Kim Addonizio
Kim Addonizio is that New Formalist wet dream, a hot babe who can bang out a sonnet on demand. If your vice runs to forms a little more obscure, you could hardly resist her. Her come-on seems to be, “Wouldn’t you like to peek at my sexy little sonnezhino?” or “Baby, baby, you gotta lick my paradelle all over.” The question isn’t why sexual intercourse didn’t begin for Larkin until 1963; it’s why—after Chaucer and Rochester and Burns, after all the ways they found to load every rift with sex—modern poetry is as erotic as a meat locker. The anesthesia and impotence of Eliot (when there’s sex in Eliot, it’s grimy and repulsive) seem to have become, not just the model for English verse, but the ideal.
Addonizio’s poems are always looking for love, and in What Is This Thing Called Love they take their desperate pleasures where they can. The hot sex takes place with a Baedeker in hand—against a chain-link fence in one poem, against a fridge in another. (If you’re going to be one of her lovers, I suspect you have to sign a legal release first.) Since the men who straggle through these poems are never named, it’s hard to tell them apart—there’s Vulnerable Kiss Guy and Orange Wedge Guy and Guy Who Drinks the Rain from the Hollow in My Throat Guy, and after a while they all seem the same. When you look at the world through her glasses, sex is everywhere; and even the muse is just a hottie on the make: “They fall in love with me after one night, / even if we never touch. // I tell you I’ve got this shit down to a science.” (It’s not clear if this is a bimbo acting like the muse or the muse acting like a bimbo—but, hey, does it matter?) We know sex is war, all strategy and tactics and lost battalions (and mostly Pyrrhic victories), but it’s refreshing to hear it said with such panache.
Sharon Olds is one of the few contemporary poets to treat sex with animal pleasure; and for her it’s an Olympic event, pursued with an athletic single-mindedness that, in one poem, is not distracted even by a recent rape elsewhere in her building. (My favorite, however, is her paean to her early mastery of the arts of oral sex.) Addonizio is wittier about the physical acts that occupy so large a mental part of our waking (and, as Freud reminds us, sleeping) lives. She records some of the ambivalent appetites that seethe within the body politic and is not beneath ranting about her secret desires, like strangling people who miss her literary allusions.
Such facetiousness is part of the latest contemporary manner—ha! ha! poetry can be just as dumb as television, too! When you stoop so low to conquer, however, it’s hard to stand up again. On occasion, Addonizio tries a subject more serious. (Bathing her elderly mother, she tries “to be more merciful / than God, who after creating her // licked her clean with a rough tongue”—so God is a cat?) Alas, she’s so used to primping and posing and smirking, she can’t recall what it’s like to be reflective.
It would be pleasant to blame Billy Collins for the dumbing down of American verse, but there’s so much dumbing down I fear he’s more a symptom than the cause. The trouble with being a crowd pleaser is that, after you have the crowd, you have to please it—too many of Addonizio’s poems are made in Betty Crocker style, all helpful hints and ingredients whipped up in a jiffy for a dish tasteless as a stuffed pillow. When Addonizio uses some arcane form, you never feel the form is happy to be there—it’s used just as carelessly as her lovers, discarded when she’s had her way with it. She finds charmingly weird subjects for poems—dead girls in movies, serial killers, why the chicken crossed the road, liver-transplant surgeons—but often the idea is all there is.
After so many poems about partying and drinking (there’s a whole section devoted to them), the poet turns just as woozy and sentimental as that loser down the bar surrounded by shot glasses. Awful things may be happening elsewhere, things the poet can’t stop, but
I separate
the two halves of another cookie and lick
the cream filling, and pour myself one more
and drink to you, dear reader, amazed
that you are somewhere in the world without me,
listening, trying to hold me in your hands.
I like Addonizio’s poems best when she’s vulnerable, when the bravado is just for show, as in her poem to a younger lover—“When he takes off his clothes / I think of a stick of butter being unwrapped.” (The calculating fuck bunny part of her is fun, too.) It’s all very well trying to make poetry relevant, to portray ruthlessly the way we live now; but in the end the poor poet is still stuck with having to say something, and to do that he has to make sure he has something to say.
