As
Reviewed By: |
Young Poets Calling: Part 3 Burning Wyclif by Thom Satterlee. Texas Tech University Press, 2006. $19.95 Sakura Park by Rachel Wetzsteon. Persea, 2006. $17.95 |
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I read Burning
Wyclif, Thom Satterlee’s debut collection, because it was
recommended to me by a friend, without knowing anything about the book or
the poet. If I had been told in advance that it is an extended sequence of
poems about the life of John Wyclif, the fourteenth-century English
theologian who is considered a forerunner of Protestantism, I don’t know
if I would have been eager to make the attempt. Generally speaking, when a
contemporary poet builds his or her work around a obscure figure out of
intellectual history, there is reason to be dubious. Think of the way Anne
Carson endows her modish, attitudinizing poems with a spurious scholarly
glamour, by associating the names of Simonides or Sappho with verse whose
actual inspiration is Gertrude Stein; or the way Jorie Graham creates the
illusion of metaphysical depth by interlarding her own text with chunks of
Heidegger and Wittgenstein. In these poets, and in the many poets inspired
by them, the past is not so much inspiration as decoration, a trove of
intellectual status symbols to be plundered at will. Even
poets who make a more serious use of ancient myths and symbols tend to
want the past to meet them more than halfway. Frank Bidart, in his book Desire,
used the Greek myth of Myrrha—a tale of father-daughter incest—to
explore the same kind of psychosexual terror he already found in
twentieth-century ghouls like the murderer Herbert White and the anorexic
Ellen West. Putting new wine in old bottles is better than shattering the
bottles, but it brings us no closer to an authentic experience of the
past. Few periods have been less interested than our own in escaping the
provincialism of the present; despite all our reflexive praise of the
Other and otherness, we are shy of history, which is the greatest
otherness of all. What
makes Burning Wyclif such an exciting book is precisely its
quietness, which is the quietness of a poet trying to forget himself. The
form of the book is loosely biographical: Satterlee imagines a series of
episodes from Wyclif’s life, beginning with his boyhood and ending with
the posthumous immolation that the Catholic Church inflicted on his
heretical corpse. Along the way we see Wyclif struggling to master
Aristotelian philosophy, as a student at Oxford; receiving ordination as a
Catholic priest; fighting off the temptation of lust, thanks to a young
widow who lives across the road; and working on his English translation of
the Latin Bible, the achievement for which he is best known. Described
this way, it might seem that Burning Wyclif is merely versified
scholarship. In fact, Satterlee has done something more difficult even
than mastering a historical period. As episode follows episode, it becomes
clear that what we are actually reading is devotional poetry—a series of
Christian meditations, in which the figure of Wyclif is used to explore
the mysteries of faith. This is hagiography in the original sense—not
empty praise, but writing about a holy person that helps us to share in
his holiness. And it succeeds because Satterlee is careful not to let the
saint obscure the man—a danger he writes about in the book’s opening
poem, “Habitus”: The fitting took all day. He tried on Son and Friend, Scholar, Reformer, Heretic; he slipped into Priest, wore also Doctor Evangelicus and Morning Star. Some robes hung too loosely; others pinched his neck. In the end, he had to wear them all and learn the sadness of being a word— only one surface to show the world while he lived underneath the layers and listened for the barely audible sound
of his own heart beating. Satterlee
knows that it is impossible to give a convincing picture of saintliness,
in a secular and psychological age, without making that human heartbeat
audible. This does not mean that he zeroes in on Wyclif’s frailties, or
supplies him with a suppositious wound to match his bow. But Satterlee
helps us believe in Wyclif the saint by showing us Wyclif the student, in
“Wintertime in Oxford,” walking through the cold “with Aristotle /
pressed to one ear, Augustine / to the other—medieval muffs . . . .”
