Equipment for Living

by Michael Robbins

  Of all the laws

  that bind us to the past

  the names of things are

  stubbornest

  When Hass’s pintails and blue-winged teals are lined up in a row, the deftness of his observations almost rivals that of the haiku masters he has so memorably translated: in a restaurant’s tank, “coppery lobsters scuttling over lobsters.” But as the above verse suggests, Hass is also given to pedantic soothsaying, telling the reader how it is in tones that suggest he is just slightly winded from having jogged down the slopes of Parnassus. The poetry takes on the tenor of the lecture hall, the quality of prose statement: Of all the laws that bind us to the past, the names of things are stubbornest. Is this true? Is it even meaningful?

  This register contributes to the dewy piety that makes it impossible to read many Hass poems with a straight face. The metaphor “jump the shark” has itself long since jumped the shark, but in its spirit I’d like to propose a new phrase to describe the moment when a poem goes hilariously off the rails. This phrase is “hating the cunt,” and I take it from Field Guide’s “In Weather,” in which a man’s “heavy cock wields, / rises, spits seed / at random”:

  It descends to women occasionally

  with contempt and languid tenderness.

  I tried to hate my wife’s cunt,

  the sweet place where I rooted.

  When discussing a poem in which the poet is so enamored of himself and his sincerity that he is rendered quite tone-deaf to the comic pseudo-profundity of his lines, one might say something like, “The third stanza really hates the cunt.” In the next section of the same poem, Hass is lying in bed listening to the mating cries of owls until he decides to imitate the wail:

  of owls, ecstatic

  in the winter trees, twoo, twoo.

  I drew long breaths.

  My wife stirred in our bed.

  So let’s see: you’re already trying to hate your wife’s, er, companionable hole, and now she has to put up with you making owl noises in the middle of the night? Let the woman sleep!

  Like Mary Oliver and Billy Collins—in their different ways—Hass has made a career out of flattering middlebrow sensibilities with cheap mystery. Unlike those poets, Hass has real talent. The Apple Trees at Olema is a frustrating blend of banality and brilliance. The second volume, Praise, now reads as a primer in late-’70s period style, the kind of laid-back beach koans that led people to believe Galway Kinnell’s “The Bear” was a good poem. There are more berries, more naming of flowers, more embarrassingly tin-eared warbling in the demotic:

  It is different in kind from a man and the pale woman

  he fucks in the ass underneath the stars

  because it is summer and they are full of longing

  and sick of birth.

  Does ass fucking really require such a high-minded justification? Upon being told someone is fucking someone else in the ass, has anyone ever responded, “What! Why?” I regret to inform the reader that Hass goes on to compare this sex act to the sacking of Troy.

  Hass’s most famous poem, “Meditation at Lagunitas,” also succumbs to his fatal need to elevate everything to the phosphorescent plane of longing. It begins vividly by tweaking a worn catchphrase into literality:

  All the new thinking is about loss.

  In this it resembles all the old thinking.

  The idea, for example, that each particular erases

  the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-

  faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk

  of that black birch is, by his presence,

  some tragic falling off from a first world

  of undivided light.

  Here, the poet is arguing against the deadening tendency to force ordinary particulars into luminosity. A woodpecker is allowed to be a woodpecker, and those who would derive allegory from its presence are seduced by intellectual fashion. Within a few lines, Hass is remembering “a woman / I made love to”: “I felt a violent wonder at her presence / like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river / with its island willows.” He’s savvy; he knows that “it hardly had to do with her.” But by the end of the poem, which everyone knows—“Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, / saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry”—you begin to realize that Hass’s particulars are often subsumed into the general because he thinks that merely intoning the names of things can replace the hard work of description. A brief poem in Field Guide ends:

  On the oak table

  filets of sole

  stewing in the juice of tangerines,

  slices of green pepper

  on a bone-white dish.