Billy Collins
Speak of the devil. The proofs of Billy Collins’s The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems came prefaced by a letter from his publisher, addressed “Dear Reader.” Why, I thought, this might be addressed to me! “The real trouble with most contemporary poetry,” the letter said, “is that it is piled high, mostly unread and gathering dust, in the attic of its own obscurity.” I was confused by the real dust in that metaphorical attic—but then I thought, contemporary poetry, obscure? Isn’t the trouble with contemporary poetry that you read book after book of it without an obscurity in sight? (Next year the government plans to put Poetic Obscurities on the endangered species list.)
“Everyone can connect with his humor and his humanity,” the letter continued. “Reading his poetry is no diagramless chore with recondite clues.” So, it’s all the fault of those other damned poets—you know who you are, leaving your recondite clues lying about, where anyone might trip over them. Go back to the hellhole you sprang from, John Keats. Get thee gone, John Milton and Alexander Pope, you diagramless whoremongers. And don’t get me started on you, William Shakespeare!
Billy Collins is apparently the antidote to all this. He’s an entertainer who gently thinks about gentle things (even when he has a harsh thought, it’s whimsically harsh), with a half-baked goofy curiosity about the world and a penchant for odd bits of information. He’ll write a poem about the code behind equestrian statues (if the horse is rearing, the rider died in battle—neat, huh?). He’ll write about a dream where he lost his nose in a sword fight (Freud knew exactly what that means), or about how he wants to be buried (fetal position, clean pair of pajamas), or about magic sunglasses that filter out an ex-lover. And what about that dog you once put to sleep? Well, he’s come back,
come back to tell you this simple thing:
I never liked you—not one bit.
When I licked your face,
I thought of biting off your nose.
When I watched you toweling yourself dry,
I wanted to leap and unman you with a snap.
Don’t worry about the dog, though—he’s in heaven, where all the animals “can read and write, / the dogs in poetry, the cats and all the others in prose.” I suspect the dogs compose poems just like Billy Collins (the cats, they’re writing poetry criticism).
Collins has the offbeat angle down pat. His images often reduce things to the size of childhood (a building with its facade torn off by a bomb is “like a dollhouse view”). On occasion—I’ll admit it—he can be hilarious. One poem mimics the patter poets use at readings, trying to be as helpful as the footnotes in the Norton Anthology:
And you’re all familiar with helminthology?
It’s the science of worms.
Oh, and you will recall that Phoebe Mozee is the real name of Annie Oakley.
Other than that, everything should be obvious.
Wagga Wagga is in New South Wales.
Rhyolite is that soft volcanic rock.
What else?
Yes, meranti is a type of timber, in tropical Asia I think,
and Rahway is just Rahway, New Jersey.
Anyone who has suffered through a poetry reading will sympathize; but, as a poem, it’s like the rat so hungry he ate his own tail and didn’t stop until he’d gobbled himself up. Many of Collins’s poems are about poetry, though his references to poets past are often condescending. The pretensions of poetry need desperately to be mocked, but perhaps not by someone who doesn’t like it all that much.
Collins suffers from mortal thoughts (there’s a dry poem about what happens when a man sees the Grim Reaper coming for him) and would like to add a few words to the ancient themes of “longing for immortality / despite the roaring juggernaut of time.” But he can’t, or he won’t, because his nervous jokes are just a way of staving off despair—his humor has only an empty pit beneath. The trouble with poetry, it turns out—and it’s a bit of an anticlimax—is that poetry “encourages the writing of more poetry.” And the trouble with The Trouble with Poetry, it turns out—and it’s a bit of an anticlimax—is that, once you know the premise of a Billy Collins poem, the poem seems to write itself (he’s almost a metaphysical poet, his poems are so entirely exhausted by working out the idea—but his two-a-penny ideas would have driven Donne to drink).
