Ashbery has inherited the mode of attention that gave us Baudelaire but also Walter Benjamin’s archives project and Roland Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero. He finds America in its hither-thither diction, much as Whitman (who scrawled down examples of American slang in his notebooks) did in its American scenes. An outsider sees things too common for us to notice or too strange for us to admit; and for his whole career Ashbery has been an American outsider, though a much honored one. He is now rapidly going, even so, from elder statesman to venerable antique (as once he went from Peck’s Bad Boy to elder statesman)—all you can do with such Victorian whatnots is dust them off once in a while and wonder what people ever saw in them.
Dean Young
The quality of whimsy is not strained. It falleth from Ashbery like the gentle rain—and it falleth on a lot of young poets now, students in the School of Goofball Poetics, boys who cut their teeth on Ashbery and Charles Simic and James Tate and now show little interest in any poems written before Dada came to town. Dean Young’s sixth book, Elegy on Toy Piano, is fairly representative of the younger generation, full to the gills with gewgaws and thingamabobs and dojiggers; but one tradition embraced is a lot of tradition rejected.
What happened?
shouts the hero rushing into the study room.
Mung magph naagh, replies the heroine
still in her gag. Insert flap A
into slot A. X-rays inconclusive.
Want to hear me count to 1,000 by 17s?
Beep hexagonal, my puppeteer.
I hate your dog.
Huh? Well, now that you mention it, fella, I don’t want to hear your times table, after all. Not every Young poem is quite this scatterbrained, but he uses non sequiturs the way a snake uses mice. (Not that non sequiturs seem to like him very much.) Reading Young is like watching a stand-up comic on a cable channel, unsure of his audience, staring at the crowd like a gazelle surrounded by a pack of hyenas and bombing like a B-17. The problem with comedy of this trivial sort is that, rather than shock or provoke, it manages merely to irritate (the reader is reduced to muttering Uh-oh or Ho-hum). A poet who wants to get laughs begins to write for the joke, and when he can’t nail that he just lays down a laugh track.
Poets find it hard to be serious now, unless they’re writing about their lives (on which they tend to be all too grave, as if working up a pathology report). At best, Young’s poems mock themselves as well as poets of more serious temper. At worst, they’re the poems of someone who took a mail-order course in surrealism:
One walking a lobster on a leash.
One who knew the functions of 14 different forks.
Something there is that does not love
a constructor of roller coasters.
When Lung Zu looked at the wall, he saw no wall.
When Po Chu walked east, she also walked west.
The symphony opens with heroic proclamation disclaimed by a hush of liquid paper.
Forever late like the White Rabbit, such helter-skelter lines seem in a headlong hurry to be elsewhere. In one poem, Young mentions setting an alarm clock for five A.M., “to write fast without thinking”; and a lot of these poems must have been written that way. He grooves along like a scat singer, not really caring if he’s blithering (not caring is, after all, the point). Sometimes his poems have delightfully loopy premises (one consists of a hundred true/false statements; another juggles the complicated mathematics involved in liking a married couple), but sooner or later they run out of steam—he’s not a poet who knows when he’s overstayed his welcome.
Young’s poems want so badly to be loved, after a while you’re willing to buy them a ticket to Lapland, just to be rid of their shining, eager faces. On the rare occasion that this poet does think about something serious, he jokes about it for a couple of lines, then scurries off in embarrassment. Elegy on Toy Piano shows what happens when a poet inherits a difficult, contradictory tradition (the uses of surrealism are almost as various as the uses of lyric) and can make nothing out of it but trash.
