Purple Patches, Fuddle, and the Hard Noon Light

I’ve had difficulty over the past decade in comprehending some of the poems of Alfred Corn. I figured the trouble was all on my side since he receives good reviews, is an intelligent person (his book of critical essays, The Metamorphoses of Metaphor, is pallid but palatable), and is published by Viking, a ritzy uptown house. I figured that I was missing something, that lines like those of the second stanza of “Lost and Found” in his new book, The West Door, must add up to something more than a mumble of disjointed abstraction. “Surely,” says I to myself, “a passage like this one in ‘Trout and Mole’ is not a sloppy purple patch; it is something rare and finer than I have grasped”:

Now something tugs upward toward the flexible, sunfired

ceiling, Something; and so with a will, higher,

a lunge up through warbled mirrorgold

into searing vacuum, brightness invisible,

arcing to the top of his bent—and snap go

the silver shutters as the wingborne prey

(for once no useless clot of thistledown,

but a crispy bite) ephemerid! is taken.

The sending up of G. M. Hopkins I allow, but how am I to forgive the television-advertising adjective “crispy” or calling the jaws of a trout “silver shutters” that go “snap” the way the weasel goes “pop”? If I accept the little Miltonic joke “brightness invisible,” must I also accept the clumsy pun “top of his bent”? Could it be that what strikes me as being in such dubious taste is actually some avant-garde aesthetic I haven’t yet heard about?

Now the jig is up. In the new book appears a thirteen-page narrative poem in workaday iambic pentameter. “An Xmas Murder” is a story of bigoted violence recounted by a country doctor in West Newbury, Vermont. A bunch of “rowdies” kill a man they don’t like, and the doctor himself is threatened after his trial testimony because he is suspected of homosexuality. No one is brought to justice, since “if you can say the things people / Want to hear, then you may lynch at will.”

It’s not that “An Xmas Murder” is such a bad poem, only that it is pedestrian, for all its melodrama. Considering the claims of sophistication that have been made for Corn’s poetry, we would think that a narrative poem in blank verse would be duck soup for the accomplished technician. But he makes two elementary mistakes: the poem natters on for at least three pages longer than necessary, and the character of the speaker is convincing neither as doctor nor as storyteller. The description of the murder, for instance, heads the list of Things We Doubt Ever Got Said by a Country Doctor: “Smash of the blackjack / Against his skull, exploding carnival / Of fire-veined shock that flies to the far corners / Of night.” That’s not colloquial speech; that’s poetic diction in the style of Batman comics. And the doctor’s self-pitying postscript vitiates his believability as a witness: “If I had had the sense to pitch / Someone unpopular from off a bridge / Instead of enjoying music, chances are / I’d be a favorite son.”

There are some good poems in The West Door. “Wild Carrot” is especially taking, and “Home Thoughts in Winter, 1778” and “Toward Skellig Michael” and “The Chi-Ro Page from the Book of Kells.” If “Naskeag” owes much to Elizabeth Bishop, well, so do other poets nowadays and the poem itself is solid. And although Alfred Corn, I think, has yet to find the kind of poetry that is truly his own, he is talented and often interesting. I mean no condescension when I say that I think of him as a promising poet.

Michael Burkard’s Fictions from the Self is the writer’s sixth book, but it is not promising. It is vaguely threatening, in the sense that there looks to be no end to the number of versifiers writing this sort of fuddle. Sometimes it seems the shopping malls are infested with them, all muttering sotto voce like mildly deranged bag ladies:

I am in a hurry to decide two things: whether my

amnesia has any color to it, whether the ghastly

charity of hope is nothing more than that adjective

I’ve chosen: ghastly.

The interesting things to observe about this passage and about most of Burkard’s work will belong more properly to sociology than to literary criticism, but maybe it doesn’t hurt to point out some obvious facts. Burkard’s work sounds like the work of John Ashbery and shares the ambitions of that poetry. It seems, of course, a poetry without ambition, but that appearance is illusionary. This sort of writing desires above all else to evade critical stricture. Whatever complaint is brought against it is opted by its partisans as a strength.

“This stuff is boring,” you say, and are told that it is meant to be boring; the fact that it is boring says something about poetry in our time. Silliness, lack of logic, disjointedness, sameness of tone—all those qualities ordinarily noted as indices to bad poetry are referred to as symptoms of social and spiritual and literary conditions. The more sophomoric these poems are, the more we are expected to admire them. It is the child’s explanation. In his first attempt to roller-skate he wobbles, staggers, slips, and falls with a thump. Then he addresses his onlookers with solemn truculence. “I meant to do that!”