What Collins does, he does very well. There are many poets who, seeing his example, seeing that poetry can reach the masses and make them laugh (this begins to sound like the plot of Sullivan’s Travels), want to stuff feathers in their heads just to be like him. The world can stand one Billy Collins, but what happens when everyone writes poems that humiliate the art they practice? I feel like a grouch to ask, but what then?
Kay Ryan
Kay Ryan’s shy, skittish poems are so small they scarcely seem to be poems. Her lines are very short (even William Carlos Williams might have found them pinched), usually three words, or four, or five, as if she hardly had anything to say—once I counted eight words in a line and fell off my chair. When a poem in The Niagara River threatens to go beyond half a page, as a few do, it makes her jumpy, because there’s hardly anything holding them together except spit and chewing gum. Yet, though she shrinks like a hermit crab (nothing tries to hide that hard except an animal wary of predators), her delicate modesty cannot conceal a poetry of winning oddity, with an off-kilter view of a world that always seems too big.
Everything contains some
silence. Noise gets
its zest from the
small shark’s-tooth-
shaped fragments
of rest angled
in it. An hour
of city holds maybe
a minute of these
remnants of a time
when silence reigned,
compact and dangerous
as a shark. Sometimes
a bit of a tail
or fin can still
be sensed in parks.
Here each small notion leans against the next, aided (rather than, as in so many poems, frustrated) by line breaks brutal as a modernist collage. In Ryan, the enjambment sharpens her quirky prose into a series of deft pauses and releases, with the occasional ring of buried rhyme or rhyme left to linger at line end. The whole is never so economical it seems starved; but the poems are reduced to minimal gestures, like those of a Noh play.
I have nothing against William Carlos Williams; but poets who love his mastery of American speech are rarely masters themselves, and he has been a terrible influence on those for whom imitation is the sincerest form of bad poetry. His poems were wonderful when they were the exception, but prose has so infiltrated and terrorized American poetry it’s now the rule—poets who prefer a subtler form of grace are criticized for being too difficult. Ryan, nevertheless, convinces me that prose can still have a sting to it. Her cunning twists and turns (like a creek meandering through a scrap yard), her way of conjuring a poem out of nothing (sometimes the poems are over before you realize they’ve begun), show how a poet overcomes the cruelty of style.
There are poets whose work is memorable because they have a quirky, slant-sided way of looking at the world; and often such poets are women. Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and contemporaries like Anne Carson, Marie Ponsot, and Kay Ryan are poets devoted to the small, oblique idea, and of all things they love Blake’s grain of sand—or, in Bishop’s lovely phrase, “my crumb / my mansion.” (There are men of such ideas, too, like Clare and Carroll—a study of the sociology of such poetry would be of interest.) These garden ontologists are all shrinking violets (think how house-bound Dickinson and Moore were, and even Bishop); but a poet doesn’t have to be in the world to be of it, and there are advantages to watching intently and keeping mum—they are the virtues of predator as well as prey.
These poets often seem to have suffered some terrible wound; a hidden pain shadows their stickery poems, sometimes so imperceptibly that if you read quickly you miss it.
Today her things are quiet
and do not reproach,
each in its place,
washed in the light
that encouraged the Dutch
to paint objects as though
they were grace—
the bowl, the
goblet, the vase
from Delft—each
the reliquary
of itself.
I’ve quoted these poems whole, because Ryan is not a good poet of parts. You have to read her slowly, if you’re to read her at all—the line breaks and rhymes remind you that patience is a virtue (not that most readers are virtuous these days). Some of her poems, I admit, are tiresome, washed with prim sentiment, plummily self-satisfied—Ryan can seem a one-trick pony. I don’t want to make large claims for her, because she’s a minor poet of a rare and agreeable sort. Her best work sits there meekly, tender but askew (practicing the “oiled motions / of avoidance”), hardly daring to ask the reader’s attention. In a time of immodesty, when overgrown monsters stalk the earth, perhaps modesty should have its day.