Jorie Graham
Jorie Graham loves big ideas the way small boys like big trucks. Her books start with some notion just the far side of grandiose (“What does it mean,” the dust jacket trumpets, “to be fully present in a human life? How—in the face of the carnage of war …—does one retain one’s ability to be both present and responsive?”) and end up grinding the Himalayas down to gravel. In Overlord, her tenth book, she visits Omaha Beach, attempting to see beyond the placid sands—where children play along the shore, where the rusting landing craft have become tide pools—the indiscriminate slaughter of June 6, 1944:
others meant for Easy Green or Easy Red also thrown at Dog—mostly all still
alive—off-schedule—including the
sweepers—all dragged down, freezing, waves huge— meant to land
where gun emplacements were less thick and channels between lines of tracer-fire
could be read through the surface of
the beach
This odd shorthand—historical flotsam and jetsam swept up along the tide line of verse (she employed no fewer than seven researchers, though she still can’t tell a bomb squadron from a bomb group)—recreates some of the frenzy, the helpless panic, of those first moments of D-Day (the code name for the invasion was Overlord). Yet the bullying italics and the knowing use of “reading,” as if the sands were simply another text, drag us away from the helpless soldiers (the most telling passages in these poems are snippets from their letters and interviews) to the mastering presence, the overlording, of the poet herself.
For a long while, Graham’s poetry has suffered this grotesque immodesty. No matter where her poems start, sooner or later their subject becomes the poet’s hyperkinetic awareness of her own senses (reading some of her poems is like tripping on LSD); and this too easily turns into the blank stare and lapel grabbing of the quietly mad—“I’m actually staring up at / you, you know, right here, right from the pool of this page. / Don’t worry where else I am, I am here.”
Graham has reduced the poetry of meditation to navel gazing; the minute attention to her yammering thoughts, to the violence of her vision (at one point she gets down to photon level), merely reworks, in stilted fashion, the stream of consciousness Dorothy Richardson pursued in the twenties. If Graham had concentrated on the accident and contingency of war, had honored the men whose deaths she casually invokes, Overlord might have become the sort of serious meditation that produced Geoffrey Hill’s The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy (1983).
Graham is so busy taking everything back to first principles, hurling Plato and Zeno into the breach, she’s in danger of forgetting that poems embrace dullness only at great risk.
[when your work sells for][millions of dollars][you][can]
indulge yourself. You can paint to prove that painting is dead. You can paint as a true believer in painting. [Oh I should][I really should][you said it was there][truly there][I only had to take the photograph] [and that only one thing exists][no … not death!][this!]
In the wrack and wreckage of her current work (did she buy a box of brackets at a discount?), it’s hard to remember the difficult pleasures of Erosion (1983) and The End of Beauty (1987), high-voltage moments in the poetry of the eighties. Unfortunately, the powers a poet harnesses for a book or two may eventually prove so unruly that what was once an imagination in tension becomes a stampeding coach and six.
Graham’s lack of any sense of proportion reduces the argument of Overlord to something like “On the one hand, my kitty has AIDS; on the other, a whole lot of guys died on Omaha Beach.” (If you think the poet can stoop no lower, that her high-mindedness can’t be more unintentionally hilarious, you haven’t read the poem in which she buys a homeless man a meal and practically kills him.) Halfway through the book, the poor soldiers have been forgotten; and Graham, like a mini-U.N., begins deliberating on the idea of nations:
Time of the flags is long past—how
str
ange—a Flag! Of what? Are you a
nation, you, you there. Are you in a nation. Is one in you?
Are you at war or at peace or are war and peace
playing their little game over your dead body?
Such hectoring, humorless lines, trite as tar paper, are worse than the propaganda Marianne Moore wrote during World War II. For years, Graham has scoured the bushes for finches, has pried loose every stray barnacle she has come across; there was long hope that these scattered minutiae (one man’s junk being another man’s scientific collection) might one day prove the coral accretion of a grand poem or two. Alas, the method has long since become her meaning: she scrapes and shuffles and observes her grains of sand, but in the end all she has to show for it is the scraping and shuffling.
Almost everything Graham writes offers the swagger of emotion, pretentiousness by the barrelful, and a wish for originality that approaches vanity—she’s less a poet than a Little Engine that Could, even when it Can’t. If I close her later books disappointed, it’s never a disappointment in their boldness but rather in her inability to bring these huge engineering projects to successful conclusion. Will that stop her? Like hell it will!
