I realized, as I began reading Every Riven Thing, that I had a very strong opinion about Christian Wiman as an editor and a critic, but I had almost no opinion of him as a poet. As an editor, he has done a good job with Poetry—the most prominent poetry publication in the United States. The magazine will win no awards for edginess, but since he took the editorial reins in 2003, the Poetry stagecoach has ferried more enjoyable passengers than in years past. As a critic, Wiman has been less inclusive. Famous (or infamous) for the negative review, Wiman championed divisive, even brutal reviews early on in his tenure at Poetry. And, in March of 2009, the Poetry website actually ran an essay review by Jason Guriel entitled “Going Negative,” a project which, fairly or unfairly, was seen as an extension of Wimanian schadenfreude.

Distinguishing between good and bad poetry is, according to Wiman, the critic’s (and the poet’s) duty. For him, that kind of aesthetic demarcation is a moral issue; for me, it is not. Goodness and badness in regard to poetry implies objective criteria and widespread agreement. Those are less interesting to me. I prefer to focus on what work a poem tries to do, which puts the emphasis on poem-making, not poem-pleasing. If you want to see just how completely readers disagree on good poetry, check out a smattering of “best poetry books of the year” lists and note the staggering levels of divergence. The same goes for the major and even minor poetry awards. To wit: one of the books Guriel gutted, D. A. Powell’s Chronic, went on to win the $100,000 Kingsley-Tufts Prize for 2010, along with several other awards. For better or worse, many of us want different poetries.

And so it was that when I opened the cover of Every Riven Thing, I found myself asking: what does Wiman want from poetry?

One thing he wants is for poetry to be poetic. Wiman stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from someone like Mary Karr, who foregrounds content over form. For Wiman, form is the fire his feet are held to. It’s the syntactic embers that burn, the linguistic flames that flare. At no point does Wiman let the reader forget she is reading poetry. Where else, except in a Cole Porter musical, does one encounter a rhyme with “proliferate” and “through with it?” This dropped-line couplet closes the poem “Given a God More Playful,” a delightfully dark light poem that marries whimsy with its estranged lover theology:

Given a god more playful
more sayful
                        less prone
to unreachable peaks
and silence at the heart
of stone

I might have plundered
thunder
                from a tick’s back

I hear a lot in these lines: Dr. Seuss, greeting cards, Richard Wilbur, William Blake, but most of all, Gerard Manley Hopkins. All of these (even the greeting card) celebrate the joy of language. No one loved language (or God) more than Hopkins, and this book aligns Wiman with Hopkins both poetically and spiritually. Consider these opening lines from Hopkins’ “Windhover,” which he dedicates “to Christ Our Lord:”

                daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
      Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
      Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

What I love about Hopkins is his shamelessness. He busts out everything he can find from the poetry toolkit: alliteration, assonance, end rhyme, enjambment, internal rhyme, slant rhyme, substituted iambic meter, controlling metaphor, and an unbelievable sense of pace and rhythm. “The Windhover” is far more opulent than “Given a God More Playful,” but then again, 1877 was a far more opulent time. Wiman’s poem is less ambitious and more self-conscious but like Hopkins’ it relishes in—worships, perhaps—the degree to which poetry lit with holy fire glows with what one might call “god’s glory.”

That might be a bit over the top, but so what? God is a bit over the top. Why expect a poem about him to be otherwise?

God as an idea, a construct, a stalker, dots the entire book. The poems attempt to connect those dots in hopes that after the slow linear work is done, a recognizable profile will emerge. This is one of the other things Wiman wants from poetry—for God to find a form the way poetry does.
Spoiler: that does not happen.

Wiman’s god is elusive. Blithe and black-blooded but oh so elusive. Wiman’s god, like Charles Wright’s, has put him on the rack:

I want to be bruised by God.
I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out.
I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.
I want to be entered and picked clean.

In this quatrain from Wright’s “Clear Night,” the poet seeks God’s brutality as proof of his presence. The poem dabs its forehead with the waters of the penitent and prays with the voice of the punished. Compare with Wiman’s “Then I Slept Into A Terror World:”

I was rifled, pilfered, praised, used.
I was lifted up into the rain’s mania,
laid cadaverously down amid the avid seeps
and intuitive roots, a little slime

Sleeping, clear night; pilfered and praised, strung up and stretched; used and bruised. Wiman and Wright look to the body as the place where the dark god goes. In Wright’s case, alienation from both language and landscape leads to a kind of prayer in which the poet asks to be reinstated into the two churches that have excommunicated him. For Wiman, “terror” is no doubt a reference to the world after 9/11 in which men eager to know their god made their own kind of mania. In both instances, the poets are estranged from yet flattened by the divine.

But, another terror Wiman wakes to is the possibility of accelerated death. Several years ago, Wiman was diagnosed with cancer, which led him to stare down mortality along with the god his West Texas Baptist upbringing taught him to revere. The very fallibility of the body might be why Wiman continually creates corporeal metaphors for god to inhabit. It is in this way that Wiman resembles John Donne. Like Donne, Wiman knows what it means to experience a crisis of belief, as in “Hammer is the Prayer”

Grace is not consciousness, nor is it beyond.

To hell with remembrance, to hell with heaven,
Hammer is the prayer of the poor and the dying.

And as wind in some lordless random comes to rest,
and all the disquieted dust within,

peace came to the hinterlands of our minds,
too remote to know, but peace nonetheless.

Metaphorically, Wiman channels Blake here, but Donne is in the background swinging the hammer, battering the heart into peace. In “This Mind of Dying,” the poet, like Donne, becomes the priest.

My God my grief forgive my grief tamed in language
To a fear that I can bear.
Make of my anguish
More than I can make. Lord, hear my prayer.

How can one not hear in Wiman’s desperate quatrain Donne’s equally desperate “That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee,’and bend / Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new?”

O to be bent by the master poet the way language bends. To bend and break. To make. In “Small Prayer In a Hard Wind,” Wiman asks to be Blaked and Donned back to life, “wind seeks and sings every wound in the wood / this is open enough to receive it, / shatter me God into my thousand sounds.” That’s so Donne it’s almost over-Donne, but, at the risk of another pun, I think Wiman cooks it about right.

Both poems use wind to indicate an absent present—that thing we feel but do not see. Wind as inspiration and exhalation, wind as breath and death, life and love. Love is the third thing Wiman wants from poetry. He sees it in God, he sees it in suffering, he sees it in his family. Sometimes, it flares in all three concurrently, as in “2047 Grace Street:”

                    It is still dark,
and for an hour I have listened
to the breathing of the woman I love beyond
my ability to love. Praise to the pain
scalding us toward each other, the grief
beyond which, please God, she will love
and thrive. And praise to the light that is not
yet

I suppose it is dangerous to assume this is a poem about Wiman’s wife, but what is poetry for if not danger? Even if it’s not intentionally about the poet’s wife, it’s about the poet’s wife. And it is about the poet. And it is about that death which is coming for both of them—only god knows when.