Mark Doty
Late in the life of a television show, there comes the hour when the writers, having flat run out of ideas, invent some desperate turn of plot or bizarre coincidence, after which the show is never the same. This is called “jumping the shark,” after a gruesomely unlikely episode of the sit-com Happy Days; and for some critics it registers the moment when the willing suspension of disbelief loses its will. I hadn’t thought about its bearing on poetry until, reading Mark Doty’s School of the Arts, I found myself in the middle of a poem about an ultrasound exam of his dog, a poem whose style would have been over-the-top describing the Passion:
No chartable harmony,
less anatomy than a storm
of pinpoints subtler than stars.
Where does a bark upspool
from the quick,
a baritone swell
past the sounding chambers?
If the phrase “jumping the shark” weren’t so good, I’d propose that in poetry such a moment be christened “ultrasounding the dog.”
As they age, poets are more willing to smuggle into their work the humdrum events of their lives—in high art, you get The Pisan Cantos; in low, the ultrasound of a dog. Mark Doty has never been shy about the tragedies of his life; but his recent books have forgotten that poetry needs to be shaped, that the mere mortal record of life’s ups and downs is not art. The poems in his new book sometimes sound like one side of a cell-phone conversation about people you don’t know, will never meet, and don’t give a hoot about. Or they’re about dogs.
I’ve never met a dog I didn’t like, but Doty makes me reconsider. There are half a dozen poems here about his dogs (which he calls, unbearably, “Time’s children”), and I began to cringe every time one of the poor mutts appeared. Doty has always been a sucker for sentiment, and there’s no crime in going all gooey over your pets—I just wish he wouldn’t write poems about them. There’s a poem about a dog so old it can’t climb stairs and sits at the bottom whimpering. There’s a fable about dogs writing a letter to God to protest the way they’re treated. (I’m not inventing this.) It’s an origin myth to explain why dogs sniff each other’s asses—guess where the dog messenger has hidden the letter.
Doty invokes high art on occasion; but, if he mentions Mrs. Dalloway, he takes us to a movie set where a crew is filming Michael Cunningham’s homage The Hours, not Woolf’s novel. Doty is no slouch at the symbolic possibilities of pinchbeck; but a poem about a movie of a book that adopts the characters of another book leaves us very distant from life (like a footnote to a footnote to Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”). This cozy world, everything a shadow or reflection of something else (“beautiful versions … no more false than they are true”), is all the cozier for being set in Doty’s neighborhood, cozier still when he makes sure we know the novelist is a close friend. And, of course, the dogs come trotting out, too.
There ought to be a certain resistance in the subjects a poet chooses; but Doty now grabs his subjects right off the shelf and his attitudes from the bargain bin. (A laggardly ten pages are required to memorialize two friends in a lot of scatty philosophizing and stray quotations from Lucien Freud’s notebooks.) Some poets suffer the delusion, later in their careers, that they can make a poem out of anything (it takes a Kurt Schwitters to make art from the gutter). When they think they are using their materials, the materials are just using them.
Few poems in this volume trouble the surface of this courtly, complacent life; but a sequence about masochistic sex, in which submission is sought and vulnerability gained, turns uneasy and even unpleasant. Parts of it rise toward the cheesy transcendence that makes Doty seem a pitchman for the human potential movement (one poem describes a boy being massaged as the “corpus of our Lord / still nailed to his cross”); yet the poems recognize, here and there, the seeming heartlessness of that sexual subculture, the invited pain, the loveless need of release. Then it’s back to an epiphany every thirty seconds and transcendence by the hour, as if all you needed for revelation were to trot down to the Jiffy Lube.
If I were a sunflower I would be
the branching kind,
my many faces held out
in all directions, all attention,
awake to any golden
incident descending;
drinking in the world
with my myriads of heads,
I’d be my looking.
This isn’t just embarrassing. This is the new theme for Sesame Street.
Doty can still be a sweet and gorgeous writer, one who sees the Poundian glamour of things: “All smolder and oxblood, / these flowerheads, / flames of August: // fierce bronze, / or murky rose, / petals concluded in gold.” As the silly and inane poems pile up, however—on a photo shoot (of him), on mnemonic devices for remembering gym-lock combinations—self-indulgence seems its own passion, affirmation its own disease.
