HERE I WAS not too long ago (August 10) getting snippy about how dull the poetry coming out of FSG can be--only to come across this just a little while later, which turns out to be excellent.
(Another danger sign--"Log-Rolling Ahead"--was that Reece had blurbed Richard Blanco's Looking for the Gulf Motel, which I had recently read, and Blanco had reciprocated by blurbing this. Whenever I notice this going on, I'm less inclined than I might have been to give either blurb much credence. But here too my skepticism turned out to be unfounded. )
What is excellent about it? Well there is the title poem, which appeared in Best American Poetry 2012 and is the main reason I took a chance on this volume. It's a poem of some length, a little over twenty pages, about a man Reece knew years ago, apparently through AA or a similar program, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "Durell" is his name in the poem; he is a bit of a mess, despite coming from a somewhat distinguished family and having received an elite education. Things just didn't work out. But Reece "needed a liberator / and liberators can come in some unexpected guises"--just as, he goes on to mention, Jesus after his death appeared in an unexpected guise to some of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, so far indeed from his usual appearance that only after the stranger had disappeared did they realize to whom they had been talking. Similarly, Reece is, many years on, still unpacking what Durell meant to him. Durell had been long estranged from his family, but after his death, Reece tracks down Durell's sister, trying to get at who the man was. He is not quite able to say, but does come up these extraordinary lines, quoted by Christian Wiman in My Bright Abyss: "All I know now / is the more he loved me, the more I loved the world."
"The Road to Emmaus" is a highlight, but there are other extraordinary long poems here: "Gilgamesh," where Reece's relationship with another man is convincingly braided with a queer reading of the Babylonian epic; "Hartford," a prose-poem or perhaps a D'Agatian "next American essay" about the city where Reece was born, which with subtle sleight of hand blends Bob Marley, Wallace Stevens, and Mary Macleod Bethune; "The Upper Room," another poem that convincingly binds a New Testament story to the poet's memory of a particular time in his life.
Reece is a priest in the Reformed Episcopal Church, and much of the book is about spiritual concerns, but you will have to go elsewhere if you are looking for uplift and consolation; we're just barely out of the Slough of Despond most of the time here, and staying out is a fairly arduous business. There is lots of elegant dry wit to get by on, though, as when Reece describes the figure on the silver crucifix he wears, "a man I now relied on," as "a childless, bachelor Jew, slightly feminine," or as when a slightly acid-flavored portrait of an elderly couple ("she is reading Vita Sackville-West, / he has food on his moth-eaten sweater vest") is titled "The Fifth Commandment"--that is, "Honor thy father and thy mother."
Saturday, September 6, 2014
Friday, August 15, 2014
Richard Blanco, _Looking for the Gulf Motel_
I PICKED THIS up because I enjoyed Blanco's inauguration poem (okay, yes, it did take me a while to get around to reading the book) for its Whitman-like qualities: its long lines, its deep-breath sweep, its embrace of the details of many different kinds of lives. Turns out, that's not the way he usually writes--at least, there is nothing of that sort in this book, but it was worthwhile all the same.
In Looking for the Gulf Motel, at least, Blanco is not really a wide-screen, Whitman kind of poet. His subject matter comes mainly from the intimate and close-to-home, family, partners, memories of growing up. His form is loosely closed, the lines perhaps not technically iambic pentameter but recalling iambic rhythms, with a penchant for 5- and 6-line stanzas.
His poetic voice is one of those that makes you think the poet is probably a terrific person to hang out with--perceptive, honest, sometimes quite funny, capable of deep attachment. This means nothing, I realize. I've met poets whose work was light, bright, and sparkling, but seemed mired in depression themselves, and poets whose work was of a funereal grimness, yet were an absolute hoot to spend time with. But, as Will Cuppy once wrote, great writers should be read, not met. The two hours (say) you spend reading this book will feel like time pleasantly spent.
In Looking for the Gulf Motel, at least, Blanco is not really a wide-screen, Whitman kind of poet. His subject matter comes mainly from the intimate and close-to-home, family, partners, memories of growing up. His form is loosely closed, the lines perhaps not technically iambic pentameter but recalling iambic rhythms, with a penchant for 5- and 6-line stanzas.
