The princess in this fairy tale grows up fat, insecure, bulimic, and soon develops a thing for bikers. Later, she marries any guy with a smooth line of patter, specializing in men who will slap her around or rob her blind. (The poems read like a captivity narrative.) She takes a naive pleasure in being married, in becoming a “Mrs.,” the same naive pleasure her mother recorded in her journals. It’s eerie—you wonder if all young children who lose a parent feel so unloved. Where’s Father in this? Brooding, remote, apologetic, he’s a faraway mountain seen across an armed border.
Few confessional poets have possessed a life with so many built-in headlines; it’s a shame Frieda Hughes doesn’t have the literary skill to take advantage of them. She excels in wide-eyed, slightly crazed run-on sentences that sound like excuses and read like indictments—they’re so near to being illiterate, you weep for English syntax:
My new lover was as rotten as bad meat
At the bin’s bottom. His truth
Rang hollow in the separation
That now divided me from his daily anger
At my head full of independence.
But my business plan became a funnel
Straight into the new man’s business arms,
His blacklisted insurance sales history
Making a proxy of me,
And I’d no idea he’d fuck a friend
And make her my enemy.
About the time the plan becomes a funnel, I no longer know what’s fact and what’s figure—and I’m not sure Hughes can tell the difference.
There’s nothing wrong with going into the family business, but literature offers no capital accrued by previous generations (even Dumas fils had to bribe Dumas père with a steaming chop for help in finishing some play or other). It pays to be talented; but, if your parents are very famous poets, you’re forever going to work in their shadows (at twenty-four, Hughes “gave up writing poetry; / The parental comparisons / Would be too painful for me”—unfortunately her resolve didn’t last). It makes things no better if you have trouble keeping your thoughts in order:
Excitement at my first Sydney exhibition
Launched me straight into the gallery owner’s
Locked doors, behind which
He drank my sales, and endometriosis
Bled me inwards, until a hysterectomy.
Even before the litany of Hughes’s illnesses (endometriosis, chronic fatigue, M.E., Crohn’s disease, a twisted colon, an allergy to fleas, and some mysterious problem with her feet), her roller-coaster ride of elation and depression provokes the reader’s sympathy. The poems are hypnotic as a train wreck; but it’s hard to pity someone so good at pitying herself, someone who loves playing the victim and manages to be humorless about it.
Hughes has the bad luck she inherited and bad luck all her own—the long-awaited London show of her paintings was hung the day of Princess Diana’s death (the poet bitterly refers to the “vast scow of national grief,” a witty phrase). Her dead mother half-possesses her; but, when Hughes writes a line that begins “Daddy, Daddy,” the effect isn’t accidental—it’s creepy. There’s so much melodrama in these poems, the reader is numb by the time she gets around to September 11:
The Twin Towers fell,
And all the people in them, I had never seen
Such carnage on a TV screen,
The images remain with me.
The images remain with me. All you can say is “Huh?” Hughes is a perfect example of what happens when a poet, though possessing none of the art necessary to turn a plain old messed-up life into literature, is the sun in her own Copernican system (she puts the Sol back in solipsism). We remember Plath, not because her life was worse than anybody else’s, but because she was able to set it down in blood. Every poem here comes with its very own five-foot-long abstract painting, displayed on a handy Web site (if you want to save yourself the trouble, the lurid, blobby images resemble a dissection of diseased kidneys). The poems don’t make you like Frieda Hughes. They make you afraid Robert Lowell’s children will take up poetry, too.
Cathy Park Hong
When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, the Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts at least spoke the King’s English; but novelists who invent a new country sometimes like to make up a language to go with it. The Lilliputian and Houyhnhnm of Gulliver’s Travels, the Elvish of The Lord of the Rings, and the Nadsat of A Clockwork Orange are highbrow equivalents of Star Trek’ s Klingon and the fertile babble of countless science-fiction tales. In Dance Dance Revolution, Cathy Park Hong has created a future resort called the Desert, whose hotels are modeled on famous cities and whose people speak Desert Creole, a weird mish-mash of languages very hard on the ear. The place sounds like Las Vegas.
