There are passages of stunning beauty, however, like views through the lens of a Leica, for which a reader will forgive many a sin.
I see Inigo Jones’s great arches
in my mind’s eye, his water-inky clouds,
the paraphernalia of a royal masque;
dung and detritus in the crazy streets,
the big coaches bellying in their skirts
pothole to pothole, and the men of fire,
the link-boys slouching and the rainy wind.
It’s dangerous for a poet to believe that gloom is the precondition for seriousness. If poetry for Hill is a “mode of moral life” (“charred prayers / spiralling godwards on intense thermals”), the evidence here lies more in design than in example—the morals are in lieu of, not on behalf. Poetry provides a moral life the way that standing on a pillar in the desert provides salvation—fine if you have a pillar, and a desert, and a terrific sense of balance, and, if not, not.
Verse Chronicle
God’s Chatter
Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey’s well-mannered, well-meaning poems are as confused about race as the rest of us. The daughter of a black mother and a white father, she was raised in the Deep South of the sixties, when the civil rights acts had still not penetrated the backwaters of her state. (Some would say that in large swatches of the South they haven’t penetrated yet.) Under the miscegenation laws, her parents’ marriage was illegal. In Native Guard, she has wrapped a memoir of her childhood around Civil War history—across the waters from her hometown, miles off the coast, former slaves and free men-of-color mustered into the Union army stood guard over Confederate POWs at a ramshackle island fort. A soldier notes in his diary:
Truth be told, I do not want to forget
anything of my former life: the landscape’s
song of bondage—dirge in the river’s throat
where it churns into the Gulf, wind in trees
choked with vines.
Soldiers don’t write this way, but poets do. The landscape’s song of bondage, the dirge in the river’s throat—this ex-slave’s fancy phrasemaking makes a lie of that “Truth be told,” because every scrap of art here falsifies the past. There were literate slaves, all too few, and perhaps none among the lowly soldiers serving at the sandy, fly-ridden prison near Fort Massachusetts. (The major of the regiment, however, a slave-owning Creole, spoke five languages and was the highest-ranking black officer in the Union army.) To recreate a voice rendered mute by history, Trethewey has sometimes borrowed from a white colonel’s memoir to make do. Putting the words of an educated white into the mouth of a freed slave isn’t so bad; but, when Trethewey is forced to choose between the pretty and the profane, the pretty wins every time. She’s an aesthete in wolf’s clothing.
Trethewey’s last book, Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002), was a portrait of a prostitute in Storyville, the red-light district of turn-of-the-century New Orleans where E. J. Bellocq took his spectral glass-plates of local whores, who looked at times surprisingly genteel. The poems invent a past reimagined through the wishful thinking of the present, in that theme park of the oppressed designed by modern academics. Forty-five years ago, an amateur historian who took the trouble to record Storyville’s surviving denizens and habitues found many prostitutes still alive—a couple of the transcripts are as brilliantly foulmouthed as any episode of Deadwood: “I been fucking f’om befo’ I kin remembuh! Shit, yes! Wit’ my ol’ man, wit’ my brothas, wit d’ kids in da street. I done it fo’ pennies, I done it fo’ nothin’ … An’ you know whut, mistuh? I got a quatah fo’ sucking off a ol’ niggah yestiddy !” It’s a long way from there to Trethewey’s prim, rose-colored-glasses whore, who however borne down seems sad in the pluckiest possible way.
As soon as you know the premises of Trethewey’s poems, you know everything—they’re the architecture of their own prejudices. Though fond of form, she fudges any restrictions that prove inconvenient, so we get faux villanelles, quasi-sonnets, and lots of lines half-ripened into pentameter—most poems end up in professional but uninspired free verse. Trethewey wears the past like a diamond brooch. She writes of her parents with no fury or sympathy or even regret, just the blank courtesy of a barista at Starbucks. You read the tales of prostitution and slavery without feeling a thing—the slaves might just as well be dressed by Edith Head, with a score by Max Steiner swelling gloriously over a Technicolor sunset. Trethewey’s moral sunniness has all the conviction of Scarlett O’Hara gushing, “As Gawd is mah witness, I’ll nevah be hungry agai-yun.”
Since the poems know where they’re going long before they get there, it’s a shock when one takes a wrong turn: as a girl, bringing daffodils to her mother, Trethewey sees in them something of herself (“each blossom a head lifted up // toward praise”):
I knew nothing
of Narcissus or the daffodils’ short spring—
how they’d dry like graveside flowers, rustling
when the wind blew—a whisper, treacherous,
from the sill. Be taken with yourself,
they said to me; Die early, to my mother.
Such lines face the guilt other poems resist, though there are secrets they can’t confess (they’re cagiest about a stepfather’s violence). Soon it’s back to a tone-deaf blues (“When the preacher called out I held up my hand; / When he called for a witness I raised my hand—/ Death stops the body’s work; the soul’s a journeyman”) or four photographs of the South tortured into poems, each duller than the last. The poems move excruciatingly slowly, their symbols marked like road signs—a landscape is never just a landscape, it’s the “buried / terrain of the past”; and, as for history, the “ghost of history lies down beside me, // rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm.” You’re surprised Native Guard doesn’t contain a tourist’s guide to the symbols, to make sure the reader doesn’t miss a thing. The book does come with notes, as if mounting every epigraph like a dead bug and pointing out each historical source made the poems any the livelier. Trethewey so wants to be praised, she has injected these poems with the formaldehyde of style.
