Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  Related questions: is Dietrich, with her “lament / for mechanical love,” a personification of random, anonymous gay sex, with which Ginsberg was perhaps feeling fatigued or disillusioned? As a gay male icon at the time, was Dietrich a symbol of gay men’s own enforced, artificial construction of self? Is Ginsberg implying that gay male love is a flight from real women—a jailbreak toward male identity and freedom? Woman’s image here is godlike yet cold and terrifying (like Yeats’ desert beast with its “blank and pitiless” gaze in “The Second Coming”). Dietrich sings, but she does not speak. Was poetry Ginsberg’s way of reclaiming and liberating language?

  Gay men’s cultish attachment to movie stars in the closeted era before the 1969 Stonewall rebellion, which sparked the gay liberation movement, is also registered in a sprightly little untitled poem by Frank O’Hara that begins, “Lana Turner has collapsed!” O’Hara, who always wrote quickly, tossed it off on the Staten Island ferry on his way to a 1962 reading where he scandalized Robert Lowell by impudently reciting it. I was very tempted to use this increasingly popular poem in Break, Blow, Burn but decided instead to treat another O’Hara poem, “A Mexican Guitar,” which has never to my knowledge received critical comment or even been publicly noticed.

  At the time O’Hara wrote his Lana Turner poem, most intellectuals accepted European cinema as an art form but still dismissed Hollywood glamour movies as trash or kitsch. The “Method,” ultra-serious and socially leftist, was the prestige style in acting. But splashy Hollywood movies, with their ferocious or suffering divas (Bette Davis, Judy Garland) and their frivolity and excess (Busby Berkeley, Carmen Miranda), were defiantly central to gay male “camp.” Andy Warhol’s hyper-colored silk screens of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe cheekily turned movie stars into Byzantine icons.

  Angst-ridden, suicide-studded Confessional poetry was then at its height. Lana Turner, fresh from a series of lurid scandals, was a symbol of glitzy tabloid celebrity and not remotely an appropriate subject for a poem. “Lana Turner Collapses on Movie Set” was an actual headline, a version of which O’Hara evidently spotted on a New York newsstand. The poet describes the weird muddle of rain, snow, and city traffic through which he hurries, distracted. The headline, with its boldface visual clarity and exclamatory, telegraphic diction, breaks on him like an electrifying epiphany. The grey mediocrity of everyday life seems transformed, and the slippery ambiguities of language and definition in which a poet dwells are temporarily transcended. Lana Turner’s soap opera traumas are like a ritual martyrdom, a sacrament avidly witnessed by her millions of fans. O’Hara’s last line: “oh Lana Turner we love you get up.” Who is “we”? Presumably gay men, who found themselves sympathetically bonding as fans with a vast audience of mainstream movie-lovers who normally ostracized them.

  Lynn Emanuel’s poem “Frying Trout While Drunk” is far more sober. Instead of the kinetic urban landscape of O’Hara’s fancy-free sophisticates (the Lana Turner poem refers to “lots of parties” where the poet “acted perfectly disgraceful”), we are now in a crimped realm of psychological entrapment and wounded memory.

  Mother is drinking to forget a man

  Who could fill the woods with invitations:

  Come with me he whispered and she went

  In his Nash Rambler, its dash

  Where her knees turned green

  In the radium dials of the ’50s.

  When I drink it is always 1953,

  Bacon wilting in the pan on Cook Street

  And mother, wrist deep in red water,

  Laying a trail from the sink

  To a glass of gin and back.

  She is a beautiful, unlucky woman

  In love with a man of lechery so solid

  You could build a table on it

  And when you did the blues would come to visit.

  I remember all of us awkwardly at dinner,

  The dark slung across the porch,

  And then mother’s dress falling to the floor,

  Buttons ticking like seeds spit on a plate.

  When I drink I am too much like her—

  The knife in one hand and in the other

  The trout with a belly white as my wrist.

