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Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich (b. 1929) could have been—to quote a phrase as battered as the palooka in the Schulberg potboiler On the Waterfront who utters it—“a contender.” Instead, she chose to assume, somewhere between middling youth and menopause, the mantle of a feminist Hardcase in Point. Since for ever, it seems like, Rich has been proclaiming she is not a poet-feminist but a feminist poet, obliged (an obligation different in no way that I can see from a calling) to obstruct the Patriarchy wherever—and here we need reach for another moldy-fig phrase—it rears its ugly head. This is to say that Rich saw her poet’s role as both exceeding in scope and transcending in its grasp that pursued by activists and activist-critics like Judith Butler and Toril Moi. On this view, the proper vocation of socially responsible women since the ‘70s was to broaden the agenda of post-‘60s feminism by tempering the shrill, largely lesbian apologetics put out by burning-bed sexual politicians of the Andrea Dworkin mold with a more measured advocacy of female independence on the one hand and female-on-female interdependence on the other. Has this tightrope act turned Rich into an agitpropagandist speaking only to the choir of feminist poets like herself and a few sisters-in-entitlement outside the arts? Not at all. The inter-activist wars of the ‘60s taught her that power was all about keeps and keeping. Thus, since her conversion to same-sex proselytizing in the early ‘70s this sister has kept her co-peers in the hood by keeping a sharp eye on the balls in power and her needlepoint politics aligned with that most inflexible of the Newtonian iron laws which stipulates that final effects can be ascribed only to efficient causes.  

         Such public positioning (some might call it posturing) has served Rich mighty well over the last several decades, but it has proved somewhat detrimental too, in that her blinkered sense of the erotic seemed to critics then a stance which deprived much of what she wrote of needed emotional range and catholicity. And the situation has worsened rather than gotten better since: what she has more lately intoned about in her verse has rarely survived the thumbscrew calculus imposed on its content by her sexual politics. Indeed, the strong liberationist wind blowing through her work is often deflected by the severity of the persona whose moistened finger is testing its direction for ideological advantage. On a rather different level, the wheels within wheels driving the typical Rich poem might seem to be behaving according to spec, but a closer look reveals something very different going on. The line of motion propelling Rich’s idiolect appears to be forever losing traction to the dual-directional drag that makes any such polemical car-and-trailer a house divided against itself. When strong syllables haul themselves over an obstacle course like prostheses in a conga line, the music of poetry gets lost amid its own shuffling arrhythmias. Note, for instance, the stop-and-go agogics of “Love Poem XXI”:  

                        The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones

                        of the great round rippled by stone implements

                        of the midsummer night light rising from beneath

                        the horizon—when I said “a cleft of light”

                        I meant this. And this is not Stonehenge

                        simply nor any place but the mind

                        casting back to where her solitude,

                        shared, could be chosen without loneliness,

                        not easily nor without pains to stake out

                        the circle, the heavy shadows, the great light.

                        I chose to be a figure in that light,

                        half-blotted by darkness, something moving

                        across that space, the color of stone

                        greeting the moon, yet more than stone:

                        a woman. I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle.  

     To start with, the conceit driving the poem (which triangulates primordial astrophysics, light, and the claro imago of Woman), is so far-fetched and under-endowed that even a Donne understudy ignorant of Gongora would know that such “teach me to hear mermaids singing” stretches don’t go the distance. However, that’s not the only item on this poem’s plaguey bill. Rich has tried, unsuccessfully, it seems to me, to feel with her head and root about the sensory deprivation tank she’s immersed herself in with her emotions. The result is a clutch of emotionally over-laden pilings being erected where an already overextended diagrammatics has failed to clear proper space for them. It’s no mystery what happens when damn-fool iambics rush in where angels of prosody would quite sensibly fear to tread. In the first four lines of “Love Poem XXI,” syllables ricochet off one another like molecules fleeing an overheated gas bubble. Pronounce aloud “And this is not Stonehenge /simply nor any place but the mind /casting back to where her solitude /shared, could be chosen without loneliness. . .,” and what trippingly rakes itself over the coals is the tongue itself, not a garland of phrases made gorgeous by its own words’ lingual caress. Were it not for the Martha Stewart-like officiousness with which the pastry shell of a Rich poem is stuffed with relevance like a meat pie, the hamhandedness of it all would turn more readers off than it does. What chimera of melopoeia, one wonders, could possibly have led the author of “Grandmothers” to imagine that beneath the expanse of all those elephant palms an orchid of inestimable worth lay hid?

                        We had no pet names, no diminutives for you,

                        always the formal guest under my father’s roof:

                        you were “Grandmother Jones” and you visited rarely.

                        I see you walking up and down the garden,

                        restless, southern-accented, reserved, you did not seem

                        my mother’s mother or anyone’s grandmother. . . .  

        Rich does manage occasionally—especially in work antedating her deliquescence into the programmatic (that is, between 1951 and 1971)—to ignite some roman candles amid the hullabaloo of cherry bombs and barely glinting sparklers. Trim and redoubtable triumphs such as “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” “Face to Face,” and, of course, “Diving into the Wreck” (dated 1973, and thus simultaneously the last of her best work and the best of her last ones), dot her work with a kind of grim persistence, landing her among other poets roughly her age the briefly realized promise of whom offset, if only to a negligible degree, the long and steady decline of their talent. That small degree notwithstanding, the promise that gleamed so providentially in certain youthful poems as well as in a sprinkle of later ones cannot dampen the impression of Rich’s lengthy career (now in well-greased glide toward what looks increasingly like flat lining) as a catenary of executions no more diverting or eventful than a passably brought off skater’s waltz. There hovers over much of her writing in both verse and prose an easeful pretense of risk which, in the decades before the present crop of neocons began making their winter of discontent everyone else’s as well, sat well with a poetic community accustomed to meeting displays of political correctness with plaudits due feats of uncommon bravery. For that reason I feel compelled to say that if there’ve been poets, socially conscious or otherwise, in the last quarter-century who’ve brandished politics more goose-steppingly correct than Adrienne Cecile Rich’s, they have escaped my notice. No Robert Bly, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, or even Charles Bernstein can compete with Rich for the sheer commissar-esque sang froid with which she has laid down her party’s line. While credit is clearly due her for the many pro bono projects undertaken by her over the years (her work over the years with inner-city youth has been particularly laudable), she seems always to have put ideological agendas ahead of adding so much as a cubit to the stature of poetry as an art which is valuable in itself, which is to say above politics. No doubt an exceptionally compassionate heart beats somewhere within that formidable chest of drawers which is the Rich fund-in-trust. But for all the need poets must feel to share their wealth of spirit with the poor, there has to be more to being Rich than playing big sister to a lot of weak sisters busy crying wolf at every male whistle, and Whistler’s mother to a lot of men content to keep their windjammers at half-mast.