Few poets have been able to pull off contemplative/metaphysical poetry in the 20th and 21st centuries. Our detached sensibilities make that level of immersion feel overly forced. It can come off as both too submerged and too transcendent. We’d rather float. But Wiman makes a case for going old school. He dives right in to sentiment but swims up with hardly a drop of sentimentality. He asks for belief but never sounds fatuous. We are a god hungry nation. Politicians know it, and it just might be time for poets to know it. Wiman, in this case, is ahead of the curve.

What does Wiman want from poetry? He wants it to be the little wafer on your tongue. He wants it to be what the wafer turns in to. He wants his poems to be what sustains you. Are the poems good or bad? I don’t care. What I care about is that they do good work.

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Leslie Williams’s first book, Success of the Seed Plants, wields its words like an axe. Its dark and strange approach to the natural world shows grace and intelligence. It is a serious, mysterious, and spirited take on humanity through the subjects of plants, rural America, and the bargain people and their environment have struck. Williams is like a twenty-first century Transcendentalist, finding spiritual breath in all manner of leaves, flowers, and branches, yet—as in Hawthorne—a gloom always lurks just below the surface of the poems.

Williams is a master of diction, especially when she seeks the inscrutability of the natural world; this diction is connected to a tone that is neither affectionate nor menacing. The speaker, who is removed and speaks in the third-person in section one, and is a closer and more attentive first-person in section two, is so adept at precision and sensuality of her word choice, that they appear spontaneous, yet inevitable. The best poems in this book are all stark, shocking beauty and insinuating splendor.

Take, for example, the end of “Notes on the State of Virginia”:

…left for dark

in Virginia’s spelled heart, hoof-sweet—
while boundless July, laden with evenings, returns

with trinkets and wares, trundles out to her farthest
field with all the stars finespun, coming on—

the still pool still fringed
with the goldenseal, with scuppernong.

Williams alludes to the speaker’s emotional state, and like the Transcendentalists’ spirit at the poem’s core, connects that state to the seasonal pleasures of the environment, and to language itself. The play with sound creates texture and visual interest not with rhyme, but with consonance. The double meaning of the word “still” in the last couplet make the reader aware of the speaker’s ancestral attachment to the land, yet makes a point of her alienation from it.

Like many first books, Williams shows facility in a variety of forms, some of which are her own invention; these forms range from intimate couplets to sculptural tercets to freer spaced lines splashed across the page. Of this variety, I find her controlled forms, like the couplets, to be most effective given her subject matter and challenging, yet pliable language. Her more experimental attempts, where syntax is removed and replaced with white space, are less interesting and useful. These experiments feel like mere lists; since they are formless the content has nowhere to go. Fortunately there are not many of these, but “As in the Sidewalk Gardens” is one such poem. Without the architecture of lines to tether it, the subject matter, which includes such terrible topics as a rose, a dead bird, a trellis, “undue love,” solitude, the phrase “a kind of” as a modifier, and the attempt at a narrative. Compared to the majority of poems here they are unreadable.

The book is intelligently organized, an immensely difficult task when a book is finally finished. Some of the strongest, most surprising poems appear in Williams’s third section, such as “Pressing Flowers” and “Amaryllis is an Alias.” These poems can be placed in a contextual conversation with perennial favorites like Marianne Moore’s “Silence” or “O to Be a Dragon.” Williams offers descriptions with such grace and accuracy that they sometimes astonish: “This flower is out for itself. Full velveteen throttle,” she explains in a poem that discusses the sexual metaphoric power of a flower.

The threads in Williams’s poem often allude to connections between the natural world and the world of culture, or human expression. Her poems therefore are self-referential pieces of evidence of these connections. For example, in “Small Diaspora” she relates boys playing little league baseball and the organization of suburban gardens: “From exuberant hanging gardens / populous with knaves— // rakes, lotharios, libertines, / paladins, princelings, brigands, rogues, / paramours, suitors swain—” Her deliberately Elizabethan language increases the formality and irony her point. Her sons in fact are part of an ordered natural world; the stakes and flowerbeds merely arrange elements of entropy and detritus: soil, decay, predation, unawareness. A couple of pages later, a poem called “The Rake” takes the double meaning of the first term in her list and employs it differently. Here, an especially trite Romantic idea—“Spring is sprung / from winter’s prison!”—complete with exclamation point, is just the beginning of a meditation on the beauty and perhaps insignificance the speaker feels observing—perhaps feeling distinct and apart—a garden.

Williams is a fine poet, skillful and smart. She takes a range of topics I find by themselves repelling or uninteresting (suburban life, nature, flowers, gardening, Thomas Jefferson, the American South, etc.) and makes them compelling; she demands my attention because she is such an attentive writer. This attention is a form of generosity. She makes poems that are meant to be savored. She was a terrific choice for the Bellday Prize, but unfortunately the production quality of the book itself is unappealing. It has a plain green cover with Photoshopped images of spores and a amateurish, last-minute quality to the design. The matte cover, with its plain type, suggests a much weaker and more sentimental book than what the book actually is. In fact, the book is the complete opposite of what the cover suggests, which is a literal interpretation of “seed plants.” This is a shame. The book is fantastic, careful, and a significant accomplishment.

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W. B. Yeats famously claimed that “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” In his energetic and peevish second collection, Monkey Bars, Matthew Lippman engages in constant or near-constant quarreling; however, he does his arguing not just with himself but with all comers, sort of Op-Ed-page-style, producing a book that is rhetorical and poetic simultaneously. Interviewer Elizabeth Hildreth has referred to them aptly as “Get your shit together, people kind of poems.”

In fact, he opens many of the pieces in the book with lines that seem to want to pick fights with specific individuals. The poem “Moses,” for example, begins, “Mike Goldstein is a bitch,” and the poem “Fuckhead” commences, “Alec fuckhead Baldwin whines/ because his motorcycle isn’t new enough.” Even corporations—increasingly defined in this country as giant unkillable people—are not immune to Lippman’s careening pugnacity, as when he opens “Wal-Mart Poem” with the assertion that “There’s never enough candy in the candy aisle at Wal-Mart.” He even argues, in the poem “From God’s Notebook,” in the voice of God, with the physical appearance of the natural world: “The ocean is not blue,” says God; “The sky is not blue.”

The result of Lippman’s perpetual contentiousness is a collection that is confrontational in the best sense of the word, interrogating the reader, himself, and America pretty much as a whole about child-rearing, over-medication, racism, consumerism and whatever else you’ve got. The title poem, “Monkey Bars,” for instance, comes out swinging against the over-prescription of drugs in the United States, including, but not limited to Lipitor, Adderall, Ritalin, and Wellbutrin before arriving at the conclusion that:

What really scares me is when they make that 500mg tablet
for getting back to that place
when there weren’t any pills,
when there was just the dizziness of laughter—
the wind in one’s face—
dying from laughter,
the joke funny,
the bust-the-gut hysteria, hysterical.

Throughout the book, Lippman positions his speaker as one who is not simply observing or describing, or even remarking on the way the ideas and things he observes and describes make him personally feel; rather, his speaker is judging—and at times condemning—said ideas and things. Lippman risks annoying the reader with his emphasis on morality and ethics. His provocations like “I don’t care what the hell you are/or call yourself, think you are, want to be” threaten to push the audience away, but his follow-ups like “It’s all a little silly and brave at the same time” pull them back in. Overall, what keeps his poems poems as opposed to screeds or manifestoes are his sense of humor and his unfailing playfulness.

