Our Savage Art

by William Logan

  On some third guy also up for the weekend.

  But Saturday we still were paired; spent

  It sprawled across that sprawling acreage

  Until the grass grew limp

  With damp. Like me. Johnston-baby, I can still see

  The pelted clover, burrs’ prickle fur and gorged

  Pastures spewing infinite tiny bells. You pimp.

  This is a Gluck you recognize and a Gluck you don’t, not quite. The rhymes that button up these poems—rhymes she soon abandoned—have been lost in the avalanche of enjambment. The economy becomes a declaration of pain, with nothing left beneath terseness except despair. Gluck’s later poems in The House on Marshland (1975) and Descending Figure (1980) turn woozy and narcotic, living in the bedclothes of dreams and myths, drawn to female sufferers like Joan of Arc and Abishag. The rough edges have been planed off, the anxieties battened into place—self-consciousness has set in.

  There are lines in Firstborn like shavings from Plath’s workshop floor (the “click, / Click of his brain’s whirling empty spindle,” the “moon as round as aspirin”), but Gluck has a dour comedy of her own: “I watch the lone onion / Floating like Ophelia, caked with grease.” Like Dickinson, she’s a flawed solitaire sometimes grimly amused by herself. The poems are not the practiced, French-polished productions of a professional—there’s raw nerve in their claustrophobic interiors. Only one or two of these apprentice pieces have the shimmer of lasting work, but all are triumphant—even gloating—in their losses.

  Fish bones walked the waves off Hatteras.

  And there were other signs

  That Death wooed us, by water, wooed us

  By land: among the pines

  An uncurled cottonmouth that rolled on moss

  Reared in the polluted air.

  Birth, not death, is the hard loss.

  I know. I also left a skin there.

  She must be one of the few poets to imitate “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” and live to tell about it.

  Though Gluck never formally entered college, she attended a few courses at Columbia and Sarah Lawrence (Hart Crane’s father invented Life Saver mints, Gluck’s the X-Acto knife)—her career is that of an outsider looking in, while the poems reveal someone trapped in a body looking out. Why return to this book almost forty years later? Not just to examine how much the poet left behind, but to note how much still seems fresh and unexhausted. In her first book, Gluck had already reached the limits of her skin. The poet she became had to be different—a metamorphosis few poets have managed with as much grace, or success. Quarrelsome though I have often been about her later work, she has earned my admiration for the way she has wrestled with what might be called the music of a career—with being a poet over time.

  Franz Wright

  The potential market for poetry action-figures must be enormous, so why not start with that holy terror Franz Wright? Every figure must come with accessories: in Wright’s case, one set for before rehab (bottle of whiskey, hypodermic, glassine envelopes), one for after (twelve-step pamphlet, Good News Bible). Wright has never had to choose between perfection of the work and of the life, the life is already so imperfect; but, like many ex-drunks and ex-junkies, he can’t let you forget his glory days. He never lets himself forget, either—he revels in old sins while begging praise for new virtues. (Some sinners end up holier than thou, some druggier than thou, though a few want desperately to be both.)

  God’s Silence lives in the suffering of forgiveness (Wright seems stuck on step five of the famous twelve: he can’t forgive himself and sometimes can’t forgive God), but it’s hard to tell when the suffering stops and the wallowing begins. The poetry is romantic in all the wrong ways—it’s the work of Peck’s Bad Boy gone straight, of Byron in a dog collar, the pages stained with self-loathing piety. Wright’s relation to his God is that of whining schoolboy to distant headmaster, a headmaster who refuses to speak to him.

  I am very afraid but still know You

  are taking care of me, and even live in hope

  You will one day see fit to put into my mouth

  words that will explain it all, floating before me in letters

  of fire.

  The religious poems here—delivered in spews of cringing self-abasement—are the more moving for being so unconvincing. Like many solipsists, Wright can’t relate to others without sentimentalizing them; and that includes God, the most forbidding of father figures. Few poets since Plath have dissected themselves so publicly for their art (I’m not even going to suggest the accessories required by the Plath action figure), and Wright is the last and most frustrated of confessionals. He has few poetic gifts beyond displaying his wounds in public; but the breast-beating apologias are cast in language so clumsy and affected, they seem a lie. Has any poet ever wanted so badly to be sincere, or failed so miserably?

