In certain cases, real deprivation occurs while a parent is alive. The permanent deprivation conferred by death may seem then a liberation: it is the late-arriving explanation of or justification for absence. By extension, in providing a cause for what has long been lacked, it releases the child from a sense of culpability. Finally the outside matches the inside. The family, finally, is not whole. No one can say otherwise.
It seems to me that the child who grows up in a family of this kind feels acutely a sense of secrecy: the truth is not available. Signals that truth is not to be demanded, nor established deceits queried, give rise to feelings of extreme precariousness or danger. In fact, there may be no dramatic secret at all. There may simply be embarrassment, the long-standing social habit of substituting fiction for candor. Regardless, the child feels that something that could destroy the family is being withheld. Ultimately, the child wishes it to be withheld because he wishes not to be destroyed. But he also wishes to know, resents the obligation to participate in a fraud. Whether the absent parent is physically present or not, the absence has not been convincingly accounted for or acknowledged. In either case, the child learns quickly because his motivation is deep: if needs will not be met, best to be self-sustaining. He learns to act a part, as do all family members in this system. For convenience, he disguises himself as a child as later he may disguise himself as a lover or scholar or family man. In any case, the integrity of the family Christmas card will have been preserved.
I mean here to distinguish absence from death, in that the missing parent continues to exist in time, so the tormenting hope of reunion remains plausible. The predicament of the child, in a period that may be prolonged by the continuation of the theoretically intact family, creates attitudes and dilemmas eerily resembling characteristics that have emerged in American poetry in the last quarter century.
The ancient and, to poetry, rewarding subject of loss has gradually given way: cataclysmic disappearance has been replaced by perpetual absence, an event replaced by a mood. In a world from which extremes of feeling have been banished, the distinction between dramatic loss and everyday experience is blurred or diminished. There will be no such shock again. Loss is the routine condition now, the overcast day, not the eclipse or storm. And a wholesome distaste for sentiment has calcified into a brittle amalgam of suspicion and wit.
Dan Chiasson’s father never materialized, though things were known about him, principally that he was still alive. And yet Chiasson’s poems inhabit anxieties of the kind I have described; he is obsessed with childhood, specifically a child’s negotiations with a reality that does not, somehow, match the reality he is told he lives in. He sees, more deeply than most, the solitude of childhood, preserved in the strange universe of the adult world, with its codes and signs and signals:
… bear with me while I try to convey what I want to convey
my father’s distance and yet the tendency of distant things
to become central; my tidelike ups and downs, up-downs
and down-ups and the influence of a superstellar body
upon me; my “poetry” as I hazard to call these writings;
bear with me because this movie, though vividly a record
of somebody saying something, has no sound of its own,
which means I might as well not have a mouth …
And later in this long poem, the title poem of Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon, in which a child is reading, or looking at, a book:
In our inattention, the child has come close to finishing
The Moonkeeper’s Son, and has learned how a grown man yearns
to go back to his time, beside his father, on the moon,
and dreams he is back there in childhood, which is
a kind of moon (this point the author intends), though mine
had a lot more pewter figurines of Christ strewn around it
than the moon, at least as it is classically represented,
would; a kind of moon, and fathers come and go, don’t they …
Dan Chiasson is a poet of dazzling intellectual resources and unmatched sophistication. His temperament is rapacious, wily; his ear quick; his range of reference memorable, in part for the casual ease of its uses. And yet the poems are more profound, more original, than their coolly enigmatic surfaces suggest. These surfaces seem a kind of dare or taunt to the reader, who is meant to sense, beneath Chiasson’s ruses and diversions, the immutable loss and sorrow and fear that give rise to them. The alertness here is the alertness of flight: all Chiasson’s worldliness, all his control, lay bare the constant dread beneath the surface, as though inventiveness and quickness could fend off catastrophe, or protect the precarious truce that has been made with reality.
