And controversy hence a question takes,
Whether the horse by him became his deed,
Or he his manage by the well-doing steed.
“A Lover’s Complaint,” attributed to William Shakespeare,
published by Thomas Thorpe as an appendix to the sonnets in 1609
RECENTLY THERE’S BEEN CONTROVERSY in the poetry world, sparked by Helen Vendler’s hard-hitting review of Rita Dove’s Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2011) in the New York Review of Books. The follow-up exchange between Vendler and Dove has, in turn, generated articles, letters to the editors, blogs, Facebook posts—you name it. This has been fascinating, but it is only good if the ensuing discussion can tell us something about the state of the art.
I found myself first on one side of the argument and then the other—so much so that it occurred to me the argument itself was not very well defined. The problem, as I see it, lies to a large extent in the way Penguin elected to advertise the anthology, claiming it is “an unparalleled survey of the best poems of the past century.” If only with the omission (due to cost) of Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg, the collection can hardly live up to that claim—and maybe if there had been less hype, the responses would have been more measured. But couple this overreaching assertion with the usual disputes with any anthology over which poets—and what poems—have been included under the label of “best” (and therefore which poets—and what poems—have been omitted/demoted), and you have a recipe for heated literary debate.
Anthologies, by their very nature, seem to imply “best” when they should probably, at most, be considered “representative.” Dove’s twenty-four-page introduction gives a lucid overview of the various movements in American poetry, along with the offshoots they spawned. With 176 poets represented, Dove makes it clear that she is trying for widespread inclusion. But American poetry exploded in the twentieth century, and any editor would need at least double this book’s 570 pages to do justice to the many tentacles. Vendler’s more scholarly approach, on the other hand, would require a more comprehensive overview of fewer poets. From the outset, Dove and Vendler were on different critical pages, and one could argue with each of them on her own terms: “best” is the issue around which Vendler mounted her quarrel; being “representative” is what Dove makes clear she wanted to accomplish as she made some radical shifts in what has, up to now, been widely considered the twentieth-century canon.
I think the reviewer’s task—of assessment and prediction—is very like the job of an anthologist. Almost every worthwhile discussion involves a look at how the work under consideration fits into a tradition, a reflection on how it does or doesn’t push at the boundaries of content and craft, and a guess at how it will make an impact on the future. Very early in the process, any committed reviewer begins to compile a life list of names that make up his or her “ghost” anthology.
So, I found it instructive to read the introduction to F. O. Matthiessen’s Oxford Book of American Verse, published just before his death in 1950. With only fifty-one poets in 1,103 pages, Matthiessen might seem to favor Vendler’s approach. But he managed to be remarkably inclusive, indicating the many ways that Americans had added their own brand of energy to the art. His introductory tone is leisurely and, at the same time, balanced and informative. He states that “Anne Bradstreet still remains our first American poet,” and his lucid discussions of Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and H.D. further demonstrate that he was not interested only in the work of dead white men. On his calibrated scales, and with some crucial critical distance, he was able to state that “Stevens has proved steadier than Pound” and “Frost is the poet of individualism,” while Eliot shows the “need for the individual to find completion in something larger than himself.”
Mathiessen uses a gentle humor as he establishes his working methods:
There are so many different ways of making anthologies that any anthologist had better begin by stating the rules of the game as he accepts them. A generation ago the usual practice was to include as many poets as possible, represented by two or three poems apiece. That served to introduce you to all the talents, but had the same confusing effect as a party that is too big. So my first rule has been: fewer poets, with more space for each. . . .
The second rule accepted here is to include nothing on merely historical grounds, and the third is similar, to include nothing that the anthologist does not really like, no matter what its reputation with others. These rules . . . grant that the pleasure of savoring and comparing different periods is one of the rewards of a lively interest in cultural history. . . .
Rule four is: not too many sonnets. They may seem to provide the easiest and neatest way of filling your pages, but they will kill one another. . . .
Rule five runs counter to all Golden Treasuries by holding that, whenever practicable, a poet should be represented by poems of some length. One of the effects of anthologies upon popular taste has been to overemphasize the lyric at the expense of all other genres. . . .
The sixth and last rule is: no excerpts.