In the book’s accompanying promotional materials, Lippman states that laughter is “the most important element. Got to be funny. Got to entertain. Humor is entertaining. Poetry has to be entertaining, that’s why it’s got to have those comedic elements.” Relatedly, he has expressed a desire to have his poems be as accessible and amusing as television. As if to illustrate this mission, he writes in “How to Fall in Love”:

The older woman in the red Honda
ran the stop sign
so I honked my big shnoz honk
but she gave me the finger
so I ran her off the road
and my daughter in the car seat said,
Dad, what did you just do?
It was like a Marie Howe poem
or a Dr. Pepper Commercial
featuring Dr. Dre
because you can’t make that shit up
especially when there’s a kid in the backseat
and the white-haired lady in the other vehicle
hits the gas
without looking.

Yes—Marie Howe plus Dr. Pepper plus Dre equals, somehow, a Matthew Lippman poem. Here, as elsewhere, his humor works to temper his judgmental critical faculty in large part for the way he is not afraid to turn it on himself. In his poem “With Black Man,” he makes himself as much of a target as anyone else, writing:

I’ve spent my whole life trying to figure out
how to walk down a street
with a black man
and not notice
that he’s black.
How do you do that?
It’s racist.
It has to be.

Thus, even as his poems come across as refreshingly other-directed, so too does he keep his own habits on the hook.

Consequently, his book is not not irritating, but it tends to be irritating about things—“all the crazy fucking college kids,” “starved African boys,” “rich white corporate Don Henley dick suckers” and so forth—that probably should irritate. Self-consciously fun as the book is, it is also full of anger and longing.

The playfulness of the book itself invites the reader to play games, like “If Matthew Lippman’s Monkey Bars were a TV show, which one would it be?” Maybe Judge Judy, or some other courtroom-themed reality-based show—not because it’s set in a courtroom, of course, but because Lippman is forever passing snappy judgments in an outspoken fashion. Poetry with an attitude: dynamic and profane. Or maybe some other as-yet-uninvented show full of Sesame-Street-style short segments and MTV jump cuts, all intended to guarantee that you never get bored thanks to endlessly crazy leaps and associations—unapologetic scene shifts, as in the poem “Oranges,” from Warren Buffett to Thoreau to the Gotham Bar and Grill to the Capitol to Bill Blass to Thomas Jefferson to “Oranges, that when peeled, squirt brand new fifties.”

Whatever show you decide that Monkey Bars is, it would be one that could be described as refreshing and fiercely loving, but also irked and unsentimental. Or maybe a show that is itself hard to differentiate from the high-concept commercials with which it is intercut: loud and clear and utterly unsubtle. That’s not a complaint. Those are the kinds of commercials you like better than the show anyway.

Read The Rumpus Interview of Matthew Lippman, part of the Rumpus Original Combo.

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Michael Klein’s then, we were still living is a masterful book full of melancholy’s dark colors, but painted-over with bright exuberance. His book is politically engaged, sensitive, and topical, but I think misses when it lacks authority on some of its subject matter. Klein writes lyrical poems in a subtle and sophisticated way—most of the poems include the first-person singular in the first line, an indication that the reader moves closely to a deeply felt human voice speaking. In many poems, the voice is a 21st century man, a lot like Michael Klein. His themes range from the death of a twin brother to the September 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent wars.

When Klein writes his most personal poems, those with an insouciant, bittersweet edge, full of affection, he writes memorable poems. When Klein is more detached—his poems about the war, for example—he still writes nonconformist poems with a bounding intelligence, but they’re an inch deep. The tour-de-force poem in this book is in its middle, “Five Places for Sex”, and it’s more surprising and complicated than what Thom Gunn had to say about sex in The Man With Night Sweats and it’s several notches above anything Allen Ginsberg wrote.

I frequently complain about too many adjectives and adverbs in poems weighing down good writing, but in this case, Klein is an expert at how to write them correctly. Like his metaphors, the adjectives are employed to heighten the imaginative leaps the lines are taking. For example, in “Five Places for Sex,” his metaphor for the orgasm and its inevitable denouement is: “until the panther rested—down so much—in the springy hills.” A different creature than Rilke’s panther in the zoo, this one conveys the ferocity and wildness of something now resting. The adjective “springy” has an organic, yet mechanical palpitation to it; that it modifies the location is even more surprising. The first section of the poem takes place on a train. The hills must be out the window; Klein therefore uses cues from a pastoral to make an evocative connection between something local and personal into a vast metaphor. Likewise, later in the poem, when there is another sexual encounter in a porno theater, the speaker describes what he sees as “squinting to a very basic music.” This could mean “important” or “essential”, but also the sense of “nothing added.” Amid the frenzy of a kind of sleazy eroticism, tinged with fear of AIDS (the poem is set in the 1980s), the boys “up on the screen” squint to the music. Klein’s subtle word choice makes something banal seething with pathos.

When Klein’s attentions are focused on something with which the speaker has authority, the reader believes the details. Those poems are not so much elegiac, but they still address grief. Rather, his poems seem to delicately conflate issues of love and death, but also social justice and unfairness, and sexuality. For example, in “Vaudeville,” he starts with something more general about the entertainment industry, then moves the camera eye closer to his own family history. We find out later that his grandparents were alcoholic vaudevillians. By the poem’s final stanza, the voice becomes raw and plaintive, which resembles wisdom:

It was what the doctor tells the patient: life is
your funny story and to live
above and below the story
you have to hear it singing only to you, away from the other singing.

Klein frequently uses repetitions of words and italics as a tool to indicate shifts in tone, in mood, and even emotional volume. It is admirable and a little unnerving just how unembarrassed he is to allow his poems to both conceal and reveal. In the poem “The mirror,” the speaker sees his lost twin brother in his own image, and using a repeated image of a shoulder bag, he is able to allow life and death—one brother to another—to commingle with anonymity and intimacy:

I know my brother in the mirror because of the way I have my shoulder bag
hanging off my shoulder—the way he would have it—not the way I would have it.
I’m not a shoulder bag kind of person.

So, it is him.
And then, of course, just as fast—it’s me
as I am in life with him, and as he is in death with me.

The poem’s long lines also mimic the thinking-through of the identity issue the speaker is experiencing, and since long lines slow a poem’s pacing, it forces the reader to take in the data more slowly and to be contemplative. This poem has some allusions to C.P. Cavafy’s poem “The Mirror in the Front Hall” in which an old mirror is “proud to have embraced total beauty for a few moments” when it “sees” a boy waiting for a receipt for a delivered package.

Klein’s métier is the elegy, the dominant form for poems written about 9/11, and the powerful image of the twin reappears, but sometimes in what I think are less successful ways. The obvious metaphor of the brother as twin and the Twin Towers as twins is little bit adolescent and disappointing. When, in “2001”, the speaker says: “In America, we make movies / before anything really happens,” the poet wrangles with the surreal horror of September 11, but not in an original or useful way. I advise all writers to eliminate “we” and “everybody.” Given the results of the midterm elections, I do not appreciate being lumped in the same “we” as the people who voted for Sharon Angle or Rand Paul. If Klein writes “we Americans,” the statement includes the millions who are repulsed. The writer should instead name the guilty parties rather than lump the guilty and innocent together in the same rubber bag. This flaw in a piece of writing is a misreading of Freudian projection, or attributing one’s faults and desires onto others.