  One of the few pleasures of writing

  is the thought of one’s book in the hands of a kindhearted

  intelligent person somewhere. I can’t remember what the others are right now.

  I just noticed that it is my own private

  National I Hate Myself and Want to Die Day.

  I hope I’m not the only reader who finds this both hilarious and insufferable. If I were a “kindhearted / intelligent person,” I’d put my head down and run like blazes.

  Wright’s father, the much loved and much honored poet James Wright (they are the first father and son to win Pulitzer Prizes in poetry), was a hard act to follow—and I say that despite never having been a fan. He comes in for abuse here, but he was a poet of more dignity and modest seriousness than his son; indeed, the son’s poetry contains the negative virtues of the father’s: brutish where his father’s affected a plain elegance, sniveling where his father’s remained sensitive, ordinary where his father’s could be unsettling.

  Franz Wright longs for the annihilations of faith (he has so many poems here about a blinding light, I tried to buy stock in Sylvania; then I realized he meant the light of God); but he doesn’t have a vocabulary sophisticated enough to render them. Most poets want to write about sinners, few about saints, because sinners are better box office—they make everyone else feel virtuous. Wright drops into quasi-religious blather at the drop of a hat (“I cling to the Before / The spirit face / behind the face / yearning for light / the water and the light / And I am flowing back to the Before”)—you’d think he was angling for an appearance on The 700 Club. His faith barely conceals the rage beneath: “Poem is not composed in states of exaltation: most that are, in fact, result in total doggerel and, frankly, insufferable puke.”

  The peculiar mixture of pride and self-loathing makes these poems rude, unlovely things, like papier-mâché sculptures by a roomful of fifth graders. Wright’s readers seem fascinated by a man obviously held together, like his poems, with spit and glue. Beyond the gruesome sentiment, the ranting and raving, the hunger for praise no Pulitzer could satisfy (it would take nine yards of cement to ruin the appetite of someone who feels so unloved) lies a damaged soul with wry self-knowledge: “Nobody has called for some time. / (I was always the death of the party.)” I wish Wright could laugh at himself more often, because when his morose, tortured poems stop asking for sympathy they start demanding pity; and then they want all the money in your wallet.

  Paul Muldoon

  Say the muses want to lay a terrible curse upon a child. They give him a bat’s ears, a code breaker’s eye, the ability to juggle words like flaming torches; then they say, “You will have all the gifts a poet desires, but nothing whatever to write about.” Paul Muldoon’s early poems were quirky and modest, and it’s hard to tell exactly when he went beyond baroque. What was manner became mannerism—he turned into one of those Las Vegas interior decorators whose motto is “If it doesn’t move, gild it!” A poet, as he ages, can become so secure in his tendencies he can’t remember when he didn’t have tendencies at all. The Muldoon of thirty years ago might shake his head in bewilderment at
the poems in Horse Latitudes:

  Not the day-old cheep of a smoke detector on the blink

  in what used to be the root cellar,

  or the hush-hush of all those drowsy syrups

  against their stoppers

  in the apothecary chest

  at the far end of your grandmother’s attic,

  not the “my sweet, my sweet”

  of ice branch frigging ice branch,

  nor the jinkle-jink

  of your great-grandfather, the bank teller

  who kept six shots of medicinal (he called it “therap-

  utraquist”) whiskey like six stacks of coppers …

  Here are the cheerfully swollen vocabulary, the onomatopoeia (“jinkle-jink”), the queerly fabricated words (“therap- / utraquist”) of late Muldoon. Should you wonder why the little souffle of “theraputraquist” has been divided like East and West Berlin, you only have to look at the end words—alternate stanzas rhyme with each other. (Muldoon’s so addicted to rhymes, for a good one he’d sacrifice three goats and a dozen lambs.)

