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          Despite strenuous and awe-inspiring acts of imagination, impish acrobatics of diction, high jinks of imagery, large dollops of wordplay and death-defying high wire walks from sense to nonsense without a net, the poems in Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life land with a thud. It is impossible not to admire their ambition and marvel at their colorful performances, but while these poems give the impression of being chock-full of every sort of happening, they are constructed by stacking one declarative line on top of another and often end up sounding like a page from Ripley’s Believe it or Not: 

The man with the metal detector hovering over the elm’s elephantine

roots has no idea he just missed a buried paint can (color: beige bal-

let) containing six letters and an engagement ring. Pug owners are

90% more likely to deny that they look like their pets than other

dog owners. The girl in the woolen hat holding her camera out to

capture herself and her pug on the bench is in the 10% minority and

cherishes her own buggy brown eyes. Mittens on strings are only

metaphorical to people without children. A jogger sees a small child

with red mittens dangling from her sleeves and thinks memory, then

imagines running around the park next Sunday with a big pair of

silver scissors, tiny mittens blossoming from the mud puddles in her

wake. Mothers Beware the Mitten Marauder! reads the headline in

the Post. Truly it’s exhausting how many minds there are to swoop

in and out of. Thoughts criss-cross the paths like branches; kites get

caught in them. Birds collide with dreams and are found dead on the

road. Sometimes a storm is the only answer. I stir up such a wind

it blows them all out of the park. Then I pour down so much rain

that the park sparkles with puddles, a thousand YOU ARE HERE

signs blinking up at me and only me, until some intrepid soul comes

stomping through with his loud thoughts of dinner.

                                                 (“Once Around the Park with Omniscience”) 

This poem has its moments (“. . .running around the park next Sunday with a big pair of scissors, tiny mittens blossoming from the mud puddles in her wake”, “Thoughts criss-cross the paths like branches; kites get caught in them. Birds collide with dreams and are found dead in the road. Sometimes a storm is the only answer.”) and it contains nicely nascent story elements and an overall whimsical tone. It puts me in mind of a children’s story in early stages. But as a finished poem for an adult, especially for one who is an experienced reader of poetry and who is both intelligent and ready to engage with it, the poem is of slight interest. It is thin, then thinner. In fact, there is a shallowness throughout this book that is not necessarily a commentary on the author’s inner life (obviously teeming), only on the author’s choices (or lack thereof), her apparent inability or unwillingness to signal what’s more or less important in these lines. This flat line phenomenon—the presentation of novelty in a dull way—turns up frequently in the work of some contemporary poets, and it’s a phenomenon worth examining. If one believes, as I do, that writing well includes, may even be predicated on, the higher-level ability of employing tonal shift, syntactical variation and pacing in the service of building suspense and interest for the reader, then the only conclusion I can draw is that Modern Life is not well written. Even as a form of reportage it is too dull. In fact, the most surprising thing about the book as a whole is its lack of surprise, line to line, poem to poem. The effect, or affect (as described in schizophrenia), stays flat, the language disconnected and tangential—not to the point, and what was the point, anyway? This style, in ascendance for the past decade, may also be viewed as a symptom. As there is no one out there to talk to, the poet may as well be talking to him or herself, and the reader has the sensation of being stuck on a train and forced to listen to the wildly tedious monologues of someone whose last concern is how you feel about it. Contemporary American poetry is like that train. Nearly everyone except the poets got off at the last stop, yet the train barrels on. 

If, on the other hand, one believes that writing such as Harvey’s constitutes a “project” whereby the text is in service to some political or aesthetic idea (cf Kenneth Goldsmith’s “boring, boring” and “unboring, boring” project), is happy with the driving idea and has no need that the actual writing be of any interest, they may read her work as exemplary without expectation of either pleasure or understanding. Not this reader. 

The sections of Modern Life that tend toward something deeper, that have a unity of tone and that have received some critical attention as poems that successfully engage the modern life of the title (“The Future of Terror” and “Terror of the Future”) are also populated with line-stacks, resulting in poems with little syntactic variation. A preponderance of lines in these poems exemplifies the syntactically coherent, semantically incoherent character of much post-language poetry and finally, for all their ambition, defeat any hope of interest or surprise as handily as the other poems in the book: 

The generalissimo’s glands directed him

to and fro. Geronimo! said the uber-goon

we called God, and we were off to the races.