Gary Snyder

There are times when one would like to think that only the work of Gary Snyder (b. 1930) and a very few others among the many pretenders to grace thrown up by the Beat phenomenon will still be making the rounds 25-50 years from now when “the face still forming” that is contemporary American poetry is finally discernible. I say this because there is much that is likeable as well as to like about Snyder’s writings, some quirk of inner loveliness that has clung to them and to him despite daunting layovers in Japanese monasteries and bust-out reunions—some lasting months or years—with such zanies of “true-life fiction” as the King of Fizz (and Pop) who dropped The Dharma Bums and Big Sur into our laps, Jack Kerouac.  

      Snyder, bless his heart, was always more “serious” than the rest of that herd of wintering buffalo that included, as well as the above mentioned hoary bison, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and, heaven knows, far more practically endowed. He was always able to declare his (always tenuous) Beat affiliations off-side whenever they threatened to overwhelm his cause of nature conservancy with clichés out either T. D. Sizuki‘s or Smoky the Bear’s playbook. On the whole, Snyder wished for no more out of life than to be able to cultivate his Bonsai garden in peace, and to carry (via that stone-cutter’s chronicle of his which is as much diary as poem, as much religious observance as Walden Pond rock-skimming), the re-energizing begun by Pound of Confucian wisdom (chih) enshrined in fastidiously precise language (CH’ing ming)—along with the revival, equally auspicious, of Ko, the Japanese Zen “season of the earth”—one giant step further.  

         In his own very quiet way, Snyder has over five decades made himself into a prime exponent of the “”earth house hold” eclogue (his own signature piece—along with an invention he calls the “hitch-haiku”), and of that variant of wilderness palm pilotry among whose lapidary marvels poems like “Riprap” reign supreme. Only Snyder has that knack whereby the rune-like poem is transformed into the very facsimile of what its dispositional shape is designed to exalt. The entire poem begs to be quoted in full:

                        Lay down these words

                        Before your mind like rocks.

                                     placed solid, by hands

                        In choice of place, set

                        Before the body of the mind

                                     in space and time:

                        Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall

                                     riprap of things:

                        Cobble of milky way,

                                     straying planets,

                        These poems, people,

                                     lost ponies with

                        Dragging saddles

                                     and rocky sure-foot trails.

                        The worlds like an endless

                                     four-dimensional

                        Game of Go.

                                     ants and pebbles

                        In the thin loam, each rock a word

                                     a creek-washed stone

                        Granite: ingrained

                                     with torment of fire and weight

                        Crystal and sediment linked hot

                                     all change, in thoughts,

                        As well as things.  

       Note that the two halves of the poem, corresponding to rip and rap, are punctuated independently, forcing the eye to accept as given what the ear has already intuitively grasped as “definitive.” Much here may be chalked up to pointers gleaned from Pound’s Pisan Cantos, which are then distilled (via certain improvisatory attention-focusers, courtesy of Black Mountain) into a burgeoning Geistsraum whose sphere of operations appears no more mysterious than a handheld apparatus the directions for handling which may be found in that owner’s-manual-in-the-shape-of-a-poem Snyder has thoughtfully supplied us with. Though such timely reductions account only for a part—the haptic part—of that pact established by the poet with his readers, like his brother-in-arms Creeley, Snyder’s aim is not just to bring the brunt of the sensory into range of touch, but to make the whole verse-writing process an intimate of its totalizing embrace. For the open field poet, the intellect is a screen door useful less to keep impurities out than to let the sun in, in all its darkness-excising splendor. Apart from light thrown on the poet’s most personal life-thoughts, another reason (no less integral to the Projectivist or, to invoke Denise Levertov’s term, “organic,” project) for poetry to remain open to experience is to faithfully represent, through diaristic notation not so remote from that of music, the defining innerness of locus and ethos indispensable to the poet’s life. “Milton by Firelight,” “Above Pate Valley,” and “The Wild Edge” are splendid examples of this, while “The Bath,” “Axe Handles,” and “The Elwha River” are self-stalkings so personal they almost make The Prelude seem an autobiographical lark inflated to epic hyperbole.  

          Despite the cachet he acquired in the ‘60s as a student-friendly poet, Snyder curiously remains among the most underrated poets of his generation—perhaps because of his continuing popularity with the young. If that is what’s behind his work’s being undervalued, we need to examine the basis on which we judge the merits of certain stubbornly unpopular poets more closely. After all, even Baudelaire was loath to go up against the grainy metricalities of his time, was indeed reluctant to contest any convention of stylistics the avoidance of which might encourage censors to give his poetry’s subject matter and suspect morality a second look. Such matters aside, Snyder’s poetry is decidedly worthy of a different kind of second look from editors and publishers beyond the limited if serviceable ambit of the New Directions and City Lights imprints. After all, how many of our poets can cram into three lines (the entire poem consists of 36 lines) the “gists and piths” involved in transmitting a timeless craft to one’s progeny, as “Axe Handles" does so unforgettably?

                        One afternoon the last week in April

                        Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet

                        One-half turn and it sticks in a stump . . . ?  

Would that more of our poets would follow the conceptual tack of a poetry built upon working principles of the sort pioneered by Snyder, Paul Blackburn, Jon Wieners, and Edward Dorn, poets who, along with Creeley and Levertov, remain the cream of what was once a bumper crop of “Make it new-ers.” It’s a pity that only Yusef Komunyakaa, Henri Cole, Li-Young-Lee, and an exiguous handful of others seem intent on revisiting this path without going to extremes favored by protégés of Marjorie Perloff, to whom journals such as Brad Morrow’s Conjunctions continue the forum of choice.

Mark Strand

Mark Strand (b.1934), to a greater extent than most of his contemporaries, comes off as more apparition than presence, more display of ominously smiling feline (out of Lewis Carroll, perhaps) than actual cat. In ways disturbing even for dabblers in surrealism, he persists the illusionist who with a single desultory wand-wave can vanish, wraith-like, into the middle distance. This need not be viewed as a disparagement. Strand’s well-tonsured mystique of the well-tonsured mysterioso has been an object of careful cultivation for quite a few moons now, he himself having broached this widespread impression—like him, lean nigh on to disappearance—in “Keeping Things Whole,” a slip of a poem that touches whimsically though substantively as much on the insubstantiality of its author’s form as on his matter:

                        In a field

                        I am the absence

                        of field.

                        This is

                        always the case.

                        Wherever I am

                        I am what is missing.

           When I walk

            I part the air

           and always

           the air moves in

           to fill the spaces

           where my body’s been. . . .  

          Even more to the forefront of Strand’s strategy of dissimulation is an obsession with physical disappearance, which, given the unexceptionability of his personal, educational and working life, does not so much as meet minimalist standards for personal weirdness affected by a surrealist, unless his time at Yale also involved recruitment as a CIA spook. (With considerable metonymic oddness, his case-file resembles that of Robert Ludlum’s rogue-amnesiac Jason Bourne, in that while the latter has a real-life identity to wield as well as withhold, he can’t seem to get his mind or his hands around it.)  