  This is a list of stuff in Hass’s kitchen. If Jack Spicer’s perfect poem had an infinitely small vocabulary, Hass’s contains only the words “ripe blackberries.” (This is, in fact, the entirety of the twelfth section of “The Beginning of September.”)

  But although the preciousness remains an irritant (“the floribunda are / heavy with the richness and sadness of Europe”—oh really?), in the three books that follow Praise Hass is often charmingly aware of, and thus able to subvert, his own windy inclinations. The title poem of Human Wishes (1989) begins:

  This morning the sun rose over the garden wall and a rare blue sky leaped from east to west. Man is altogether desire, say the Upanishads. Worth anything, a blue sky, says Mr. Acker, the Shelford gardener. Not altogether. In the end. Last night on television the ethnologist and the cameraman watched with hushed wonder while the chimpanzee carefully stripped a willow branch and inserted it into the anthill. He desired red ants.

  The first sentence is not promising, but what follows is terrific, in part because the gardener’s platitude deftly exposes the hollowness of the opening. The poet’s aside—“Not altogether”—responds to the Upanishads but also to Mr. Acker’s bland assertion, and that puffery about “a rare blue sky” is deflated by association. Hass has jumped a few levels of the game. The bit about the nature program is just as astute: not “there was an ethnologist” or “we saw a show where an ethnologist.” The definite articles produce an immediacy that is reinforced by the lack of framing. There is always an ethnologist on television somewhere, watching a chimp.

  Human Wishes’ prose poems inaugurated a genial talkiness that also enlivens the best work in Sun Under Wood (1996) and Time and Materials (2007). The poems in these later collections are often anecdotal, playful even when politically outraged, skillfully polished in order to appear offhand, attentive to their own processes. Hass has an engaging way of seeming to switch tracks, often by tossing in a seemingly random historical factoid, as in these lines from “Churchyard”:

        When deer in the British Isles were forced to live in the open because of heavy foresting, it stunted them. The red deer who lived in the Scottish highlands a thousand years ago were a third larger than the present animal.

  Hass is at his best when, as here, he is at his most casual. “The Miwoks called it Moon of the Only Credit Card” is not a line that would have occurred to the young man who wrote Field Guide. He cultivates a sense of having jotted down something that flitted through his thoughts, without ever straining after the unconvincing illusion of stream of consciousness. A poem in Time and Materials ends by musing of Whitman, “He was in love with a trolley conductor / In the summer of—what was it?—1867? 1868?” Another poem, “I Am Your Waiter Tonight and My Name Is Dmitri,” begins:

  Is, more or less, the title of a poem by John Ashbery and has

  No investment in the fact that you can get an adolescent

  Of the human species to do almost anything

  This is “why they are tromping down a road in Fallujah / In combat gear and a hundred and fifteen degrees of heat.” These lines are both funny and furious (also unfair to Ashbery’s delightful “My Name Is Dimitri,” which, by the way, is spelled by Ashbery with three is), but did we really need the Horatian tagline that follows? (Take a guess.) At times this didacticism becomes p
reachy, and Hass sounds like Bono lecturing the UN:

        In the first twenty years of the twentieth century 90 percent of war deaths were the deaths of combatants. In the last twenty years of the twentieth century 90 percent of war deaths were deaths of civilians. There are imaginable responses to these facts. The nations of the world could stop setting an example for suicide bombers. They could abolish the use of land mines.

  We appreciate your input, Professor Hass. We will take it under advisement.

  FREDERICK SEIDEL’S BAD TASTE

  A popular clip on YouTube shows a local news reporter trying to interview a costume-shop owner who’d been charged with cyberstalking. The woman is dressed as a giant rabbit and refuses to take the reporter seriously. When he asks her to remove “the bunny head” she complies, only to reveal that she is wearing a vampire mask underneath. My interview with Frederick Seidel, ostensibly for the Village Voice, was marginally less successful than this.