This is a self in hiding or disguised, its evasions and flights impossible to track because they are not here-to-there escapes but rather a commitment to ceaseless mobility or a very specific and very revealing form of hiding, ventriloquism. Chiasson has inhabited, at various times, an elephant, a mosaic of a hare, a thread, the eye of a needle, and a revolving door, this last providing a pithy analysis of family or social life with its impossible-to-decode rules and signs:
I spit and swallow with equal gusto.
Spitting is not a sign of disgust.
Swallowing is not a sign of hunger.
Casting out is not a sign of anger.
Allowing in is not affection.
I chug along, doing what I’m meant to.
No disguise is more effective than compliance, no flight more devious than the route of the revolving door.
Chiasson’s obsessions have not shifted. And yet each book marks a deepening, discovers some new tone or structure that allows the present to incorporate the past more subtly, without falsifying it in any way.
His powers were not immediately apparent. The Afterlife of Objects documents technical and intellectual virtuosity. It seemed to me, when I read it in light of what followed, comparable to the school figures or compulsory figures in the Olympic skating competition, an event television viewers do not see. In fact, we probably wouldn’t know a perfect circle from a flawed circle, though we are reminded by the commentary that the great expressive skaters are not invariably perfect technicians. So, too, in other arts. But the conjoining of expressive capacity with brilliant technique—in dance, think of Farrell or Baryshnikov—produces an art of thrilling variety and daring.
Dan Chiasson seemed at first essentially a master of style: armored, elusive, fundamentally mistrustful, after the current fashion. What has come to distinguish him from others is his insight into the idiom of the time, in which nostalgia and irony replace overt intensity. Chiasson is uniquely a poet for whom hiddenness is a profound psychic truth, a poet for whom guardedness corresponds to rather than precludes inwardness. The authentic self is performed as a false self, but every pose is a clue. Hiddenness and flight are not devices by which interiority is fended off. They are maps to insight and every detail of performance is a glimpse of the obsessed self.
As book has succeeded book, Chiasson’s poems have made these performances increasingly resonant and poignant, the structures more and more supple and capacious, in their elegance capable of bearing unimaginable weight. Fictions, inventions, plays, masquerades: these are still central. The poems continue to rely on and exploit artifice, but this, after all, is how a child tells his story. Which, in Bicentennial, is the story of how a child (himself) is provided with a father (himself).
Midway through the title poem, a young nun takes out a coin from the collection she has brought to the convent, a “… Standing Liberty quarter / Engraved with the first initial of a boy / She’d dated, and who’d taken her to the fair.” This is the climax, for the speaker, of the interlude:
I had the distinct impression she still loved him,
The way the whole afternoon led up
To her getting the quarter from her drawer,
And putting it on the TV tray
Next to her bed, next to the rosary,
And watched me react when she said
The word boy.…
The boy standing there—the speaker—is a collector, too, and knows the value of every coin; he wonders “How much less it now was worth engraved”:
Now she puts the coin into the drawer, and
We move inside my mind to the Paris skyline,
Where an enormous Ferris wheel appears,
Lit by the light it generates, a wheel
That spins and spins nowhere, nowhere,
All night, whether we watch it or not,
And children are having their childhoods right now,
This late in time, as though they had to stand in line
Just to be born …
There is a section break after the line, so the Ferris wheel, which has given its name and essence to an earlier poem, stays a bit in the mind, an emblem of detachment and escape—but this is a new kind of escape, endless, without destination, an image of being carried or borne. The children standing in the line are waiting, the poem tells us,
Just to be born, get on, and ride, and
From the top they see the sliver of history
Fate is allowing them to see, before
They disembark and scatter, some to joy,
Some to misery, and whether they live
For a hundred years or die, as some have,
Tomorrow, this is the childhood these children
Are having, which is something I remind
My own children, all the time—I say,
You are having your childhood now;
And they say, yes, Daddy, and I say,
Jokingly, but not really, how do you feel it is going,
And they light up and say, Great,
Which is just what I would have said as a kid
If someone—though who would it have been?—
Had asked me this very same question:
The Ferris wheel is the revolving door from Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon turned vertical, celestial, a circle like the sullied quarter (worth both less and more). In “Bicentennial,” though, repetition allows for mutation or correction. This father speaks to his children as though that long-absent father had finally appeared, filled with all the information and wisdom it had been his part to convey; he speaks to his children as to reasoning beings, the joking question also a reminder to stay conscious. What follows has the sweetness of a book for new readers: the generous-hearted children may not understand the question but they know the answer. The children reassure their father, who has appealed, after all, to their analytic capacities at a moment when the script can still be modified. Their father needs to know that his moodiness and withdrawals have not crippled the children or destroyed their childhoods—that period in which trust in the world is still possible. The children’s collaboration contains, it seems, no fear or anxiety, only solicitous tenderness, a mirror of their father’s feelings toward them. The question changes the narrative slightly (no one has actually asked it before), and the response the poet would like to have made is now the response of his children. Possibly not the truth, but spoken out of a fullness of heart nevertheless.
