G. C. Waldrep, _Feast Gently_

 THIS IS THE fifth collection by Waldrep that I have read, and it’s my favorite so far (he has published another since this one, I should mention, with another coming out shortly).

I kept thinking of Hopkins—and let me immediately qualify that and emphasize that Waldrep does not sound like Hopkins at all (no one should try to sound like Hopkins). What I have in mind is that Hopkins had an astonishing, even preternatural gift for presenting sensory details but at the same time a kind of mistrust in the body, a suspicion that it was too easily snared. Waldrep likewise serves up an astonishing array of sensory imagery (“From waxy cells bees tender their last dances”) but feels a degree or two of anxiety about the body (“We are all cages / of meat”).

Hopkins found comfort and meaning in traditional rituals of worship, but also experienced terrible doubt. Waldrep moves into the subjunctive mood of prayer often in the book (“Let my frame be a honey-stanchion then, / a sill, a dry milk” or “Let me be the only / casualty, the waking wound towards which the forest / of my fading heat is climbing”), but serenity is elusive (“In the marriage plot / of faith, I drew the Hanged Man.”)

Like Hopkins, then, Waldrep seems a composition of incompatibilities, an ascetic sensualist, a doubting believer. Joshua Corey captures some of this in a back cover blurb, writing of “an ecstatic sobriety.” Even the title—“feast gently.” Indulge yourself, live it up, but with restraint, tenderness, a delicacy of touch.

One last kinship: Hopkins never sounds like anyone but Hopkins, and Waldrep, even when he is going in for self-abnegation, never sounds like anyone but Waldrep. And I am glad of it.

Martin Amis, _The Rachel Papers_

 OUCH. AMIS’S DEATH gave me a chill, he being only a few years older than I am. Brr.

As I wrote a while ago (6/16/2016), Amis’s oeuvre has an arc roughly comparable to that of Evelyn Waugh, turning from an early run of shorter, snarkier, more satirical novels to longer, more ambitious, more weighty ones. Waugh’s earlier ones have a somewhat higher standing now, it seems to me. Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust capture something of their time that no one else caught as well, but it takes a hardcore commitment to Waugh to get through the Sword of Honour trilogy. In Amis’s case too, I suspect, the bad boy early career fiction will stand a better chance with posterity than the more mature work, and for the same reason—it seems to tune in on something definitive about the moment it was written.

Take The Rachel Papers, for instance, his first novel, published when he was just 24. There he is in the back cover author photo doing his best Jagger-circa-1972, shaggy hair, direct gaze, pouty unsmiling mouth, dangling mostly-consumed cigarette. 

The narrator, Charles Highway, is hours away from turning twenty and saying farewell to youth as he tells us of his preoccupations of the last year, which are mainly about getting into Oxford and bedding a young woman named Rachel. Charles is a highly recognizable character: callow, shallow, horny, and hyperliterate, "having a vocabulary more refined than your emotions” as he puts it. So yes, he is a stereotype, but Amis so perfectly renders that stereotype as it manifested in 1969-71 (e.g., Charles’s conviction that turning 20 makes one irrelevant) that, fifty years on, the book is valuable as a portrait of its era. One doesn’t exactly like Charles Highway, as one doesn’t exactly like Holden Caulfield, but he is as recognizable as your face in the mirror.

And then there’s the style—fast, fresh, funny, a firecracker or two on every page. Amis is a young writer showing off, true, but that can be a lot more diverting than a mature writer trying to be Saul Bellow.

Well, rest in peace, Mr. Amis. I think you have an excellent chance of continuing to be read.

Robert Hass, “A Sunset” and “Meditation at Lagunitas”

 ROBERT HASS HAD a poem, “A Sunset,” in the September 9 issue of the New Yorker, and its final line—“That burned, that burned and burned”—reminded me suddenly and sharply of the final line of what may be Hass’s best-known poem, “Meditation at Lagunitas”: “saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.”

Interesting coincidence, both poems ending with a thrice-repeated word, so I fetched down Hass’s Praise (1979) to re-read the earlier poem and see whether they were related in any other way. I would say they are. 

