Our Savage Art

by William Logan

  Campbell McGrath

  Campbell McGrath loves the world’s bewildering variety (you might mistake his poems—gaudily colored, artificially flavored—for a candy shop), and like most gods he can’t bear to leave a single thing out. He has an eye for the natural world, particularly the shell-strewn beaches of south Florida, and a sculptor’s understanding of nature’s forged, damascened surface:

  Ocean like beaten metal removed from the cooling pail, mark of the hammer and tongs, the smith’s signage, grain revealed as by pressure of the burin in a Japanese print, substantial, bodily, color of agave, color of bitter medicine …

  Such gorgeous, insistent language suffers only a touch of self-congratulation; yet McGrath has trouble knowing when to stop—the poem soon breaks down into pointless and exhausting profusion:

  the frilled lips and spooned-out tails of horse and queen conchs,

  sponge tubes, varieties of seaweed and uprooted coral,

  tiny broken elkhorn infants, torn fans, punch cards,

  serrated disks and tribal ornaments, teeth, dismembered ears

  and bleached stone knuckles of a skeleton seeking restitution.

  Whew! a critic once wrote. Hiroshige has his endless views of Edo, and McGrath his endless views of Miami sand and Miami sky; but such jerrybuilt lines seem far too much like the rampant property development he complains about.

  Seven Notebooks is a pell-mell jaunt through one poet’s calendar year, diary entries interrupted by poems, poems abandoned for long quotations—this catchall lacks any noticeable pressure toward concision or hint of deep-browed introspection. Accumulation is all. Some of the notebooks claim a presiding form (the ode, the haiku), some an artistic familiar (Neruda, Whitman, Hiroshige), and some a theme (rhetoric, disorder), though few possess all of them. At times, McGraw shows how an acorn of prose becomes a poem—freshly sawn and sanded in the workshop, the poem is often less attractive than the rough oak of prose with which he began.

  Because we’re still in the great Age of Confession, the notebooks tell you a lot about the poet’s wife and his sons and his planar fasciitis, tales that might be gripping in a Christmas letter but are of little interest outside the immediate family. It’s a pity that suburban lives and suburban worries are rarely riveting—not every man is a Larkin. It would be all right if McGrath’s nattering were an excuse for poetry, though the poetry seems an excuse for the nattering. He can write a musing, probing line that suggests all the virtues of curiosity:

  Then the imagination withdraws, drifts across the table to investigate the glass flowers rolled in cloth tape.

  It hovers, probes the petals, some like galaxies, some like figs or seashells. Dutiful and penitent,

  it shimmers back across the gulf of air, without a metaphor, to doze away the afternoon.

  Then just as reasonably, just as artfully, he can write lines of fatuous self-absorption or ponderous mumbo-jumbo: “The opposite of sunlight / is not darkness but anti-light, / a mass of ionic occlusion, / seams of which riven / with purple fire illuminate / the parataxis of butterflies.” That sounds like Isaac Asimov on a bad day.

  McGrath takes himself seriously, which means too seriously. He writes a lot about “cognitive manipulation,” “rhetorical posture,” “ethics of stimulus,” “harmonies of fulfillment”—trying to make poems of such things is like trying to build a Ferrari from spit and cardboard. (“Ideas that burn in the mind!” he exclaims at the end of one poem. Good luck with that, you want to reply.) Too often the poems seem like a freshman philosophy seminar wrestling with a chapter on epistemology. It’s nice to have a loose baggy monster as a form, but not if what you get in the end is a loose baggy monster.

  Whitman is the dominating presence here; but it’s a mistake for a poet without the gift for blather or much warmth of spirit to quote the good gray poet so lavishly. Whitman thought about things (later readers condescend to him at their peril), where McGrath just writes agreeably about them in his sun-addled way. The modern poet wants to make 9/11 his Civil War, but he sounds like William Jennings Bryan—he won’t stop the rhetorical roar until the apocalypse comes to town:

  And I beheld a city

  where blood ran through streets the color of raw liver, stench of offal and kerosene and torched flesh,

  tongueless heads impaled on poles and severed limbs strung on barbed wire beneath unresting surveillance cameras …

  On and on it goes, like some PG-13 version of Howl. Poetry has to be more than a mass of images presented without taste or judgment, or pretentious witterings about language (“If language is a circulatory system of symbols …”). McGrath never notices when the reader’s eyes have glazed over.