His poetic voice is one of those that makes you think the poet is probably a terrific person to hang out with--perceptive, honest, sometimes quite funny, capable of deep attachment. This means nothing, I realize. I've met poets whose work was light, bright, and sparkling, but seemed mired in depression themselves, and poets whose work was of a funereal grimness, yet were an absolute hoot to spend time with. But, as Will Cuppy once wrote, great writers should be read, not met. The two hours (say) you spend reading this book will feel like time pleasantly spent.
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Christian Wiman, _Every Riven Thing_
I READ WIMAN'S My Bright Abyss about a year ago, and re-read it this summer as part of a group, so it seemed like a good time to try his poetry. He included quite a few of these in My Bright Abyss, so I knew more or less what to expect, but they still came as a bit of a surprise.
Wiman's having outed himself, so to speak, as a Christian believer led me to expect all his poems to be roughly of the sort that we hear Garrison Keillor read in the morning: close observation of an ordinary scene, a slightly more graceful version of ordinary speech, a teaspoon of affirmation lightly concealed in the close. Wiman can do that sort of thing--"From a Window" is a good example.
But his usual vein is more wrought, more knotted, more clotted. This is from "Hermitage":
He found
shells brittling back toward their sea,
leaves and twigs more sun
than themselves, and a thousand other fragments
eternity was tugging at,
and wrought it all into a tenuous, tenacious form
as if he were founding ruins--
a man who himself seemed half-born.
half hewn, his skin mapped
with damage, sweat slicking the juts and
cliffs of flesh, eyes so like the sky
he seemed at once all-seeing and all skull.
Wiman's music is not always that percussive and emphatic, but the above is not an atypical passage. There's something of Browning's or Donne's willingness to make noise. Or Hopkins's willingness to fracture the poem's surface, creating a kaleidoscopic effect:
until my fixed self, my fluorescent self
my grief-nibbling, unbewildered, wall-to-wall self
withers in me like a salted slug
He seems to want to connect with the tradition of religious poetry that gives itself permission to be difficult, something you have to wrestle with--Donne, Hopkins, Eliot (or Herbert, who is a shade more accessible than Donne but not at all easy, if you ask me). The title poem in Every Riven Thing, for instance, is nothing but knuckle balls, its statements looking plain enough until you take a swing at one and find yourself whiffing.
That teaspoon of affirmation is usually there...much more than lightly concealed, though.
Wiman's having outed himself, so to speak, as a Christian believer led me to expect all his poems to be roughly of the sort that we hear Garrison Keillor read in the morning: close observation of an ordinary scene, a slightly more graceful version of ordinary speech, a teaspoon of affirmation lightly concealed in the close. Wiman can do that sort of thing--"From a Window" is a good example.
But his usual vein is more wrought, more knotted, more clotted. This is from "Hermitage":
He found
shells brittling back toward their sea,
leaves and twigs more sun
than themselves, and a thousand other fragments
eternity was tugging at,
and wrought it all into a tenuous, tenacious form
as if he were founding ruins--
a man who himself seemed half-born.
half hewn, his skin mapped
with damage, sweat slicking the juts and
cliffs of flesh, eyes so like the sky
he seemed at once all-seeing and all skull.
Wiman's music is not always that percussive and emphatic, but the above is not an atypical passage. There's something of Browning's or Donne's willingness to make noise. Or Hopkins's willingness to fracture the poem's surface, creating a kaleidoscopic effect:
until my fixed self, my fluorescent self
my grief-nibbling, unbewildered, wall-to-wall self
withers in me like a salted slug
He seems to want to connect with the tradition of religious poetry that gives itself permission to be difficult, something you have to wrestle with--Donne, Hopkins, Eliot (or Herbert, who is a shade more accessible than Donne but not at all easy, if you ask me). The title poem in Every Riven Thing, for instance, is nothing but knuckle balls, its statements looking plain enough until you take a swing at one and find yourself whiffing.
That teaspoon of affirmation is usually there...much more than lightly concealed, though.
