Equipment for Living

by Michael Robbins

  This strange thing must have crept

  Right out of hell.

  It resembles a bird’s foot

  Worn around the cannibal’s neck.

  This is the beginning of a poem called “Fork” (it’s followed by “Spoon,” “Knife,” “My Shoes,” and “Stone”). It’s a great poem to teach. Forget about self-expression, kid: learn to see the monster on the dinner table.

  In his early poems, Simic is a carny barker, fast-talking up the grotesques with a snake-oil man’s pinstriped charm. He zips around telling jokes in a faux-biblical register, as in the exquisitely titled “Concerning My Neighbors, the Hittites”:

  Great are the Hittites.

  Their ears have mice and mice have holes.

  Their dogs bury themselves and leave the bones

  To guard the house. A single weed holds all their storms

  Until the spiderwebs spread over the heavens.

  This has the quick spark of the best Monty Python sketches, but “Their ears have mice and mice have holes,” with its associational slippage, is great poetry.

  Selected Early Poems (first published in 1985; updated 2000), from which the first ninety pages of New and Selected Poems are drawn, is full of such little astonishments. The poems strut with confidence and verve. Unending Blues (1986), the prose poems of The World Doesn’t End (1989), and some of the pieces in The Book of Gods and Devils (1990) are similarly charged.

  But then Simic just stopped. I don’t mean he stopped writing—he churns out books like Trollope on NoDoz. He stopped taking pains with his poems. “Many other strange things came to pass,” he writes in 1990’s “Factory.” I sat in the coffee shop. Many other strange things came to pass. Something about flies and ashtrays. You write the poem.

  It’s not that he’s forgotten how to make poems—he retains a mechanical efficiency, with tidy stanzas leading to some tweaked lyrical summation. But the fire’s gone out of them. They’re comfortable, unassuming, the sort of thing an investment banker might discover in the New Yorker and send to his son at MIT. A typical poem ends:

  In Los Angeles, one Sunday morning,

  The photographer took a picture

  Of a closed barbershop

  And a black cat crossing an empty avenue,

  A blind man outside a bus station

  Playing the guitar and singing

  If the worst are full of passionate intensity, Simic would seem to be in the clear. Most of the later poems are like this, banal snapshots bewildering in their literality. Here’s the last stanza of “The Melon”:

  I remember a hornet, too, that flew in

  Through the open window

  Mad to taste the sweet fruit

  While we ducked and screamed,

  Covered our heads and faces,

  And sat laughing after it was gone.

  If he wrote “Fork” today, it would end, “Its shiny tines reflect the light.”

  There is, of course, a tradition of fine poetry that distrusts metaphor. But such poetry distinguishes itself by the artfulness of its selection and articulation. Simic no longer bothers to tweak a cliché until it seems sinister: “a Vietnam vet on crutches / . . . tries to bum a dime or a cigarette.” If I were commenting on a student’s draft, I’d jot, “A dime or a cigarette is what you expect to follow ‘bum’; what if he tried to bum something more startling?” But Charles Simic is a former poet laureate and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize.

  There are moments in late Simic when the old headless chicken rears its bloody hackle: “When you play chess alone it’s always your move.” But as long as Selected Early Poems—my favorite of which, “Psalm” (“I’m Joseph of the Joseph of the Joseph who rode on a donkey”), is not included in this latest collection—and The World Doesn’t End are in print, this edition is superfluous. In the late ’90s an interviewer asked Simic where he finds inspiration. “Piece of cake,” he responded. Alas.

  KILL ROCK STARS’ MEMOIRS

  The rock-star memoir is one of those dicey genres whose success depends on exceeding the lowest possible expectations. Patti Smith’s Just Kids was highly acclaimed despite her apparent belief that serious writing is principally a matter of avoiding contractions. Keith Richards’s Life was New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon’s choice for book of the year despite being called Life. Jay Z’s remarkable Decoded was cowritten with Dream Hampton, so it doesn’t count. The gold standard is Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, Volume One (2004), a work of freaky genius that nevertheless contains several phrases on the order of “Sigmund Freud, the king of the subconscious.”