          What Strand and other irrealists resembling him bring to poetry is a desire not so much to transcend as to do an end run around what Bertolt Brecht immortalized as Entfremdung, or estrangement of matter from medium. Such a technique traffics widely in alienation but still remains a far cry from whatever it is that makes the tenor of poems like “Eating Poetry” and “The Prediction” so upratchetingly unnerving. Virtually every Strand poem applies its own unheimlich maneuver to reality’s windpipe, revealing thereby that to unhinge the predictable by de-Freudianizing the uncanny is to pare away the casing of an existential rather than a psychological dissymmetry. “The Prediction” has to be the crux and locus classicus of all generalizing about Strand as laureate of the “stand-in reality” pop-up that disquiets by watching you watch it watch you:

                        That night the moon drifted over the pond,

                        turning the water to milk, and under

                        the boughs of the trees, the blue trees,

                        a young woman walked, and for an instant

                        the future came to her:

                        rain falling on her husband’s grave, rain falling

                        on the lawns of her children, her own mouth

                        filling with cold air, strangers moving into her house,

                        a man in her room writing a poem, the moon drifting into it,

                        a woman strolling under its trees, thinking of death,

                        thinking of him thinking of her, and the wind rising

                        and taking the moon and leaving the paper dark.  

          Imagine, if you will, an Escher sketch in which every level is a superimposed copy of itself copied precisely to look as it did before it was superimposed but reproduced verso so as to make its superimposition seem subtractive rather than additive, and you have arrived at a simulacrum of just how a Strand poem becomes like those roses in Eliot’s Four Quartets which “have the look of roses that are looked at.” Or better yet, consider the off-the-wall teaser used by the comedian Stephen Wright used about how he realized when returning home one night that each of his possessions had been stolen and replaced with a perfect replica. Likewise, in Strand’s world existence is not an accident of being but always and with stunning inherence an antic rather than ontic twist on coming to be. This last, unlike becoming, resembles more tinglingly what it feels like to come upon a discontinuation unawares—as, for example, in coming to “this” in the manner suggested in “Coming to This”:

                        We have done what we wanted.

                        We have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry

                        of each other, and we have welcomed grief

                        and called ruin the impossible habit to break.

                        And now we are here.

                        The dinner is ready and we cannot eat.

                        The meat sits in the white lake of its dish.

                        The wine waits.

                        Coming to this

                        has its rewards: nothing is promised, nothing is taken away.

                        We have no heart or saving grace,

                        no place to go, no reason to remain.  

          There is something about a poet responding to the inner command, “Faites vos jeux d’esprit,” that seems rather too pat, even—one hates to say this straight out—facile. The too-good-to-be-true rebus of Mark Strand, poet-in-virtual-exile, looks somewhat disconcertingly here to be kicking in again in such a way as to confirm the suspicion that poetry really is, as T. S. Eliot once declared, “a mug’s game.” Or in the Strandian corner of this trope, a pose built up into a Masque of Unreason enjoying posing as Death cat-scanned just to rattle the hoi-polloi. To be sure, American poetry has undergone a make-over since the ‘60s, with numerous coats of paint having surrealistically been splashed on its homely physog. But the mainframe unsettlings Strand goes in for far outstrip the laptop frissons that are the stock in trade of a Michael Palmer or a Charles Simic. A Strandian unmooring of Houseboat Reality is always a strictly zero-sum affair: its intent is to leave the reader hanging, if only by the narrowest hair, to that terra infirma-cum-Sheol the recently scrubbed HBO series, Carnivale, labored mightily to strand (no pun intended) its viewers in. Up till now, Strand has proven a survivor, even if the stakes keeping him in the game have mustered fewer distinctly blue chips than previously. For ten years following the much heralded publication of his Selected Poems (1980), he published relatively little in the way of new poetry. Then, three collections in more or less swift succession—The Continuous Life (1990), Dark Harbor (1993), and Blizzard of One (1998). None raised much of a din in anyone’s head, but then, how many new books of poems do? Even Ashbery’s Sebastian Venable-like productions nearly every autumn surrender to David Copperfield-like magic by the time a new one is due. (Who today speaks animatedly of Chinese Whispers or Girl on the Run?) Rather than dwell on new things for a respectable period, we prefer as a culture to stoke our love affair with recycling that the recording industry and the rest of the media seem so caught up in. Tenuously senior poets whose Collected Poems are subject to burial with the same dispatch as the remains of their authors provide the only reality-fix we ever fix on in reissue-fixated times such as ours.

Charles Wright

Like the staring contest between Mark Strand and Avernus in which each, at least so far, has yet to blink, Charles Wright’s (b. 1935) dalliance with “death, memory, landscape, language, and God”—also a career-length instance of metonymy—has won him the regard—awe-drenched in some cases—of critics who not only fall for “oceanic themes” like a ton of bricks (think James Cameron and the film Titanic) but also insist that grab-bags like the faux-Vedas of Jerome Rothenberg be cherished as the cutest darn things since Hesiod’s Theogony began the collation of works and days. What is it, one wonders, giving vent to a bemusement that could halt Erato in her tracks, that would compel even a Dittohead Whitmanite like Wright to confess, that “out of any two thoughts I have, one is devoted to death”? Must Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, W. C. Williams’s In the American Grain, and the pungently plurisignative tomes of Edward Dahlberg be combined to muster the IQ needed to do justice to that question? Rereading all of Wright won’t do it, for he and his soul mates are at the center of its muddle, swimming wildly toward the nub of the vortex. Yes, we are at swim again with a poet whose work divides without conquering what it comes at and sees only through a glass darkly what it lusts after with contumely. The division before this house separates the admirers of Wright as a seer of the “intensive” from those who view him as the not-quite Goethean Heimrat of the prolusively “extensive.” Or, citing a recent anthologist, “between the concision of haiku and the rambling openness of the long poem.”  

          Wright has not blenched, even under intense interrogation by The Paris Review, at owning up to a marked propensity for “sprawling” in his poems. (He cuts the losses this might tend to incur by hastily adding, “with a succession of sufficient checks and balances.”) Having once allied himself with Deep Image poets of the school of Bly, Merwin, and the other Wright—James—he found his second poetic wind a few decades later when he was taken with the notion of choreographing his own verbal reënactment of the Ghost Dance of 1890, an incendiary event that all but set New Mexico ablaze when it was performed. Much has been made by reviewers of the obsession with syllable counting and numerology that erupted from Wright’s segue into his career’s second phase. As Jahan Ramazani puts it,

Since Wright eschews fixed meter and rhyme, the organizing principles behind his porous yet tightly structured poetry are not immediately self-evident. He has referred to the seven-syllable line as his “ur-line,” and most of his lines have an odd number of syllables(he counts a dropped line as part of the same line). The numerological patterning of his work extends from this micro level of syllable count to the number of lines within stanzas, the number of stanzas or sections within poems, the mirror relations among poems within a volume, and even the ordering of books across the career. . . .  

And to think some thought Marianne Moore a doily short of an antimacassar!  

          Ignoring the weird word counts, it’s sometimes hard to know just where in the self-storage space Wright’s aesthetic rents a poem like “Stray Paragraphs in February, Year of the Rat” (1997) ought to be stowed:

                        East of town, the countryside unwrinkles and smooths out

                        Unctuously toward the tidewater and gruff Atlantic.