Monday, August 11, 2014
Aravind Adiga, _The White Tiger_
HOW OFTEN DOES a first novel win the Man Booker? With a quick internet check, we learn that Adiga was preceded in that accomplishment by Keri Hulme, DBC Pierre, and Salman Rushdie (if we don't count Grimus). An odd assortment, I'd say. The White Tiger is the goods, though.
Adiga has found a terrific voice for the narrator, for instance; the whole novel is an immense memo to (then) Chinese Premier We Jiabao, explaining how free market capitalism works in India, which turns into an account of how Balram Halwai became the successful entrepreneur he is today. Balram's voice begins in bluster, swings into satire, and finally plunges into confession. He makes every page interesting.
As in, say, The Great Gatsby, our theme is self-invention; unlike Gatsby, in The White Tiger we hear directly from the self-inventor himself. Self-invention is never easy, but Gatsby had something of an advantage in being in the country that invented it, rather than in a country with a millennia-old caste system, where your ancestors have been in the same village doing the same work for centuries, and your very name broadcasts your lot in life. Balram has to generate genuinely terrifying amounts of escape velocity to get out of what he was born to it--and that is just what he so memorably does.
That yeasty old class ferment of prejudice and ambition that proved so heady for Balzac and Dickens is still cooking away in the sub-continent, it appears.
Adiga has found a terrific voice for the narrator, for instance; the whole novel is an immense memo to (then) Chinese Premier We Jiabao, explaining how free market capitalism works in India, which turns into an account of how Balram Halwai became the successful entrepreneur he is today. Balram's voice begins in bluster, swings into satire, and finally plunges into confession. He makes every page interesting.
As in, say, The Great Gatsby, our theme is self-invention; unlike Gatsby, in The White Tiger we hear directly from the self-inventor himself. Self-invention is never easy, but Gatsby had something of an advantage in being in the country that invented it, rather than in a country with a millennia-old caste system, where your ancestors have been in the same village doing the same work for centuries, and your very name broadcasts your lot in life. Balram has to generate genuinely terrifying amounts of escape velocity to get out of what he was born to it--and that is just what he so memorably does.
That yeasty old class ferment of prejudice and ambition that proved so heady for Balzac and Dickens is still cooking away in the sub-continent, it appears.
Sunday, August 10, 2014
Wong May, _Picasso's Tears: Poems 1978-2013_
I WROTE A short review of this that I hope will appear elsewhere, so here I will simply (a) note that I do not expect to see a more intriguing volume of poems this year and (b) take David Orr to task.
In his NYTBR review of James Franco's new book of poems (July 20), Orr imagined that "if James Franco were just another M.F.A. student struggling to catch the attention of the two part-time employees of Origami Arthropod Press, he'd probably be reading this piece and fuming about all the attention being given, yet again, to James Franco."
Is there a whiff of condescension in there towards those two part-time employees? I think there is, and it is surely misplaced. Those two part-time employees of Orr's imaginary poetry publisher are probably both poets, hence much likelier to recognize exciting poetry when they see it than are their counterparts at FSG or Knopf or maybe even Graywolf and Sarabande. I, for one, would be a lot more curious to see what is on offer at the fictional "Origami Arthropod Press" than I would be to see the next Copper Canyon volume. So three big huzzahs for the poet-publishers at Octopus, and Action Books, and Wave, and Omnidawn, and Apostrophe, and all the other enterprises where a great era in American poetry is underway in, as usual, a place where almost no one would notice it.
Friday, July 25, 2014
Barbara Ehrenreich, _Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything_
IS BARBARA EHRENREICH really, as the jacket flap announces, "one of the most important thinkers of our time"? She is a terrific journalist--one of those, like Garry Wills or Malcolm Gladwell, who are more worth reading on a given topic than most experts--but the claim still feels like a stretch, to me.
Well. Moving on.
