American Poets in the 21st Century

by Claudia Rankine

  As I set about rereading Brian Blanchfield’s poetry for this essay, I found myself thinking that it’s hard to know where to start describing the poems: they are so dense and various and open out onto so many different vistas. But here’s the funny thing: I slowly realized that knowing where to start is an interesting problem for him, too. Both of his books of poems start twice, with a kind of proem, a pause, then a second “first” poem. Indeed the first first-poem in his first book, Not Even Then, names this interesting problem in its title: “One First Try and Then Another.”1

  I think the reason Blanchfield may have taken an interest in the difficulty of beginnings is linked to his sense of the sheer abundance of experience on which poetry is capable of touching, as well as to the rustling panoply of meanings so many of the words in the English language have accrued. These two things are related, of course, and Blanchfield works them in tandem to great effect. My essay will be largely about this tandem, and my thesis—inasmuch as I have one—is that Blanchfield assembles from material like connotative richness and suspended word order a poetry that aims to lure us into a plurality we couldn’t have predicted. He often does this by introducing—often surreptitiously—virtual, grammatical, and actual third persons into poetic scenes that seem at first to have space only for two. It’s a kind of transformation that isn’t only additive: as Blanchfield put it in a recent interview, “We is not the plural of I.”2 His poetry’s search for the right conditions for this transformation is the engine of their difficulty; it’s the well of their queerness.

  Take that first-first-first poem, for instance. “One First Try and Then Another” begins with three scene-setting lines and a fourth that adds a sudden plot:

  Careful, a night set on edge

  the European tradition of virtuoso

  and the raw desire to articulate.

  I pushed them both backward on the bed in the end

  and each played on, one first

  try and then another.3

  It takes a moment to grasp that “night” is the subject and agent of the first sinuous sentence: night, personified and feeling careful, sets virtuosity and rawness in close proximity to one another. This opening throwing of the poet’s voice and giving agency over to an abstraction is tough, it’s modernist, it’s worthy of Hart Crane—but Crane would never have written that next line. “I pushed them both backward on the bed” is where the mischief starts, and in its sexual bluntness, it’s a one-line measure of all that’s happened in American gay history between the time of Crane and the time of this poem.

  I don’t mean Blanchfield’s poems are un-closeted or “openly gay.” I think it’s more like Blanchfield has figured out that the history of the closet, with all its negative connotations of loneliness and self-denial, nonetheless intersects with the history of gayness and queerness as excitingly subcultural and semi-secret. The thrill of initiation is everywhere in his writing. And when his poems are thrilling, as they so often are, I think it’s because he’s also figured out that the history of poetry and the history of subculture themselves exist in an enduring tandem. Daniel Tiffany’s work on poetry as cant and underground speech, on poetry as a kind of riddling, has brilliantly made this history clear—and one key aspect of Blanchfield’s gift is to keep running all these semi-secrets into each other.4 The magic his poems work is to make the reader feel that, in unlocking their difficulty, he or she is entering a demimonde whose substance is the discovery that the world and the word are wide open, full of multiple meanings and meanings yet unmade.

  Look back, if you will, at “One First Try.” The poem is difficult and riddling—we can’t be certain what it’s about—but scan for these words and phrases, and you’ll find an only partly obscured and plot-like sequence across its three stanzas:

  raw / desire / pushed them both backward / on the bed / torso / hands / adolescent / barn jacket / strewn / stroke / building / libido / loudly / skillless

  They make a poem, too—or they’re the poem under infrared light, the poem you can see with your Eros goggles on. It’s about a three-way. Or, sort of—it’s also about something like three-ness. The poem has three stanzas, after all, the lucky one at midpoint held on either side by the most erotic word of all, “thought”—and the last line contains a true linguistic rarity, a word with three l’s. “Skillless”: a Crane-like word for abandon, but also a nod, I think, to the double-l’s at the end of James Schuyler’s 1969 poem “Freely Espousing,” which like Blanchfield’s poem opens with night as the medium that links or edges opposites. Schuyler calls this “marriages of the atmosphere.”5