                        A love of landscape’s a true affection for regret, I’ve found,

                        Forever joined, forever apart,

                                                                        outside us yet ourselves.

                        Renunciation, it’s hard to learn, is now our ecstasy.

                        However, if God were still around,

                                                 he’d swallow our sighs in his nothingness.

                        The dregs of the absolute are slow sift in my blood,

                        Dead branches down after high winds, dead yard grass and

                                    undergrowth—

                        The sure accumulation of all that’s not revealed

                        Rises like snow in my bare places,

                                                                        cross-whipped and openmouthed.

                        Our lives can’t be lived in flames.

                        Our lives can’t be lit like saints’ hearts,

                                                                        seared between heaven and earth. . . .  

       It’s not that as poetry its spin evades the looms of established verse forms or genres; it’s that, as verbal weave, it’s all bobbin and spindle, woof and warp, with hardly one lick of real flax to rub up against another. How, apart from its tendency to crawl graphically down the page, is Wright’s “revelatory” bone meal different from the mercurially bound amalgam with which the Maximus Poems of Charles Olson stuffs the cavities of its argument? Olson, too, made outlandish claims for the potency of the syllable, believing it superior to the line through the privilege it earned as head tutor to the heart. Olson, it should not be forgotten, became notorious for laying girder upon girder of poem-talk interspersed with long tone-deaf patches of pedantry, all of which falling under the shade of toppling towers of abstraction gleaned from this historiographer of decline or that.  

          Not that Wright is given comparably to the splitting of hairs: if anything, he prefers it pulled out by the handful, so that his way with scrupulosity is to wave it away, like Dylan Thomas in his Welshed-on outback or Theodore Roethke in his greenhouse, in Nihil Nosters like this one from Black Zodiac:

                        If I could slide into a deep sleep,

                        I could say—to myself, without speaking—why my words

                                    embarrass me.

                        Nothing regenerates us, or shapes us again from the dust.

                        Nothing whispers our name in the night.

                        Still, we must praise you, nothing,

                                                                         still must we call to you.

                        Our sin is a lack of transparency.

                        November is dark and doom-dangled,

                                                                                     fitful bone light.

                        And suppuration, worn wrack

                        In the trees, dog rot and dead leaves, watch where you’re

                                    going . . .

                        Illegibility. Dumb fingers from a far hand. . . .  

          One is either drawn to this sort of thing by encouraging one’s own self-transport to some likeness of the place Wright’s poem was called forth from, or left utterly cold by it. It is poetry that delights in hand-jiving the void and flaying all signative recognition to white light’s illegible bone. In a truly upending sense, it is Whitman’s Death, death, death, death, death etiolated to earth-wrack and warmed-over nihilism. O Walt, how plentiful the waxings waned in thy name; how unquenchable thy hymn to death on others’ lips.

C. K. Williams

C. K. Williams’s (b. 1936) poetry has proved very much an acquired taste which, to be honest, not many readers have labored all that intensively to acquire. His verse is problematic in a number of insoluble ways, not least of which being its insistence on being long in the shanks but short on vivifying implication and nuance. With this Williams at least, what you see—spread-eagled on the page and bearing an uncanny resemblance to the fourteeners of Arthur Golding (the Elizabethan translator, made much of by Pound, of Ovid’s Metamorphoses)—is what you get, his docket of themes a bill of particulars being as likely to put you on as explain at length how particulars all too often bill us. (Caveat to formalists: If Ashbery’s extra-long-line and margin-to-margin prose poems raise your hackles, the loose and baggy monster that is Williams’s prosody will decidedly not be your pekoe or camomile.) Actually, the concerns which propel this poet’s later verse to dizzying widths of script are broadly coterminous with what keeps it earthbound thematically, which is more often than not a Pinsky-like tropism toward the totems of the down and out—from oil-slicks to tattoos. That and a letch for noodling which is plainly more at home tinkering with corpses—metal ones—in New Jersey’s automobile graveyards than coring, say, Plato’s Timaeus in some remote corner of Cornfordville. Not that Williams is averse to playing the symposiast in company with such summarians of the cornswoggle as Windelband, Höffding, Marías, or Copleston. “The Gas Station,” perhaps his most signature composition, effects conjuration with names which usually only those who themselves possess comparable ones—like Theodor Adorno—can get away with brandishing like talismans: “This is before I’d read Nietzsche. Before Kant or Kierkegaard, even before Whitman and Yeats. /I don’t think there were three words in my head yet. I knew, perhaps, that I should suffer, /I can remember I almost cried for this or for that, nothing special, nothing to speak of. . . .” Williams’s poem seizes upon what is presumably an authorial experience, when quite young, with a prostitute—a collective experience—since it is one shared with adolescent friends.

      At the moment which reduces to a disarming nakedness the nucleus of its recollection, the poet and his friends are imprisoned in a car that is parked at a service station. They are waiting for one of their party to reappear from the restroom where he has gone to relieve himself in more than just the normal urinary way. “Because one of my friends, in the men’s room over there, has blue balls,” he writes, “He has to jerk off. I don’t know what that means, ‘blue balls,’ or why he has to do that, / it must be important to have to stop here after this long night, but I don’t ask.” The reader doesn’t need to be told how this “don’t ask, don’t tell” scenario came to unfold. As a mature and presumably sophisticated adult (which the teenagers undergoing the night’s initiation rite plainly are not), he has no trouble grasping the consternation shown by the speaker of the poem at being beset by two unassimilable agendas simultaneously. Clearly, the poet’s adolescent counter-self (in post-Socratic drag) is addressing us as ex officio spokesman for a group of ephebes (an unflattering designation but they certainly aren’t men) having been “serviced” by the same whore. The friend taking so long in the rest room has had to masturbate because the act of fellatio performed on all members of their party was phoned in by an exceptionally uncaring prostitute who disserviced one boy who was then left writhing with “blue balls” and having to bring to the point of culmination alone what hooker indifference to anything but the cash nexus either could not, or in the last extremity would not, finish off. The entire poem (whose material seems tailor-made for the T.A.’s fifty-minute hour) hinges, like others in the Williams oeuvre, upon the indissolubility of certain kinds of knowledge. Its soft center resonating with echoes which return to us, wafted on the wings of song or prayer, and haunting us not just with roads not taken, but with woods stopped by on snowy evenings when ramps, fatefully swerved onto, prove later to have been life-altering. “Freud, Marx, Fathers, tell me,” the voice of “The Gas Station”’s contrapasso pleads,

                                                                        what am I, doing this, telling

                                    this, on her, on myself,

                        hammering it down, cementing it, sealing it in, but a machine,

                                    too? Why am I doing this?

                        I still haven’t read Augustine. I don’t understand Chomsky that

                                    well. Should I?

                        My friend at last comes back. Maybe the right words were

                                    there all along. Complicity. Wonder.

                        How pure we were then, before Rimbaud, before Blake. Grace.

                                    Love. Take care of us. Please.  