It is a comic, touching image, and also a suggestive one. For the voices
of Augustine and Aristotle did echo in Wyclif’s ears, and we can’t
enter into the medieval Christian worldview without some knowledge of
those thinkers—not just abstract knowledge of their doctrines, but an
inward sense of how Wyclif experienced them. Satterlee,
in other words, has to teach us lost ways of thinking about the world and
God, if we are to appreciate either Wyclif or the poems Satterlee wants to
write about Wyclif. We join the young theologian in mastering
Aristotle’s categories (in “Wyclif Places Himself, His Room Within the
Ten Categories of Essential Being”); we are made to feel the allure of
self-flagellation (in “Brethren of the Cross: Oxford, May 18, 1349”);
we are immersed in medieval iconography, in a remarkable poem that
imitates the shape of a triptych. That is one of several poems which
experiment with the layout of words on a page. Another, “On Angels,”
brings home the old scholastic quandary about angels dancing on the head
of a pin by literally shrinking itself down to a point. (These visual
arrangements, reminiscent of Renaissance picture-poems, are generally more
successful than Satterlee’s attempts at traditional form. His
villanelles and sonnets are a little awkward, and feel ill-at-ease among
their free verse neighbors.) Satterlee’s
resurrection of a lost vocabulary of thought and feeling is what allows Burning
Wyclif, in its best moments, to achieve a genuinely religious power,
reminiscent of George Herbert. No contemporary poet I know has captured
the challenge of faith better than Satterlee does in “Ordination,”
where we see Wyclif receiving the sign of the cross on his brow: There the bishop builds the cross, two beams linked in the place of the skull. Of all the miracles Wyclif ever believed, none taxed him more than to find himself still standing with all that weight on his forehead as
the bishop moved away. Satterlee’s understated imagery transforms the ordinand’s head into Golgotha, the Hill of Skulls, and the bishop’s gesture into the beams of the Cross. The weight of this mystery bears down on Wyclif’s head, in a beautiful image of submission, and a subtle foreshadowing of Wyclif’s own posthumous martyrdom. That bizarre punishment—the heretic’s body was dug up in order to be burned, forty-two years after he died—is the subject of the title poem, which concludes with Satterlee’s observation that “no one even thought the word martyr.” It is a beautiful reminder of the absurdity and the mystery of martyrdom, which is a gift that the oppressor thoughtlessly bestows on his victim. Religious reflection of this order is very rarely found in contemporary poetry. One might not even have thought it was still possible, until Thom Satterlee achieved it—a sure sign of a true poet.
In
a perfect world, Rachel Wetzsteon would be one of the most popular poets
of her generation. You would see people in the outdoor cafes along Upper
Broadway reading copies of Sakura Park, her third collection, the
way pilgrims to Greenwich Village carry Scott Fitzgerald or Edna St.
Vincent Millay. For Wetzsteon’s poems manage to turn Morningside
Heights—a quiet, bourgeois neighborhood near Columbia University, home
to the park of her title—into a theater of romance, an intellectual
haven, a flaneur’s paradise. Her poems evoke the kind of life that
generations of young people have come to New York to live—earnest,
glamorous, and passionate, full of sex and articulate suffering: The pastry shop’s abuzz with crazy George and filthy graffiti, but the peacocks are strutting across the way and the sumptuous cathedral gives the
open-air banter a reason to deepen: the
languorous talkers, to rival the ones outside!
In a period when New York has happily given itself over to getting and
spending—when being young in the big city is a kind of package-tour,
affordable only to neophyte lawyers and bankers—it is heartening to see
Wetzsteon affirm the city’s true glamour. Wetzsteon can write
convincingly about glamour, that perilous muse, because she knows that it
is not superficial, a matter of how you dress or who you know. It is,
rather, one of those “structures inside the mind,” a way of seeing
yourself and your surroundings as charged with mysterious significance. To
be really glamorous, Wetzsteon convinces us, you need the self-awareness
that comes with intelligence: “Romantics, so far gone / they think their
lovers live for wisdom, woo / by growing wiser,” she writes in the comic
poem “Love and Work.” Wetzsteon
can sound a bit like Dorothy Parker when, in the same poem, she complains: There is an inner motor known as lust that makes a man of learning walk a mile to gratify his raging senses, while the
woman he can talk to gathers dust.
But while Sakura Park draws inspiration from Parker’s brand of
tough-talking, quick-witted femininity—and from savvy screwball heroines
like Irene Dunne, whose performance in The Awful Truth (1937) Wetzsteon
invokes—the reader is always aware that this is just one of the roles
Wetzsteon likes to watch herself play. Her sensibility is equally informed
by Baudelaire, the prince of flaneurs, and Kierkegaard, the prince of
ironists, both of whose names appear in the text. Like them, she
perversely prefers suffering to happiness, because suffering leads to
self-consciousness: Looking down at the city below, I am almost grateful that when I said I
have met my soul my soul said no; it was a verdict that nearly bled the hope from my veins, but it got me thinking.
Many of the poems in Sakura Park are about unhappy love affairs,
and perfectly capture the arc of emotions from flirtation to passion to
remorse. (“Little Song for a Big Night,” one of the best poems in the
book, covers that whole trajectory in five stanzas.) But Wetzsteon always
returns to the conviction that it is “thinking” that matters, more
than feeling—a conviction that is, perhaps, a prerequisite for being a
poet. She makes this clear in just three lines, from the sequence
“Flaneur Haiku”: Lovers holding hands: a sign of sharpened senses or
stupefaction?
Wetzsteon’s poems are odes to sharpened senses, to possibilities held
open, and to the city whose own sharp openness seems like a standing
invitation. The spell of Sakura Park, woven from Wetzsteon’s
intelligence and lyric deftness, has already become, for me, a part of New
York’s magic. |