I quoted the first stanza of Burkard’s title poem, figuring that he must count it as one of his strongest pieces. And in fact it is stronger than his other work. “Eerie” opens with these lines:

When in my terror I have not given you

the admiration, when I have not felt the rain

chilling my body when it chills my body,

and I have fallen asleep green but in the green light

which is not the illumination the potato light gives off,

which is not the corridor leading to a window

in the middle of the city, in the middle of the room

where the stone drops

but I do not see it.

The sweaty effort here to produce an effect like those of the surrealist paintings of Magritte, Chirico, Delvaux, and the others does not succeed because Burkard cannot keep his heavy hands out of the image. “I have fallen asleep green”—this phrase is jarringly cute and self-conscious and reminds us that the visuals are not there to be experienced like images in a real poem but are only the digressions of a fellow with a typewriter.

(Yes, I know. One might instead say something like “Burkard now allows us to recognize the presence of the poet in the poem, the painter in his painting, by an adroit appeal to the reader’s sense of propriety. He shares with us the joke of allowing his use of ‘green’ to be felt as ‘cute,’ and his knowingness, and ours, invalidate the charge of cuteness at the same time they produce it.” But I try not to write sentences like these and am a better person for my effort. There is hardly room for two Helen Vendlers in contemporary criticism.)

Lines like Burkard’s are not actually read; they are merely noticed where they appear on the page. This school of authors has come close to achieving in writing what Erik Satie desired in music. Musique démeublement, he called it, music that would simply decorate an environment in the way that furniture decorates a room. Of course, Satie’s notion has since been accomplished in dreadful style with Muzak, and Muzak is the art form most closely allied to this sort of writing. I prefer to call it “writing” because it rests on too faulty an aesthetic to be called poetry. The mere fact that a clutch of lines is savorless, purposeless, and without narrative interest or logical thread doesn’t make it a poem.

Now and again Burkard does make a noise that sounds like poetry—whether accidentally or not, I can’t say. But I found the opening of “Picture with No Past to It” witty, and there is a haunted Edward Hopper quality to some of the more purely imagist poems like “Little Final Sunlight”:

station in Dover

Delaware, mint

green house,

facing it, the white

shade bending in

the little final sunlight

left. Light within

above clock,

people, even a head

or two. Or here

and there, out of time.

But even these few simple lines trail off with a flippant gesture and a flaccid pun.

As I noted with Alfred Corn’s poems, the influence of such arch-imagists as Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop seems to be strongly welcome in current poetry. Elizabeth. Spires’s title poem in Annonciade contains these lines:

An arm throws open a shutter, flooding

the doubting mind with the brilliant

light of the Midi that changes white

shadowed sheets on the crumpled bed

into a still life of desire and absence.

The lines that follow do not waver in their lyricism, and throughout the book this strong pictorial sense brightens the pages. But Spires is not content to draw pictures, she must draw conclusions from them—homilies, metaphysical reflections, drifty musings—and these distractions sometimes lessen the power of her images.

In this same poem which tells of a stay at the Annonciade in Menton, France, the poet begins to muse upon the nature of the illnesses that bring patients (“we,” she calls them, “the ill and ill-disposed”) to this monastery to recuperate. She comes to a comfortless conclusion:

How can such suffering be chance?

Surely the spirit chooses its affliction

and makes it manifest, watching itself

fall and retreat from the world to atone,

as holy hermits did, for some secret

failing only its own heart knows.

There is a bothersome fecklessness about the lines, which could be written only by a young poet in sound health, and the poem never recovers from them, for all its heavily sentimental ending.

I do not think that Elizabeth Spires is unfeeling, only that some of her poems lecture fruitily about themselves instead of closing. Even a fine and lovely poem like “Sunday Afternoon at Fulham Palace” is not unmarred. After showing us the park and empty palace, the fountain and peacock, the band concert and spectators, the poet slides into a reverie about destruction, and imagines, as the band plays “Mood Indigo,” a bomber flying overhead, “the gray metal belly opening and the bomb dropping, / a flash, a light ‘like a thousand suns,’ / and then the long winter.” Then she is recalled to herself by the presence of her lover; the band plays a selection by Purcell; and the couple begins to return home.

All is as it was as we make our way back along the Thames

to Putney Bridge, the old souls still sleeping unaware,

hands lightly touching, as the river bends in a gentle arc

around them. Mood indigo. The white peacock.

The walled garden and the low door.

This makes a marvelous closure, a calm and sweet walking-away from the subject, a warm inevitable distancing. But the poem doesn’t end here, alas: “As if, if it did happen, we could bow our heads / and ask, once more, to enter that innocent first world.” The unmusical stutter of that line opening ought to have signaled Spires that the poem was over.