  I have loved you all my life

  She told him and it was true

  In the same way that all her life

  She drank, dedicated to the act itself,

  She stood at this stove

  And with the care of the very drunk

  Handed him the plate.

  As autobiography, if it is that, Emanuel’s poem seems influenced by Robert Lowell’s seminal Life Studies (1959). (I used a Lowell poem from that book, “Man and Wife,” instead of this one.) Admirably condensed and finely written, “Frying Trout” distills an entire life of helpless observation and pained reflection. Food, drink, and sex are literally and symbolically intertwined. Everyday routine and rituals, such as cooking, are punctuated by erratic and impulsive breaches of convention. The daughter both admires and pities her mother and tries to understand her weaknesses and compromises, which she fears she has inherited via the time-dissolving act of drinking. The mother is betrayed and humiliated by her own desires and foolish trust. She accepts exploitation and betrayal as the price of sexual pleasure, a mime of love.

  Emanuel’s intense imagery, skillfully underplayed, is tremendously evocative. The knife and white-bellied trout suggest sex but also a masochistic vulnerability. Exquisitely caught details abound in quick scenarios: the mother’s knees turning green in the car’s radio light; bloody water trailing to a gin glass; buttons of a fallen dress “ticking like seeds spit on a plate.” Flesh is fruit here, carelessly devoured. This poem patiently, methodically offers its story without sentimentality or melodrama. There is no flinching from harsh facts and yet no gratuitous self-dramatization either. Emanuel’s technique is quiet, steady, and scrupulously exact. “Frying Trout While Drunk” is a tour de force of courageous truth-telling.

  Two poems about women rockers nearly made the final cut. In “Marianne Faithfull’s Cigarette,” Gerry Gomez Pearlberg describes a scene of charged suspension and voyeurism. Spare and ritualistically structured, this poem has a cool Baudelairean perversity. Marianne Faithfull, “bored,” is chain-smoking while a crew of daft academics is “talking, talking, talking.” The poet is transfixed by the singer’s discarded cigarette, branded with its “ring of lipstick.” There is an idolatrous fetishism in her desire for the butt, but she asks someone else to fetch it. Abashed, she herself will not cross the aesthetic distance to the enthroned star, whose insouciance is wonderfully caught.

  The poem becomes the words that the poet could not speak in the star’s presence. I love the gap between the academics’ inflated discourse and the squalid litter of Faithfull’s red-smeared cigarettes—a tainted beauty that the fascinated poet tries to capture. However, I did not include Pearlberg’s poem, which so perfectly captures my own cultic attitude toward stars (such as Elizabeth Taylor, Catherine Deneuve, or Daniela Mercury), because I was uncertain about its interest to a general audience. Furthermore, I had qualms about the finale: “Watching her light up was like seeing the Messiah. / Or Buddha’s burning moment under leaves of cool desire.” This is way too much. Faithfull’s oblique, imperious divinity is already well caught by the poem. We don’t need the Messiah and Buddha, with their centuries of accumulated associations, to come crashing in like colossi. All the poem needs at the end is a haiku effect, words floating off like smoke.

  Alice Fulton’s “You Can’t Rhumboogie in a Ball and Chain” is a tribute to Janis Joplin. (“Ball ’n’ Chain,” a blues song by Big Mama Thornton, was Joplin’s hallmark.) The first two stanazas are a knockout:

  You called the blues’ loose black belly lover

  and in Port Arthur they called
you pig-face.

  The way you chugged booze straight, without a glass,

  your brass-assed language, slingbacks with jeweled heel,

  proclaimed you no kin to their muzzled blood.

  No chiclet-toothed Baptist boyfriend for you.

  Strung-out, street hustling showed men wouldn’t buy you.

  Once you clung to the legs of a lover,

  let him drag you till your knees turned to blood,

  mouth hardened to a thin scar on your face,

  cracked under songs, screams, never left to heal.

  Little Girl Blue, soul pressed against the glass.