Even within his own restrictions, he admits that “the space allotted to the various poets is not always proportional to their relative importance” and acknowledges that “mere length is of course deceptive.” He breaks his own rules by including excerpts from Pound’s Cantos and Hart Crane’s The Bridge. In closing, his astute analysis leads him to deduce that “If this poetry reveals violent contrasts and unresolved conflicts, it corresponds thereby to American life.”
Matthiessen’s selection reminds me that anthologies are about the past as much as the future. There will always be some poets in need of resurrection, and he finds ample room for those important, now-neglected southern poets John Crowe Ransom, Conrad Aiken, and Allen Tate. I find myself reading them again, in new contexts. Even more telling, I am faced with what I consider to be a problem for all anthologies that cover a set period of time (as opposed to a particular subject, or movement, or mode)—and that is how the most recent material (the stuff that is most often the province of the reviewer) is handled. It’s relatively easy to sort through the past and see what work has stood the test of time; it’s a bit more difficult to uncover work that has been overlooked or to resurrect work that has a personal attraction; and it is decidedly not easy to predict which contemporary works will speak to, and for, the future. Yet future relevance is where the difference of opinion has genuine critical ramifications. The predicament is that an anthology of any note may—no will—be used in the classroom as though it were the definitive arbiter for an entire period: a canon-maker of its own.
Imagine an anthology of nineteenth-century British poetry, printed in 1911. Such a collection almost certainly would trivialize someone like Yeats, who had yet to write his important later poems. It could not predict how Wilfred Owen would couple his elegant use of form with the stark realities of World War I, making him a potent addition for the twentieth century. Here is my question: how can any anthologist represent present-day poems when we do not yet know the subterranean forces at work and the way the future will likely see them playing out in poetry? Those forces include the political scene—not an upcoming election but the large-scale shifts in philosophy and outlook that characterize certain times, the kind that make us just now able to assess what was happening in the Germany of 1933 or the South Africa of 1970. But they also include linguistic experimentation (the kind that influenced the surrealists or today’s Language poets) and quantum leaps in poetics (the kind that made for movements such as “imagism” or “the confessionals”). What, I wonder, would have happened if any of those movements had come in the last ten years of a century, before they had time to make their way into a more general consciousness?
F. O. Matthiessen deliberately skirted those issues, taking the route of “fewer poets.” Of the seven under the age of fifty in his selection, six are still integral to American letters: Robert Penn Warren, W. H. Auden, Karl Shapiro, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell. Only Howard Baker is not instantly recognizable. (Note: in 1950, Elizabeth Bishop’s first book was four years old, Robert Hayden was still offstage, and Sylvia Plath was not yet on the horizon.) Although today we would probably allocate these poets’ work in different proportions, this is an amazing track record—one with which any anthologist (or reviewer) would fear to compete.
Rita Dove has elected to include a larger percentage of younger poets—thirty-eight were under fifty (and ten of them were under forty) in the year 2000. These younger writers show a broadening base for poetry, yet, for all their numbers, they do not reveal a new aesthetic hovering in the wings, nor is there sufficient range to cover the experimental atmosphere presently at play. In order for them to be included, the full accomplishment of the previous generation seems to have been shortchanged, and several prominent poets born between 1935 and 1945 are mysteriously absent.
Maybe the solution is to be even more bold. If we can’t predict what will prevail, we might at least put our fingers on the tenuous pulse of a nation, feel out its range of moods and its underlying diversities. Why not state the obvious—that it’s too soon to do anything other than indicate the various, multiple directions and concerns of contemporary work—and then open the door with a proliferation of, say, fifty or more new poets, giving the reader a sense of the century opening out, rushing toward a future that will only later be measured and evaluated? This would entail some demarcation, maybe even a two-volume set, but it could empower future students by asking them to be the perceptive readers we hope they will become. The good teacher might open up the newer poems to examination—or offer up to debate the relevance of poetry itself. Penguin’s ads might have to shift from “best” to “representative” in the most accurate sense of the latter. The tenor of the discussion would change—and the impassioned “complaint” might be seen for what it is: a lovers’ quarrel.
In this light, I will examine some recent work for how it makes a transition from the old century to the new, and speculate on its eventual long-term effects.
Marvin Bell’s Dead Man appeared at the tail end of the 1980s but didn’t declare himself fully until 1994 when he asked that we follow him into brave new worlds. However, these things take time, so he returned in 1997; then, in 2004, the faint sound of his “resurrected footsteps” summoned us again. Now, in 2011, he is almost apocryphal and has emerged in two new books, asking—no demanding—more of us. The Dead Man is urgent; he has something to say, and he needs a response:
He dares to wake the audience.