Living with a Wild God is a memoir with a very specific focus. As a teenager, Ehrenreich had a series of peculiarly charged psychological episodes, in which her powers of perception suddenly, as it were, amped up to a paranormal level, seeming to reveal to her some not-exactly-human agency in things. Sometimes the episodes would have an all-is-one feeling, but the most powerful one, contrarily, conveyed a profound apartness and desolation--like the experience Henry James, Senior (the novelist's father) called his "vastation."
Someone brought up in a religious tradition would likely think of these episodes as mystical experiences, but Ehrenreich, raised by atheists and in those days aiming at a career in the sciences, rejected that possibility. Nonetheless, she kept a journal in which she (among other things) pondered what the experiences might have meant.
In her early twenties, she got inadvertently sidetracked into anti-Vietnam-war activism, and a whole other life opened up: she became an organizer, a movement journalist, also a wife and mother...became Barbara Ehrenreich, in short, and stopped thinking about the episodes, which had become less frequent, less intense.
About 2001, collecting her papers for a university archive, she comes across the journal, and starts thinking again about the experiences. She is still an atheist, but the life she has lived and the topics she has researched in the intervening years now lead her to wonder if there is indeed some non-human Presence or Other that, for the time being, we are unable to detect or measure, but which we may eventually discover to be as real as microbes, or sub-atomic particles, or black holes, or other entities that existed long before we humans were able to ascertain their existence.
Interesting book. It often, occasionally for pages at a time, seemed to be turning into a more ordinary memoir, dwelling on her parents, or her teachers, or her early interests without too keen a concern to stay focused on the book's putative topic. Ehrenreich emphasizes that the book is not an autobiography, but any number of pages to which one might open randomly would persuade a reader that an autobiography is exactly what it is.
Still, given the ever-expanding literature on experiences of this sort, and given the way accounts of such experiences veer almost immediately into religious speculation, having a non-believer's account of how such an episode feels together with a non-believer's speculations about its causes is helpful.
Coincidentally, the day after I finished Living with a Wild God, I read a fine essay by Sallie Tisdale (in Conjunctions 61) about her underwater encounters with manta rays, and her sense of the power of engaging with non-human intelligence seemed to resonate with Ehrenreich's. Of one such meeting, Tisdale writes, "I felt blessed--not by some imagined connection, not by recognition or a meeting of minds, but by the strange that will remain forever strange and by its strangeness tell me who I am." Ehrenreich's book is another testimony to the preciousness of that strangeness.
Well. Moving on.
Living with a Wild God is a memoir with a very specific focus. As a teenager, Ehrenreich had a series of peculiarly charged psychological episodes, in which her powers of perception suddenly, as it were, amped up to a paranormal level, seeming to reveal to her some not-exactly-human agency in things. Sometimes the episodes would have an all-is-one feeling, but the most powerful one, contrarily, conveyed a profound apartness and desolation--like the experience Henry James, Senior (the novelist's father) called his "vastation."
Someone brought up in a religious tradition would likely think of these episodes as mystical experiences, but Ehrenreich, raised by atheists and in those days aiming at a career in the sciences, rejected that possibility. Nonetheless, she kept a journal in which she (among other things) pondered what the experiences might have meant.
In her early twenties, she got inadvertently sidetracked into anti-Vietnam-war activism, and a whole other life opened up: she became an organizer, a movement journalist, also a wife and mother...became Barbara Ehrenreich, in short, and stopped thinking about the episodes, which had become less frequent, less intense.
About 2001, collecting her papers for a university archive, she comes across the journal, and starts thinking again about the experiences. She is still an atheist, but the life she has lived and the topics she has researched in the intervening years now lead her to wonder if there is indeed some non-human Presence or Other that, for the time being, we are unable to detect or measure, but which we may eventually discover to be as real as microbes, or sub-atomic particles, or black holes, or other entities that existed long before we humans were able to ascertain their existence.
Interesting book. It often, occasionally for pages at a time, seemed to be turning into a more ordinary memoir, dwelling on her parents, or her teachers, or her early interests without too keen a concern to stay focused on the book's putative topic. Ehrenreich emphasizes that the book is not an autobiography, but any number of pages to which one might open randomly would persuade a reader that an autobiography is exactly what it is.