  Expectations duly lowered, I was ready to give Neil Young’s memoir a chance even though it is a) titled Waging Heavy Peace and b) written by Neil Young, who has always struggled with lyrics—you know, the writing words part. “That perfect feeling when time just slips / Away between us on our foggy trip,” anyone?

  Now, Neil Young is a colossus. He’s reshaped rock and roll. That maelstrom of guitar fuzz you hear in Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, Built to Spill, Nirvana, or in metal bands like Horseback and Royal Thunder—Neil Young made that possible. After the Gold Rush, On the Beach, Tonight’s the Night, Decade, Rust Never Sleeps—these are sacred documents.

  But as sure as this old world keeps spinning round, the man cannot write a book.

  Waging Heavy Peace (it helps if you mentally substitute a better title—which is to say, any other title—whenever you read those words) is as messy as the druggiest Crazy Horse solo. Unlike a Crazy Horse record, though, there’s no discernible structure, just a free-associating ramble through the haze of Young’s green mind. That could be fun enough, and the old man sure has some tales to tell. But the prose. Reader, the prose.

  The pull quote on the dust jacket had me worried before I’d even turned to the first page:

  I think I will have to use my time wisely and keep my thoughts straight if I am to succeed and deliver the cargo I so carefully have carried thus far to the outer reaches. Not that it’s my only job or task. I have others, too. Sacred things that I need to protect from pain and hardship, like careless remarks on an open mind.

  Ah, the weird Victorian transmissions of the amateur writer. Who says “I so carefully have carried thus far”? Why both “job” and “task”? What does the last clause modify? What could it mean for a “careless remark” to be “on” an “open mind”?

  Indeed, there is not a hint of inspiration on any page of Waging Heavy Peace, nothing to indicate Young has any idea that sentences can do more than impart basic information:

  There is a lot of misinformation about ethanol. . . . The production of the concert got some awards as well and was seen as bold at the least. That made [the producer David] Briggs and me feel pretty good. The movie we made of the concert is one of my favorites. . . . I got a few sexually transmitted diseases and started to become aware that there was a responsibility connected to the decisions I was making. . . . We had some really great times, David and I! That was only one of them! I am laughing my ass off right now just thinking of the fun we had! How lighthearted.

  No one expects belles lettres from rock stars, but it’s depressing to learn that one of your heroes writes like a composition student aiming for the earnest tone of a public service announcement. Without a wink of irony, Young will exclaim “That’s life!” or end a chapter with “The sky was the limit.” Compare Dylan in Chronicles:

  Once when I was lying on the beach in Coney Island, I saw a portable radio in the sand . . . a beautiful General Electric, self-charging—built like a battleship—and it was broken. . . . I had seen a lot of other things broken, too—bowls, brass lamps, vessels and jars and jugs, buildings, buses, sidewalks, trees, landscapes—all these things, when they’re broken, make you feel ill at ease.

  This is mysterious, haunting in a way that’s reminiscent of Dylan’s best songs, even though he’s describing one of his worst (“Everything Is Broken”). It’s not a coincidence that Dylan spends pages hyperventilating over Rimbaud and B
yron and Faulkner and Coleridge, while the only indication in Waging Heavy Peace that Neil Young has ever read a single book comes when he mentions buying a used Clive Cussler novel.

  Soft target, you say? Well, the guy did write a book, and he is asking you to throw thirty of your clams at it. But all right, what about the content? Turns out it’s the extension of form. Young is never more frustrating than when he finally threatens to get to the good stuff. “It’s better to burn out than to fade away” serves as the epigraph to a chapter that begins by noting that line’s relationship to both John Lennon and Kurt Cobain. But Young has little to say about Lennon or Cobain. The chapter devolves into a mash note to Jimmy Fallon.

  Playing guitar with Charlie Manson merits a couple of perfunctory paragraphs. After Hurricane Katrina, Neil gets a call from his “old friend Bruce.” It’s Bruce Springsteen! On the phone with Neil Young! What did they talk about! Who knows! “There is no need to go into what two old friends had to say to each other at this point.” Right. Unless you’re trying to write an interesting book.