Likewise, in Klein’s poems about the war, he writes about the fall of Kabul in the same way; the pronoun is meant to suggest unity and empathy, but actually does the opposite. Since the speaker lacks authority, he teams up with others to make the voice plural, as if that will boost its authority: “Almost free? / Almost enough horses? / Peace passeth not their understanding, but ours.” The problem is that, unlike his other work, Klein has no real authority about the subject and the poems feel disingenuous, no matter how interesting the writing is. If you read a book like Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War, by a person with dust on his eyelids, you realize a piece of writing that seems too psychically distant from the war do not suffice. Perhaps this is a question of sentimentality, relying on the subject matter of the poem to carry its emotional weight while the writing—which is tantamount to thinking—stays small.

Nevertheless, Klein’s then, we were still living is a thoughtful, emotional book that treats death in a fresh, even endearing way. The personality of the writer overflows in the best poems; it shows vulnerability and nothing here is overwritten. The tone is exactly right. Serious readers of poetry should get this book and absorb its message.

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Valerio Magrelli’s Vanishing Points is all analog, tape hiss and wood, pencil and glass, tree and water. Vanishing Points is also all I, all eye, all consideration and thought. Vanishing Points is also a book in which a poem’s thought is established—features a poetry of this is, of declarations—and then the thought is considered, thought about, poked at. Vanishing Points is also Italian, and is one of very few books in translation I’ve read which makes me hungry as hell to know the language in which the work was written: not since first reading Neruda have I so wanted to understand the foreign words on the pages facing those on which the poetry’s been translated.

Here’s a fair sample of some of the aspects involved. Let’s try to do this as it appears on pages 78-79 of the book—this is from the first page/poem of “Rosebud,” from Magrelli’s second book Natures and Veinings:

Just trace the movement of the poem: we’re given, at the start, a head-fake in the direction of love and longing, but this suitor’s not interested in sending his words to some object of desire. Instead his utterances create what he desires, and for a moment a reader could be forgiven for thinking the poem will end up being about the Stafford-ian aspect of the poem (recalling his I’d just as soon be pushed by events to where I belong). Magrelli, though, turns again, and finally what’s under examination comes literally full circle: at the poem’s start, the speaker’s not making claims; at the poem’s end, he’s positioned himself to have his own sights in his sights—in other words, he’s now capable and/or ready to maybe move toward making claims.

This sort of luxurious consideration of the daily minutae of being alive and aware, tiny steps attended tremendously to, makes Magrelli’s poetry almost overwhelmingly rich. Everything comes within the man’s purview to poetically consider. Magrelli offers something close to an ars poetica with “The Tic”:

Gestures that go astray
appeal to me—the one
who trips up or upturns
a glass of . . . the one who forgets,
is miles away, the sentry
with the insubordinate eyelid
—my heart goes out
to all of them, all who betray
the unmistakeable
whirr and clunk
of the busted contraption.
Things that work are muffled
and mute—their parts just move.
Here instead the gadgetry,
the mesh of cogs, has given up
the ghost—a bit sticks out,
breaks off, declares itself.
Inside something throbs.

The poem’s mundane magic in any number of ways—how it literally enacts, with words, what it’s getting at (the forgetting person coming in as something in the poem’s forgotten), how the poem can only exist/make noise because it fundamentally doesn’t work. Most remarkable, though, is the notion of here: “The Tic” situates Magrelli’s poetry only in the realm of things which don’t work, only in the places where things, through their brokenness, can make declarations.

Lest the reader get lulled into believing that there’s some heirarchy of brokeness (there’s mechanical stuff, there’s thought, there’s sensual/body stuff), or that brokenness is fundamentally spectrumizing (which’d be fair to consider, given that in “The Tic,” the I’s heart goes out to other stuff), there are poems like “Potential Energy”:

The long drive over,
I stare ahead
at the face of this person
I’m talking to.
And the features peel
apart on either side
—a tree-lined boulevard—
in one continuous
opening out of space.
You be my street!
And when you start
to talk I just
keep hurtling on
through pure
unobstructed
miles of face.

There’s a forceful cognition at work here, an inclusive, drawing-in mind which lets the drama of travel and the unfolding of scenery create a framework for how to understand another’s face. Note that this is not necessarily a beloved the speaker’s addressing here: you be my street. Through rigorous consideration, with patient generosity, Magrelli’s poetry allows all his subjects—broken machines, utterances, each of us—to be our own streets, and in such a transfixing world, a circle closes around Kant: things can be both means to an end and ends in and of themselves. Better still: the means are the ends themselves. Magrelli’s poetry is muscled thought in which nothing’s unworthy of being allowed to be bigger, greater, stranger, and more full than what it seems.

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Skip Clive James’ sometimes silly introduction to Opal Sunset, Selected Poems, 1958-2008. Make an effort to remember as much a possible from Cultural Amnesia, his prose classic in which he’s as good on Tony Curtis and Beatrix Potter as he is on German martyr Sophie Scholl and many others. Opal Sunset is plenty satisfying without these associations, though exposure to James’ astute, original prose strengthens pleasure in his energetically beautiful poems that are profound, graceful and sometimes angrily ethical without ever slipping into self-righteousness.

James’ interests range wide and his skill almost always lives up to them, even if some of his poems–particularly his 6-page tribute to the deserving Philip Larkin– are too long. “A Valediction for Philip Larkin” gets off to a shaky start with much verbiage about where James was—in Kenya– when he learned of Larkin’s death, getting to the point after more than three pages, that

You were the one who gave us the green light
To get out there and seek experience,
Since who could equal you at sitting tight
Until the house around you grew immense?
Your bleak bifocal gaze was so intense.

On the next page of the same poem, James reaches more of the core of the matter and can almost be excused for earlier filler :

The truth is that you reveled in your craft.
Profound glee charged your sentences with wit.
You beat them into stanza form and laughed :
They didn’t sound like poetry one bit,
Except for being absolutely it.

He’s also speaking of himself here, and pulls it off because all that reveling in his own craft leads to poems that are “absolutely it,” making a reviewer’s task an immersion in serious entertainment.

James is tidier and equally moving on the notoriously slovenly Auden, as he acknowledges what’s been said by many others:

By now of course, we know he was in fact
As queer as a square grape, a roaring queen
Himself believing the forbidden act
Of love he made a meal of was obscene.
He could be crass and generally lacked tact.
He had no truck with personal hygiene.
The roughest trade would seldom stay to sleep.
In soiled sheets he was left alone to weep.

“What Happened to Auden,” is genuinely poignant, matching the best of Frederick Seidel, whose relationship with form, and observation of louche life come to mind often in Opal Sunset, the title poem a lovely song to James’ native Australia. “Hard-Core Orthography’’ is great fun, and its brittle, never heartless tone make it accessibly amusing to those whose Latin is even more limited than mine.