The speaker of these headlong, take-no-prisoners poems is a tour guide who chatters away cheerfully to an unnamed historian.
… Opal o opus,
behole, neon hibiscus bloom beacons!
“Tan Lotion Tanya” billboard … she
your lucent Virgil, den I’s taka ova
as talky Virgil … want some tea? Some pelehuu?
The advanced publicity copy called this a “fluid fabricated language.” I’d go as far as fabricated (it sounds too much like the ludicrous speech of Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars). Hong is droll enough to make the guide our Virgil, though the inspiration of the Inferno goes no deeper. However tiresome the sci-fi premise, she sees the advantage, as Swift and Tolkein and Burgess did, of making things new by making them partly incomprehensible. When the guide refers to each hotel as a McCosm, the microcosm has just met McDonald’s.
A little Desert Creole goes a long way; after a few pages of this contorted pidgin, though it’s sometimes mellifluous as Caribbean patois, the reader might well demand a Berlitz course, or subtitles.
See radish turrets stuck wit tumor lights around hotel
lika glassblown Russki castle sans Pinko plight,
only Ebsolute voodka fountains. Gaggle fo drink?
Hundred ruble, cold kesh only. Step up y molest
hammer y chicklets studded en ruby y seppire almost
bling badda bling. Question? No question! Prick ear.
Not many poets can go from bling bling to Shakespeare’s prick-ear’d in a line; but the joke begins to wither even before you realize the author has a not-so-subtle agenda. Born in Korea, the guide was one of the dissidents behind the Kwangju Uprising of 1980, in which hundreds were killed or imprisoned. Beyond the Desert lies a heavily guarded ghetto for exiles and malcontents, off limits to visitors. It’s no shock that Adrienne Rich, who chose this book for the Barnard Women Poets Prize, is delighted by the heavy-handed politics (“The Guide … plays whatever role she must in the world of the global economy, using language as subversion and disguise”—this isn’t an introduction; it’s a manifesto).
For the poems, however, the political gloss is like a bad coat of varnish. Armchair lessons in modern Korean history gradually take over, and the reader might reasonably feel that the ticket he bought for Club Med turned out to be for a visit to the Black Hole of Calcutta. The narrative stalls badly, while the nosy historian (whose father was once the guide’s lover—what are the odds?) provides her own tiresome memoirs and pages of workshop poetry—what the author herself might write without the trappings of Desert Creole. The guide’s demented gabble is far more poetic, if far less intelligible:
Odes scuppa off lika fat wingless birds
from hum-a-day coralim streets.
Hurdy-gurdy sounds: cricket shrieks
o mahikit, abraded music slum scent.
How-kapow pops, a lime streak starled
lika Gerty’s bloomas fire crack de dusky violet sky.
This has its own cracked genius and nutty integrity—Gertrude Stein would have lapped it up.
In the end, Hong has built an elaborate superstructure just to set out some shopworn academic notions about the dispossessed, whose plight here is transparently allegorical (sci-fi has always suffered pro
blems of affect). Still, it’s good to know that in her strange future world, where words are patented and auctioned off, where the patois apparently changes minute to minute, a guy can still go down to a karaoke bar and pop a Viagra to forget his troubles.
Frederick Seidel
The rich are different from you and me. They write better poetry, or did when poetry was an art of leisure. It sometimes seems that, in the centuries after scops stopped singing for gold rings in the meadhall, few men except Sir This or Lord That had the free time to bother with verse—if you weren’t nobility, or landed gentry, or clergy, you were plumb out of luck. Later, poetry made some great poets rich, like Shakespeare and Pope, and some rich poets great, like Byron and Shelley. Wordsworth and Coleridge were able to scrape by without much by way of day jobs; and neither Tennyson nor Browning ever had to shovel coal. There are exceptions, but many well-known poets never earned a paycheck. Only in the twentieth century did poetry become an art not just read but written by the middle class.