  In keeping with his perverse ways, Seidel agreed to answer only two questions. One of my questions ponderously involved the received sense, here in the States, that poetry is no longer a vital cultural force, a feeling further emphasized by the National Endowment for the Art’s (NEA) recent announcement that in 2008 almost ninety-two percent of American adults had read no poetry at all. What role, I wondered, can poetry play in such an environment? I had in mind something like Allen Grossman’s admission that he is uncertain what poetry “can now mean in the context of the actual human task.”77 But Seidel simply responded with Samuel Johnson’s line, borrowed from Sidney (who got it from Horace), that poetry must please and instruct. Fair enough. So what are his poems instructing us in or to do? “That’s for you to say.” At least I think this is how the conversation went: when I sat down to transcribe the interview, I discovered, not without a sense of relief, that I had inserted the microphone cord into the wrong jack on the tape recorder. Only my questions had been preserved.

  A friend suggested I should just have asked: “Why are you a monster?” For it is wonderfully apt that this particular interview should have crashed so spectacularly: Seidel is, as everyone notices, a terrifying poet, who writes terrifying poems.

  “Everything in the poems is true,” Seidel told New York magazine in 2006. “You should take them at face value.” Richard Poirier provides the de rigueur response: “Fred’s created a character named Frederick Seidel that has little to do with who he is.”78 In a review of Seidel’s Cosmos Poems and Life on Earth, Calvin Bedient likewise assures us that Seidel’s “poetic ‘I’ ” is “fictive and hyperbolic.”79 Something about Seidel’s poetry moves critics to foreground the familiar claim that the speaker of a poem is not identical with the poet. For what could it mean to take lines like these, from “Letter to the Editors of Vogue,” at “face value”?

  I am drinking gasoline

  To stay awake

  In the midst of so much

  Murder.

  My daughter squeaks and squeaks

  Like a mouse screaming in a trap,

  Dangling from the cat who makes her come

  When he does it to her.

  What would it mean to inhabit Seidel’s assertion rather than reflexively dismiss it, to suspend our learned doubt about the “speakers” of poems? It can’t mean accepting everything in the poems as literally true: I doubt even Seidel drinks gasoline. Taking the poems at face value does not require us to take them as factual autobiographical reports. Rather, I contend that Seidel gives himself over to grotesquerie, caricature, and hyperbole, a strategy of outsized scale, in order both to offer a critique of morality based on taste and to claim for himself an extreme form of agency.

  Specifically, Seidel conducts an amplification of affect beyond what we might legitimately ascribe to ordinary persons. Every critic of Seidel has located him within the Lowellian tradition of masculinist confession. But if the literary historical assumption about confession is that it institutes a norm of subjectivity, Seidel’s work helps us to see that this norm’s contours have always been extreme rather than normative. Or, to put it another way, Seidel’s hyperbole, like Freud’s and Nietzsche’s, encodes an intuition that the extreme is the norm rather than a deviation from it. This is a corollary of the premise from which Seidel begins: that we live in a culture of almost unlimited suffering, a culture whose capacity to produce guilt and shame is infinite. To respond adequately to the infernal conditions of modernity requires what George Puttenham, in 1589, termed “Hiperbole, or the Ouer reacher, otherwise called the loud lyer,” the “immoderate excesse” of poetic speech.80 As Seidel has it, “Civilized life is actually about too much.” His lurid hyperbole is a way of negotiating the problem of personhood in an impersonally violent world.