  The heavy sprung rhythms and eye-popping imagery, rattling the reader with hard consonants and alliteration, are reminiscent of the poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose ecstatic techniques are deployed here for far earthier and more carnal purposes. Even Fulton’s rugged slang scintillates. Through a series of sleazy snapshots, Joplin’s pain and defiance and her bold explorations of the netherworld are rivetingly captured.

  If it had continued at this sensational level, “You Can’t Rhumboogie” would, in my view, have become a contemporary classic. But over the next four stanzas, the sense of urgent compression is lost. We get tantalizing glimpses of seedy diners, “nameless motels,” and bad memories of senior proms, but the bruising shocks of the wonderful opening stanzas are repeated and done to death. “Blood” pops up in every stanza; there are simply too many traumas and tortures for the beleaguered reader to process. Instead of sympathizing with Joplin, we feel resentfully penned in a gore-spattered emergency room. While the powerful rhythms and images did all the work at the start, there’s now a turn toward editorializing and psychoanalysis (“self-hatred laced your blood”).

  The final stanza is clever but makes too radical a shift in tone:

  Like clerks we face your image in the glass,

  suggest lovers, as accessories, heels.

  “It’s your shade, this blood dress,” we say. “It’s you.”

  Well, we’ve sure left Texas. That’s Sylvia Plath coming through the door—a far more middle-class and coyly ironic voice. Fulton has unfortunately abandoned the proletarian percussiveness of her opening, which explodes with the vernacular.

  David Young’s “Occupational Hazards” still enchants and intrigues me. It draws its inspiration from riddles, fairy tales, children’s songs, and emblematic chapbooks with roots in medieval allegory:

  Butcher

  If I want to go to pieces

  I can do that. When I try

  to pull myself together

  I get sausage.

  Bakers

  Can’t be choosers. Rising

  from a white bed, from dreams

  of kings, bright cities, buttocks,

  to see the moon by daylight.

  Tailor

  It’s not the way the needle

  drags the poor thread around.

  It’s sewing the monster together,

  my misshapen son.

  Gravediggers

  To be the baker’s dark opposite,

  to dig the anti-cake, to stow

  the sinking loaves in the unoven—

  then to be dancing on the job!

  Woodcutter

  Deep in my hands

  as far as I can go

  the fallen trees

  keep ringing.

  The poet’s pure pleasure in improvisational, associative play with language is registered in the mercurial puns and quirky metaphors. Young’s catalog of occupations echoes the children’s limerick “Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub” (“The butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker”). However, each vocation here—butcher, baker, tailor, gravedigger, woodcutter—can be read as an analogue to the practice of poetry.

  The butcher going to pieces is the poet exploring his or her emotional extremes, out of which may come “sausage,” the inner life ground up, processed, and strung together in linked stanzas. Such a life requires intestinal fortitude. Rising long before dawn, bakers (normally beggars) “can’t be choosers”; like writers wrestling with their material, they are under compulsion to knead their sticky, shapeless dough. With a strangely active dream life, the bakers see metaphorically: “buttocks” and “moon” prefigure the raw white loaf (compare the slang term “buns” for buttocks; flashing one’s buttocks is “mooning”). Poets, the “kings” of their own “bright cities,” have a tactile intimacy with language, while their sources of inspiration range from the coarsely material to the celestial.

  A tailor at work resembles the poet cutting, trimming, and stitching his verse. The needle is the sudden penetration of insight, while the flexible thread, assuring continuity and shape, is dragged in the rear as a secondary process. The result is “my misshapen son”: art-making by men is an appropriation of female fertility. The end product, like Frankenstein’s “monster” with his stitched-up face, may seem ugly or distorted (in an avant-garde era). But the artwork is the artist’s true posterity, a child of the intellect rather than the body—a distinction made by Plato.