Frederick Seidel is a throwback, a bon vivant who rubs shoulders with politicians and film directors, fashion designers and heads of state, at least when he isn’t roaring around on a handbuilt motorcycle or getting measured for a pair of bespoke shoes. You have to admire a poet who finds time to worry about the rag trade:
Huntsman indeed is gone from Savile Row,
And Mr. Hall, the head cutter.
The red hunt coat Hall cut for me was utter
Red melton cloth thick as a carpet, cut just so.
One time I wore it riding my red Ducati racer—what a show!—
Matched exotics like a pair of lovely red egrets.
The jaunty meter underlies a lament for vanished graces—Seidel is a man who believes that “Civilized life is actually about too much.”
Seidel dares you to dislike Ooga-Booga for who he is. (He dares you to dislike the title Ooga-Booga. Perhaps it’s not surprising that he’s so rarely anthologized, while so many right-thinking sapheads are.) He won’t kowtow to the mob; yet there’s a great deal of tastelessness in his good taste, not just in the designer goods and dropped names (“Diane von Furstenberg in those sweet bygone days / Got it in her head I had to meet her friend”), but in the masochism, the Balthus-style Lolita watching, and the priapic sexuality that absorb his waking imagination. When I wrote that American poetry had too little sex in it, I wasn’t hoping for lines like “My dynamite penis / Is totally into Venus” or “I love it when you make me get down on all fours and crawl.”
The mystery of Seidel is whether his abasement is a vulnerability indulged or an act of power disguised as submission. His early poems, in Final Solutions (1963) and Sunrise (1980), were so much under the thumb of Lowell they bore the older poet’s inky fingerprint; but the later poems, produced with ever greater rapidity in late maturity and old age, are full of brute misanthropy and lavish disgust—Seidel revels in the savagery of the underclass and the decadence of the obscenely wealthy:
White linen summer clouds squatted over Ðiên Biên Phu.
It must be 1954 because you soil yourself and give up hope but don’t.
The boys are reading L’Etranger as summer reading.
My country, ’tis of thee, Albert Camus!
The host sprinted upstairs to grab his fellow Existentialist—
To drag him downstairs to the Embassy’s July Fourth garden party.
The Ambassador’s son died horribly the following year
In a ski lodge fire.
That world of linen suits and embassy parties seems as distant as Edwardian England, but then so do existentialists. Seidel is a connoisseur of experience, and expensive handmade goods are one of the last preserves of the artisan—it’s not the price Seidel admires, but the authenticity. (It’s curious that he’s such an unreflective soul—he’s one of those existentialists who uses Nietzsche as an excuse not to think.) Beneath his contradictions there must lie some simple slogan like MASS MARKET = FASCISM. As for Fascists, he turns them into a joke: “Mussolini in riding boots stood at his desk to stuff / Himself into the new secretary who was spread out on the desk. He goes uff. / He goes uff wuff, uff wuff, and even—briefly—falls in luff.” In luff!
It’s hard to get the radical sympathy and aristo loathing in focus—Seidel’s an original, but you’re glad there aren’t more like him. At best, this Cassandra offers a peek from behind the arras at the “useless royals,” beautiful people, and oligarchs who run the world. These new poems are clumsy, hideously uneven, smug in their misanthropy, sometimes more agitprop than poetry, jingly, and often comically vulgar (“I’m in such a state of Haut-Brion I can’t resist. / A fist-fucking anus swallowing a fist”). The fretted, distressed lines itch to be something else and end up like nothing but themselves.
Is it possible Seidel knows no more senators than he does sultans? I’ve always thought there was half a chance he was a Walter Mitty figure holed up in some East Village garret, doomed to press his nose against shop windows like most of the rest of us. It worries me that such a high-hatter doesn’t know that H. Huntsman and Sons still sits proudly at 11 Savile Row, as it has for almost a century. What sort of snob wouldn’t know that?
Robert Lowell
The year before his death in 1977, Robert Lowell published the most peculiar of his many books, a Selected Poems that featured maimed and crippled versions of some of his most famous poems. Lowell suffered from revision mania, never content unless tinkering with his lines; his poems endured so many home improvements, he sometimes seemed to forget why he’d written them in the first place. His friends indulged him in this practice, when they did not encourage it.