  Seidel’s confessions sometimes take a plausibly Lowellian form: “A naked woman my age is a total nightmare,” he writes. This is readable as (although not only as) confession—as if pronounced, that is, with chagrin, in acknowledgment that one is in error. But such moments, although outrageous, compete for space with more telling ones. Seidel imagines a terrorist blowing up the Chunnel train, along with “a flock of Japanese schoolgirls ready to be fucked / In their school uniforms in paradise.” He is given to schoolboy blurts like “Shit with a cunt! / The prince was blunt. / Shit with a cunt. // Cunt with a dick!” Here we find Seidel reveling in unacceptable social attitudes—whatever schoolgirls might actually do, a fairly uncontroversial morality disallows describing them as “ready to be fucked,” especially when they are about to be murdered (in a vignette of stereotyped Islamist fanaticism)—and a kind of infantile scatology, Tourette’s syndrome as nonsense verse. These ejaculations are characteristic of Seidel’s work, and they undermine the moral scaffolding on which an earnest Lowellian confession (which, however theatrical, solicits expiation) would seem to depend. However indebted to Robert Lowell he might be in other ways, it would be a category mistake to see Seidel as truly “confessional,” precisely because he “confesses” in order to offend against the norms of taste, to revel in, rather than repent of, the sins he has committed. He’s more like the movie villain who brags of his crimes in order to make the hero squirm.

  Indeed, the rehearsal of historical pain in his own person for which Lowell is chastised by Marjorie Perloff and other critics is a form of theater that Seidel will stand on its head. He rehearses his personal crudities in the viscera of history. Given just how crude and visceral his poetry can be, such that some critics are tempted to conclude it is all a put-on, it’s worth thinking about the term face value. The OED defines it as “the value printed or depicted on a coin, banknote, ticket, etc., especially when less than the actual value; (fig.) the apparent character, nature, worth, or meaning of a person or thing.” On this definition, Seidel is directing us not to look for some “actual” meaning behind the poems’ “apparent” meaning: their appearance is their reality. But this means we should be especially careful about what we take to be their apparent meaning. We should pay particular attention to the language of the poems, even when that means looking at what disgusts us, as Seidel’s speaker does in some lines that do seem to seek absolution: “I hate seeing the anus of a beautiful woman. / I should not be looking. It should not be there.”

  Poirier would have us believe that the “actual value” of these lines, as opposed to their “apparent character,” depends on the recognition that (what might seem) their callow investment in surfaces “has little to do with who” Seidel is. But the indictment of surfaces is self-directed: “I should not be looking” at the woman’s anus. And even as the petulance of “It should not be there” expresses a wholly impotent protest against the entropic processes of nature—a futile desire that beauty not be marred by reminders of its origins in and eventual return to decay and waste—it more complexly confirms that self-indictment: it should not be there in my field of vision, I should (but do not) have the decency to avert my gaze. The face value of the anus is staring him in the face—he stares into i
t and sees himself as if it were a mirror: I’m the asshole.

  The value, then, of his outrageousness is to be had by taking it seriously. When Lowell admits that “Everybody’s tired of my turmoil,” it’s possible to read him as truly self-deprecating. Seidel, on the other hand, despite gestures toward self-deprecation, rarely lets us forget not only that he really is an asshole, but also that he is not about to apologize for it. To ask whether this is a persona is beside the point, or it is to overestimate the distancing effect of personae. Isobel Armstrong has astutely problematized the status of Browning’s personae in Men and Women by suggesting that the poet is “extraordinarily faithful” to a Benthamite conception of aesthetic fictionality. On this view, a fiction must be dealt with “as if it were real simply because it has entered substantively into experience by existing at all.” By not writing in propria persona, Browning builds the politico-ideological problem of agency “into the very structure of the poem as a problem.”81 Rather than absolving the poet of personal commitment to his words, persona dramatizes the problems of selfhood, the questions of where and how agency inheres. The sheer force of the personality on display renders toothless the resort to persona as a way of excusing the poet’s seeming depravity. Seidel’s poetry, in the words of Armstrong’s reading, “declares itself insistently, almost raucously, with a kind of ravenous energy which asks to be confronted.”82 What that energy asks to be confronted with is the reader’s taste—his or her disgust and offense—to suggest that that taste provides the unexamined foundation of a morality that serves as a facade disguising hard truths.