He is of a mind to taunt and defy, to provoke and to goad.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Tell him you know.
Cover your mouth if you need to, but speak up.
Okay, just who is the Dead Man? He’s not quite Bell, but he is the product of his mind. In fact, he’s mostly mind, touching as the mind touches—a roving catchall for scraps of thought, observation, speculation, meditation, oddball coincidence, idiosyncratic cosmology, past, present, future, wit, worry, wisdom. He may have tried—and failed—to “cut a break in the Möbius strip of experience,” but still he takes us on a dizzy ride along interconnection’s scenic highway. The electronic world of the Internet is perhaps his métier; he is as fast, as random, as all-informed and underwhelmed as that. Here, let him speak for himself: “The dead man is the ultimate camouflage. / He is everywhere, but where is he?” One might say, as Randall Jarrell said of William Carlos Williams, “There is no optimistic blindness in [him] though there is a fresh gaiety, a stubborn or invincible joyousness.”
Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems is not just more of the same, however. The book announces itself in enigma with an epigraph: “The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it” (Bertrand Russell). Although Bell has retained the sentence as his working unit for the line, the poems of Vertigo are arranged alphabetically by title, as if to say there is no rhyme nor reason, no chronology or logic to it all. But remember the subtitle. He’s “living” now—he does not “mean,” but is—and that suggests that his thoughts are more connected, his sentences are more likely to follow one another in associative patterns we recognize. The haphazard becomes a method of coherence. If the Dead Man thinks about hats, for example, he sticks to his subject, even if it does take him as far as the desert, Astaire & Rogers, Prague, Havana, fedoras, helmets, hard hats, berets. “The dead man does not come to you hat in hand”—and you are challenged, again, to see that poetry does not beg, but proffers. If the Dead Man considers wartime, he does not let you off easy: “He has unpinned the grenade and cocked his arm like a pitcher with no target. / He has lobbed death into the distance without knowing where or why. . . . The dead man touches the horror day and night, why don’t you?”
Taking in a few sentences of Vertigo at random, any reader would find it impossible to miss the sure ear that dominates this collection. The rhythms are those of speech, but speech raised to the nth power, speech infused with the vigor of aphorism and the echo of prosody. The music, though somewhat masked by the sheer energy of Bell’s combinatorial method, is the river in which the ideas eddy, mix, and remix.
I have said before that I think the Dead Man challenges readers of poetry to think about what poetry really is, what it really does. He asks us to rethink the endeavor; the spaces he opens are new places. The Dead Man may take an ordinary walk, but his quotidian observations are never just simple insight, warmed-up nostalgia, or false epiphany. He shuns what’s easy in favor of widely ranging topics and complex juxtapositions that leave the reader to fill in gaps and find new directions. In short, he involves us in the making of meaning.
In Vertigo, Bell makes this challenge overt by tackling the relationship between ideas and things. Two fifteen-sentence disquisitions (“About the Dead Man and ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’” and “More About the Dead Man and ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’”) introduce a whole new form of literary criticism, and they belong alongside any critical study of William Carlos Williams’ famous poem. The Dead Man’s “take” demonstrates intimate knowledge of the good doctor’s entire body of work:
Not an actual wheelbarrow, not the thing itself.
The dead man has been asked about the thought of the barrow.
Not of a pushcart, not of the gardener, not of the farmer.
This red wheelbarrow sits pristine after rain.
The dead man can tell it is spring and all, it’s the rain.
The reader is laughingly asked to participate. “Thus” did the Dead Man “peel the layers of claptrap.” And further, thus did he talk, with reverence, about the poem:
To the dead man, the poem is itself a dance, a complex of the
sensory at a distance neither of time nor of space.
Albeit, it is as well a piece in a jigsaw of the imagination and a
credo born of desire.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The dead man can hold in mind a red wheelbarrow and a blue
guitar at the same time.
They are equally light in the ether.
Stevens was music, Williams was dance, the wheelbarrow was red.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
So much depended on the poem having no title.