“Meditation” addresses the inability of language to achieve plenitude, that “a word is elegy to what it signifies,” making the repetition of “blackberry” at the end poignant. Can poetry use language to transcend  language’s limitations? Can it bring us a little closer to the truth that language falls so short of? The poem does not exactly say “yes,” but it does leave an opening for “maybe.”

“Sunset” also begins with a nod to the duplicity of language, claiming that “sordid” can mean “bruise-colored, a yellow-brown.” News to me, and unrecorded in the OED, but certainly a good instance of language being slippery—and if language is that slippery, can poetry be anything but slippery? Can it (Auden not withstanding) make things happen? Could it, for instance, have prevented the school massacre at Uvalde? If the “angry adolescent boy in Texas / Who shot and killed nineteen children / With a high-powered weapon my culture / Put into his hands” had read poetry rather than play first-person-shooter games, would that have made a difference?

The question of whether “culture” in the old sense (books, paintings, and opera, rather than the NRA and computer games) can make anything happen occupies most of “A Sunset.” Ashbery knew better than to try, Hass suggests, not out of indifference but out of modesty. Hitler’s record collection (“Wagner, of course, the operas / Especially, but also Mussorgsky, / Rachmaninoff”) did not stop him from being Hitler, nor did Monet’s painting the waterlilies at Giverny lessen the carnage of trench warfare.

Beauty ought to make a difference, right? But will we ever know that it does? Just as “Meditation” has no evidence that language gets us somewhere other than the uncanny lift of “blackberry, blackberry, blackberry”, “Sunset” has no evidence that beauty gets us somewhere other than our capacity to be brought up short by a sunset: “In the dark / I thought of an ordinary radiance / That burned, that burned and burned.”

Larry Levis, _The Gazer Within_

 MY INTEREST IN Larry Levis led me to this volume of his occasional prose, assembled a few years after his death by James Marshall, Andrew Miller, and John Venable, “with the assistance of Mary Flinn.” I’m not sure what the editors’ tie to Levis was…friends, former students, I imagine. The foreword is by David St. John.

I obtained a copy through interlibrary loan. Thank you, South Dakota State University!

Levis’s prose is intelligent, light on its feet, vivid, witty, and passionate about poetry…no surprises there. Of particular interest:

—An autobiographical essay written in the last year of his life. Levis devotes most of his space to his childhood and youth on his parents’ farm in the San Joaquin Valley, a recurring landscape in his poetry.

—An essay on his most crucial mentor, Philip Levine. 

—An essay on elegy (Levis’ s late work includes about a dozen poems he identified as elegies), with particular attention to Heaney’s “Station Island.”

—a lengthy and candid interview with the poet David Wojahn.

—“Some Notes on the Gazer Within,” an essay of twenty pages that looks to be Levis’s most developed statement of his poetics. Judging from this essay, and drawing on the typology I sketched in the Sept. 11, 2024 post, I feel safe calling Levis a “Camp A” poet, interested in paying attention to and faithfully representing actual phenomenon (e.g., in this essay, landscapes and animals).

—“Eden and My Generation” interested me because it hinted at the existence of what in that same post I called “Camp B” poets, whose work is based less on actual phenomena than on the processes of language. As Levis sees it, “In a way my generation has had to invent a way of thinking and a language which could not only record its losses, but could also question the motive behind every use of that language—especially its own.” Case in point, Levis’s discussion of Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas,” which both evokes a place in Hass’s memory and “all the new thinking” about language.

Coincidentally, I had just been thinking about that Hass poem since Hass published what looked to me like a re-boot of it in the September 9 New Yorker. But that’s another post for another day.

Heather Christle, _Heliopause_

 I WAS LOOKING for The Crying Book on my shelves last week, in anticipation of Christle's forthcoming book on Virginia Woolf, and came across this, her fourth book of poems. Have I read this? I asked myself. Turns out that I have not, even though it came out in 2015. Well, now is the time.

"Heliopause" is "the boundary of the heliosphere," according to the online dictionary I consulted, and the "heliosphere" is defined as "the region of space, encompassing the solar system, in which the solar wind has a significant influence." We are, then, dealing with boundaries, with the liminal, with zones where one place becomes another place. 