Yet this poem survives its faults—and so do others. The last two lines of “The Little Boys” don’t belong there, but it’s a memorable poem nonetheless; the last thirteen lines of “Mutoscope” are excess baggage, but the poem remains both wry and wistful, a mixture of tones hard to bring off. Several poems do achieve harmonious natural closures; “The Woman on the Dump” is a striking allegory that allows no room for commentary, and even with its apostrophic O’s “Glass-Bottom Boat” holds up in its final phrases. “Patchy Fog” consists of two stanzas, and its last lines bring the poem round in a satisfying circle. But the vivid first stanza is more beautifully quotable, and shows Elizabeth Spires at her very best.

This morning the lilies on Ames Pond,

pink and yellow cow lilies, spoked lilystars,

lie open waiting for the sun, and trees,

or the ghosts of trees, a mild smoky gray-green,

hover and point toward the unseen, heaven

of unbelief, as fog boils and rolls

off the road in patches that come and go,

like the call and its echo of the Great Blue Heron

that lives alone in the pond’s long shadow.

The cleanness of Spires’s best presentations is matched, or nearly matched, by some of Emily Grosholz’s poems in Shores and Headlands. Her landscape sonnets especially are lit with a ringing clarity that is both precise and playfully impressionistic, employing a technique that brightly delivers subject matter while also transcending it. “Siesta,” in fact, remarks upon the similarities and differences between the visual and the visionary.

All afternoon the heat intensifies

in leaps, like goats climbing the terraced hills;

another fig bursts on the tree; the olives

surrender another cache of livid shadow.

Cicadas transpose their note to a higher key.

As if the ear were the most material sense,

they sing us back to flesh and bone, the steep

rocky quarter acre where we happen to live.

But the eye is aethereal, that watches over

the tranquil cool Aegean, mantle of blue

woven east and west with the stitch of wind.

We see beyond our country into another,

familiar, never attained, where scattered islands

gather like the dream’s immortal children.

“Siesta” is perhaps not perfect. The final clause is highfalutin Symbolist gossamer more reminiscent of Herédia than of Valéry. Still, the poem makes an admirable whole shape, its sharply limned details gracefully harmonized within the whole design.

Grosholz is a thoughtful poet, sometimes a metaphysician, and her philosophy can lead her into trouble when she tries to say too many things at once. “Two Variations on a Theme” offers the following difficult formulation, hobbled with a lifeless and puzzling personification:

I am, I see, but only insofar

as I have been deceived.

Ambiguous delight withdraws behind

the window-screen, inflamed with visible night.

Too much lamplit cogitation will sometimes invest subjects with more importance than they can bear. It is possible that the failure of the poet’s brother to receive a grant for his scientific project (“The End of Summer”) is not so tragic as it may have seemed, and the humor that Grosholz shows in “The World as Will, Idea, Grappa, and Pigeons” and in “Nietzsche in the Box of Straws” would be welcome in other poems as well. “Nietzsche” is especially charming; the veil is lifted from autobiographical material and the personal note is modestly attractive. There is a maturity in the gentle self-irony of “Nietzsche” missing from more portentous performances like “Perpetual Acquaintance.” Here are a few lines of amiable apostrophic parody from the former poem:

Oh, thou dry-footed, ghostly

children of the earth,

regret your frail, ill-fitted

and so inflexible spines,

learn from me the way

to be ponderous and fluid,

like the visionary prose

of Nietzsche, slipping under

the surface of the will’s

abyss, its spiraled blue.

Grosholz and Spires are similar in their strengths—fine observation, warm deft renderings of image and small incident, beautiful capacities for enjoyment—and also in a weakness which seems to stem from lack of confidence in controlled presentation, resulting in a sometimes fussy meddling. It’s almost as if both poets were not quite sure what to do with their hands while writing a poem.

In the reflective lyric, restraint is power. John Burt has discovered a restraint that allows him to write sententiae and invent proverbs without seeming overweening. Of course, the persona poem takes much of the curse off the too-nifty formulation because we attribute the encapsulated wisdom to the speaker rather than to the poet. Burt’s The Way Down contains a large number of persona poems, including “From the Diary of Willard Gibbs,” where we find this couplet:

We love Theory as poets love pale women,

For its perfection and its lack of pity.

Gibbs was not the sort of person to think of mathematics in terms of La Belle Dame Sans Merci, but John Burt’s metaphor here is so exact, so just, that it gives us a lightning insight into the philosopher-scientist’s attitude toward his discipline. Later in the poem there is a description of Gibbs’s investigations into the Second Law of Thermodynamics that comes perhaps a little too close to magazine popularizing (“I learned that every order runs to rot, / That every motion must in time be spent”), but the wry humanity of the speaker shines in his conclusion: “I have, at least, survived my theories.”