Marvin Bell treats us to his own wily mind making its own dancing connections and, at the same time, asks us to put even that activity into perspective. With his restless inventiveness, the dead man (now lower-case d) is equally light in the ether. The camera zooms out, and out, until the individual becomes a dark speck on the floor of the canyon below, while poetry itself . . . well, the wheelbarrow was red.
And then the camera zooms in again. Whiteout pairs four of the poems from Vertigo and twenty new Dead Man poems with photographs by Nathan Lyons, the founding director of the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. In his introduction, Bell states that their desire was not to illustrate but to work so that “Each photograph would create a perimeter. Each poem would look over its shoulder.” The resulting poems are neither description nor commentary, but accompaniment. Whiteout has been beautifully produced, and Lyons’ astutely observant and imaginative eye reminds us just how real the Dead Man is: in image after image—masks, skulls, graffiti, statues, gargoyles, icons, windows, signs, and shadows—Lyons has uncovered the skeletal evidence of his presence in the world. The lost and the obsolete are his domain, and the corresponding poems play with idea more than image, forcing uncanny perception (“the spraycan is just a shortcut, like camera obscura”) and uncomfortable recognition (“They come and go like the neutral stares of strangers”). The photograph engages the eye; the writer enlarges the image until what he says of it becomes a part of what it is.
So, with the added substance of these two books, I’ll inch myself further out on my limb and restate that I believe Marvin Bell’s Dead Man poems should close any anthology of the twentieth century and open any anthology of this new century’s work. They change the game. They insist that we pay a new and different kind of attention. They ask for abstract thought about concrete event: Williams squared. And they persist—like the dead man who speaks them, like the poet who speaks him—as a testament to what it is to have lived in these turbulent times, to have loved this world with a clear, unclouded eye, reminding us in every possible way that “A poem is about what is happening as you read it.”
In his several ways of looking, Wallace Stevens tried to distinguish between the idea of the thing and the thing itself, eschewing Kant’s “thing in itself” in favor of Nietzsche’s more subjective views of art. Marvin Bell finds common ground between Williams and the more cerebral Stevens by holding red wheelbarrow (object) and blue guitar (imagination) in his mind simultaneously. Jane Hirshfield bridges the same gaps, but with entirely different methods. The “things” of Come, Thief are multitudinous—the table of contents, with its characteristic emphasis on the noun, might suggest a hard examination of the tangible world: “French Horn,” “The Pear,” “Chapel,” “Sweater,” “Protractor,” “Green-striped Melons,” “Wild Plum,” “Sheep,” “Suitcase.” But “idea” also proliferates, with titles such as “Critique of Pure Reason,” “If Truth Is the Lure, Humans Are Fishes,” and “When Your Life Looks Back.” More telling are the titles using the conjunction “and”—the connective tissue that combines and recombines to spark the neurons: “Vinegar and Oil” with its unexpected reversal; “Building and Earthquake” with its flare of apprehension; “Heat and Desperation” to whet the appetite; “Stone and Knife” to solidify association. Even a glimpse at such titles jolts the reader into new terrain—a cloud chamber where particles collide and suggest new possibilities.
Like Shaker furniture, Hirshfield’s work is more complex than its simple lines might suggest. Not content to let the idea simply reside in the “thing,” and not satisfied with a purely theoretical approach, Hirshfield melds object, abstraction, and imagination in something more akin to collage. Her poems move so quickly—a Chinese painter’s brushstroke—from thing to idea to thing that the two are, almost literally, inseparable. The shifts are mercurial, so much so that we apprehend them in the same instant of time. Consider the gap between the title of “The Decision” and its first two lines:
There is a moment before a shape
hardens, a color sets.
Via that white space, the reader is drawn into an emotional landscape where the nature of the decision is unknown, but the ephemeral quality of the experience is almost material. The letter that could be snatched back, the word still unsaid: “The thorax of an ant is not as narrow. / The green coat on old copper weighs more.” So small, and yet something, even in potential, has changed, and “it cannot be after turned back from.” The poem catches the ineffable moment when the mind, or heart, could go in any direction—the moment that, by its very existence, introduces alternative, option, choice. What is unspoken or unacted is, therefore, also something. Some thing, caught in the currents that hold the stillness exactly.