Kevin Young
There’s this skirt, dig, named Delilah Redbone, see, and this dick in Shadowtown named Jones, and the sap falls for her. The frail’s maiden name was Trouble; and the dick, his middle name is Danger. If you’ve never gotten your fill of alibis, gunsels, snitches, paybacks, hideouts, and hooch, Kevin Young drags in the whole cast and a police van of props in Black Maria, his homage to hard-boiled fiction and the great films noirs of the forties. The trappings of a new genre often refashion an old one (though in new feathers even a good poet may look ridiculous). Almost two decades ago, Nicholas Christopher’s detective novel in verse, Desperate Characters (1987), showed how impossible the genre can be for the dilettante; but then almost a century and a half ago another amateur proved that brilliant things could be done—what is The Ring and the Book but a detective novel? (Some might claim Paradise Lost is a police procedural.)
Young, whose last book was a misdirected and sentimental reworking of the blues, is an ambitious young poet with quirky ideas. Black Maria is meant to be a film, its sections, called “reels,” composed of poems that straggle down the page half starved for punctuation:
I didn’t have a rat’s chance.
Soon as she walked in in
That skin of hers
violins began. You could half hear
The typewriters jabber
as she jawed on: fee, find, me,
poor, please.
Shadows & smiles, she was.
Strong scent of before-rain
Her pinstripe two-lane
legs, her blackmail menthol.
The occasional phrase reveals what delights await a genre transformed; but the rest is jazzed-up jawing and sidelong remarks that niggle their way toward wisecracks (“pinstripe two-lane / legs” must refer, clumsily, to the dark seam in old nylons). Young loves wordplay more than any contemporary except Paul Muldoon; he’ll go to great lengths to fetch a pun, and even greater ones to drag back a bad joke. The poems here are addicted to internal rhymes, winsome glances at the reader, and a diction that slides from the most perfumed poeticism to ghetto dialect (the language at times suggests that Jones and Redbone are black, though it’s not entirely clear).
Such frenzied invention might be just the thing to invigorate contemporary poetry, which often can’t see past the third-rate traumas of private life (the vampire in Sylvia Plath turned out to be—Plath). Think how Auden’s urban-renewal projects unsettled the thirties and forties—“Letter to Lord Byron,” “New Year Letter,” “For the Time Being,” and “The Sea and the Mirror” razed some of the settled assumptions of modernism. Young has seen that noir can capture, as critics have been saying for decades, the anxieties of the age—and what age is more anxious than ours?
Young’s vers noir, alas, has none of the suspense of film or novel. Narrated in a slack-jawed style where all characters talk alike, it meanders along without much by way of plot, the incidents democratically cliched, the denizens proud to be stereotypes, only the language working overtime. Young is devoted to his dumb jokes; and by the time you’ve been sledge-hammered by “my entrenched coat,” a “well-minxed martini,” “here comes the bribe,” “two eggs, / over queasy,” an “ashtray full of butts / & maybes,” “she played / soft to get,” and “case clothed” (all right, I admit a fondness for “older ladies // … thought his shinola // didn’t stink”), you’re punch-drunk and ready to cry “Uncle!” You might forgive as merely high spirits such punishing punning, such quarrelsome quibbles; but the poet’s archness falls prey to far too much blowsy sentiment (genre is doing a lot more for Young than Young is doing for genre): a can “whose jagged lid // opens your hand / as if charity,” “smelling of catharsis / & cheap ennui.” Bullets are made of lead, and so is the repartee.
Black Maria is set in the thirties or early forties (there are references to a tommy gun and a decoder ring, one that might come in handy for deciphering the poet’s system of capitalization), but somehow the modern age of the bikini (a word first recorded in 1947), the Saturday night special (1968), and paparazzi (1981) keeps sidling in. Then there are the wobbly writing, the misdemeanors of spelling and grammar, the dog’s dinner of punctuation, the dialect that often goes on the lam. As the story inches forward, repeating some scenes as if we hadn’t gotten the idea, the whodunit becomes the who gives a damn? After some two hundred pages, though we’re no closer to knowing these characters (or having any idea what’s going on by way of plot), there’s a passage of science fiction that seems to have fallen out of another novel on the paperback rack.
