Before poetry began pitching its tent in the library and museum, before, that is, mediated experience supplanted what came to seem the naïve fantasy of more direct encounter, a great many poems began in the garden.
In the tense final decades of the twentieth century, poets have tended to treat the natural world as a depleted or exhausted metaphor: the old associations, continuity and renewal, like other emblems of hope, seem poignantly remote. Nor do artists seem tempted to resurrect them—they hardly lend themselves to the prevailing tone, to the particular set of tools a generation has systematically developed and enshrined, tools developed to address other kinds of experiences than those nature is presumed to afford. If, recently, disinterest has given way to fierce stewardship as the environment grows more and more imperiled, if nature threatened and uncertain has been restored to a certain dignity as the mirror of our own precariousness, if the throwback has become the harbinger, the problem of tone still remains. The vanishing garden currently revived by poets suits a period in which experience is filtered, prismatically, by art and history: it is not so much a real garden as a garden previously real. The inauthentic present suggesting the charged and important past insofar as irony permits.
Irony has become less part of a whole tonal range than a scrupulous inhibiting armor, the disguise by which one modern soul recognizes another. In contemporary practice, it is characterized by acute self-consciousness without analytical detachment, a frozen position as opposed to a means of inquiry. Essential, at every moment, to signal that one knows one is not the first to think or feel what one thinks or feels. This stance is absolutely at odds with the actual sensations of feeling, certainly, as well with the sensations of making—the sense, immediate and absolute, of unprecedented being, the exalted intensification of that fundamental isolation which marks all things mortal.
Green Squall begins and ends in a garden. But no one would mistake Jay Hopler for a poet of another century: he is more mad scientist than naturalist, his exploding Florida garden a formidable outpost of the seasonal garden of English lyric. If the seasonal garden represents cyclical time (the old ideas of renewal and so on), Hopler’s obsession is with entropy, its symbol, often, unremitting fertility:
And the sky!
Nooned with the steadfast blue enthusiasm
Of an empty nursery.
Crooked lizards grassed in yellow shade.
The grass was lizarding,
Green and on a rampage.
—“IN THE GARDEN”
So the book starts. But “begins” and “ends” seem the wrong terms—Green Squall hardly ever leaves its fertile premises. Hard, though, to equal all that flourishing:
1
There is a hole in the garden. It is empty. I envy it.
Emptiness: the only freedom there is
In a fallen world.
2
Father Sunflower, forgive me—. I have been so preoccupied with my backaches and my headaches,
With my sore back and my headaches and my beat-skipping heart,
I have ignored the subtle huzzah of the date palms and daisies, of the blue daze and the date palms—
3
Or don’t forgive me, what do I care?
I am tired of asking for forgiveness; I am tired of being frightened all the time.
I want to run down the street with a vicious erection,
Impaling everything, screaming obscenities
And flapping my arms; fuck the date palms,
Fuck the daisies—
4
As a man, I am a disappointment, I know that.
Is it my fault I was born in shadow? Through the banyan trees,
An entourage of slovenly blondes
Comes naked and begging—
5
My days fly from me as though from a murderer.
Can you blame them?
Behind us, the house is empty and quiet as light.
What have I done, Mother,
That I should spend my life
Alone?
—“AND THE SUNFLOWER WEEPS FOR THE SUN, ITS FLOWER”
Insouciance and bravura notwithstanding, there is a solitude in this art as deep as any in American poetry since Stevens. For all the explosive vitality and wild fantasy, there are almost no people here. The mother who periodically figures is like Ramon Fernandez in Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West”: from neither is response expected. Ghostly, remote, part imagination, part memory: behind the appeals and questions to such figures, another larger question lurks. Beneath “tell me if you know,” the echoing “tell me that you are, that you exist.”
Stevens, the great master of tropical extrapolation, is the presiding influence. Like Stevens, Hopler combines verbal extravagance and formal invention with the philosopher’s profound inwardness. In Green Squall, inwardness is manifest: even the garden is a courtyard. Impossible, here, not to think of the place where prisoners take their exercise. Despite violent flourishing, Hopler’s courtyard is a kind of prison, a place of voluntary entrapment or exile; its occupants aspire to invisibility. As a place, as an idea, utterly distinct from the hospitable earth of sentimental practice.
Hopler’s real companions are other forms of life: flowers, dogs, birds. His flowers have an energy the speaker envies, as he envies their resilient obliviousness. Hopler is as far from unconsciousness as any poet I can name, despite his relentless efforts to intensify sensory deprivation. But at least once the courtyard affords the serenity that is the aim of self-deprivation, justifying the speaker’s obstinate retreat:
This morning, still
And warm, heavy with the smells
Of gardenia and Chinese wisteria,
The first few beams of spring sun-
Light filtering through the flower-
Crowded boughs of the magnolia,
I cannot conceive a more genuine,
More merciful, form of happiness
Than solitude.