  Schuyler’s poem pivots on a kind of pun or overlap of meanings around the word “espousing,” so that the word is allowed to mean both “taking a spouse” and “advocating”—especially advocating for aesthetic pleasure, not least the pleasure of fleeting juxtaposition. Down by the Tidal Basin on a spring day in Washington, DC, Schuyler spots a pair of figures in the distance, and it inspires him to pun again, this time on their bodies and the shapes of like letters nestling alongside each other. At first he thinks they’re in a kind of silent reverie, but then he realizes,

  It is not so quiet and they

  are a medium-size couple who

  when they fold each other up

  well, thrill. That’s their story.6

  I think this lovely ending, with its miniature couple likened to a pair of l’s, serves as ground and intertext for the way the last two lines of “One First Try and Then Another” bring that triple-l into play:

  Then all limbs arms and loudly I don’t want to

  play down the skillless touch.

  Separated at first by a space between words (“all limbs”), the l’s drift together at last in “skillless”—that sneaky extra l so easy to scan right past, hiding in plain sight. The lines talk back to Schuyler, to free espousal, and add a radical to it. The poem finds space inside an earlier virtuosity and makes it breathe. It opens the volume.

  “One First Try” establishes a pattern and a set of opportunities that Blanchfield will work and rework throughout Not Even Then, and then both deepen and loosen in his second volume, A Several World.7 In brief, I think the key elements of that pattern are to recognize a kind of productive reversal in doubling back or starting over, and to see reversal as making a space for invitation, for bringing more entities or persons into the ambit of a poem. This work is never merely additive, though, so much as a source of possible solidarity. As he puts it in the charming opening of a poem from Not Even Then, “Dyslexics unite, I mean, start over.”8 Elsewhere, in the punning opening lines of a poem from A Several World, Blanchfield writes, “Aggregate is a pavement rough on the feet.”9 And indeed if you look up “aggregate” and “pavement” together, you will learn that the word is a paver’s name for the mix of stone and gravel and sand beneath us on the sidewalk. It’s a Whitmanian aggregate, where we find not just one of the roughs, but a whole lover’s army of them, serving as the medium of our transit. If that sounds Situationist—sous les pavés, la plage!—I think it’s meant to. The politics of Blanchfield’s poems reside in an insistence that poetry, rather than an elevated specialness, is a kind of heightened lowering, an invitation to a demotic state of deep linguistic play in which one can undo oneself a little, and imagine being undone. The poems are still quite difficult, but their commitment to pun and secondary meaning and the blur between the visual and the verbal—if you slow down with it long enough to start to speed back up again—feels remarkably friendly, like being taken in hand.

  This friendly, roughed-up difficulty is a gambit, but it’s part of a tradition, too—a tradition among English-language gay male poets at least, of something like trying to have it both ways: on the one hand, dizzying high language, and challenging deep play, and on the other an insistence that everyone is welcome. I sense it begins in Auden, who wanted camp and erudition, tenderness and baleful wisdom, to coexist without any fuss—and it moves across the Atlantic with him to be taken up in the poe
try of Ashbery, Schuyler, and O’Hara, which experiments continuously with weaving a slant gay male sensibility into the history of poetic language and inviting everyone to share it.

  Like any tradition, this one shifts and twists along with history and literary history alike, and in the movement between Not Even Then and A Several World, I sense Blanchfield becoming more consciously aware of this. The poems in the second volume train a longer gaze on the question of where they fit in what he calls, in the book’s main sequence, “The History of Ideas.” They also tell poetic time by placing poetry, again and again, in the context of other media. And it’s this dunking of the poetry in film, in painting, in conceptual art, in dance, that proves to be his poetry’s most wide-reaching means of asking whether subcultural specificity has anything to do with aesthetic experience in some “universal” sense. I suppose I could put it better by saying that I think the poems in the second book are testing whether poetic strategies like reversal, pun, and intermixing are like or unlike related strategies in other arts, and whether, further, poetry can mix and mingle with them.

