The problem: On the eve of the concert, Saudi Arabia unveiled its tower, the world’s new tallest building. Someone had to add some height to the Burj, and fast, lest Britney’s tour smack of mediocrity.

If Tony could accomplish that, said the email from the State Department boys, he’d get fast-tracked back to citizenship on Main Street, back to its chemically treated water and secretaries and manicured garbage, which looked to him now like paradise.

People, I’m about to suggest that the tourism czar of the most populous emirate called upon an American poet to take a skyscraper higher than it was zoned to go. Am I not without precedent? Not too far northwest from downtown Dubai, the ancients found it possible to build what would later be called the Tower of Babel using only bricks and common speech. And the pyramids of Giza! Some say it is a mystery how they were erected, but is not ambivalence the bronze lever that moves boulders?*

*N.B. (when cranes are unavailable and/or during eras in which cranes were not yet invented)

The fact is, only Tony Hoagland could have saved Britney and the Burj.

Burj Khalifa

As the tourism czar knew, in that canny way of tourism czars everywhere, Tony Hoagland, when he was good, was very very good. And when he was bad, he was Hegelian.

And so Tony and our little group of ex-pat poet hangers-on ascended to the Burj’s 160th floor. Very unironically—despite having one eyebrow raised in an expression of irony throughout the process—Tony broke the neck off a bottle of Bud and scratched into the black marble ceiling Paul Celan’s directive, “Keep Yes and No Unsplit.” And we were off.

We were about to spiral up into nothingness in the ancient dialectics ritual known as an Ambivalence-Off:

Us: Does it seem lately as if every couple you know is splitting up?

Tony: What is taken apart is not utterly demolished… It is two spaceships coming out of retirement, flying away from their dead world, the burning booster rocket of divorce falling off behind them, the bystanders pointing at the sky and saying, Look.

Us: Have you ever stopped to consider how advertising is one big brainwash?

Tony: No wonder I want something more or less large and salty for lunch. No wonder I stare into space while eating it.

Us: Do you have regrets?

Tony: I stood in one garden, looking over the fence at another. I thought I had to change my life or give up, but I didn’t. Year after year they kept growing into each other: the dreamed into the real, the real into the dreamed—the two gardens…

Us: Giles Corey, do you plead aye or nay?

Tony (squeaking): More height! More height!

The spire on the Burj Khalifa grew and grew.

The problem with trying to build tall buildings, said architect Louis Sullivan in 1896, is how to “impart to this sterile pile, this crude, harsh, brutal agglomeration… the graciousness of these higher forms of sensibility?”

I don’t know, I don’t know.

When Britney Spears in the backstage interview said she found Mr. Hoagland’s poetry “really beautiful,” it was as if she were speaking encouragement to the one pale dandelion venturing out of the crack in the tar of an empty parking lot.

Yes, Britney, it’s an austere beauty at best. Pretty plain. But it’s 100% American, no? USA, baby.

You can find Britney’s Burj Khalifa performance on YouTube. When the camera spans the crowd during “Oops!… I Did It Again,” look for a pale white man in the second row clapping and smiling and wincing—all simultaneously, and very unironically.

There have been reports from Houston that, upon his return, Tony Hoagland was seen riding around the city on a donkey. We all, his hangers-on, immediately thought of Erasmus on Christ: “And therefore he chose rather to ride upon an ass when, if he had pleased, he might have bestrode the lion without danger.”

But maybe his car was just in the shop.

Me? I’m back from my imaginary Dubai now too, but persist with my hanger-on-ness. I write this review in a bakery near Brown University, amid poets much more experimental and beautiful than Tony Hoagland. Reading Unincorporated Persons so conspicuously here feels like walking into a French New Wave festival and announcing that my favorite, uh, film is Tommy Boy. In defense, I also keep on the table Erasmus’ The Praise of Folly, and when one of the post-postmodern Providence poets walks by and glances at the Hoagland, I crack open Erasmus. “If anyone among ye seem to be wise, let him be a fool that he may be wise,” I say.

I’m standing on my chair now. “As if it could be any dishonor to excel in folly,” I say. Now I’m standing atop the table and ridiculous. The manager is coming over. “We don’t let people do this anymore,” he is saying apologetically. “Liability issues.”

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**

I asked a person I was in love with to read to me the first poem in Archicembalo, “Who Is Josquin des Prez.” We were late into the night, and I wanted to hear his voice. The Archicembalo poems are full of questions but few questions marks, and this man had perfect pitch—not a deep voice, but one that did not seem to waver, even in intervals of tension, teasing, or bruising.

On the front flap of this book of prose poems structured after a 19th century musical primer, G.C. Waldrep prompts us, “What does it mean to listen to poems the way poems listen to paintings?” While I have sincere doubts that even Waldrep knows exactly what this means, the directive is liberating. No matter how intimidatingly intellectual these poems might look to the casual browser, the poet himself is basically saying, “Hey, no critical analysis required.” And so, over the last six months, I’ve made Archicembalo into background noise—I am reporting on it not as a reader but as a listener.

April in her citron, May in his green.