In many ways, Hirshfield demonstrates not so much the ideal “vortex” of Pound’s imagism as the fusion of moment and insight found in the best haiku. Like haiku, where the juxtaposition hinges on a kireji that cuts the stream of thought and thus colors the way the ideas are related, her poems are anchored in the natural world yet make associative connections and quicksilver adjustments that let the mind do its subterranean work. Two small poems on opposing pages give a feel for the way the blend of external and internal worlds creates a new, and insistent, awareness:
The Dark Hour
The dark hour came
in the night and purred by my ear.
Outside, in rain,
the plush of the mosses stood higher.
Hour without end, without measure.
It opens the window and calls its own name in.
*
Everything Has Two Endings
Everything has two endings—
a horse, a piece of string, a phone call.
And after.
As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.
Each of these poems captures a moment in time and then opens out, reaching for the infinite. The thing in itself is considered in its fuller context—its possibilities and limitations, its history and future as well as its palpable present. The poem is completed in the reader—it “happens” as you read it.
Yet Hirshfield’s poems do not happen in a vacuum. She alerts us, again and again, to the moments that could otherwise be lost, the shimmer of possibility inherent in any situation. “There is something that waits inside us, / a nearness that fissures, that fishes,” she writes in “Of Yield and Abandon,” and in “A Thought” she senses the source of that something: “One word’s almost / imperceptible shiver.”
Come, Thief contains three dominant images: window, bell, and water. Sight, sound, and fluid life force. In each case, she complicates before she clarifies: “A lit window at night in the distance: / idea almost graspable, finally not” (“Big-Leaf Maple Standing over Its Own Reflection”). She asks in “Of Yield and Abandon,” “But what is the point of preserving the bell / if to do so it must be filled with concrete or wax?”—yet in another instance (in “A Roomless Door”) silence is made dynamic as the sound of weeping becomes “a piano’s 89th key.” And what of metaphor? “Too slow for rain, / too large for tears, / and grief / cannot be seen” (“It Must Be Leaves”). “A Blessing for Wedding” unites all three images in its litany:
Today when windows keep their promise to open
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Today when rain leaps to the waiting of roots in their dryness
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly
Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears
Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes
Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you
Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days
Poems like these work their best magic when juxtaposition calls up an almost instantaneous recognition. Otherwise, the reader will struggle to force the perception and the resulting comprehension will be overly intellectual. For this reason, some of the poems are more successful than others, and many of those I most appreciate pay extra attention to sound—in the form of rhyme. The echoes come hard on each other’s heels, deftly dodging expectation in favor of surprise. “Three-Legged Blues” plays with interior refrain as it goes through variations on “What almost happens, doesn’t. / What might be lost, you’ll lose.” “My Luck” fools around with “up” and “down” until syntax itself becomes a driving force. “A Hand Is Shaped for What It Holds or Makes”* is an electrifying cross between terza rima and villanelle, then and now, memory and loss. It erases time even as it takes its measure. “Once we were one. Then what time did, and hands, erased / us from the future we had owned.” The line break erases the “us” and propels the poem toward its final stanza, where the poet recognizes what poetry cannot do:
Wasps leave their nest. Wind takes the papery case.
Our wooden house, less easily undone,
now houses others. A life is shaped by what it holds or makes.
I make these words for what they can’t replace.
And so I nominate that poem for inclusion in my own imagined anthology because it pulls the tradition into the next century, a tribute of the current to its source. And, if I could have a second entry, it would surely be the final poem of the book, “The Supple Deer,” which opens with simple description of how a buck (antlers to hind hooves) “poured” through a gap in a fence without leaving behind even a tuft of belly hair. But Jane Hirshfield’s felt longing elevates the description to insight: not self-knowledge, less fleeting than that . . . something more encompassing, more akin to the indefinable suddenly given expression:
I don’t know how a stag turns
into a stream, an arc of water.
I have never felt such accurate envy.
Not of the deer:
To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me.
Over a decade ago, in 2001, I was reading thousands of individual poems nominated for another anthology—the Pushcart Prize. How would I choose only fifteen? Which fifteen? So many poets whose work I did not know, so many poets writing about so much, in so many ways. And then there was one poem—by Kevin Prufer—and I knew. Knew instantly that it was a poem that spoke both of the past and to the future. The twenty-first century was underway, and here was one poet who had opened himself fully to its brutal beginnings.