  Let’s jump volumes and look at the corollary poem to “One First Try,” the first poem in Blanchfield’s second book of poems to date, A Several World. It doesn’t immediately call forth other media, but it sets us up for how Blanchfield will treat them, because of how the poem describes the bodies that occupy it—they mix and mingle, too. The poem is called “Eclogue Onto an Idea,” and that “onto” does a good deal of work—indeed the poem feels like an attempt to give narrative or flesh to what the preposition has traditionally meant and done.10 “Onto,” such a simple word, carries specific connotations of vantage and prospect, of windows opening onto views, of terrain observable from slightly above. It also carries connotations of conveyance: you hop onto the train, get onto a plane. Meanwhile, the poem works up the word “out” in a related sense: not “out” as in “to kick out”—“out” as in removal or displacement—but in the sense of “outdoors.” The poem begins “Up ahead out here,” and ends twenty-six lines later with the standalone line “Way out there now.” It frames itself in spaciousness, and with the idea of purview—an interesting opening move, in a book that will turn out to be all about the pleasures of compressed space, and the affordances of darkness.

  The poem is a narrative of occupying a body entirely from within. It seems to imagine that the widest vantage, from which the world is most brightly lit, is from inside the dark of another’s body, looking out. The poem suggests that this looking out, when it happens, happens as if in poetry. Indeed it may be poetry:

  Up ahead out here, and his affiliate, rival in the eyes,

  someone near, but not our crowd, someone whom

  you approach in a poem only

  to the extent of his vantage out, to the verb open out

  onto. To that extent, you fit into his

  looking suit, to the glove points, othering,

  a long parenthesis of lens, a self sort of, a caul kind of

  first feeling, to the doubled pocket

  mouth. Kissed him from inside:

      what’s yes in any es gibt, contributing thus

  the plus of a little sentience. Have you too felt extra fleetingly?11

  The immediate challenge these lines present is their anacoluthon, that is, the way the order of the words seems either scrambled or ungrounded in a subject. We want to read that “up ahead out here, [in this vast space, there is] someone near,” but Blanchfield, as in most of his poems, withholds key grammatical information—or, at least momentarily. If we’re looking for a missing “there is,” it pops up a few lines later, in German, as es gibt. “There is” / es gibt: our languages for givenness, like the “it’s” in “it’s raining.” Blanchfield’s withdrawal and translation and reoffering of the grammatical subject is meant, it seems, to throw us right into the presence, into the givenness, of this “someone,” whose sudden presence makes us feel a vastness and a nearness, both at once.

  Here’s what fascinates me: this spatial and grammatical derangement is not meant as an alienation effect in the traditional avant-gardist way. It is not meant to distance us from the poem so much as to startle us into recognizing our closeness to it, and to pull us closer in. It suggests that poetry disorients in order to attract. To the “extent” that we are suddenly both near and far from this someone, that is, it is because we “approach” him “in a poem.” And we don’t just take on his gaze, look out from behind his eyes: we fit inside him entire, down to our gloved fingertips, and “[kiss] him from inside.” The blank space after “inside,” and the way “what’s yes” is placed just after it on the line below, mime the jump inside this other body: after the colon, we’re in.

  You’ll have noticed that I’ve let the poem draw me in to using the first-person plural—this is a persistent effect of Blanchfield’s poetry. His use of “we” or “us” or “ours” often contains an initial perplexity that, once overcome, transmutes into a welcome, so that the “we” in his poetry ends up enacted, and not just grammatical. In this, it is a little like Ashbery’s famous use of “you” to mean some shifting ratio of poet and reader. “Eclogue Onto an Idea,” in fact, calls up not only this strategy in Ashbery, but the sense of onrush he creates in “At North Farm,” the short opening poem from 1984’s A Wave. Ashbery’s poem begins like this:

  Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,

  At incredible speed, traveling day and night,

  Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.