Having belatedly published Lowell’s Collected Poems (2003), his publishers have done an about-face and dragged the ruins of Selected Poems back into print, now in an expanded edition, as if enlarging a bad idea somehow improved it. What were they thinking? The unwary reader will find some poems in versions no reader could love—once a poet contracts revision mania, there’s no stopping him until he has revised his poems down to a line, then a word, and finally just a punctuation mark. (Yet, in Lowell’s case, what a punctuation mark!)
Lowell’s bouts of revision may not have been wholly separate from his manic depression. Confined to a mental hospital, he once started to rewrite Paradise Lost, convinced he was John Milton. The poems in Selected Poems were revised as if Lowell were under the impression he was Robert Lowell. He reduced “In Memory of Arthur Winslow,” “The Death of the Sheriff,” and “Her Dead Brother” to their first sections, “Thanksgiving’s Over” to its opening and close, and his longest poem, “The Mills of the Kavanaughs,” to its last five stanzas. You open Selected Poems to discover corpses with only the head or feet remaining, or in one case the head and the feet. (Perhaps stung by his reviewers, in a revised edition Lowell restored the cuts he made to some poems, but not to those above.) Selected Poems is the most famous example of poetic butchery since Marianne Moore took a hatchet to her Collected Poems. The notes to this expanded edition make almost no mention of Lowell’s roughshod alterations and say nothing of the controversy they engendered.
Frank Bidart, the coeditor of Lowell’s Collected Poems, has provided a peculiar, woolgathering foreword to this edition; but he nowhere takes credit for editing it. He argues that Lowell was what is now called a “transgressive” artist—“his art again and again broke taboos, both thematic and formal.” It’s true that Lowell changed American poetry at least twice, first in the highoctane meter of Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), which won the Pulitzer Prize, and later in the guilty family gossip of Life Studies (1959). The hurricane of the first book passed away quickly, but we have lived in the climate of the second for half a century.
Lowell’s formal poetry, however, shattered no taboo, merely reviving and elaborating, with a strong dose of Milton, the style of Fugitives like Allen Tate. The verse of Life Studies was a sea change in subject more than theme or form—Lowell, to use a theatrical metaphor, broke down the fourth wal
l of the stage, speaking in propria persona of the private life once off-limits to poetry. (It hardly broke a taboo when the poet at the same time, partly influenced by the Beats, changed his style to a metrically haunted free verse.) Lowell saw the advantage of being Lowell—or seeming to be. He considered the poems a fictive autobiography, changing details like a Flaubert, not a Rousseau. Still, having long been a cousin of the novel, poetry after Lowell became the stepdaughter of autobiography. This change was as radical as modernism’s shift to free verse.
Like Picasso, Lowell was a restless artist who believed that originality required constant change (unfortunately, as with urban development, if you tear down too much, you have no urbs any more). Bidart calls him the “poet of the irremediable.” Though Lowell often considered the past with a rueful despair, a poem like “Skunk Hour” isn’t beyond hope, having found, in the lowliest places, the will to go on.
The anonymous editor has restored Lowell’s prose memoir “91 Revere Street” to Life Studies, now printed in its entirety, adding a couple of poems to For the Union Dead (1964) and a dozen or more sonnets to one of Lowell’s beautiful follies, the sonnet-mad volume of History (1973). Poems from Day by Day, published weeks after Lowell’s death, have now been included. Many of these new choices show a sensitive and informed taste. Less happily, seven sonnets have been dropped in Lowell’s revised selection from The Dolphin (1973)—why keep his deformed versions of some poems only to banish poems he wanted to include? (Indeed, why not call this the Expanded and Contracted Edition?) No justification is made for such eclectic pantry-raiding masquerading as sober editing. Worse, the informative notes, borrowed from Collected Poems, remain uncorrected, though reviewers took pains to point out many errors of fact and fancy.
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