Four books later, Prufer is still exploring our nation’s most difficult issues—not in the docudrama style of much contemporary poetry but within a visionary landscape that acts as moral challenge. By evoking a state of post-apocalyptic trauma, Prufer plunges himself into imagined realms where perspective shifts and shimmers; he can concentrate on the microscopic and the infinite within the same poem; he can “look down” on his subject as if from a great height, can weigh, and grapple, and enter.
In a Beautiful Country is not very different in tone from Prufer’s two preceding books, both of which also posit a fallen empire, something at the flute end of consequence—a battle-scarred landscape within which we see the world with a post-9/11, post-Iraq, post-the-next-war outlook. “Transparent Cities,” a kind of futuristic fairy tale, reminds us not only of the recent past but of the potential future:
Terrible city many years from now
and the burning paper
that sears the hair with embers—
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I rocked with every step
the black horse took
and gasped to see transparent towers rise
like God’s great hands unflexing from the snow banks,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Such buildings and the dust
that glittered over us.
The personal terrain is once again covered with snow; it sifts through cracks and colors the heart. In “The Ambassador” snow hides the corpse that takes its surprising indifference with it into another state of being:
I am a worthless, unproductive thing,
far beneath the weeds:
jawbone split by roots, a useless finger bone,
while natives turn the earth above and, once or twice,
a piece of me turns with it,
rising to catch the air,
then down again into the soil.
The narrator of the poems is often just such a generalized figure, an abstracted being who seems more spokesman than speaker, but even when the “I” plays a more conventional role, it retains the detached distance necessary to assess and comment, note anomaly and pinpoint irony. Much of the material of these poems is familiar: hospital, illness, war, conflagration, aftermath, aftermath, aftermath. But the speaker’s remove gives it all a retrospective blush; his is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. In “Night Watch” even grief is softened and blurred by imagination:
My father, as I implied, would die that night.
That was thirty days ago.
And the boy,
he was far below, in a story I invented,
sleeping in a car
as daylight broke through clouds,
and try as they might,
they couldn’t wake him.
In a very real way, it’s true that the child does die with the parent’s death, and the admittedly invented story unearths a universal.
As shown, Prufer’s lines range across the page, and the stanzas are often set off by the use of intervening marks. Like gems, each facet is framed with white space, seeming to float a bit like the often-invoked snowflakes. Even more, these poems read easily out loud, unfolding their sense in sure cadences that lull you into a dreamscape, then startle you awake, face to face with what you’d hoped to guard against. In this manner, In a Beautiful Country forces you to peer into the cloudy mirror of incrimination that solidifies Prufer’s reputation for walking the tightrope between the personal and the political, and rounds out his cautionary tale.
Of course, this now-familiar landscape—of burning buildings, falling people, myths that fail and failure turned to myth, obliterating snow and stars that glitter overhead in their great cold—could begin to seem redundant. So, to rekindle the reader’s imagination Prufer will need to find new ways to augment and even alter his project as he continues to examine what he sees as the moral fissures in modern-day America.
One of Kevin Prufer’s strengths is his ability to startle with the apt adjective, the unpredictable verb, or the eccentric perspective. The patriot missile has a “perfect, absent brain”; bombers “unzip” the sky; the “body / buried in the black char of branches” is “after all, not a man, but a woman, / that was, after all, / a pile of leaves—” And, oh, those “pills” of snow. But facility with words is not all that will be needed to intensify his now-established message.
In a Beautiful Country does contain hints of something new to come. The first is an increased attention to form and rhyme—often a rhyme that deliberately deteriorates as the material gets more and more problematic, going from true to slant to none as though to demonstrate that rhyme itself can be an obfuscation. Beginning with light humor, these poems often veer into unexpected places. Humor can trivialize, and some of Prufer’s rhyming poems seem to want to show us how that happens by letting their subjects deteriorate right under our ears.
Those poems are complemented by the second new ingredient—a proliferation of the ars poetica, culminating in “Four Artes Poeticae.” Within the larger context of the book’s dark vision, they imply the perennial question: what is the meaning of poetry in such a world? The first stanza of “Ars Poetica” announces itself as a kind of nursery rhyme:
A bomb undid the barn
and blew the horse apart
and charred the little lamb
I loved with half my heart.
(It made me think of art.)
In the following poem (also titled “Ars Poetica”), the speaker addresses the plight of a man who has just badly injured himself crashing through the glass patio doors:
And where was I? There I was, on the other side of town, looking out the window at the snow,
holding this brand new poem in one hand and my phone in the other.