  Instead, if you read Waging Heavy Peace, you will learn more than you ever wanted to know about model trains and old cars, Young’s obsessive hobbies. You will thrill to PowerPointillist descriptions of his business meetings. You will be told that all good things must pass, but no one knows why. You will be made to feel guilty about listening to MP3s. You will wonder just how many sentences in a single memoir can begin “Anyway . . .” You will marvel at the astonishments of the LincVolt. (I think this is a kind of electric car, but it is so boring to read about that I learned to start skimming whenever the word LincVolt loomed in my peripheral vision.)

  And you will find it affecting to listen in as this aging artist mourns his lost friends, as he worries that the cloud on his MRI presages the dementia that felled his father, as he likens his forty years of drug and alcohol use to a big sleep. The simplicity of the prose befits these moments: in a chapter devoted to heroin casualties we learn that when producer Jack Nitzsche overdosed, “I was on the road. I didn’t know what else to do, so I just sent flowers.”

  The chapter should have ended there. But Young cannot resist what Greil Marcus once called the “traditional Neil Young sappiness,” so we get some guff about life in full bloom and having faith when darkness falls. It’s easier to forgive the sap when a galaxy-spawning guitar solo is around the bend. If you really want to wage some heavy peace, do yourself a favor and put on “Cowgirl in the Sand” or “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black).” There’s little ragged glory to be had from this open mind’s careless remarks.

  DARK, DARK, DARK

  Dark, black, twilight, loneliness, darkening, winter, isolated, dark, ashes, loneliness, terribly, terrible, blind, weep, nothing, ashes, fear, waste, sufferings, poison, hatred, kills, dying, gray, night, dying, suicidally, terribly, black, empty, evening, darkens, wasted, dark, hatred, frightened, sorrow, shadows, death, dark, fear, killed, dark, dark, dark.

  That’s a compilation of keywords, in order of appearance, from the first nine poems of James Wright’s 1963 collection The Branch Will Not Break. As you might have gathered, Wright is not the least melodramatic poet ever to bleed all over the thorns of life. In one poem from Branch he actually writes that his body is “crying / In its dark thorns. / Still, / There are good things in this world.” Cool, keep us posted.

  Wright was the first poet I fell in love with after deciding I wanted to write poetry. He was my North, my South Detroit, my small town girl. My fascination with these lines from “To the Muse” ensured I would not write a good poem for many years:

  Oh Jenny.

  I wish to God I had made this world, this scurvy

  And disastrous place. I

  Didn’t, I can’t bear it

  Either . . .

  As a callow nineteen-year-old, I found Wright’s romanticized “Jenny” a portable signifier, more approachable than Petrarch’s Laura or Dante’s Beatrice. She was Sarah Chesnutt, the combat-booted goddess of my college workshops. (We’re friends on Facebook now. She’s married, has a kid. Hi, Sarah.) Jenny was everyone who ever left “the scars / Of forgotten swans” incused upon my heart.

  Robert Hass (another early influence, about whom more anon) has said that “the suffering of other people” becomes, in Wright’s poems, “part of his own emotional life.”50 This is clearly what the poems aim for, but not always what they achieve. It is often truer to say that the suffering of other people becomes a proxy for Wright’s own suffering. Other people seem to matter for him, at his worst, only insofar as they provide structural equivalents of his own “loneliness” and “anguish” and other such interchangeable markers of the utter desolation that is his:

  The cracked song

  Of my own body limps into the body

  Of this living place. I have nobody

  To go in with

  But my love who is a woman,

  And my crude dead, my sea . . .

  It is easy to feel that, if fetal alcohol syndrome could write poetry, it would write this poetry. Or consider this passage from “Many of Our Waters: Variations on a Poem by a Black Child”:

  I feel lonesome,

  And sick at heart,

  Frightened,

  And I don’t know

  Why.

  help.

  This is literally the sort of thing you might find in a high school student’s journal. Presumably that’s why the next lines are “The kind of poetry I want to write is / The poetry of a grown man.” But do those lines justify Wright’s having written the poetry of a tween?

