Sam Riviere, _81 Austerities_

 I LIKED RIVIERE'S novel, Dead Souls, so much that I decided to try his poetry, which turns out to be "interesting," as we say when we think something might be important but don't want to risk declaring that we like it.

81 Austerities contains, as you might have guessed, eighty-one poems, all originally published on Riviere's blog in 2011, at a moment when the British government was adopting "austerity measures," that is, raising taxes and cutting public services.

The eighty-one poems leave the impression of practicing certain austerities themselves, as they are generally brief (only a few require more than one page) and largely do without upper-case letters and punctuation marks.

The no-caps, no-punctuation style, the brevity, and the syntactic plainness of the poems ("I was watching TV / with the windows open / it was a warm night"), combined with their first appearing in a digital medium makes a reader think of Instagram poetry, but in many a wink to the reader Riviere reveals he is cannier than that. For instance, there is a poem at the very end titled "81 Austerities" that seems to consist of quick comments on the other poems in the volume.

I found myself thinking instead of Chelsey Minnis (see posts of March 17, 2019; October 13, 2019; and January 22, 2020). Minnis's poems, too, seem superficially like the kind of poem you would find in an intelligent but anxious teen's journal or social media account. Often enough, though, they seem to be deliberately trying to sound like that, a poetic knuckleball wobbling its way past you for a strike. Is this poem the pathetic little squib it looks like at first glance or is it...important? 

But what in the world makes a poem important? Should we refrain thinking of importance, however defined, as the right goal for a poem?

I am also reading Michael Hamburger's translations of Holderlin currently, and I wonder if Riviere and Minnis are programmatically renouncing ambition. 

Holderlin lies behind Heidegger's exalted idea of poetry as the Un-Concealing of Being, as the basis of all art, as the basis of history...you name it. For Heidegger, poetry is where the big meanings are. But what if going for the Big Meanings opens the door to the political commitments for which Heidegger is so (rightly) notorious? Is ambitious poetry complicit with horror? (Pound, for instance).

This in turns reminds me of a passage in "A Sunset," which Robert Hass recently published in the New Yorker.

This may be where
John Ashbery would introduce a non sequitur,
Not from aversion to responsibility
But from a sense he no doubt had
That there was a kind of self-importance
In the introduction of morality to poetry
And that one might, therefore, be better off
Practicing one’s art in more or less
The spirit of the poor juggler in the story
Of Christmas who, having no gift to bring
To the infant god, crept into the church
In the night and faced the crèche and juggled.

Ashbery steers as far as he can from sounding like a vates, to be sure. Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett also could be said to be trying to tack as hard as they could away from the poetic course celebrated by Heidegger. So I wonder if  Riviere and Minnis are looking for ways  to write poetry without being Poets.