Clive James’ life was shaped and shadowed when his father chose to fight with the Australian army during World War Two. James was six when his father was killed in action, and his mother never remarried. From this he has carved an admirable life in letters, fueled by voracious curiosity, moral imperatives and the openly urgent need to create the sublime where those two meet. He also has a need to give and receive tenderness, and a rigorous internal minder that marries this to clear thinking. Many poems, and many more lines, couplets and quatrains in Opal Sunset are superb, making their lesser companions wan imitations of what James can really do when his interior editor and his varied gifts unite.

“My Father Before Me Sai War Cemetery Hong Kong “ sums up a paradoxical burden he bears so eloquently, declaring, “My life is yours, my curse to be so blessed.” Like prayer, the words , with humble defiance, successfully challenge rational understanding. They instill necessary, utterly irrational conviction that the senior James is listening somewhere, and providing benediction and sustenance, hard-earned by both father and son, and contradicting the announcement that

You can’t see me or even hear the sound
Of my voice though it comes out like the cry
You heard from me before you sailed away.
Your wife, my mother, took her turn to die
Not long ago, I don’t know what to say.

But he does know what to say, which is why this piece belongs with the most treasured, canonical war poems in any language. “Son of a Soldier” deserves the same honors, with its acknowledgement of thirst the writer “could never slake,’’ and other universalities made lyrically particular.

“The Great Wrasse : for Les Murray at Sixty” is a four-page dazzler about a fish native to Australia’s waters, and is free-association, gorgeously wrought . There is no room here for the entire poem, but the fragment below is as vivid and spacious as anything else in it one might select :

Over the reef,
You realize, is where this fish belongs –
Above it and not of it. Nothing is written there,
Enjoyed or cherished. Even the beautiful,
There in abundance, does not know itself.
‘Sex is a Nazi,’ you once wrote, and so
It is here. Killing to grow up so they can screw,
Things eat, are eaten, and the crown-of-thorns
Starfish that eats everything looks like
A rail map of the Final Solution,
But all it adds to universal horror
Is its lack of colour.
Even in full bloom
The reef is a jardin des supplices :
The frills, the fronds, the fans, the powder puffs
Soften the razor’s edge, the reign of terror.

From this tumble of allusions emerges three last lines as flawless as the whole :

And finally, most fabulous of all,
A monumental fish that speaks in colors
Offering solace from within itself.

Those last five words serve as a call to what makes poetry so necessary and why those who love literature wish for the gift of photographic memory, even when the poem names an act of brutality. In “Yusra,” James has a heroine, a young woman murdered by members of the Public Morals Unit of Hamas. They disapproved of the display of her ‘’half unclothed” skin in company with her fiancé and a friend. The other two survive beating, but she, treated more viciously , dies. The effort to comprehend the point of view of her murderers is an essential element in the poem’s power :

Could they not see the laughter in her face
Was heaven on earth, the only holy place?
Perhaps they guessed, and acted from the fear
That Paradise is nowhere if not here.

Yusra, your name too lovely to forget
Shines like a sunrise joined to a sunset.
The day between went with you. Where you are,
That light around you is your life, Yusra.

That light around Clive James deserves long life.
I wish I had the time to memorize so many stanzas
In this volume, so striking and so true.
Instead I cling to pages, talismans.
This somewhat awed and sometimes surly tribute
Is a fragment of what this writer thinks is due.

Related Posts:

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• Poems Retrieved by Frank O’Hara
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• Bright Wings An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds edited by Billy Collins
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Steve Healey’s 10 Mississippi is a wowingly seductive book, and it’s seductive not just because it features the river I happened to grow up within spitting distance of, and not just because Healey’s style has a kinship with other folks I’m fond of (Dean Young seems an overt, interesting presence within). It’s seductive because, page by page, poem by poem, 10 Mississippi is cyclic and aswirl, is, as a book, as flowing and eddying as the river of the title. It may be best to have one of his poems to reference—here’s “Green Shoes,” chosen at random.

If you’re looking for my knees,
they can be found halfway up my legs.
They are not pretty. They resemble
piggy banks that have been broken
and glued back together several times.
Yet they are useful. When I walk,
they allow my tibias to swing
slightly ahead of me into the future.
My feet take turns landing
on a new piece of ground up ahead.
My feet are wearing green shoes,
and when I walk, the grass grows.
I watch how effective the grass is
at growing, except that I’m a liar,
in fact the grass is dying.
It has not rained for weeks
and the grass is now a brown mat.
I think about the other crimes
I could commit. I could kick
a hole in a pony and take all
the gold doubloons that fall out.
Sometimes I walk to that place
where the cop stands in front
of the yellow tape and say,
what happened, officer?
The cop says something but
all I can hear is a child crying.
It sounds like coins hitting the street.
That’s when I know it’s time
to escape. My knees go into action.
I’m walking again. I’m wearing
the ghosts of green cows on my feet,
and they make all the difference.

Toggle up or down for humor, and “Green Shoes,” can be read as something like a representational Steve Healey poem from 10 Mississippi (an unfair phrase, representational poem, but still). First, note the repetition: the green shoes at start and end and currency coming thrice into play (piggy bank, pony’s innards, child’s tears), and note that the currency fundamentally brackets the poem. It’s not a trick or move or schtick or anything, but Healey does this frequently, across lots of his poems, to often phenomenal result (the book’s opening poem, “Lifeboat, Wingspan,” pulls the same trick of repetition except tripled or quadrupled; in a poem like “Green Afternoon,” a grill and the notion of things [pants, bodies/lives] that we insert ourselves into dance sweatily close, causing buzz; section two’s multi-pager “While I Held My Breath Underwater” uses sound, held breath, and stillness as notions to move and build from and with).

Note, also, the actual bricks of the poem: across 10 Mississippi, the poems are made by discrete, direct, declarative lines. “I think about the other crimes / I could commit” is a perfect example of what magic Healey’s abracadabra-ing throughout: what other crime, the reader’s left to ask, have you already committed? That your foot enters the future? That you’ve lied to us? These poems do much—they mean and they make gorgeous noise, and they cycle and repeat—but they imply an awful lot, leave whispery trace, nods toward what came before.

Last: note nature and its degradation and/or death, note the appeal to some authority, and note the half-comic/half-tragic dissolve at the poem’s end (for instance: is this ironic, some clever play of a faux-environmentalist claiming that green shoes are enough? It’s clearly in W.C. Williams/red wheelbarrow territory, ditto’s Frost’s unpopular road, but how to actually take and break down the line is unclear by the poem’s end). These are pattern-ish, of a sort, though not at all in a bad way: reading Healey’s 10 Mississippi is huge fun precisely because of these features that pop up across the poems, variously by poem.

And what do these patterns seem to be doing? What’s Healey getting at? Before looking close at another poem, take just a second to consider the phrase 10 Mississippi. Consider when you’d say it (meaning: what age and in what context). Consider how the word of the river is acting as a measurement of time. Consider that (probably) a high percentage of the time you say ten Mississippi you’re gonna follow it up with ready or not, here I come.