Jack Gilbert
There are poets reluctant to write and poets reluctant to publish, and Jack Gilbert is a little of both. His first book, Views of Jeopardy (1962), won the Yale Younger Poets award; but in the following decades he published only two others. If you can trust the articles that accompanied publication of his new book, Refusing Heaven, the manuscript had to be pried from his fingers. Many poets publish far too much; but, in the long run, the longest of runs, the niggardly turtle probably has the advantage over the profligate hare—he leaves less junk for the future’s derision. (If you think this doesn’t matter, consider how high Kipling’s standing might be if he’d been more circumspect.)
Gilbert’s prosy, cheerless sentences pile up in patient suffering, suffering that prides itself on being without pity or delusion (which means it’s riven with self-pity and self-delusion). One of the pleasures of his work is that the pathos is cut with masochism—you feel he couldn’t write so much about misery without a taste for it, and like many miserable people he writes about laughter in ways that make you want to weep:
There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world.
I had to check the cover of the book to be sure this hadn’t come from a self-help handbook or an old Jonathan Edwards sermon. Gilbert’s sorrows require more than a little preaching, though even the desert fathers entered into more-miserable-than-thou competitions.
Gilbert, who came of age among the Beats in San Francisco, fled the poetry world for a reclusive, peripatetic life, one interrupted by long romances. Most poets are either a man’s man or a woman’s man (though Byron was perhaps both), and for Gilbert the world is a world of women. (The poems make him seem the last man standing. If you subtract the Greek gods and various poets and novelists, there’s hardly another man in sight—Hannibal isn’t exactly competition.) Gilbert has had three great loves. One of his wives died young of cancer, two decades ago; his poems indulge in the consoling passions of memory—and the consoling negations of grief. Yet the memories too often seem thumbed over, his love a kind of knight-errant narcissism: “We are allowed / women so we can get into bed with the Lord, / however partial and momentary that is.”
Gilbert is a curiously parsimonious poet, loving abstraction the way some misers prefer bonds to cold cash—parsimony is often meanness of spirit, whatever the dividends. With age he has grown crafty and codgerlike, scorning, not just the siren songs of the poetry world (which make most good poets pour wax into their ears, if not molten lead), but the siren songs of words themselves. He sets them down grudgingly but obsessively, so even longer poems tend to be flavorless and bureaucratic (he’s a clam-tongued parson with a Richardson novel somewhere inside him). If you drop a hat, he’ll launch into a lecture:
Poetry registers
feelings, delights and passion, but the best searches
out what is beyond pleasure, is outside process.
Not the passion so much as what the fervor can be
an ingress to. Poetry fishes us to find a world
part by part, as the photograph interrupts the flux
to give us time to see each thing separate and enough.
The poem chooses part of our endless flowing forward
to know its merit with attention.
This is duller than a freshman aesthetics textbook, with a metaphor so clumsy (“Poetry fishes us”) you wonder if it wasn’t ghost-written by an ad copywriter.
The poems in Refusing Heaven spill out, full of their own rectitude but often haggard and marooned—they’re gloomy, tarnished fragments of some lost silvery life. Beyond the pissing and moaning, the endless refresher courses in self-pity, lies an old man facing death, clawing over his past and, despite the lip service to stoic resignation, absolutely terrified. His poems are interesting, not for the honesties they intend, but for the ones they conceal.
Geoffrey Hill
On Michaelmas night of 1634, the Earl of Bridgewater’s children and their music teacher presented a candlelit masque at Ludlow Castle. It was probably the composer Henry Lawes, that teacher, who asked a young poet of their acquaintance to provide the verse. Only a couple of years removed from Cambridge, not yet twenty-five, entirely unknown as a poet except among close friends, the young man was John Milton. Geoffrey Hill’s Scenes from Comus is a typically complex, crabbed, benighted, and frequently bewildering meditation on this strange allegorical entertainment.