     “The Gas Station,” then, and “Tar,” “It Is This Way with Men,” and perhaps “Alzheimer’s: The Wife”—in addition to, of course, all of Flesh and Blood (1987), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award—and Repair (2000), which is nearly as indispensable, leave us with the double helix of Williams’s unique genome pretty much in hand. How good is it all? Perhaps that’s a question inappropriately put to a canon like Williams’s, stubbornly remaining a body of work that must be allowed to open gradually for the individual reader, petal by petal, at rose-speed. Such poetry as is generated by C. K. Williams’s nitrogen cycle owes less to spreadsheeted chlorophyll counts than to the sort of elaborate wraparounds that share with string theory and déjà vu a common counter-clockwisedness. One thing is beyond argument: in the united states of Williams, it is decidedly not the economy, stupid.

Charles Simic

The fortunes of Charles Simic (b. 1938), like those of others in that age group having come up during the ‘60s and including figures like Diane Wakoski (b. 1937), James Welch (b. 1940), and James Tate (b. 1943), flickered bravely through the ‘70s, sputtered gamely in the ‘80s, and were more or less seen as having flatlined whether they did or not when the roll call of the ‘90s was finally taken. Consider them casualties of the Theory Wars, if you like; for though not all of them found the levelings of postmodernism hostile to their interests (Wakoski certainly didn’t), nor the rise of multiculturalism an impediment (Welch, a Native-American, assuredly did not), something clearly stalled, if was not actually derailed, in a number of careers whose morning line odds once signaled sure bets. Simic’s bona fides as a stand-up surrealist probably carried him further than others in this group, particularly since he tailored the taffy-pull of his psyche to an audience weaned on the European, rather than the plain vanilla American, version of the Breton lai. It wasn’t always so in Simic’s rather checkered personal history. Early poems like “Fork” demonstrate that in 1969, the year of Nixon’s volunteering for more kicking around by the national press, of percussive intrusions into Laos, and of Cheap Thrills courtesy of Janis, Simic was already marching to the beat of a drummer indifferent to all but the tattoo of Luis Buñuel:

                        This strange thing must have crept

                        Right out of hell.

                        It resembles a bird’s foot

                        Worn around the cannibal’s neck.

                        As you hold it in your hand,

                        As you stab with it into a piece of meat,

                        It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:

                        Its head which like your fist

                        Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.  

          Born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia and not actually resident in the United States until 1948, Simic writes verse vividly recalling the German bombardment of his country and the civil war it unleashed. That, combined with the grisly Serbian folklore he was force-fed as a child, led him to conclude that the stuff of bad dreams he had thought traceable to fetors found only in eastern Europe were as harvestable on his adopted soil as the Pippins in apple pan dowdy. The Vietnam war then doing a number on the second country to give him shelter might not have been lobbing bombs into his own back yard but its remoteness in geographical terms did not hinder him, or that other refugee from his part of the world, Jerzy Kosinski, from darksiding the moon with postings from the void that would soon option Charles Manson and his bevy of bacchantes. Novels like The Painted Bird and Steps were then providing rock poets like Bob Dylan with the malaise and discomfort needed to repaint Grant Woods’s American Gothic in the stark new colors vocalized in “Desolation Row” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” In Simic’s verse the repressed didn’t just return, it marched belligerently into American living rooms demanding to know why food hadn’t been left out for it in the form of some fulsomely pulsing neck.  

          Helen Vendler, who is neither as a rule egregiously mistaken nor right against all odds, has somehow managed to nail Simic’s brand of disquietude with astonishing accuracy. In “A World of Foreboding,” a review of the poet’s two collections, The Book of Gods and Devils (1990) and Hotel Insomnia (1992), appearing in her book Soul Says: On Recent Poetry (1995), she identi-sketches him in these bold lines:

Charles Simic’s riddling poems, for all that they reproduce many things about his century (its wars, its cities, its eccentrics, and so on) in the end chiefly reproduce the Simic sieve—a sorting machine that selects phenomena that suit Simic’s totemic desire. There is no escape hatch in a Simic poem; you enter it and are a prisoner within its uncompromising and irremediable world. [. . .] Simic’s poems, even when they contain a narrative, can almost always be “folded back” into a visual cartoon accompanied by a caption. I say “cartoon” at this point rather than “emblem” because Simic is a master of the mixed style, with vulgarity cheek by jowl with sublimity. . . .  

      She then proceeds to the observation that Hotel Insomnia (whose poems are glosses on the various “boxes” constructed by the artist Joseph Cornell) “is more an evolving sequence than a collection of separate poems [. . . and what] makes it a sequence is the inscribing on every page without exception, of several words from the repeated epistemological master list [of words] that forms a backdrop to the whole. . . .” The eight master-headings under which these “repeated” words appear are: Closure, Menace, Home, Nature, Body, People, City, and Subhuman. The strong implication driving her analysis is that such encryptions have furnished Simic with the means to control the anarchic updrafts of terror threatening constantly to transform his theme park of horrors into the dingy-est ding-an-sich of secret nightmare ever to have its cover blown.  

          As a technique, this approach has proved a win-win one for Simic: unprocessed garbage in, elixir of processed garbage out, and all with the poet’s individual stamp on it, making it somehow more artful than awful—but just barely, like a signature soup can by Warhol that proves what’s in a name is more than just nominal. By such means Simic separates himself from his merely irrealistic or un-realistic contemporaries and emerges from the fray a genuine surrealist. Vendler is right to note that “the sardonically comic side of his nature alternates with the remorsely bleak” in his poetry. The discovery that to conflate the choleric, melancholic and sanguine humours is only to blacklight the unintentionally humorous is what makes Simic more than just one more Eichendorf dandling märchen on his knee. This acerbic Serb doesn’t settle for teasing the horrific from its lair, he puts it through a puckish, Till Eulenspiegel-like “sieve” (Vendler’s veridicalism) that strews double-handed germs of anxiety with the ambidexterity of a Johnny Appleseed sowing Winesaps and Red Delicious. The somewhat earlier poem “Classic Ballroom Dances” (1980) revealed a mellower Simic, one who not only had Terpsichorean blasts like (W. C.) Williams’s “The Kermess” and Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” safely under his belt, but had by great labor run the gamut of boozy, swervy dance steps himself:

                         Grandmothers who wring the necks

                        Of chickens; old nuns

                        With names like Theresa, Marianne,

                        Who pull schoolboys by the ear;

                        The intricate steps of pickpockets

                        Working the crowd of the curious

                        At the scene of an accident; the slow shuffle

                        Of the evangelist with a sandwich board;

                        The hesitation of the early-morning customer

                        Peeking through the window grille

                        Of a pawnshop; the weave of a little kid

                        Who is walking to school with eyes closed;

                        And the ancient lovers, cheek to cheek,

                        On the dance floor of the Union Hall,

                        Where they also hold charity raffles

                        On rainy Monday nights of an eternal November.  