A Life of Consolations

You’ll get your reward in heaven, said my mom
when I didn’t make the cheerleading squad.
I remember this while pretending to study
the street map. Why do these little defeats
keep stabbing me after all these years?
I change. The light changes. I drive
up and down streets whose names
I don’t know. I drive along the river,
curving with its curves. I still
can’t do the splits. At times
I’ve had too many freckles.
I have an old snapshot of them.
Like stars at the bottom of a chocolate milkshake.
That would be a good way to die.

Again: note the repetition, either directly (death opening and closing the poem, cheerleading and then the splits, later) or indirectly (“I change,” he writes, then mentions how at times he’s had too many freckles [meaning: he'll maybe have too many again soon, or just did recently, or who knows]). The poems are startling silver darting things, fish of meaning, tough to grasp, appearing as one thing in certain light (ha ha ha the second line begs you to chortle) and something else entirely in another (the poem’s huh of an end). Every poem in this book can make the reader feel the breath of impending doom and the breeze of what-if, sometimes back-to-momentary-back, sometimes simultaneously.

Brute facts that should be acknowledged: the book is split into six sections, with the second section featuring one long poem, and the fourth section featuring a poem cycle (I don’t know what it’d be called, but that seems appropriate; if there’s an actual literary term for it, I don’t know it), called 10 Mississippi, which has a poem for each numeral (“1 Mississippi,” “2 Mississippi,” etc.) and sports aspects of narrative (the poem cycle starts with a body being pulled from the river, and notions of seeking, searching, flowing, and obscuring get comingingly considered through the course of the ten poems).

I will say this, aside from brute facts, aside from the pretty magic, cyclic way Steve Healey puts words on the page, how he makes poems: I hadn’t read Healey before, and, on finishing this fantastic book, I felt both sad and happy. Sad that I hadn’t read him before (the man’s got another book, Earthling, also from Coffee House), happy that there’s more out there.

Related Posts:

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In his review of The Waterboy, Roger Ebert confesses that he doesn’t really cozy to Adam Sandler movies. “I try to keep an open mind,” writes Ebert “and approach every movie with high hopes. It would give me enormous satisfaction (and relief) to like him [Sandler] in a movie.” To come clean like this is an ethical move I appreciate, and so it is at this point where I also come clean. Despite my attempts to keep an open mind, I should admit that in regard to this specific poet, my own preferences and the reader’s may not be in alignment.

This is not to say that I think Ai is to poetry what Adam Sandler is to film (she’s no Happy Gilmore). Ai is a serious poet with serious talent; however, I have never been moved by her aesthetic. I would say the same, by the way, of U2, Mahler, Salman Rushdie, and James Cameron. I find all supremely gifted, and I’m glad they are in the world doing their various work, but their relative virtues are lost on me. And so, it was with some trepidation that I began Ai’s collection of poems, published posthumously, after she very suddenly, very quickly, and very tragically died of complications relating to cancer in March of this year. Needless to say, if my experiences with this book mirrored those with previous Ai collections, it was going to make for an awkward situation. Ai is a beloved, award-winning poet who has made giving voice to the marginalized (a project I greatly respect) an integral part of her opus. I did not want to be the lone bastard who gave her final collection a negative or even lukewarm review. But, I told myself, I was prepared to do so.

Thankfully, such obnoxious behavior can be postponed. No Surrender is a fine book. It’s smart, funny, angry, political, and utterly poetic. Ai successfully blends personal autobiographical poems with her trademark dramatic monologues, making for a truly original text—a kind of personified hybridity—that is both haunting and humorous.

Part of what has bothered me in the past about Ai’s poetics is her adherence to and execution of the dramatic monologue. In contemporary America, the dramatic monologue is a tough genre to pull off. There are few other practitioners; plus, one never knows exactly how one is supposed to interpret the various personas. In a historical moment when so much poetry is personal—even poems donning disguises—it remains unclear to me if Ai’s different voices are proxies for her own voices or just proxies. Are we supposed to see through the looking glass of the persona into the poet herself? Or, is the character staring back at us in the poem’s mirror a version of us? That elements of Ai’s personas contain scraps of details similar to her own life makes things even more difficult. Where is Ai (the name itself an invented persona) within the many Ai’s/I’s?

Ai has described herself as “one-half Japanese, one-eighth Choctaw, one-quarter Black, and one-sixteenth Irish.” I find this construction telling in two ways. First, all those fragmented selves do not, literally, add up to a whole self, a detail I doubt is random. Second, and more importantly, Ai intends the reader to know that a dialogue among her various ethnicities lies at the core of her being. For Ai, the self, like the poems, seeks identity through discourse and exchange.

Identity (a term I have grown weary of yet still deploy) turns out to be the main theme of No Surrender. A series of poems with titles like “Motherhood, 1951,” “Sisterhood,” “Womanhood,” “Widowhood,” “Brotherhood,” “Manhood,” and “Fatherhood” make up the first ten poems of the book. Each of these pieces interrogate the roles Ai’s characters must play and the cultural assumptions associated with each. In my favorite of these, “Womanhood,” an Irish woman named Michael talks to us about her father who called her “boy” and about how she’d “rather be a boy and get to swear and drink, / Spit and piss outside on a dare.” Tortured by the death of her brother, whose name she carries, she seems to live in order to dive deeper into guilt—guilt from miscarriages, adultery, divorce, and simply being alive: “Then I thought I was cursed / Because I had been given my brother’s name. I decided he hated me / Because I was alive and he was doing time in Purgatory. / I suffered privately.” The poem closes with a unification of those divided selves in an oh so Irish moment: “I chugalug my beer / Then climb onto a table and dance, Waiting to hear what I fine lad I am / Father, son, daughter at last.” An beguiling trinity, one that offers a strange but compelling unity. In her many poetic personas, Ai has become father, son, and daughter, begging the question if the poet, too, discovers through diverse personification some sense of unity.

Because she frequents heavy personification and the dramatic monologue more than any other contemporary American poet, Ai is often compared to Robert Browning. But Browning’s devotion to form, in particular his gorgeous iambic lines and unpredictable rhymes distinguish him from Ai, who, in general, eschews traditional verse. In many of her new poems, though, she plays with sound in pleasing ways. In the above, for example, “beer” and “hear” are not end rhymes, but we catch the internal harmony, just as we appreciate the off-rhyme of “dance” and “last.” In one of the best and funniest poems in the book, “Violation,” a darkly comic tale of a mock or actual rape of a twenty-something male, Ai almost channels Dr. Seuss:

And eventually, I mean like another year,
I become a hotline volunteer.
No, I didn’t turn gay,
but that’s the way I’m dealing with the feeling
that I got violated no matter
what anyone else might say.

Rhyming couplets, internal rhymes, staggered end rhymes, dark humor, and colloquial slang compressed into six lines is pretty strong work. “Violation” is an immensely likeable poem that plays with expectations of form much the same way the poem’s plot goofs on expectations of gender.