Mark Strand
Mark Strand’s louche charm and languid good manners (he’s as debonaire as Cary Grant in a tux) let him treat weighty matters as if they were light as feathers and feathery matters as if they weighed out as lead. His teasing, self-mocking parables, so even-tempered a flamethrower couldn’t ruffle their composure, have made many readers wonder if he can take anything seriously. The new poems in Man and Camel don’t try very hard to be exceptions.
I am not thinking of Death, but Death is thinking of me.
He leans back in his chair, rubs his hands, strokes
his beard, and says, “I’m thinking of Strand, I’m thinking
that one of these days I’ll be out back, swinging my scythe
or holding my hourglass up to the moon, and Strand will appear
in a jacket and tie, and together under the boulevards’
leafless trees we’ll stroll into the city of souls.”
There’s much to be said for treating even Death with devil-may-care carelessness; but critics have long had trouble dividing the absurdist Strand, the one who could sell Dada to Eskimos, from the moody, philosophical poet who has occasionally made an appearance through this long and desultory career. Even Strand has trouble telling them apart.
The eerie fables and quirky anecdotes in Reasons for Moving (1968) and Darker (1970) were told with a minimum of detail and all the affect of a dry martini. They were much imitated in their day (sometimes they even imitated themselves), but the longer and more pretentious poems that followed in The Story of Our Lives (1973) were more tedious to read than they must have been to write. Strand’s reputation never quite recovered, though he was very quickly promoted to that Grand Old Man status in which poets win awards for books not half as good as ones ignored when they were Sweet Young Things.
Had Sylvia Plath never written a line, Strand would have been the most gif
ted American poet born in the thirties; and his darkly cynical poems sometimes sound like a posthumous version of hers, what she might have written after laying waste to everything in sight. Shorn of metaphors and similes, prosaic as a paper bag, Strand’s poems come long after an apocalypse no one can quite remember.
Man and Camel seems at first by the Strand whose every poem is a variation of a joke about a man walking into a bar with a parrot on his shoulder. A man begins to act like a horse, but he can’t fool real horses (“they might have known me / in another life—the one in which I was a poet. / They might have even read my poems”). A man finds he can walk into fires and emerge unscathed. A man on a porch sees a man and a camel stroll by. The man and animal wander up the street and out of town, singing a haunting song, then stop and return to the man on the porch. “You ruined it,” they say. “You ruined it forever.” It’s amusing, a little, this thinly disguised revenge on people who want something from art. Strand is often most heavy-handed when he’s writing about nothing at all.
It’s a surprise, then, after so many poems half thought and half baked, to find a group written in the same style but violently sad and unappeasable.
I still recall that moment of looking up
and seeing the woman stare past me
into a place I could only imagine,
and each time it is with a pang,
as if just then I were stepping
from the depths of the mirror
into that white room, breathless and eager,
only to discover too late
that she is not there.
The poet seems to have woken to some arctic world of Schopenhauerian suffering. These poems rely too heavily on props left over from the seventies—night and moon and stars, all available by mail order—and you’re never sure this more solemn poet isn’t going to tie your shoelaces together when you’re distracted. Worse, the book closes with an overwrought sequence, “Poem after the Seven Last Words” (the last words of Christ), commissioned to be read between movements of a Haydn string quartet (or, as the proofs had it, “Hayden”). Religious poetry is not the ironist’s metier, because it removes his chief weapon: “you / shall be with me in paradise, in the single season of being, / in the place of forever, you shall find yourself”—who knew that Christ had mastered, not just the pop-psych jargon of “finding yourself,” but the run-on sentence? Still, it’s good to be reminded that sometimes, when this poet balances doubt against absurdity, doubt still triumphs.
A. R. Ammons
In 1955 a sales executive for a medical glassware firm paid a notorious vanity press to publish his first book of poems. The book sold sixteen copies (royalties amounted to “four four-cent stamps,” the poet joked), other copies being palmed off on business cronies by the poet’s father-in-law. Exactly a century before, Walt Whitman had paid the printer’s bill for Leaves of Grass out of his own pocket. The young glassware man, A. R. Ammons, went on to win two National Book Awards and the Bollingen Prize. The reissue of his rare first book, Ommateum, with Doxology, completes the barrel scraping that followed his death five years ago.
Ammons was always an oddball in American poetry, producing lyric reflections and rambling meditations on nature, philosophy, science, the verse stumbling along as if it couldn’t quite catch up. He wrote in inspired fits, good and bad indifferently jumbled together, and is perhaps most famous for Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965), composed on an adding-machine tape, which made the lines short and the poem nearly endless (you wonder if he took the tape on his way out the door of the glassware business). A new preface by Roger Gilbert proposes that, after Leaves of Grass, Ommateum may be the “most important self-published book of American poetry”; but it must compete with first books by, among others, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Ezra Pound.