Young has tried so hard to make this a tour de force, he’s forgotten, not just the ontology that makes film noir so haunting, but the suspense that makes it entertaining. There seems no world beneath the clamoring surface of his language, which lacks the philosophy of form on which genre depends. This giddy be-bop poet hasn’t yet found the right back alley for his gifts.
Ted Kooser
Ted Kooser is a prairie sentimentalist who writes poems in an American vernacular so corn-fed you could raise hogs on it. Kooser never met a word he didn’t like, unless it was a long one, or one derived from Latin, or Greek, or French—in the new poems of Delights & Shadows, which recently won the Pulitzer Prize, as well as the older ones in Flying at Night, he stands for a foursquare, hidebound American provincialism that, by gum, has every right to write poems and, by golly, means to write them, too. His poems tend to be short, dying for air, afraid to do more than tell you what happened on the porch, or right out the window, or maybe, just once, down the block.
William Carlos Williams may be responsible for the strain of American individualism that, in our poetry, took the multitudes of Walt Whitman and squeezed them into a shoe box (think of the mop-haired words Whitman loved, not just foreign but American, too). It seems odd that poets should be drawn to plain-talking yokelism in a country clapped together out of immigrant ways and migrant tongues, but it doesn’t take long for a country to establish its own traditions and begin to hate everybody else’s. In Williams, and Creeley, and Kooser, you see the wish to make poetry out of the American language, meaning any word that can be spoken down at the corner grocery without making the clerk furrow his brow (when Kooser gets stuck for an adjective, he slaps in “old” and keeps on going, so after a while he’s got old men, old ladies, old dogs, old moles, old coats, old stoves, old snow, old thunder, old No Hunting signs, and much old else). It doesn’t matter that the grocery is now a Starbucks and the clerk is called a barista.
Kooser wants a poetry anyone can read without shame and understand without labor, because he thinks poetry has too long been in the hands of poets who “go out of their way to make their poems difficult if not downright discouraging.” This would come as a surprise to Shakespeare and Milton, Pope and Browning, and other poets who tho
ught poetry was for those who loved it enough to spend time educating themselves—indeed, who felt that learning to read poems was itself an education. (Folks like Kooser want to render Shakespeare or the Bible in kitchen-sink English, without a difficulty or a discouragement in sight.)
The current poet laureate, like many of his countrymen, doesn’t like anything that seems tough going. (It’s fortunate he isn’t in charge of teaching music, which has all those pesky notes.) Kooser prefers a poem whose meaning can be plucked from a dry streambed like a nugget of gold.
A Glimpse of the Eternal
Just now,
a sparrow lighted
on a pine bough
right outside
my bedroom window
and a puff
of yellow pollen
flew away.
It’s not much of a fight, but the monosyllables beat the disyllables hands down. There’s nothing awful about a poem that ends in mystic nothingness (at times you feel Kooser practices a kind of prairie Zen), slathered in sentiment like corn on the cob with butter; but, to outdo it, the next poet off the farm will have to write in grunts.
Maybe you’d like to get into this poetry racket yourself. Kooser’s The Poetry Home Repair Manual is full of down-home charm and genial misinformation (the poet laureate is folksy as an old rain barrel). He dispenses dollops of homespun wisdom to folks who want to write poems but have never had the gumption to try—they’ve been scared off by, of all people, poets themselves, who apparently spend most of their time advancing their careers and worrying about literary critics and making their poems so tangled up that, well, they’re just nonsense to an ordinary Joe: “most of us learned in school that finding the meaning of a poem is way too much work, like cracking a walnut and digging out the meat.” If Shakespeare knocked on his door for advice, Kooser would scratch his head and say, “Why, Bill, I guess these look like poems, but they’re way too much like walnuts for me.” Among all the poets of the past, who inspired our poet laureate? Whom does he use as an example? Why, Walter de la Mare!
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