  When I was young, Wright’s emotionally freighted repetition seemed talismanic, as if he were holding off the dark by naming it over and over. I tried it, mouthing “dark” and “darkness” and “darkening” as I wrote my idiotic dirges. (I just made that up, but it sounds like the kind of thing I would have done.) Any fetish, though, loses its virtue through overuse. How much more powerful than anything in Wright are Whitman’s sympathy and restrained expression:

  It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,

  The dark threw its patches down upon me also,

  The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious,

  My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?

  I had to destroy James Wright, like Journey and Dylan Thomas, in order to save myself. They were always wrong, the old masters. When you’re young you either shatter your idols or they consume you. Only now, having reached the heretofore unthinkable age of forty, do I begin to see that we never really kill our fathers. Harold Bloom, in his mad, brilliant Anxiety of Influence, writes that “the later poet opens himself to what he believes to be a power in the parent-poem that does not belong to the parent proper, but to a range of being just beyond that precursor.”51

  But in Wright’s best work, such as the second of the “Two Poems about President Harding,” a power pulses that is not his alone, and therefore not soaked in the ethanol of the self:

  A hundred slag piles north of us,

  At the mercy of the moon and rain,

  He lies in his ridiculous

  Tomb, our fellow citizen.

  The poem’s final lines hearken back to this opening:

  America goes on, goes on

  Laughing, and Harding was a fool.

  Even his big pretentious stone

  Lays him bare to ridicule.

  I know it. But don’t look at me.

  By God, I didn’t start this mess.

  Whatever moon and rain may be,

  The hearts of men are merciless.

  I hear the music of Wright’s beloved Thomas Hardy in this. Rather than private tokens of loneliness, the moon and rain are natural forces: symbols, to be sure, but symbols of the impersonal erosion of time, like the wind and rain that erase the names—and, metonymically, the memory of their bearers—on Hardy’s headstones in “During Wind and Rain.”

  Except that Wright’s “at the mercy of” seems to embed the
possibility that the moon might harbor mercy in its heart—could not, at any rate, harbor less than humans do in theirs. This notion, along with Wright’s rhyme scheme, recalls my favorite of Hardy’s poems, “I Looked Up from My Writing” (unaccountably excluded from both the Faber & Faber and Oxford World’s Classics editions of Hardy’s selected poems):

  I looked up from my writing,

  And gave a start to see,

  As if rapt in my inditing,

  The moon’s full gaze on me.

  Her meditative misty head

  Was spectral in its air,

  And I involuntarily said,

  “What are you doing there?”

  The moon replies that she has been “scanning pond and hole / and waterway hereabout,” looking for the body of a man who drowned himself from grief at his son’s death in the Great War. (Wright’s Jenny is discovered, drowned perhaps, in a “suckhole.”) Hardy is as pessimistic as Wright, but his sympathy seems less feigned. The poem concludes:

  “Did you hear his frenzied tattle?

  It was sorrow for his son

  Who is slain in brutish battle,

  Though he has injured none.

  “And now I am curious to look

  Into the blinkered mind

  Of one who wants to write a book

  In a world of such a kind.”

  Her temper overwrought me,

  And I edged to shun her view,

  For I felt assured she thought me

  One who should drown him too.

  I imagine the moon spitting the word book with contempt.

  For both poets, the sense that the world is hardly fit for men to live in is connected with poetic making and with the avoidance of accusatory gazes. “Don’t look at me,” Wright says. “By God, I didn’t start this mess.” In “To the Muse,” he denies having “made this world, this scurvy / And disastrous place.” Hardy is shamed by the moon’s looking at him (looking into his “blinkered mind”) in the act of making a poem, a vocation the moon condemns as—what? trivial? useless? insensitive, inappropriate in a world of suffering? The moon summons something of the spirit of Theodor Adorno’s endlessly repeated line about the barbarism of poetry-making after Auschwitz. To write a poem is, ultimately, a redemptive act, a profession of faith in beauty (whether or not the poem is “beautiful”). But in a world where sons are pointlessly slaughtered, fathers drown themselves, and the hearts of men are merciless, the promise of redemption is a bad joke and beauty an insult.