  This is the sort of tour de force Muldoon lives for; but after you read nineteen sonnets, each named for a battle beginning with the letter B (including Basra, where the armored cavalry of Gulf War II forms a counterpoint to the horses of earlier wars), or the villanelle, or the double villanelle, or the sestina, or the pantoum, or the ninety haiku—most of these forms with his own madcap stamp upon them—you wonder if there was a point. He never runs out of things to say, only things worth saying. There were other poets like this once, and they wrote in Latin two thousand years ago and were ridiculed as Alexandrians.

  There’s nothing natural about Muldoon’s poems now—they’re full of artificial sweeteners, artificial colors, and probably regulated by the FDA. Poem after poem fires off words with such abandon, they’re noisier than Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound (if at fifty-five you title a book Horse Latitudes, write a terrible set of couplets about Bob Dylan, and start your own rock band, people will wonder if you’re having a midlife crisis). Muldoon’s a Wittgenstein disciple who believes the world is everything that is the case, and he can’t bear to leave anything out: you can find Gene Chandler, stilettos, spivs with shivs, tweenie girls, and anti-Castro Cubans, all within half a dozen lines. He has a riddle about griddle that takes thirty lines (if you haven’t gotten the hint, Muldoon’s favorite rhea is logorrhea—or is that his favorite logo?). Like God, he loves all things equally and not wisely but too well; in the democracy of such love lies tedium.

  What happens if you patiently untangle the spells of this sorcerer? (It helps to have some hepcat up on the latest lingo as well as a fat dictionary.) “The Old Country” seems composed of nothing but frothy contrivance:

  Every flash was a flash in the pan

  and every border a herbaceous border

  unless it happened to be an

  herbaceous border as observed by the Recorder

  or recorded by the Observer.

  Every widdie stemmed from a willow bole.

  Every fervor was a religious fervor.

  This rings its changes all the way through a crown of sonnets; yet, if you examine every line, you see the terrible small-mindedness of a town where everyone watches everyone else, noting his pronunciation and the newspaper he takes—and all the local conventions are cliches. When you penetrate the asphalt of these poems, you may find a nugget of gold; but sometimes you need a jackhammer to do so.

  Becalmed in the horse latitudes that afflict most writers, Muldoon will pitch logic, truth, beauty, and meaning overboard, just to save the cheepcheep of that smoke detector. A very few poems, like “The Treaty” and “Eggs,” though dressed in the bling-bling of his later work, return him to the Ireland before and during the Troubles (he’s now an American citizen and a professor at Princeton). Something has been gained, a lot of it twenty-four carat; but much has been lost as well.

  Verse Chronicle

  Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Luff

  John Ashbery

  John Ashbery has long threatened to become a public monument, visited mainly by schoolchildren and pigeons. For half a century, he has pressed the limits of the expected and at last become an expectation itself—if the avantgarde has to die somewhere, become rear guard at last, it will be in poems like those in A Worldly Country, where promises remain unkept, meaning is never surrendered or redeemed (as worthless as a Confederate bond), and gestures are frozen in medias res. Ashbery has become too self-parodic not to be his own joke (“So why not, indeed, try something new? / Actually, I can think of a number of reasons. / Wait—suddenly I can’t think of any!”), yet that joke lays waste to a lot of the poetry of the past half century. If such a curate’s egg loves to be bad, God help us should he ever try to be good.

  Not the smoothness, not the insane clocks on the square,

  the scent of manure in the municipal parterre,

  not the fabrics, the sullen mockery of Tweety Bird,

  not the fresh troops that needed freshening up. If it occurred

  in real time, it was OK, and if it was time in a novel

  that was OK too. From palace and hovel

  the great parade flooded avenue and byway

  and turnip fields became just another highway.

  Leftover bonbons were thrown to the chickens

  and geese, who squawked like the very dickens.

  This is tosh, but Ashbery’s patented, vitamin-enriched tosh. The lines begin with Augustan composure, like Auden fingering his favorite props and imagining himself John Dryden. Ashbery can’t pretend to be a philosophe very long; his inner child soon drags in Tweety Bird and then all hell breaks loose—the syntax remains formal and proprietary; but the age slips between the eighteenth and the twenty-first, the diction between palace and hovel and real time.