          Arguably, Simic’s game has improved markedly over the years. For one thing, he no longer lets minor shock effects disvalue his take on the American dream, having begun sometime around the early ‘80s to insist on a decidedly more catholic rosary of anomalies. “Head of a Doll,” from the tip of the dying millennium’s backside (1999), very nearly encroaches upon the “Hieronymo’s mad againe” territory seized by Paul Célan by converting the blood simple congealed within the Creeley stanza into its Doppelgänger alembic of Gnosticism re-buffed and re-Bosched:

                        Whose demon are you,

                        Whose god? I asked

                        Of the painted mouth

                        Half-buried in the sand.

                        A brooding gull

                        Made a brief assessment,

                        And tiptoed away

                        Nodding to himself.

                        At dusk a firefly or two

                        Dowsed its eye pits.

                        And later, toward midnight,

            I even heard mice.  

Though somewhat advanced in years to still be considered a “younger poet” (he’s 67), Simic remains a dangerous man to believe down for the count. He has proved more than once a Merlin of self-transformation, passing through the needle-eye of enough vanishing points to make even a Cocteau dizzy. But more importantly, he has outlasted most of his fraternity mates in the Deep Image brotherhood, and his ability to maintain stride no matter how soapy the causeway, looks fair to keep him at the head of the current quarter-horse pack, at least for a while longer.

Frank Bidart

The springiest thing about the art of Frank Bidart (b. 1939) is that being so much at variance with the droppings of other birds similarly wired, it is not easily pigeonholed. Hang it as one might, it simply won’t suffer its jersey to grace some sweaty movement’s locker room or tour bus. This might perhaps be due to Bidart’s never having been apprenticed to the Stanford Deli and its celebrated slice-and-dice maître d’hôtel, Yvor Winters. Or, like Jorie Graham (see below), to being impatient with verse either fashionably staid or just as fashionably unruly turned out by the yard everywhere one looks. However Bidart might’ve avoided the way of this particular flesh, there is a good chance that American poetry will someday be rewarded with a Collected Poems by this poet unlike any to have so far turned its face to the wind. For who but Bidart could successfully agglutinate the fissionable material that “Ellen West” (1977) is irradiated with and husband its critical mass just long enough for the core of its operatic melodrama a due voci to fireball on cue? Or glass-blow a snow globe like ”Another Life,” which plants JFK’s 1961 trip to Paris in hallucinatory soil so rich that it is impossible not to see prefigured in its coiled trope the future blight its lines inexorabilize? Bidart’s style is often described as heavily dependent on “cinematic montage” and on fragments kept from dissolving into sameness only by the buttressing effect of slim wedges of heterogeneity. Fond of typographic jumpstarts and barking block capitals out of Kenneth Patchen’s Journal of Albion Moonlight, Bidart can whipsaw from O’Hara-esque effusions to bleeding chunks of raw cliché offered with the cuff-shooting quand même of a Malko or Svetlanov polishing off a bonbon by Glazunov.  

          A lot of stuff happens in a Bidart poem but much of it remains hidden behind a swirl of signals tricked out in wimples and ruffs snagged from the best of school-of Michaux costumeries. Under an epigraph from Paul Valéry, “Another Life” bravely sets out, determined to somehow italicize itself into a Zen concentration appropriate to its tailgating frame-tale’s hairpin curves—

                        “—In a dream I never exactly dreamed,

                        but that is, somehow, the quintessence

                        of what I might have dreamed,

                                                                         Kennedy is in Paris

                        again; it’s ’61; once again

                        some new national life seems possible,

                        though desperately, I try to remain unduped,

                        even cynical . . .

                                                 He’s standing in an open car,

                        brilliantly lit, bright orange

                        next to a grey de Gaulle, and they stand

                        not far from me, slowly moving up the Champs Elysées . . . .  

—and ends entangled in a holoscene from which private dream cannot with any certainty be disengaged from public event:

                        —I turned, and turned, but now all that was left

                        was an enormous

                                                fresco; —on each side, the unreadable

                                                                                     fresco of my life. . .”  

      So the sausage of a Bidart poem blasts its containing membrane to bits, the resulting tatters having been unmasked as pieces of the sausage itself mirrored from the underside. The exploded membrane that appeared only to disappear, its forcemeat spurting every which way, is then seen (in retrospect) as the dot from which originated the big bang of Rimbaldian délire that provided us with the show we’ve just watched. When optimally choreographed, the sense of seeing a dream of some pièce de resistance walking materializes out of our assisting (as the French idiomatically put it) at a spectacle in which a delirium of sorts withers into its own truth, avoiding all taint of a moral tied with a neat gratulatory bow. Bidart and Jorie Graham clearly head a class of supreme wingers maximizing the possibilities of today’s “cinematic” poetry—and it’s hard to predict just where Bidart’s romance with the cutting room floor (not to mention its epos of Camp indulged and denied) will carry him next. To stay on top of Bidart’s unique gyrational act, we need to remain not just tuned but fine-tuned.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky (b. 1940)—is almost as well known as a translator of Dante as he is for being an original poet. Another alumnus of the Wintersian school of nail-biters, he has survived the slicer, having emerged from the experience, unlike Edgar Bowers, say, or Wesley Trimpi, with minimal scarring and, from the look of it, few permanent ill effects. Vengefully or reverently, he has enshrined the Svengali-like attractions of his one-time mentor (whom he characterizes, with some Freudian irony, as “the Old Man”) in a poem in which, as viva voce remembrancer, he reproduces verbatim Winters’s ritual introduction to his Stanford poetry seminar. The strainings, duly italicized, from “Peroration, Concerning Genius” (the XXth segment of a long poem titled “Essay on Psychiatrists”), are themselves worth retailing:

                                                . . . “I know why you are here.

           You are here to laugh. You have heard of a crazy

           Old man who believes that Robert Bridges

           Was a good poet; who believes that Fulke

Greville was a great poet, greater than Philip

Sidney; who believes that Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Are not all that they are cracked up to be. . . . Well,

I will tell you something: I will tell you

What this course is about. Sometime in the middle

Of the Eighteenth Century, along with the rise

Of capitalism and scientific method, the logical

Foundations of Western thought decayed and fell apart.

When they fell apart, poets were left

With emotions and experiences, and with no way

To examine them. At this time, poets and men

Of genius began to go mad. Gray went mad. Collins

Went mad. Kit Smart was mad. William Blake surely

Was a madman. Coleridge was a drug addict, with severe

Depression. My friend Hart Crane died mad. My friend

Ezra Pound is mad. But you will not go mad; you will

            grow up

To become happy, sentimental old college professors,

Because they were men of genius, and you

Are not; and the ideas which were vital

To them are mere amusements to you. I will not

Go mad, because I have understood these ideas. . . .”  

     Contrastingly, the Randall Jarrell portrait of Winters in conference with his sycophants appearing in “Fifty Years of American Poetry” is not at all like the portrait painted by Pinsky. In fact, his “parable” is almost the inverted anti-self of Pinsky’s breathless adulatio:

. . . These poets have met an enchanter who has said to them: You have all met an enchanter who has transformed you into obscure romantic animals, but you can become clear and classical and human again if you will only swallow these rules.” The poets swallow them and from that moment they are all Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a wax one; from that moment they wander, grave weighing shades, through a landscape each leaf of which rhyme and scans, and says softly: “And the moral of that is . . .”  