In his late age, Hill’s work has too often become a frustrating cacophony of fabulous and tedious monologues—a welter of howls, of the pained protestations of the damned. It used to be that, if you worked away patiently at a Hill poem, it would yield its beauties. Some lay temptingly on the surface, where they lie still; but the matter of the poem was often hidden in allusion or obscure fact (and obscurer wit). In his recent poems, the spillage of bile and mechanic observation by a lamely joking observer has left a reader bankrupted by the labor required to understand them. (Not surprisingly, Hill now lacks an American publisher.)
In Scenes from Comus (dedicated to his friend the composer Hugh Wood, whose symphonic cantata of that title was written forty years ago), an anguished calm has settled upon this frequently unsettled poet. The coarse asides and annoying mannerisms have been chastened if not subdued, the language has become less resistant, the bullying marks of punctuation less frequently indulged (in his Hopkins phase, Hill wants to sit at the reader’s shoulder and rap time with a ruler, which is foolish but not criminal).
Hill is meditating here on character, on license and chastity, on the “covenants with language” that have inspired him to imperturbable obscurity, since public speech so often caters to emollient lies. Milton’s Comus is a magician, a goatish enchanter who can turn men half into beasts (his mother was Circe)—he might easily be seen, like Prospero, as the poet’s alter ego. The thematic strain of Milton’s closet drama is chastity threatened and preserved: a lady is captured by the enchanter, who binds her with a spell. Hill’s meditation is scouring but tangential—the poem touches most tellingly on the alchemy of sexual love and, perhaps, on the chastity required when two lovers live at a distance. (It is no secret that Hill lives in Boston, while his wife, a librettist, serves as curate in an English church.)
One of many clues to this dark poem comes from Hill’s quotation of a phrase (“not in these noises”) from Milton’s description of his early reading, which included
the divine volumes of Plato, and his equal Xenophon: where, if I should tell ye what I learnt of chastity and love, … whose charming cup is only virtue, which she bears in her hand to those who are worthy (the rest are cheated with a thick intoxicating potion, which a certain sorceress, the abuser of love’s name, carries about) …, it might be worth your listening, Readers.
Hill ranges widely around “licence and exorbitance, of scheme / and fidelity; of custom and want of custom; / of dissimulation; of envy // and detraction.” A good part of the poem takes place in Reykjavik, for reasons that remain mysterious. Hill expects his readers to be familiar with Hallgrimur Petursson (a priest whose Passion hymns are among the beauties of Icelandic poetry), and brennivin (Iceland’s favorite alcohol, made from scorched potatoes), and gutta serena (the form of blindness from which Milton suffered), and Comus itself, or at least to spend the time looking them up. (If he tries to look up “titagrams,” however, he’ll be plumb out of luck—could these be the same as strip-o-grams?)
A woman asked Browning, so goes the anecdote, probably apocryphal, what he meant by a certain knotted passage in Sordello. “Madame,” he replied, “when I wrote that only God and I knew what it meant. Now only God knows.” (Carlyle said that after reading the poem his wife didn’t know “whether ‘Sordello’ was a man, or a city, or a book.”) Some of poetry’s obscurities may be recondite clue-mongering, perhaps; but most are a lively demand upon the reader’s intelligence and an entrance to those dark realms where literature does its work. I don’t say Hill always knows the difference; but he is an old-style modernist, whose style is didactic when it isn’t simply hectoring, who still believes that poetry might be a machine for making the reader think. And he is capable of passages of stirring beauty:
While the height-challenged sun fades, clouds become
as black-barren as lava, wholly motionless,
not an ashen wisp out of place, while the sun fades.
While the sun fades its fields glow with dark poppies.
Some plenary hand spreads out, to flaunt an end,
old gold imperial colours.
The English landscape haunted by the past is an exemplary check to Hill’s splenetic pride. It will take long critical reflection for readers to come to terms with this obdurate poem, but Scenes from Comus shows the valedictory temper and devious revelry of the most brilliant and irritating poet we have. Besides, how often will you read a book with a blurb by the archbishop of Canterbury?