Burt’s most ambitious efforts are “Leonce Pontellier,” which deals with the characters from Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening, and “Plains of Peace,” a five-part poem with as many speakers, about Woodrow Wilson, his illness, and the First World War. I admire the genuine achievements of both these poems, and, though their complexities are forbidden to a reviewer with limited space, I shall remark that “Leonce Pontellier” requires the preparation of a fresh reading of Chopin and is worth it. “Plains of Peace” needs as background only Burt’s helpful endnote. In this passage, the president’s wife waits for her husband to sing a Schubert song:

This light is from Vermeer, come back to us

To hurt us with its beauty and reproach;

When last we sang these songs we were at peace.

Will we sing again, or will the light

Break and flare at stand-to till night falls?

We will be ghosts, who give ourselves to ghosts …

Through all these poems there is nothing unnecessary, nothing self-touting, nothing overdone. Burt grasps the central dramas of his situations, sets them in place as firm scaffolding, then builds his poems upon and within them. “King Mark’s Dream” dramatizes the unhappy royal passion for Iseult, who is seen in the poem as a “child he found weeping at his door”; but she is a child whose power “loosened all the knots that held his breath.”

In “Rich Blind Minotaur Led by a Girl,” the girl loves the monster. Burt draws her as someone born wise; she possesses an innocent wisdom ordinary mortals can never attain:

Her innocence was never ignorance.

Love takes us as we are, and at our worst

Loves us the better as our worst is ours.

Burt has many other strengths besides wise utterance. He can make pictures as well as any other poet writing, and he is, as I say, well aware of the advantages that restraint brings to imagery. In “The Funeral Day” the octave of the sonnet exhibits the preternatural silence of a house in which a father or grandfather lies dead. Birdsong annoys the speaker and he rises to close the window—and sees the Connecticut farmland outside with its gauzy white canvases:

And there I saw the tobacco-fields

Moving their shrouds in the dusk.

The wind came thoughtlessly over the wide cloth

And lifted the white undersides of leaves.

I didn’t close the window. When I sat back down,

I didn’t say what I had seen.

David Huddle shows even more restraint than John Burt. In both his poetry and his fiction Huddle has faithfully eschewed ornament. Similes and metaphors are rare in his lines, replaced by intense concentration on the subject and powerful objective presentations of situation. These latter characteristics made his earlier Paper Boy pungently memorable, and now in Stopping by Home he has added the usage of traditional forms—sonnets, syllabics, rhymed quatrains, shaped poems—in order to produce ironic tension and striking formulation. The sestet of “Bac Ha,” one of the best of a series of Vietnam War sonnets, shows Huddle’s fine scorn for adornment:

Division’s garbage dump was three acres

fenced off from that hamlet’s former front yard.

Black-toothed women, children, former farmers

squatted in the shade all day, smiled at the guards,

watched what the trucks dumped out. Walking nights

out there, you’d be under somebody’s rifle sights.

Huddle’s spare reportage makes Corn’s sensationalized violence look silly and displays once again the power of understatement. We all learned about understatement from Hemingway’s sweet melancholy, I suppose, but Huddle’s is of a grittier sort. One of his best poems, in fact, is about the way wars have changed and how the manner of perceiving them has altered. “Cousin” is dedicated to John H. Kent, Jr., 1919–1982:

I grew up staring at the picture of him:

oak leaves on his shoulders, crossed rifles

on his lapels, and down his chest so many medals

the camera lost them. He wore gold-rimmed

glasses, smiled, joked about fear. He told true

stories that were like movies on our front porch:

he’d fought a German hand to hand. The word

courage meant Uncle Jack in World War Two.

Ten years from my war, thirty from his, we

hit a summer visit together; again

the stories came. He remembered names of his men,

little French towns, a line of trees. I could see

his better than mine. He’d known Hemingway!

I tried hard but couldn’t find a thing to say.

Stopping by Home is in large part a farewell to the world of our fathers. After the sequence of tough-minded Vietnam poems comes an equally unglamorous series of childhood poems and after that a longish sequence in various forms about the harrowing death of the poet’s father. There is nothing flimsy or arbitrary in the design of the book: each group comments upon and shores up the others, and Huddle never backs off the hard facts of the case, never shirks the weight of his guilt, never fails to confront the depths of his sorrow. His poems are lit with hard noon light; his language is as plain and sturdy and grainy as fresh carpentry. Above all, though, his strength is in intense concentration, in his fixed unwavering gaze that gives him the right to speak of the subjects he chooses in the way that he finds necessary. It is his refusal to prettify, to evade responsibility, to compromise, that lends to the five final words of his book such a feeling of wholesome blessed release:

He was.

I say my father was

here. I say he lived thousands of strong days.

I know he got sick. My

father

died. I

can say that, can walk

from home to work, can touch my daughter’s hair,

can say anything

I want.