  Young wittily says that the merry gravedigger (“the baker’s dark opposite”) must “dig the anti-cake” and “stow the sinking loaves in the unoven”—as if the bakery has gone through Alice’s looking-glass and turned into a graveyard. Cake and corpses: this morbid mingling of sweets and rot is a brilliant conflation of motifs from Hamlet, with its jovial gravedigger and its satirical imagery of the murdered king’s body served up as “funeral baked meats” at a too-hasty wedding banquet, where the main dish is the queen (Hamlet I.2.180). Meditating on elemental realities, the poet faces death and turns it into artistic sustenance and pleasure (“dancing on the job”). Finally, the woodcutter is the poet who ruthlessly topples his lofty forebears to clear mental space for himself. But their words still ring in his mind. They have seeped into his bones, to the deepest layers of his psyche. Poetry, a form of making, is a mission he cannot escape. The battered hands of the craftsman dictate to the soul.

  I often regret not including David Young’s marvelous poem in Break, Blow, Burn. But in perfect truth, I wondered if I could do it justice. It was weighed against May Swenson’s “At East River,” which has a similar list-like format and childlike sense of wonder. I ultimately went with Swenson because of her poem’s intriguing parallelism with Wordsworth’s panoramic sonnet about a modern metropolis tranquilly embraced by nature, “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge,” which appears earlier in my book.

  A. R. Ammons’ “Mechanism” upset me severely and still does. This poem should have been the dramatic climax of Break, Blow, Burn. In fact, it should have been one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century. Its vision of complex systems operating simultaneously in human beings and animal nature is at the very highest level of artistic inspiration. But in execution, the poem is a shambles, with weak transitions and phrasings that veer from the derivative to the pedantic. “Mechanism” (available online, including at the Poetry Foundation Web site) is my primary exhibit for the isolation and self-destruction of American poetry over the past forty years:

  Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree,

  morality: any working order

  The pretty goldfinch flitting in and out of the poem symbolizes nature unconscious of itself. Flashing through the cherry bushes in the last line, it carries a valedictory blessing like the ones in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and Wallace Stevens’ early poem “Sunday Morning” (which ends with flocks of birds sinking “on extended wings”).

  But it is the doggedly philosophical late Stevens, notably in “The Auroras of Autumn” and “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” who is exercising a baleful and crippling influence here on Ammons, as on so many other American poets of his generation, including John A
shbery. (Two examples of luminous early Stevens appear in Break, Blow, Burn.) Over time, Stevens’ language tragically failed him. He ended his career with a laborious, plodding, skeletal style, employed in self-questioning poems of numbing length. Gorgeous images or lines still abound, but pompous, big-think gestures have become a crutch.

  The obtrusive “ideas” in late Stevens have naturally provided grist for the ever-churning academic mill. But poetry is not philosophy. Philosophic discourse has its own noble medium as prose argumentation or dramatic dialogue. Poetry should not require academic translators to mediate between the poet and his or her audience. Poetry is a sensory mode where ideas are or should be fully embodied in emotion or in imagery grounded in the material world. Late Stevens suffers from spiritual anorexia; he shows the modernist sensibility stretched to the breaking point. Late Stevens is not a fruitful model for the future of poetry.

  In Ammons’ “Mechanism,” Whitman’s influence can be felt in the cosmic perspective and catalog of organic phenomena. But there isn’t nearly enough specificity here. Whitman was able to invoke nature’s largest, most turbulent forces along with the tiniest details of straw, seeds, or sea spray. Ammons was on the verge of a major conceptual breakthrough in his willingness to consider the intricacies of human organizations, corporations, and management as expressions of the nature-inspired drive toward order. Whitman’s melting, all-embracing Romantic love is no longer enough for a modern high-tech world. Connecting sexual “courtship” to state-guaranteed “territorial rights,” Ammons is using an anthropological lens to focus on the ancient birth of civilization itself in law and contract. And by conflating history, science, economy, and art, he would end the war between the artist and commercial society that began with the Industrial Revolution and that has resulted in the artist’s pitiful marginalization in an era dominated by mass media.