While most of the pieces take comical turns—one of the best involves a runaway Nun who flees to Vegas and meets the ghost of Elvis—a few poems stand out for their earnestness. I was most struck by a series of four poems that explore Native American issues. These pieces feel like signature poems not only because of their thematic consistency but also because the cover of No Surrender features a gorgeous example of Native American ledger art in which a Plains warrior shoots a vanquished cavalryman. The Native-centric cover, the plurality of Native-centric poems, the title of No Surrender, and the overt embrace of Native resistance makes one wonder if Ai, who had been living in Oklahoma for the past several years, had finally found a cultural model of endurance and survivance that matched up with her ambitions for her poetic project.

That poetic project gets beautifully encapsulated in the final two poems of the book, which for me have become among her most memorable. The penultimate, entitled “Deathbed Scenes” explores the relationship between the Japanese Princess Takamatsu and her granddaughter. With an understanding that death is near, the Princess (who was famous for underwriting cancer research) walks us through her spiritual journey that culminates in the creation of a poem about her life and death. What’s fascinating is that both the Princess and the granddaughter function as rather thinly veiled alter-egos for Ai herself. She is both the dying woman and the poet—yet neither role comes off as precious or self-indulgent. It seems impossible for both personas to simultaneously embody the regal and the self-effacing, and yet they do.

No Surrender’s closing note, entitled “The Cancer Chronicles,” has to be Ai’s most honest, most thoroughly stripped down poem of her career. Written in the third person, this long poem, divided not into sections but “stages,” is riveting reading. In fact, let me do both the poet and the reader the honor of not summarizing it or quoting from it; rather let me urge the reader to experience the experience in its totality.

I’m convinced these final two pieces are the reason the book jacket makes opposite claims about the poems between its covers—something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. In her blurb, poet Marilyn Chin offers this observation about Ai’s departure from form: “After her lifelong work in writing consummate persona poems and dramatic monologues to rival those of Browning, Ai does an about-face and offers great surprises in this posthumous volume.” However, in a fascinating counter-blurb, the book’s jacket copy opens with this confident claim: “In No Surrender, her final collection, Ai returns again to the form of the dramatic monologue for which she is best known.”

Who’s correct? Chin or Norton? Does Ai take her poetics in a refreshing new direction, or does she write some of the best dramatic monologues of her distinguished career?
Thankfully, both.

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• Between Good and Bad, Right and Wrong
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• The Day I Got Burned I Wanted To Be Burned
• The Hokum of Her Clothes

What’s to love about poetry? I mean really. Most of your friends that aren’t poets can’t stand the stuff, and even some of your literati friends (the novel reading ones, say) try really hard, but can’t quite commit. I mean, the way experience is embodied in a poem is about as similar to other kinds of literature as a hog is to a javelina. I’m happy to report that this is a poem you can love:

Me & My Falcon

I’m reserving a copy
of Half-shaved Head
for you Clay
who haven’t looked into
your own face
for five lives now
just send back cupcake
cups of water
flattened down Wonder Bread
scripture & Guidelines
will I leave a half glass
on the counter?
I won’t. I’ll always
drink it up.

This poem appears in John Coletti’s first full-length collection Mum Halo, out from the estimable Rust Buckle Books. It demonstrates many of the extremely pleasurable qualities of Coletti’s work: the personal tone, in which a speaker addresses a friend directly, by name; the line-centered thinking, in which poem expands, contradicts, and explodes each idea or hurt it seems to put forward; the musicality, so careful and so surprising in it effects, and finally, the almost impossible way the poem ends, bringing all the unruly activity firmly back to the personal, a wounded, heartfelt, and mysterious thing. Reading, and re-reading these poems, you’ll find lines which are so outrageous, hilarious, and true that they get lodged in your head, like songs; and, you’ll find yourself quoting the poems to others, because they seem so apt in their ungainliness. This is a stupendous book and its poems seem like they’ve always been here, alongside our thinking.

The business of the personal is always vexed in new poetry. There are lots of reasons for this, of course, part of our general cultural irony, our love of the artificial, and maybe even a distrust of authenticity, and it’s heartening that some younger poets engage with the material world emotionally, and Coletti’s able to do this without coming off self-obsessed, exhibitionist, or boring:

Kathleen

Wide yellow butterfly
club level watermelon
your bus won’t
make a heart shape
of me

Such delicate evasions, bringing it all back to the heart! I just love “club level watermelon.” One of those lines that make no sense-sense, but make all the sense in the world.

One of the most remarkable elements of Coletti’s work is the way the lines interact. The poems seems like “piles” or “stacks” of lines, calling to mind early assemblage art, except that the assembled objects are things perceived, brought together within the order of the poem, and the lines’ strange electricity come from the way the perceptions rub against each other:

Flower Pot Inlay

I do not accept lawnmower turtles in love
progress inanimate buzz wings no
jasmine cabbage and bark life for me
feet asleep in California
clay hearts circle Faberge
bird-rabbits punch breeze
oozing optical mall trestles
my perception of violence
mist rusting autumn sky
I like my little secret
only hurts myself

Because the poems eschew punctuation, the primary unit of organization is the lines, and their juxtapositions and abstractions are gorgeous in a craggy, difficult, but never grouchy or icy way. This feels close to the way one thinks and feels in the world – it’s not ordered, not a stay against confusion, but is almost a celebration, even of the hurts: “bird-rabbits punch breeze / oozing optical mall trestles / my perception of violence.” The poems feel lived-in, and track very closely the way wholes are made from collections of details, thereby avoiding the kind of generality that haunts abstract ideas, or, in poetry, abstract images. For example, a line as superficially abstract as “progress inanimate buzz wings no” is, it seems to me, really a moment of sensation rendered as purely as language can do. I think this is what they mean when people speak of ‘phenomenology,’ and if it is, I like it.

You already know it, if you’ve read this far, but these poems are finely hewed, if off-kilter, bits of slangy musical speech. Coletti makes sounds like: “Funny PC how serenely go wackadoo,” “Empire’s fungal hush,” “piling Oui in creek wheat,” and “Christian spaced out, slowly alive.” The concentration on music is never rote, and Coletti never seems to let himself write a flat line, which is a great relief – it is dream data, after all. From “Fat Looking”:

Perforated ah, faded will of Toothacher
I smell a bridge
made of natural bugspray
my ear, the one that works
has a big crossbow coming out of
its Spanish lifter, soldier

I’m not sure another poet could get away with such lines, but because Coletti’s poems are written by a person, an “I” in the poem, and because they are so often addressed to others, the poems, even at their most difficult, evince a dare I say “friendly” (even in hard times) approach to the kind of material that other poets, perhaps those less concerned with the “charm or luxury of the poem,” might make bombastic, arid, or just plain old pretentious? Like, I mean, this poem is almost a Cognitive Science experiment!

In surprising and various ways, the final lines of these poems often provide the space in which the junk, dailiness, childhood, friendship, tenderness, and comedy that Coletti so freshly presents in the earlier lines come into sharp focus. In the final lines, the material world’s worlds confusions and joys are often brought to bear on problems of the heart. It’s like that Linton Kwesi Johnson song, when he says “This song will go on / in your MIND!” and they put this super-dubby echoplex effect on his voice (“in your mind…in your mind…in your mind”). I think we poet readers think of this as being “haunted” by a poem, but that’s the wrong word. Here, look at this:

Is Beth Here?