The speaker in these poems is alone in rooms. Only outside, walking or picking rocks in a field, does he have mild companionship. This was nothing like my April life. In rooms, including bathrooms, I was almost never alone. The poems of Archicembalo brought blessed solitude, in the way walking as an anonymous through a downtown lunch crowd does. When one is beautiful (which is to say when one has inherited) one may stand alone. Does this make one lonely, does this make one less beautiful or more, does this express a miserly disposition and if so when and to what purpose. Even during jury duty, in the waiting room with so many put-out potential jurors that the courthouse ran out of chairs, even there, the book built its closet around me.

But it was a less a search for solitude than for… the pure space of absence—Das Ding, a Lacanian proposition I shallowly understand: Desire is best represented by emptiness. When I am full of feeling, yes, I find myself before the empty of a baseball field in winter, the empty of a highway on a Sunday dawn. The country around Karbala is desert, meaning a dry wind and sand and pilgrims in like season, later skirmish coached with salt. What is a desert, a desert is, an empty desert is a breach and thus makes also whole.

Whole poems in Archicembalo act like vessels of pottery. I marked lines and pages into which I poured my desire.

Seekonk River railroad bridge

How often in May did I stand at the Seekonk River railroad bridge, which was raised to let a ship pass in 1976 and never lowered again. I took the bridge’s unrelenting jam to signify the absurdity of crossing from East Providence to Providence, from one kind of life to another. I left the money on the table and walked down to the bridge. A bridge asks more of us. A bridge asks for commitment, a bridge is the instrument of plaintive investiture, a bridge is the negation of one reputable stance.

Now I realize maybe Waldrep meant a musical bridge. That’s what he must have meant.

With each thread a plan suggests that this is the most agreeable solution and fine indeed for general leaving. June in his surfeit, July in her tallow shift.

I had very little time. What I preferred to read was not contemporary poetry, as much as I admired its intellect and structures; nor that other kind of contemporary poetry, as fascinated as I was with autobiography writ artistically; nor that third altogether too-clever kind that fit neatly between ads in magazines with actual circulations.

I was too critical. Because as I read Archicembalo, I found reverb—that is, I found the self (mine) reverberating. Not reflecting! As Angie Mlinko asserts in a recent issue of Poetry, “I get hooked on poems for the music they make, not the mirror they hold up to me…” (Of course, she goes on to say, “but then maybe some mirrors are more surprising, more disorienting, than others.”) In reverberation, writes Gaston Bachelard, we find the real measure of a poetic image.

French philosophers love the idea of reverb: Eugene Minkowksi used it to describe the essence of life, “the dynamism of the sonorous life itself which by engulfing and appropriating everything it finds in its path, fills the slice of space, or better, the slice of the world that it assigns itself by its movement, making it reverberate, breathing into it its own life.”

This is also a good description of Archicembalo. In this book are poems of the mind. But they drift into riffs, into spaces into which images would seep, and become then poems of the soul. To look into a cannon’s mouth is likewise an argument about solitude, it is a risky business. Does this make one beautiful. Of course. Which we have done and more surely for not wanting enough, for not waiting, for wasting and not trusting and for so.

August not hardly. September September September who can imagine such a splendid petulance…

Darcie Dennigan

I dreamt that G.C. Waldrep was offering me a tumbler of Pepsi, and amid the soda bubbles were many pills. “G.C.,” I said in the dream, as if realizing it for the first time, “I am kind of having a hard year.” I did not see the dream as a buried wish for suicide but more as a belated thank you: a longtime bar patron realizing her deep appreciation for the jukebox. Waldrep’s poems constitute my anthem for this year in the same way that the Violent Femmes are the sacred band of rocking out while cleaning the kitchen.

“Who Is Josquin des Prez,” ends If one cannot imagine a snowdrop then one might imagine its absence. A snowdrop as its own absence, a snowdrop is its own absence, a snowdrop absent. A snowdrop. White on white / on white. Is it the man who read this poem aloud whom I cannot imagine now except as an absence, or is it my self? The ancient Greeks considered music and lyric poetry dangerous. They could affect a person’s mood and character. They could alter her soul. I left the money on the table and walked down to the bridge. Root and stone, my heart gives way to a third arm. I felt and I thought I was done.

October: idem.

Quick! For you, dear Rumpus readers, a different, objective take:

Many reviewers of Archicembalo say it is the son of Tender Buttons. Yes and no. Waldrep’s very short poems certainly are. And yes, in his longer poems, he is using repetition to make rhythm, and he is playful and funny and brilliant, but it is music and not language or the representation of objects that is his obsession. Like Stein’s, his poems may frustrate those looking for that friendly neighborhood narrative arc, or at least a linear progression. But in his longer poems—the bulk of the book—he is incapable of escaping or eschewing emotion and meaning, and so renders himself much more human than the Stein of TB. I feel as if Archicembalo is Waldrep’s very revealing memoir—though the only fact I have gleaned from reading it is that he probably has an aunt.

And what about this absence of question marks? Their absence seems much more than a punctuation game—the ambiguity it causes signifies a self that is stunned, stuck.

Maybe that’s me and my reverb talking again. But look at the facts and statistics of Archicembalo:

In the first 42 pages (after that, I lost count), there are 280 questions. Only four of these questions are punctuated with a question mark:

Is everything OK?

Shuffleboard?

and

Do we choose the means of our drowning? Or do others choose for us?

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