The Ferris wheel they have all ridden together is also the Ferris wheel of a miraculous “play,” very formal and very short, about adult passion and adult regret. The cast is small: a Man and a Faerie. The Faerie (playing her guitar) tells the Man:
Your symbol is the Ferris wheel, which gobbles
Its own tail, the peaceful circle,
The serene return to origin and out again,
As though the return never happened,
The journey undoing the return,
The return undoing the journey,
The pattern made from the pattern it traces:
A pattern that, by tracing it, it erases.
The man remembers his children’s loving the Ferris wheel in Paris:
… I can remember thinking,
How odd that I am thinking,
Not about the Paris skyline
(Which I had never seen, though I was thirty-nine)
But about the Paris Ferris wheel,
Not at all interested in the Champs, or Notre Dame,
It felt like an affirmation of what is really human.
I thought of community theater for some reason.
I had a deep wish that someday
My boys would play
Clara in a drag version of The Nutcracker,
The weird things people do to make each other happy—
Before long, the ride ends. The Faerie begins to weep uncontrollably. We realize—we are told—that the two have been, in the past, lovers. And the man wishes they could perform the play over (toward, we infer, a less wrenching end). We are instructed to think of the poem as a play, the lines repeated nightly, the Faerie’s tears shed nightly—many men, centuries of men, and many Faeries, all imprisoned in the same narrative, the Ferris wheel corresponding to the immutable storyline.
Bicentennial is, in a sense, a meditation on circles; the Ferris wheel is, I think, the circle’s most profound iteration. The calm progress of the wheel is both escape from earth and, as well, a means by which perspective is shifted. Time seems, for the period of the ride, more like eternity and less like what the line (to invoke a competing geometric term) represents as it sprints from birth to death but never back. In this extraordinary book, the line and circle coexist. Nothing is just one thing: the coin tainted by attachment is also the coin the young nun values, different from all other Standing Liberty quarters. And the realistic boy, who hasn’t as yet felt these emotions, feels a kind of awe in their presence as well as mild contempt.
Biographical fact shapes human life, but it does not predict the imaginative constructions that given materials may produce. Dan Chiasson’s gift could have elaborated itself in endless dexterities; human attachment has made this art not only adroit but passionate and worried and exposed. The births of his own children have allowed the recasting of a pivotal role; the absent father can, at last, be replaced. The children in these poems can have two real parents. They can be encouraged to think about their experiences, to discuss them. There can be a home for the wit and plangency that are the poems’ signature. It is a fantasy, of course—as it is a curiosity that Chiasson’s real father does die, his remoteness becoming complete, final.
Nothing in that past can be changed or restored. But the present can change the way it is thought about. In this new enactment, presence can replace absence, which is the best that can be managed in human time.
2016