Never mind that we could only grow

gray things, that inspecting the horse’s gums

in the gymnasium predicted a jagged

road ahead. We were tired of hard news—

it helped to turn down our hearing aids.

We could already all do impeccable imitations

of the idiot, his insistent incisors working on

a steak as he said there’s an intimacy to invasion.

That much was true. When we got jaded

about joyrides, we could always play games

in the kitchen garden with the prisoners.

Jump the Gun, Fine Kettle of Fish and Kick

the Kidney were our favorites. The laws

the linguists thought up were particularly

lissome, full of magical loopholes that

spit out medals. We had made the big time,

but night still nipped at our heels.

The navigator’s needle swung strangely,

oscillating between the oilwells

and ask again later. We tried to pull ourselves

together by practicing quarterback sneaks

along the pylons, but the race to the ravine

was starting to feel as real as the R.I.P.’s

and roses carved into rock. Suddenly the sight

of a schoolbag could send us scrambling. 

                                                (“The Future of Terror/1” ) 

While this poem has been cited in some reviews as emblematic of Harvey’s “Terror” sections, and while it is cohesive by comparison to others in these sections, it still posits the reader as a lost traveler receiving anonymous, monotonously declarative announcements over a megaphone hidden somewhere in an unfamiliar landscape, none of which turns out to be directions to familiar ground. Nothing finally comes to anything, though there are moments of possible accretion (for example, starting with “We were tired of hard news” would give the poem some traction), and the poem remains on one plane, in the reportorial style of the declarative sentence, a collection of needles without a haystack, a flock of bats without a cave. What is the intent—or is it merely lack of intent—that creates such tedium? The diction is lively enough, the imagery often startling. Why is it ultimately boring? Let’s try another version: 

We were tired of hard news—

it helped to turn down our hearing aids.

We could already all do impeccable imitations

of the idiot, his insistent incisors working on

a steak as he said there’s an intimacy to invasion.

That much was true. When we got jaded

about joyrides, we could always play games

in the kitchen garden with the prisoners.

Jump the Gun, Fine Kettle of Fish and Kick

the Kidney were our favorites.

But night still nipped at our heels.

The navigator’s needle swung strangely,

oscillating between the oilwells

and ask again later. 

Removing the generalissimo’s glands, the horse’s gums, the uber-goon and other portions of the poem that seem pointless or silly and unnecessary, and beginning with a statement that piques curiosity (what is the “hard news”?) and ending with an intriguing quote, in an interesting syntactical position, enables a certain cohesion or structure and reveals a serious and frightening poem inside, one that may or may not benefit from another good line or two: “The sight of a schoolbag / could send us scrambling” (without the “Suddenly” of course) or “Never mind that we could only grow / gray things.” There is at least one good poem here, one that bears re-reading and takes its reader seriously enough not to strew red herrings around for the hell of it. 

Glands, gums, and uber-goons are not the real problem, of course, only symptoms. If “to read” means to follow with your eyes, one word after another, until a text becomes comprehensible, then I cannot say I’ve read Modern Life. If, on the other hand, “to read” means to scan, in the sense of reading labels, like a grocery store’s optical reader, or if it means to observe various-sized and colored containers without being able to see what’s inside, or if it means to skim, admiring the typeface design and visual placement on the page, or if it means to obtain data from a storage medium (the page), and transfer said data to another storage medium (the brain) via the movement of eyes, then I can say I have read this book. But what does such a reading mean? I can’t say I enjoyed it, nor can I say I didn’t enjoy it, since each word, then each poem, overwrites the previous one. Was I changed by the experience? I don’t know. I don’t think I had an experience. 

With only other poets left to read poets, with critics at a loss to read or evaluate poems (how to read or evaluate a poem not meant for a reader of the first type, above?), and with a blurb-storm that blows over the landscape with such force the landscape is itself is in danger of being obliterated, poetry has entered its Golden Age of Logorrhea. So: 

I put on my coat of pastilles and glass and hit the road with a Phillips screwdriver. Dog Pants. The way out is in, cried a newly promoted magpie. Look inside me, Trojan the Horse said. Someone succumbed to a shape of stars. Someone folded in like an Robo-accordian. Someone smelled a herd of centipedes. Someone wondered why poetry so publicly acclaimed could be so barren of life.