  There’s so much froth and frippery here, the reader might not even notice the rhymed couplets. Many of Ashbery’s poems recall, with ironic fondness (or sullen mockery), the age of the age of reason; in our own muddled, maddened century, apparently all we can expect from a philosopher prince is the notion that the fissure between fact and fiction is of little consequence. Postmodernism’s fond delusions give comfort to many a religion; but, if real life doesn’t matter, why should we care about the dying or the dead? In the aesthetic fiction Ashbery inhabits, Death never calls—perhaps the Grim Reaper hasn’t thought of a punch line yet.

  Ashbery’s new poems are wearyingly discursive (Helen Vendler suggests that his short poems are diary entries, but I prefer to think that Ashbery writes every morning and never has a thing to say). The poet’s continual low mutter about art and perception is often brilliant in a secondhand way. He can make sense when he wants to (“Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” is one of his few poems of sustained invention that doesn’t lack sustained sense), but he’s a lot more fun when he’s goofing off.

  Cannily you looked on from the wings,

  finger raised to lips, as the old actor

  slogged through the lines he’s reeled off

  so many times, not even thinking

  if they are tangential to the way we

  slouch now.

  The way we slouch now! The stray lines offer social commentary as keen as anything Trollope wrote about Victorian England.

  Perhaps I’m not the only reader who thinks that, while scribbling down far too much poetry in the past fifteen years, Ashbery has lost the cunning of his sentences, which sometimes dodder about as if they’ve forgotten their subject. Were he unfortunate enough to develop Alzheimer’s, the poems wouldn’t change a bit. Besides, he long ago created a world nonsense surplus—with a nonsense mountain somewhere in Belgium, like the EU butter mountains of old. Ashbery has written some of the worst lines in contemporary poetry, just to show he can:

  So often it happens that the time we turn around in

  soon becomes the shoal our pathetic skiff will run aground in.

  And just as the waves are anchored to the bottom
of the sea

  we must reach the shallows before God cuts us free.

  The ghost of William McGonagall must be jealous.

  Critics have often compared Ashbery to the abstract expressionists (I’ve probably done so myself); but his hectic, Scotch-taped compositions are much closer in spirit to Roy Lichtenstein—campy, cartoonish, with no pretension but a lack of pretension. Pop art never wanted to be taken seriously, which means it’s treated far more seriously than necessary. Though nearly eighty, Ashbery still loves to shatter the small vases of lyric, even if he doesn’t know what to do afterward. (He stares at the reader, as if to say, “I told you they were glass!”) If the old lyric was fragile, the new one offers little beyond glib puckishness. As soon as you think Ashbery has a serious idea, he makes you regret it; yet we return to him, those of us who return, because we don’t always mind regretting it.

  Frieda Hughes

  Happy families are all alike, but unhappy families … look out! Your mother will leave journals, Hollywood will option them, and Gwyneth Paltrow star in the movie (lucky you, it will bomb at the box office). Frieda Hughes is the daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, a fact suppressed in her first book but known to anyone not on long-term duty in the Antarctic. Her original idea in Forty-Five, her fourth, is to devote a poem to each year of her life—and then make a painting about it, too.

  Hughes was too young to remember her mother’s suicide, which remained a secret kept from her until a newspaper published the story. This may explain the lack of emotion in the daughter’s memory:

  My mother, head in oven, died,

  And me, already dead inside,

  I was an empty tin

  Where nothing rattled in.

  Had the poems continued in this Hansel-and-Gretel vein, the book might have become a remarkable document of a child’s growth to consciousness, something Wordsworth attempted in The Prelude, not entirely successfully. (The believable children in literature are rarely interesting, and the interesting rarely believable.) Hughes thought her aunt was her mother; when her father remarried, her new stepmother stepped from the pages of “Snow White”—“She thought me too familiar / She said, smiling over spaghetti sauce / In the frying pan.” (Her father’s seven-year affair with Assia Wevill, who also committed suicide by gas oven, is dismissed in a single obscure phrase.)