The word shows up in its literal sense in the sequence "Dear Seth," a group of verse epistles. "Neil Armstrong died / the same day Voyager finally reached the limit / of our solar system," Christle notes in one letter, then adds in the next: 

     I am still thinking about space
For a long time they did not know
if Voyager had crossed the heliopause
and we lived
     in the strange interim
of an event perhaps having occurred
in the uncertainty of something 
having happened

Those moments that distinguish a "before" from an "after" recur throughout the book, like the deaths of friends ("Poem for Bill Cassidy"). The poems are often set in the "during," when we are no longer "before" but not yet "after." One of the longer pieces is an erasure poem based on the transcripts of Neil Armstrong's communications with mission control as he took humankind's first steps on the moon, for instance, but we also have that more familiar and longer-lasting watershed, pregnancy: ("Tomorrow the baby hits the size / of a banana"). 

The theme is a good fit for Christle. The shorter poems in the collection reminded me a lot of her earlier work and her ability to somehow situate her poems between whimsy and terror. This is how "Keep in Shape" ends:

               See how
the weather does not write me
never phones
          I can't pretend
that doesn't hurt
               but I can
pretend I'm burning down my home

The little joke about the weather as bad boyfriend or negligent child turns into a confession of feeling and then into a vision of destruction...that is the echt Christle note, right there. Where are we? We are all over the map, all at once...that's where we are. I hope her (deserved) success as a prose writer does not mean she won't be publishing more poetry.

Hergé (Georges Remi), _Tintin en Amerique_

 JUDGING FROM THE COVER, I guessed this early (1931-32) entry in the Tintin series was full of unpalatable stereotypes of indigenous American peoples, and in fact it is, so I am not sure why it has not yet been shuffled off into the same limbo where Tintin au Congo now resides.

More surprising was that the whole United States is satirized from first page to last: organized crime (page 1 et seq.), the hypocrisy of Prohibition (p. 36), lynching (pp. 35-37), sensation-seeking journalists (p. 44). The French are among the nations that have a robust strand of anti-Americanism in their culture, I know, but the strength of the satire took me a little by surprise.

The most surprising instance--also, I have to say, one I was glad to see--occurs on pp. 28-29. Tintin, while sitting on a rock on indigenous land, accidentally discover an oil gusher. He is instantly surrounded by oil speculators, who offer him five thousand, then ten, twenty-five, fifty, and finally a hundred thousand dollars for his oil rights. He explains that the land and its oil rights belong to the indigenous people he has just been spending time with. The oil men then offer the chief of the nearby settlement twenty-five dollars for the rights. "Le Visage-Pâle est-il fou?" ("Is  the Paleface mad?") asks the chief. The oil men then send in the army to dispossess the natives and set up an oil operation. 

It's like Killers of the Flower Moon in ten cartoon panels.

Larry Levis, _Winter Stars_

 PAINFUL BUT BEAUTIFUL. "My Story in a Late Style of Fire" aligns unnervingly with two of the poems that appeared in The Darkening Trapeze, "Elegy for the Infinite Wrapped in Tinfoil" and "Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire," but the figuration of self-destruction as arson is if anything more direct and confessional in this earlier poem. I got the feeling that some headlong but doomed affair had once and for all finished off Levis's marriage, that he knew it was futile and wrong but wasn't about to stop himself, and ended up burning down his own life. I'm just guessing, of course.

That poem and the two final ones in the book would be part of any argument that Levis's work is worth reading and heeding, I think. "The Assimilation of the Gypsies" and "Sensationalism" both start from photographs by Josef Koudelka, with Levis opening the photos up into stories or screenplays that turn out to be about our relationship to time, which is mainly our relationship with death, and so we might connect these to an earlier poem in the book, "Those Graves in Rome," one of which is the grave of one whose name was writ in water...and it's all painful. But beautiful. I'm going to go see if I can recall the last stanza of "Ode on Melancholy" now. I had it memorized once. I bet Levis did too.