—“AUBADE”
More commonly, the view is less sanguine, as in these two sections from the long poem at the center of the book:
6
We Cannot Love the World as It Is
We cannot love the world as it is,
Because the world, as it is, is impossible to love.
We have only to lust for it—
To lust for each other in it—
And, somehow, to make that suffice.
7
Revisited
No, somehow to make that sacrifice.
—“OF HUNGER AND HUMAN FREEDOM”
Repeatedly one sees in the stanzas—sometimes even in the phrases—a characteristic psychological progression, most marked in poems of real gusto and high spirits: the initial spurt of energy and animal vigor yields almost immediately to morose woe. Euphoria seems less a precursor of depression than a component of being depressed. Anxiety either aborts or trumps it, the danger of euphoria being how much noise it makes: it threatens to reveal the soul’s hiding place. Hopler’s stanzas are like runners who charge the starting gate and then, two feet later, sit down in the dust. But the variations within this structure, in poem after poem, are extraordinary. What is more extraordinary, however, is that irony and self-consciousness, both taken to extremes, have not suppressed intensity. Nor has Hopler’s devastating bitter wit, his Larkinesque crankiness, suppressed amazing verbal beauty.
His tonal range, like his range of formal strategies, is immense. How exhilarating to discover, in a long-winded period, a poet with a genius for epigram. A number of poems in Green Squall do not exceed six lines; others are made up of linked epigrams, bleak pensées connected together in one varied glittering comic gesture. “The Frustrated Angel,” for example, with its sly self-contained jibes and deadpan remarks:
The Angel says I have the quiet confidence and smoldering
Good looks one usually associates with more confident and attractive people.
A coward’s confession—, that’s what he thinks my ulcer is.
And later:
That’s mighty big talk, isn’t it, Hopler—coming from a man who lives with his mother?
Reprimand and regret weave through these poems like dark thread. Fantasies of erasure alternate with visions of stasis: Hopler broods over the present as one broods over a diagnosis—it confirms the past as it predicts the future’s cold encroaching certainties. But the major mistakes have all been made, the first having been the most dire:
1
Being born is a shame—
But it’s not so bad, as journeys go. It’s not the worst one
We will ever have to make. It’s almost noon
And the light now clouded in the courtyard is
Like that light one finds in baby pictures: old
And pale and hurt—
And later:
3
The clouded light has changed to rain.
The picture—. No, the baby’s blurry.
—“THAT LIGHT ONE FINDS IN BABY PICTURES”
Green Squall is a book filled with tardy recognitions and insights. Always we sense, beneath the surface of even the most raucous poems, impending crisis: the terrifying onset of that life long held at a distance. Always bravura is connected to melancholy, fastidious distinctions to wild exuberance, largesse to connoisseurship, self-contempt to uncontrollably erupting hopefulness. Hopler’s dreamy obscurities and rapturous effusions share with his more direct speech a refusal to be groomed into uncommunicative cool: they are encoded, not unintelligible. He writes like someone haunted or stalked; he wants, simultaneously, to hide and to end the anxiety of hiding, to reveal himself (in every sense of the word), to give himself away.
Like all art that has a chance to be remembered, Green Squall is an account of being. Such helpless authenticity seems rare now. But perhaps it has always been rare. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the ratio of competent verse to art has, in our time, shifted. Jay Hopler sounds like no one else: there is a kind of dazed surprise in the lines, as though the poet himself didn’t know where these riches came from. And excitement of the highest order: you could no more sleep through Hopler than you could sleep through an alarm clock—the pleasure, of course, is hardly comparable. Like all artists, Jay Hopler writes not to report or re-create experience but to create forms that both enact and define it:
1
Not enough effort in the sky for morning.
The only relics left are those long,
Blunt fingers among the multitudinous buds.
How hard it is, we say—
The will to work is laid aside.
2
I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries.
I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.
I have imagined bees coming and going.
I have said that the soul is not more than the body.
I’ve melted my silver for you.
I have strewn the leaf upon the sod.
I have just come down from my father.
I have suffered, in a dream, because of him.
3
Suddenly from all the green in the park,
A small white envelope appears.
As limpid, dense twilight comes,
The center of its patch of darkness, sparkling,
Rises like a moon made of black glass.
Beneath the clouds the low sky glows—
The garden that was never here,
Reveal it to me.
—“A BOOK OF COMMON DAYS”
2006