If Ommateum was the “first expression of a mature, startlingly original artist,” as Gilbert believes, it would have taken a crystal ball to tell. The poems are fervent and indistinct, not at all like the house style of the fifties, but not very original, either—the best are faded washes of Pound in high Romantic mode, and indeed many use as their protagonist a heroic figure named Ezra, half prophet and half wandering Ishmael: poems have been set in Sumer, as well as at a crucifixion, in a crusade, and during a medieval plague. For all his heroic fortitude and heroic claptrap, the hero seems less Gilgamesh than Gumby.
The worst poems are impossibly dotty, so awful you wonder what the author ever saw in them:
Silent as light in dismal transit
through the void, I, evanescent,
sibilant among my parts,
fearing the eclipse of a possible glance
and not glancing, shut-eyed,
crouch froglike upon my brain.
Even if you paid through the nose to get a vanity press to publish this, you’d have to bribe the typesetter not to cut his own throat.
One scholar has suggested that Ommateum is an example of “outsider art”—the folk art, often touching and strange, sometimes quite mad, of uneducated naifs and mental patients. Ammons was a thoroughly educated navy veteran (he studied for an M.A. in English at Berkeley), not some hick with a charred twig and a slab of bark; yet the implicit comparison to Whitman, another outsider, has curious merit. Ammons and Whitman both pretended to be more naive than they were (Whitman was self-educated and a newspaper editor, not the slouch-hatted bumpkin of Leaves of Grass), and each violated the poetic constraints of his day. We look back at Whitman and see his peers writing third-rate Keats; we look at Ammons and see his peers writing third-rate Eliot and Pound—yet Leaves of Grass is a work of genius, and Ommateum a collection of thoughtless witterings:
My dice are crystal inlaid with gold
and possess
spatial symmetry
about their centers and
mechanical symmetry and
are of uniform density
and all surfaces have equal
coefficients of friction for
my dice are not loaded
Thy will be done
whether dog or Aphrodite.
The young poet eventually learned how to make the short line bear more weight (here the lines stutter with ecstatic nonsense: “Come word / I said / azalea word / gel precipitate / while I / the primitive spindle …”). Ammons the woodsman and natural philosopher is occasionally on display (“The grasses heading barbed tufts / airy panicles and purple spikes”), but the poems celebrating the cornucopia of the earth’s business lie a good distance in the future.
Ammons took the long way around to become a poet. Ommateum disappeared without notice, apart from one dismal review in Poetry; and it was eight years before he published another book. He was lucky this volume became so rare (God help him, he thought it might have been his best), because for a long while the poems lay hidden from sight. This reissue commemorates the ambitions of that young ampoule and urine-bottle salesman. The only way Ammons could have improved Ommateum would have been to burn it.
Louise Glück
Many poets never live down their first books (a few find they cannot live up to them); but sometimes later books take such a radical turn, the first is forgotten or dismissed as youthful folly (Frost’s agreeable and slight A Boy’s Will was soon overwhelmed by the genius of North of Boston). Sometimes in this chronicle I want to look back at neglected books, even books that might have to be rescued from the author’s distaste. Think of Louise Gluck’s Firstborn, published in 1968. The original dust jacket referred to her as “Miss Gluck,” a form of address that sounds almost Victorian now—you’re surprised she wasn’t called a poetess. When reprinted in the eighties, this debut was practically orphaned by its author, who felt only “embarrassed tenderness” toward it.
The disconcerting, morbid psychology of Firstborn seems heavily marked by the influence of Sylvia Plath (Ariel had appeared only three years before). The younger poet’s lines are seductive as a tango as she tries to shake off all the older poet knew (the debts accrue
d as inspiration were paid in resistance). Where Plath was a poet of melodrama and rude outburst, Gluck is all pinched reserve (she speaks like Atropos, every sentence cut short), the poems reduced to slivers of glass. She watches a family on a train:
the kid
Got his head between his mama’s legs and slept. The poison
That replaces air took over.
And they sat—as though paralysis preceding death
Had nailed them there. The track bent south.
I saw her pulsing crotch … the lice rooted in that baby’s hair.
How Freud would have loved the violence of her seeing! Brute but matter-of-fact, the lines have the rhythm of complaint but not concession; they’re almost sorry for the world they have to record. The pleasure the poet takes in the senses lies partly in the gratification of disgust—Sharon Olds and C. K. Williams might have learned at her feet.
In Firstborn, everything happens for the observer’s eye (urgent as tabloid headlines, the poems are cast all too frequently in the present tense). Though later books reconvened Glück’s life as myth, here she lives in the world of cars and soup cans, the world of the everyday. The world of boys.
Requiring something lovely on his arm
Took me to Stamford, Connecticut, a quasi-farm,
His family’s; later picking up the mammoth
Girlfriend of Charlie, meanwhile trying to pawn me off
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