     In its own garrulous way, Pinsky’s self-indicting recollection (recalling the monologue skidded into on the witness stand by The Caine Mutiny’s Captain Queeg) remains the best sketch of “Winters the riveting delusionist” we have—truly a tour de force. For sheer quality of attainment it belongs next to that shimmering kaleidoscope slide, which, though now 20 years old, is for many Pinsky’s best work to date, “The Figured Wheel.” Sounding for all the world like something Allen Ginsberg put through a syllable grinder calibrated by Marianne Moore, this poem consists of 49 lines of irregular iambic hexameter assembling, under a brightly Chagalled exhibition-hall ceiling, themes which have yanked at the elbow of this poet for years. Among these are the ineludability of nihilism, the tendency of homo sapiens to keep nihilism at arm’s length despite its ineludability, and the power questions have of further deflecting, if not completely vanquishing, the destructive effects wielded by the grandiose answers they lead to. Pinsky’s “figured wheel” can be viewed as either the imago of answers masquerading as “whole World.com” or the “slouching toward Bethlehem” eidolon of “answerworld.2.” Either way, this Ferris-like rotator in ineluctably rolling on, pointlessly levels everything in its path and leaves obviated in its wake all meaningful life as we know it or imagine it. For Pinsky, the overarching feature of the wheel is this: in its indomitable rolling action it takes on accretively all myth systems, religions, and historicisms it passes over. More rapacious by far than even Howl’s Moloch, it is no mere dreidl of Moira but as the rota obligata of Ananke itself:

                                                                                                . . .

            The wheel as it turns goes on accreting ornaments,

            Scientists and artists festoon it from the grave with brilliant

            Toys and messages, jokes and zodiacs, tragedies conceived

            From among the dreams of the unemployed and the pampered,

            The listless and the tortured. It is hung with devices

            By dead masters who have survived by reducing themselves magically

            To tiny organisms, to wisps of matter, crumbs of soil.

            Bits of dry skin, microscopic flakes, which is why they are called “great,”

            In their humility that goes on celebrating the turning

            Of the wheel as it rolls unrelentingly over

            A cow plodding through car-traffic on a street in Iasi

            And over the haunts of Robert Pinsky’s mother and father

            And wife and children and his sweet self

            Which he hereby and unwillingly and inexpertly gives up, because it is

            There, figured and pre-figured in the nothing-transfiguring wheel.  

          The same bizarre amalgam of Lilliputian focus and Brobdingnagian depth of field occurs in shorter Pinsky poems also. Never one to squander question times on “What if's,” this poet likes to zero in on the ciphers (recognizably human, though denuded ontologically to Gordian naughts) prompting the discerning to prefer the query, “What about . . . ?” As is stressed (almost to the point of obsession) in “The Questions” (1983), such interpellations—always with respect to people—are as endemic to the autonomic nervous system as breathing:

                        What about the people who came to my father’s office

                        For hearing aid and glasses—chatting with him sometimes

                        A few extra minutes while I swept up in the back,

                        Addressed packages, cleaned the machines; if he was busy

                        I might sell them batteries, or tend to their questions: . . .  

     People—the gross generic rather than the collective mysterium from which census takers distill statistics—have for Pinsky remained too long the mere unempowered shadow-subjects of demagogues shuttling with evangelical impunity between the homologues pray and prey. While a “Poem About People” might never restore the pre-Enlightenment grace dispersed by that generic, Pinsky is betting that, if taken seriously, the pixel count of perception might be raised enough for the us not susceptible to being folded into we, the people to recapture that quotient of humanity long been absent from our field of vision. You know this monster most dear, O reader; it is the people, that flawed simulacrum of ourselves that would rather congregate en masse than commune darkly with its own navels; that prefers the transport of rock concerts and ball games to not driving others to distraction with unresolved needs of their own. Also—and this perhaps is what is most irremediably awful about this aggregate—its adsunt is not the result of some Intelligent Daseiner having dropped its singulars here (like the naturalized citizens of Zola’s Germinal or Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, for example), but are literally being spewed out everywhere to be run over, mangled, and crushed not by anything as cosmically elegant as a figured wheel but by a rota ordinaria no more intergalactic than the Spenglerian go-round writ no larger than the microdot from which we all sprang:

                        The jaunty crop-haired graying

                        Women in grocery stores,

                        Their clothes boyish and neat,

                        New mittens or clean sneakers,

                        Clean hands, hips not bad still,

                        Buying ice cream, steaks, soda,

                        Fresh melons and soap—or the big

                        Balding young men in work shoes

                        And green work pants, beer belly

                        And white T-shirt, the porky walk

                        Back to the truck, polite; possible

                        To feel briefly like Jesus,

                        A gust of diffuse tenderness

                        Crossing the dark spaces . . .  

This, then, just in: though lacking in the breadth—and depth—sufficient to land him in the class of an A. R. Ammons, Robert Pinsky appears to have carved a reasonably secure niche for himself among the better quality also-rans and reality-show survivors of American poetry’s own figured wheel. Not a bad thing, considering: others equally promising have, given comparably protracted careers, fared worse. The problem with Pinsky-style verse is that, while remaining distinct through its various devolutions, it never really evolves into that non pareil poets all crave but hardly ever produce. To sound more or less like one’s own age is, sad to say, to be left to resound, rather less than more, in others’.

Sharon Olds

One very much dislikes relegating a poet like Sharon Olds (b. 1942) to the heap of the second-rate, for plainly she deserves better, post-confessionalist leanings to the contrary notwithstanding. Unfortunately—and this should not be ignored or downplayed—many of her poems, fascinating as they appear, are not, strictly speaking, poetry at all. A hypostasis, or even a hologram of it, perhaps, but an eidolon, not the living, breathing thing itself. How, you ask, can something be a version of something without ultimately requiring to be judged as a version of that thing? Well, zebras are not, despite their equine attributes, horses; nor are tents houses, or soapbox derby vehicles automobiles. An Olds composition might look like a poem, read like a poem, invite judgment, positive or negative, and be given a pass as though it indeed were a poem, but still lack enough of what makes a poem truly one and not just a reasonable facsimile of it like the “prose poem,” the apothegm, or the purple aphorism when all the beans have been counted.  

      Even freakish genera can be induced to throw off diverting exceptions to their own rule, which might explain how the naturalistic yodel favored by Olds can be nudged and prodded until it yields up radiant deviations from poetry’s clutch-purse of norms. One such is “You Kindly,” which I hesitate to call a “love poem” because, as much as I am moved to be moved by it, I cannot certify it’s having met that faux-genre’s faux-requirement that the love-object of such a poem must appear as an actual individual. Love-objects may go unnamed—indeed, that is usually their fate; but the person in question, along with his or her personhood, should be conjurable beyond a separately hymnable clutch of limbs, organs, salivary glands, and nipples. True, the “you” referred to “kindly” in Olds’s poem does point to the poet’s own husband; yet there is little in Olds’s loving litany to confer real flesh on the disembodied and wispy him-ness therein rhapsodized.  