  But will he know where to find you,

  Recognize you when he sees you,

  Give you the thing he has for you?12

  Ashbery’s poem has a sense of menace to it, a sense that the oncoming visitor may require propitiation (“Is it enough / That the dish of milk is set out at night”). In Blanchfield, though, however disorienting the arrival inside another may be, however perplexing the mingling of near and far, the momentary coexistence the poem describes is a kind of additive, a buoy: “contributing thus / the plus of a little sentience.” The question the poem asks next, “have you too felt extra fleetingly?”—that is, have you, too, felt ghostly presence within you, or alongside you, or have you felt like such a presence?—the question is frankly Whitmanian. Think of the way the poet inhabits the position of a lonely woman in section 11 of Leaves of Grass, observing unseen the “twenty-eight young men” who are bathing nude on a riverbank. Another corollary would be the poem from the “Calamus” sequence in Leaves of Grass called “Not Heaving from my Ribb’d Breast Only,” where Whitman builds up a long series of figures for passage between the body’s inside and its outside (“Not in sighs at night … Not in the curious systole and diastole …”) in order to conclude,

  Not in any or all of them O adhesiveness! O pulse of my life!

  Need I that you exist and show yourself any more than in these songs.13

  “Adhesiveness,” as Whitman’s critics have long noted, is nineteenth-century sexological language for male homosexuality. In contrast, heterosexuality was referred to as “amativeness.”14 His critics have also noted that the poems in which the rhetoric of adhesiveness appears tend to be melancholy, much like the places where male-male desire is triangulated by a ghostly third presence. But Whitman’s self-ghosting is also the source of some of his most powerful assertions of friendliness across time and space, as when in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” he cries out to the “generations after [him]” and says, “Consider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown ways be looking upon you.”15

  So there is a literary history—possibly, if we are willing to stretch terms a bit, a gay male literary history—of depicting the erotic proximity of men by distorting time and space. Blanchfield clearly knows this. In a short poem from A Several World called “And By and By,” it’s as though he’s reading a book about the languages of homo-adhesiveness and hetero-amativeness:

      Women feel

&nb
sp; intimate face to face. Men, shoulder to shoulder,

  I read later in his notes, without citation.16

  He hedges his bets: it’s not clear the poet believes in this gendered distinction, but he is also committed to exploring it, or using it as a heuristic. He pushes it hard: shoulder to shoulder becomes body inside body; looking in the same direction becomes occupying nearly identical space. And, toward the end of “Eclogue,” Schuyler’s “That’s their story” becomes Blanchfield’s “This is their scene”: the mysterious third observer, the poet, looking on at the blended subject he’s constructed, sees not only “story” or narrative, but surround, environment. Here are the poem’s last lines:

  Situation’s giving onto someone.

  Put out some hedge and overhear.

  The foreground and the horizon are idea’s.

  Consider the milieu durance.

  Way out there now.17

  These five end-stopped sentences twirl around the poem’s key prepositions, “onto” and “out,” accelerating their relation toward the poem’s close and adding silent apostrophe s’s to the mix of things we need to think twice about: “The foreground and horizon are idea’s.” Near and far belong to “idea,” whoever or whatever that is—they are notional, in this closing spiral where space and time compress, and which coughs up from the literary past the gentle Whitmanian imperative from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “consider”: “Consider the milieu durance”: think of the surround as a kind of time. That last line, which opens onto the book, takes my breath away. It feels like it’s spoken from an open desert, by an impossible speaker who can make that openness feel like radical proximity or imminence. Way out there: that’s what’s next. What a promise—!

  And what an interesting way of taking a place in literary time. To Whitman’s yearning for adhesiveness, and to Ashbery’s anxious sense of onrush, to Schuyler’s playful pursuit of juxtaposition, Blanchfield adds that extra l, the “plus of a little sentience,” at least fleetingly—and in such gestures of superadding, he begins to tell a story of the way a latter-day literary queerness, at least in its gay male variation, can keep faith with the difficulty of earlier poetry while claiming an exuberance about the erotics of proximity that earlier poetry either denied itself or shunted elsewhere. I’ve tried to show, here at the outset, that one way Blanchfield does this is intertextual, that is, by reworking that earlier poetry. But he also puzzles out his place in literary history by a flexible pun on darkness as subcultural shadow and darkness as the medium for illuminated arts—especially theater and film.