Still, given the ever-expanding literature on experiences of this sort, and given the way accounts of such experiences veer almost immediately into religious speculation, having a non-believer's account of how such an episode feels together with a non-believer's speculations about its causes is helpful.
Coincidentally, the day after I finished Living with a Wild God, I read a fine essay by Sallie Tisdale (in Conjunctions 61) about her underwater encounters with manta rays, and her sense of the power of engaging with non-human intelligence seemed to resonate with Ehrenreich's. Of one such meeting, Tisdale writes, "I felt blessed--not by some imagined connection, not by recognition or a meeting of minds, but by the strange that will remain forever strange and by its strangeness tell me who I am." Ehrenreich's book is another testimony to the preciousness of that strangeness.
Thursday, July 24, 2014
Frank Bidart, _In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90_
I BOUGHT THIS eight years ago, and I don't remember why, exactly. For some reason I mentally group Bidart with Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and Richard Howard, all of whom I deeply enjoy, Bishop especially so, but something about his (as I saw it) alignment with those poets or his being published by FSG made me think he was probably a little cautious, maybe even fussy, precise in his craftsmanship and a bit confessional at times but not likely to be audacious or startling...well, wrong again. When will I learn to mistrust my own preconceptions?
Someone, many someones perhaps, must have told Bidart along the way not to resort to ALL CAPS so often, to say nothing of frequent recourse to italics, but he just ignored them, apparently, and good for him. That was my first clue--these are not well-behaved poems, really, and you notice that most immediately when they can't stop themselves from disdained modes of emphasis.
Then, there is Bidart's willingness to ventriloquize the mad, bad, and dangerous to know--Nijinsky, a young anorexic woman, a child murderer. Or this, about a kind of relationship so obviously exploitative and even predatory that one can hardly imagine a redeeming feature, which somehow he nevertheless finds:
The boys who lie back, or stand up,
allowing their flies to be unzipped
however much they charge
however much they charge
give more than they get.
To state the commercial nature of the encounter so plainly, then to say it again, and to italicize it both times--and then to see the encounter as a gift! Not what I was expecting.
Then there are the extraordinarily exposed poems about his parents, "Confessional" and "Golden State," which seem as though they are going to be Lowell-esque but wind up as different from Lowell as California is from Massachusetts.
And then there is "The First Hour of the Night," inaugural installment of a long poem he has, I gather, continued. The poem starts as a narrative, veers into the ekphrastic about Raphael's School of Athens, then becomes a kind of dream-vision of the history of western philosophy. It reminded me, in a way I find hard to describe, of Shelley's magnificent fragment The Triumph of Life, one of the last Romantic poems I would expect to find any contemporary analogue for. I need to read the sequels.
Someone, many someones perhaps, must have told Bidart along the way not to resort to ALL CAPS so often, to say nothing of frequent recourse to italics, but he just ignored them, apparently, and good for him. That was my first clue--these are not well-behaved poems, really, and you notice that most immediately when they can't stop themselves from disdained modes of emphasis.
Then, there is Bidart's willingness to ventriloquize the mad, bad, and dangerous to know--Nijinsky, a young anorexic woman, a child murderer. Or this, about a kind of relationship so obviously exploitative and even predatory that one can hardly imagine a redeeming feature, which somehow he nevertheless finds:
The boys who lie back, or stand up,
allowing their flies to be unzipped
however much they charge
however much they charge
give more than they get.
To state the commercial nature of the encounter so plainly, then to say it again, and to italicize it both times--and then to see the encounter as a gift! Not what I was expecting.
Then there are the extraordinarily exposed poems about his parents, "Confessional" and "Golden State," which seem as though they are going to be Lowell-esque but wind up as different from Lowell as California is from Massachusetts.
And then there is "The First Hour of the Night," inaugural installment of a long poem he has, I gather, continued. The poem starts as a narrative, veers into the ekphrastic about Raphael's School of Athens, then becomes a kind of dream-vision of the history of western philosophy. It reminded me, in a way I find hard to describe, of Shelley's magnificent fragment The Triumph of Life, one of the last Romantic poems I would expect to find any contemporary analogue for. I need to read the sequels.
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