The dialogue between the poems makes it obvious that, for Prufer, the answer to the larger question is less than clear. If a poem cannot save a person, then the poet cannot save the world (no matter how much he “thinks of art”). Finally, in the series of four “artes poeticae,” the speaker discloses his fallback position: “Dear God of Art, / I was always talking to you.” That the God of Art was not impressed is a given. He was not impressed when the poet dissected the butterfly and laid it out for all to see, nor was he moved when the speaker cut his finger watching “your hundred deer” devour plants in the garden. The lonely, solitary “I” is left to “the long night of the mind,” and God’s “million glass stars / keep falling / on the rooftop” (“In My Brain Is a Room; In That Room You Are Sleeping”).
The big question remains: what can poetry do in a degraded world? At the end of this present century, an anthologist may provide the answer, but for now one can only predict that Prufer’s unsettling prophecies will have staying power. There is no other contemporary voice quite like his, and I believe that, taken as a whole, Kevin Prufer’s prognostic backward gaze may someday prove to have shown us where we were going before we got there. Maybe the God of Art will approve.
Every once in a while a writer emerges for whom language is ultimate. Not just Coleridge’s “best words in the best order,” but the Word. Kevin Goodan’s third book, Upper Level Disturbances, establishes him as one of these. Anchored to history and place, rooted in personal experience and loss, the poems do not find closure but instead open out into question—and quest. Goodan knows that a question takes a long time to answer, and that maybe the answer cannot be found, so he moves in language as though to reach for the something he knows is not there—and in so doing to find, somehow, the something that is.
For Goodan, the “things” are, for the most part, of the land—but silo and corn-crib, thresher and kill-truck, are as much a part of the landscape as river and bluff, pine and hawk. Rain falls on them all in equal measure. The land, with its cycles of death and renewal, legends itself deep, the way it is. Goodan’s focus here is on the work—the tools and the drudgery and the rare moments of providence. His poems display the vocabulary of hard use, not just hay-rake and band-saw, but words with which we are less familiar: swale and stob and kerf and knurl. In fact, at times sound is almost a substitute for language. Goodan gives voice to the machines, finding in them a “link” to understanding. “Thus I Am Called, Thresher to the Fields” begins where Frost’s “The Tuft of Flowers” began, by following “the one who has come before,” but Goodan blurs the “I,” moving intimately into the gears so that driver and thresher are one:
And I move with a hub on trunnions,
A spring draw bar, a friction clutch—
Its hinged arms beveling the flywheel
For its sacred duty.
Frost’s “questions that have no reply” become, in Goodan’s hands, a laborer’s prayer:
That the tandem simple valves not seize,
That the bedplate and guides be bored,
And the automatic band cutters,
Pneumatic stackers
Forget not the weight per bushel of grain
The state of heaven requires—
And grant me torque blocks
Against which to twist my life.
With its clatter of precise nouns, this poem might almost be an anti-pastoral, but Goodan is equally eloquent when it comes to description of the natural world:
I watch the air become
Si, si, si, si of a migrant bird unknowable.
Last night I glimpsed storm through slits between trees.
Whispered home to the lightning
Which came down and came down then vanished.
Goodan’s work closely exemplifies Donald Hall’s description of a poem as being “one man’s inside talking to another man’s inside.” The poem completes itself inside the reader—not as a statement or story, but as a second voice simultaneously reaching for the unknowable. Goodan understands the difference between correlation and cause and effect, and so his poems refuse to “add up” so much as they “add to.” They proceed with the quickened “logic” of instinct so that meaning is generated not by what they say but what they do—by their very method of coming into being.