Some vague emotional long leaves
read backwards
become permanent
footnotes of greediness
white flowers whiter than night
woods in tablecloth
rented a limo
picked up some propane
then straight to IKEA
w/you, hollow word
plumper emblem
proof the refuse
still be friends

I’m just slayed by these final four lines – YOU, the idea of YOU, is a “hollow word” a “plumper emblem” and “refuse,” and the fact that, despite the betrayals of language, one can still be friends with the YOU – one could almost ask the word YOU “Is Beth here?” Is she in the word YOU?

Like I said, reading poems that cut to the quick and slide around inside one another is tough music, but, the pleasures of poetry lie in that flirtation, in that dare, and poems can still allow us to touch a person, not some character, not some words. And that’s a real gift, and it’s always been rare. I’ll take Coletti’s echoes and intimations any day.

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Paul Muldoon has said his aim is to write poems “that are crystal-clear and whose surfaces are pellucid and immediately tangible.” The opening lines of his most recent book, Maggot, can be used to test that aim:

On my own head be it if, after the years of elocution and pianoforte,
the idea that I may have veered

away from the straight
and narrow of Brooklyn or Baltimore for a Baltic state

is one at which, all things being equal, I would demur.
A bit like Edward VII cocking his ear

at the mention of Cork.

Determining whether he’s hit the mark depends, I suppose, on your skill at untangling complex clauses and the allusions they embed. But you might be tempted to think, Poor guy. He can’t help himself: Here is a man at the mercy of his own erudition and linguistic facility.

What comprises Maggot is a series of poems that take the poet’s gift of associative thinking and syntactical ingenuity to (il)logical conclusions. In this way, he reminds me less of other learned contemporary poets, such as Geoffrey Hill, and more like the novelist Thomas Pynchon, particularly in his mixture of the high and the low, anachronistic terms the poems themselves wouldn’t even traffic in. In “Francois Boucher: Arion the Dolphin,” about a painting by the eighteenth century French Painter, Muldoon paints (ha ha) for us the following scene:

A rock god waiting in the wings
to set himself before the king,
this eye-linered and lip-glossed Arion fouters
with his lyre’s five strings

across the span
of twenty-five centuries. His big hair’s bigger than ever from the fan
of a wind machine. The sky’s pinks and pewters
resound in the brainpan

of a bloodied Triton still grasping his horn
through a briny flurry
while the doo-wop chorus

of Nereids or such sea-born
nymphs seem content to hold their hurry
till those twenty-five centuries have taken their course.

Those sentences are, one must admit, some kind of achievement. And that’s only Part I. Part II begins, “A course that was laid long before…”, taking us deeper down the rabbit hole of associative—which is to say, poetic—thinking. As in Pynchon, some of what comes out of that hole feels tied to another, particular-to-the-author era (doo-wop?), but whereas the novelist shows how the system of language gestures toward possible conspiratorial and/or spiritual realities outside the work, Muldoon’s poems seem to regard our brain’s ability to conceptualize as a prison of arbitrary meaning-making (and thus meaninglessness).

That’s not to say prison can’t be fun. It all depends on how you spend the time you’re doing. The poem “@,” for example, begins like this:

Like the whorl of an out-of-this-world ear that had been lent
to an oak gall wasp by a tenth-century Irish monk
who would hold out oak gall ink against the predicament
in which he found himself…

And ends like this:

Like the tapeworm swallowed by a hippie who once was fat
but is now kind of bummed out you’ve lost track of where she’s at.

The middle two stanzas are as elaborately playful as these, making for a poem that embodies what Walker Percy calls the mind’s favorite project: “a casting about for analogies and connections.” That project, as is often the case in Maggot, results in a pun-sprung joke, the punch-line an expression of a fertile mind mulling the prevalence of an until recently obscure symbol of abbreviation.

Muldoon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Moy Sand and Gravel had a lot of play in it as well—all Muldoon’s books do—but there the longer poems were interspersed with short, clear lyrics of the sort Muldoon claims to want to make. This book is animated by a different energy, playing on the meanings of words and ideas by recasting those words and ideas into different contexts, riding them across fixed stanza forms and numbered sequences to see how far they can be taken. The lines are in free verse, with end-rhymes acting like erratically measured poles propping up a sprawling tent. The elaborate, dazzling pattern stitched into the canvas, the star of these poems, is the sentence: “Forty years of Jumbo doing a one-handed handstand while some geek / simultaneously bites the head off a Wyandotte cock / and the band plays a Hungarian dance by Brahms / doesn’t mean we’re all on the same page.” What goes on outside the tent is largely concealed because, like the baby embedded in the skull on the book’s cover, it’s occurring outside of the poet’s head. Whatever gets through that shield and into his brain is assimilatable, becoming material for the circus inside.

The result is a poetry that gives the lie to the idea that open forms, more than closed forms, somehow hew closer to the way things really are. Muldoon illustrates how the limitation of knowledge and information—the former a product of patience, the latter a commodity of convenience—limits self-transcendence. (Poems like “The Fling” and “Extraordinary Rendition” articulate the effect of this on our romantic lives.) If what we know is, like the expanding universe, both comprised of and bound by the space that makes thought possible, then one way to convey that situation, that existential trap, is in language both expansive and airtight.

But it’s not airless. Watching Muldoon’s sentences course across the forms he has set for himself is like watching an elite athlete being put through his paces. Still, for this reviewer, Muldoon’s work is at its most powerful when driven by something extratextual, events in particular that sting of injustice. It’s in these poems (see earlier poems “Pineapples and Pomegranates” & “Meeting the British,” and, from the current volume, the devastating “Moryson’s Fancy”) where Muldoon’s formidable skill doesn’t simply sustain, as if on air, an idea as a kind of plaything. He pulls it down to earth and plants it. His translation of Charles Baudelaire’s “The Albatross” is preceded by an epigraph reporting the recent, ugly news of the death-by-plastic-pollution of albatrosses on Midway Island. Muldoon performs a delicate sleight-of-hand, turning Baudelaire’s celebration of the poet—“not unlike this Prince of Clouds / who rode out the storm and suffered the slings / and arrows”—into a stark reminder that it’s not poets out there choking on discarded plastic bags, though they might just as easily be duped into mistaking trash for sustenance.

If the squirmy maggot does essentially this—i.e., turns crap into nourishment—it’s because it’s a necessary step toward a life on the wing. What this book demonstrates is how smarts (and skills) of the sort that can off- and sure-handedly weave any number of historical, philosophical, pop cultural, and literary tidbits into an elegant (and eloquent) tapestry might still regard that project as a waste of time:

Dedicated as I was to getting the jump
on the big rig, the fact that a stump might still bleed
through a plaid shirt didn’t chime
with just how little any of this counts
when not even the grain in the grain silo amounts
to chicken feed.

That’s human nature, but Maggot itself challenges the conclusion. Nobody invests this much energy and attention into poetry without thinking there’s something in it that’s nourishing for people, too.

Related Posts:

• Simplify Me When I’m Dead
• The Word on the Street by Paul Muldoon
• The Patron Saint of Bad Marriages and Atomic Bombs in Peace Time
• Hammer Is the Prayer of the Poor and the Dying
• From Exuberant Hanging Gardens