      A pity, because it is a rare thing in American writing today to come upon a woman’s paean to a sexual alter ego who is unequivocally male. We find such cropping up occasionally in Denise Levertov’s early verse and in the prose-poetry fantasias of Anaïs Nin, but in not many other places where the intent is not, at least on the surface, silkily pornographic. With an expediency bordering on genuine abandon, “You Kindly” makes its ascension to one-of-a-kind exceptionality from the very first of its 67 lines. So seamless in fact as a model of erotic bliss is it the sensual allure that it limns is scarcely dimmed by its reduction of male attractiveness to a handful of protruberantly tasty bits. Only cited in toto can “You, Kindly” be fully appreciated for what it is, but for the sake of even the modicum of erotogeneity that a potsherd of Olds is likely to arouse, its opening lines are cited below as an example of this poet’s ability to be shorthair-raisingly evocative without ever once being spurred to speak in poetry’s tongues:

                        Because I felt too weak to move

                        you kindly moved for me, kneeling

                        and turning, until you could take my breast-tip in the

                        socket of your lips, and my womb went down

                        on itself, drew sharply over and over

                        to its tightest shape, the way, when newborns

                        nurse, the fist of the uterus

                        with each, milk, tug, powerfully

                        shuts. . . .  

         Superb as this is, its “tug,” to borrow one of its own words, is unmistakably toward prose’s gravitational field rather than poetry’s. The latter rides to its realizations on the swiftest of steeds; Olds’s below-the-belt confessio reaches the hitching post of its transcendence in no more than a walk. Unfair? Okay—in an andante sure of its destination but heedless of delights that might strew its ambling path. It might be reverently observant of the feelings that brought it to the pitch of adoration, be even grateful for having glimpsed them; yet it seems no more concerned with who owns the zones being caressed than the point of view in any piece of soft porn might be.  

      And then, of course, there is the matter of Olds’s “tell it like it is”—well, matter. Confessional poets often bore because that is what people who go on interminably about their own troubled pasts invariably do. The last person to have written compulsively about himself without hopelessly boring his reader was Montaigne, and even he starts to pall when, having strapped on his rhetorical heels, the mountain outside his study window and his persona assume equal elevation. (Rousseau, too, could drop lids crashingly, a fact to which fact many in his time bore witness, whether having been present when he was doing his thing or merely gossiping about having learned it secondhand. Anyone doubting this can have their qualms quashed by reading his Confessions, a book that refutes for all time D. H. Lawrence’s injunction to always put one’s trust in the teller rather than his tale.)  

      Electra-complexed or not, Olds has always had much screaming to get off her chest, all of it sayable but frequently devoid of telling effect—at least not without issues of privacy and taste being raised which she herself might well broach given different circumstances. Like other “postconfessional” poets she doesn’t so much write out of calamitous experience as out of a need to write herself into it, to the point of clinical blowout, if need be. Still, we’re left with the nagging question: if whose need be—the reader’s, or just hers? Since the reader is not admitted to the consulting room he has to rely on the poet to present herself uncensored but tempered enough to commit her ideas and emotions to the refining fires of art rather than to the less fiery arts of refinement. The way of the latter leads directly to store-bought naturalism, self-immolation, and the therapeutics of shock, which is the same, I guess, as saying that Olds habitually favors the fiery arts over similitudes less warm to the touch. The aspersive paternal shadow cast in poems like “The Promise,” “The Glass,” “The Feelings,” “The Exact Moment of His Death,” “My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead,” and “Once” comes off in far too many poems as a literary property and not a crippling parental blight. For one thing, it is difficult to see the man infernalized in them having wrought the havoc that is attributed to him; the glowing mental and sexual health of the poet retrieving his shade from Hades rather compromises the testimony given. Such poems may invite the wrath of the politically correct but others, such as “You Kindly,” argue for greater caution in the wielding of “clinical” generalizations about the despoiling effect (short of actual molestation) “abusive” fathers can wreak upon their daughters’ sexual lives. More must be known about the susceptibility of individual women to such damage, which means that political capital should cease to flow from dissension sown among already overstressed combatants in the gender wars, and writers like Sharon Olds are in a good position to see at least some of these poisonous trends reversed.  

          But there are aspects of being catapulted into the maelstrom of a poet’s personal life that are more disturbing even than these. To start with—and it is for this reason that I flee the confessional when in range of the outpourings of a Gregory Orr, a Bruce Weigl, a Marilyn Hacker or a W. D. Erhart—confessionalism doesn’t just violate the lyric impulse, it does what can only be called a Sadean number on it. Which is why Olds too often impresses one as a Sexton lacking the single bell whose pealing tones can all but cover the raging multitude of sins confessionalist poets harp on. Anne Sexton—certainly no slouch at Walmarting the sexually unspeakable—managed when at her best to keep personal gossip and the lyric imperative sufficiently compartmentalized that the one was never allowed to wreak havoc on the other. She could grasp, in other words, what Olds, forever prone to ruckus and retribution, remains unable to implement beyond the crudest of fauvismes: the refusal of permissiveness that alone keeps the storm surge unleashed by open confession from battering the shoreline of those only too easily beset poetics of personal reconnaissance. Lyric poetry tells us, in language both memorable and personally involving, what it feels like to experience significant emotion from the inside. Confessional poetry, always on the other side of this, tries to clarify (to whom in particular—or for that matter in general—often being left hanging) what the experience, in whatever form it takes, means. And for no more ostensible reason than to register satisfaction at being the fount from which the blessings of meaning cracked open in this way flow. If the confessionalist impulse had no deeper source than “look at me, look at me,” it would create no more muddle in setting “sinners” off from the “sinned against” than did Wordsworth or Coleridge in writings each of them published after their entente of the Lyrical Ballads had run its course. The confessionalist muse does not pull up stakes when the literary sensibility is under pressure to withdraw so that pathologists properly equipped to arbitrate issues of life and death can weigh in on the side of good and plenty over and against the worse and not enough. No, it is precisely at such times that the confessionalist muse is about her business of warming the tub to ensure the swift emission of blood from the slashed wrists of those benighted enough to have wished for her intervention in their affairs. Not to put too fine a point on this, confessional poetry publicly re-privatizes public excoriation until it resembles emotional solvency. Is the result poetry? Leonard Cohen once jokingly remarked that writing was easy: all you had to do was sit down and open a vein. Was he really joking, or just pulling the leg of those prone to being fatuously over-serious? Either way, modern poetry has to center on more than just the world being kept alive by a dialysis machine making poets’ offal impurities go round. Otherwise, it is no more than a brief and abstract chronicle of organ damage wholly befitting the piss-poor time we live in.  

      Yet, how remote all this seems from the renally rich strains in which Sir Philip Sidney and poets of his kidney waxed apologetic. Attendant upon worlds much differently golden, their verse hewed to the uplifting while sensibly forgoing the arch; and, though beset by hell-hounds not easily distracted by a sop, their diurnal round may have been as replete as our own with means exceeded and lives lived griplessly end over end, but what a difference their day made to the standing of poets in general in that world!   

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