Sentences end with missing subjects or predicates. Or sentences proceed with such radical enjambments that parts of lines become units of sense, to be read forward and backward with the shifting perspective of an Escher painting. Compound nouns turn lines gnarled and dense. Verbs disquiet them. Often, new words are coined—words that ought to exist, need to exist, in order to better approximate a feeling. Consonants crackle; vowels woo; phrases twist their recombinant DNA down through the vertical plane. Like stones in a creek bed, the capital letters that begin each line disrupt the horizontal flow, and sense is deflected, is cut through by wind, by fire, by memory’s insistent claims. Often the gap between the extended title and the poem can only be bridged by intuition. “The Flame-Front I Maintain Is for This Tinder Only,” with its one long sentence staking out an emotional meteorology, exhibits most of these attributes:
Smoke
And the scent of smoke
The yellowed curls rising,
Bramble knurled, thorn-riven,
A surge of scorn-briar across the brakes,
Poplar storm-torqued in the gaze,
Stone-boat keeled to the dead-furrow flooded,
A thrashing in the fire,
In the brindle gussets of the fire,
I stir, I stir, white oak, sugar maple sappy,
Flame-spits from the bark
Of every feral being,
My face a roiling seepage of code
Down into the fire,
A name for every wrongness,
The harsh, the true,
A brightness not the world,
A blinding, like voices surging through the keys
Trying to find home-notes
By the intercession, at the intersection
Of the crown-fire in the folds of the mind,
Poplar that are memory,
Briar about my face, the fire
Cresting the ridge of my words
In the dry, autumnal dark,
In the fields of the floodplain,
In my eyes, in our eyes
Where the fire feasts upon the patterns of other weathers.
Each poem in Upper Level Disturbances acts in a similar manner. Images coalesce, and the reader discerns meaning by piecing together scraps taken from the entire collection.
With its Plath-like intensity, the opening poem, “Come Take These Words from Me,” establishes not the book’s tone but its pitch:
And through the day we feed the fires
And transform the field-jumble into lines.
Far faces bleared by fire, who are you
That the bright mares of language stride forth
Their flames? I am never more than this.
Fire becomes the book’s informing metaphor. If Kevin Prufer’s conflagration serves a futuristic vision, Kevin Goodan’s functions as reminder—and forge. His fires do not lick and fawn; they blaze up, searing the lungs. Goodan is no stranger to fire, having served as a firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service for ten years; in poem after poem, he uses its vocabulary (cauterize, smolder, cinder, ash, tempering, carbonized) and knows its predilections (“stobs and understory kilned by the radiants”). He understands how the tinder is fuel, the bellows is agent. Words are “rivets” of fire, and a dead starling gives off a “negative flame.”
In many ways, each poem aspires to its vanishing point. “I write letters to the unseen,” the speaker states. As with Goodan’s first two books, there is an ever more elusive “you” so shrouded that it serves in turn as the poet, the reader, a loved one gone, and a cryptic god whose very shape is silence: “And I will live another year / Without you, but this rain / Makes the present and past / Almost marry.” Here present and past coincide even as the poet moves into the future, knowing that the ever-expanding present will always include the loss. But “You do not come near me now as you did years ago” (“Last Moth Before Winter”) and “Yours is a landscape where no past thrives” (“She Called Your Name Over and Over Then Died They Said”).
In this new collection, Goodan seems haunted not so much by loss as by remembered violence. Again and again, he finds a kind of beauty in the knuckle and hock, the “band-saw arcing through bone.” Using memory as a kind of back-fire—“flame to vanquish flame”—he conjures the slaughterhouse:
In the dream I come back to slaughter—
Gelid blood upon me, bone flecks, ingots of tallow
Stacked in the cold-room, sawdust fresh and bloodless
And fragrant in the chill beneath the halves of beasts—
“Listening to Arvo Part’s Fur Alina,” the final poem, is chilling in its self-recrimination—or, possibly, its stoic acceptance. Dedicated to Joe Grady, shot dead in Hungry Horse, Montana, 1997, this poem is set at the tail-end of the century (“Music, winter, the whites and bitumens / of winter”), and the “you” with “the small hole / I need not touch to know—” is
. . . here now, within the music
Within winter, you
who called for me
And I who chose not to save you.
The poet shows himself no mercy. In the face of such enormity, what is left but wonder? Who is he, that he could wield the sledge? What is death, that it so resembles sleep? Where is God, whose time zone has no clock?
Upper Level Disturbances distills the tradition of the psalm: “Let me shut mine eyes”—and the poems lift from the page, neither supplication nor praise. A cross between Hopkins and Merton, rapture and asceticism, Kevin Goodan’s petitions reach into those places you can “see through, but not beyond.” This is a young poet whose career I intend to follow. He approaches those instances “When the unsayable is lodged in the throat” and “Where every moment is a landscape / We enter, depart, at the same time”—and he does so with such lyric authenticity that we can chart the age-old course any vital question takes: “Who are you that I am left beneath the rumble of clouds with no way to answer?”