  Marie Howe

  The long line in poetry requires a page too narrow—if you designed a book as wide as the longest line in Leaves of Grass, the lines would seem mere prose, or typography run amok. Though it might seem counterintuitive, a poem’s long lines need the runovers imposed by a rational margin. Such lines reveal their character in a continual breach of manners.

  Marie Howe makes her lines fabulously long—twenty or thirty or even forty syllables can go by before she feels obliged to call it quits. The poems in The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, her first book in ten years, have a lot to say. Angry, foulmouthed at times, she writes as if she were thrashing her enemies with a club.

  The thing about those Greeks and Romans is that at least mythologically,

  they could get mad. If the man broke your heart, if he fucked your sister speechless

  then real true hell broke loose: “You know that stew you just ate for dinner, honey?—

  It was your son.”

  That’s Ovid for you.

  Poets have looked to Homer and Virgil and Ovid for a lot of things, but rarely for permission to get mad. Angry poets are almost always angry at someone—usually parent or spouse or lover (how many poets have ever been angry at their kids?), but you wonder if they would have been any less angry if the wife or father or boyfriend had never existed.

  Howe is better than most poets in this vein—it’s unfair to call them Confessional Poets, because they have so little to confess. They might better be christened the Memoir School, poets so wrapped up in the truth of their lives (though truth is the first victim of memoir), the poems seem claustrophobic. The trouble with such poets is that their lives become an end in themselves, rather than a needle’s eye used to interpret the world. Shakespeare’s sonnets are memoirs of a sort, probably drawn from hard experience—but they tell us about the modes of love, not the manners of his life.

  Howe’s poems are always a little more honest than you would expect and a little funnier than you could hope for. She’s gloomy, to be sure, and unappealingly dramatic, on occasion jabbering on witlessly; but her sardonic humor comprehends her limitations.

  I don’t want to offend anybody but I never did like fucking all that much. Like I always say

  the saw enjoys the wood more than the wood enjoys the saw—know what I mean?

  These remarks are laid at another woman’s doorstep; but such things are rarely said and even more rarely hilarious. Howe has a way of making you think—she’s a bully at times—and then making you sorry for it. That’s what good art does.

  Howe’s life seems too privileged for her to ask for so much sympathy; but she listens to the irritable part of her soul, and sometimes her ironies are more visible when you read the poems again. The weakest poems here are meditations in the voice of the Virgin Mary—the idea is too self-important and the sequence too pious to let in Howe’s compromised vision. She’s far better in a horrific poem about her drunken father, who in the middle of the night orders his children to clean the kitchen, then the basement, then the garage. Her small acts of defiance explain a lot in the poems that follow—they’re the aftereffects of a Catholic girlhood.

  Howe has a knack for finding the small inscrutable moments in life and leaving them inscrutable. (Airless as contemporary poetry often is, it could gain a lot fr
om the short stories of Flannery O’Connor and Grace Paley.) In my favorite poem here, the poet has been ordering her daughter to hurry here, hurry there, to keep up. Then:

  Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her,

  Honey I’m sorry I keep saying Hurry—

  you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.

  And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking

  back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,

  hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.

  There’s a recognition of mortality in those lines. Not all Howe’s poems cohere; sometimes they’re collections of bits and stunts that make a discordant whole, if they make a whole at all. Though she rarely does more than C. K. Williams (she must be president of the Manhattan chapter of the C. K. Williams Fan Club), though at times she’s so intense she holds eye contact too long, these bitter, bittersweet poems offer the woman’s half of an unanswerable equation. Howe has learned how not to be ordinary about ordinary time.

  Jorie Graham

  When Jorie Graham has a message, it’s a very big message; and it couldn’t be any BIGGER if it were plastered on a BILLBOARD. Things MATTER, they matter a LOT, no REALLY, they matter this VERY SECOND. Graham wasn’t always a poet reduced to pouting and pontification; but the reader can keep track of her now only by how loudly she’s shouting:

  blues, you know the trouble at the heart, blue, blue, what

  pandemonium, blur of spears roots cries leaves master & slave, the crop

  destroyed,

  water everywhere not

  drinkable, & radioactive waste in it, & human bodily

  waste

  Graham’s poems in the past two decades have forgotten the cunning deployments of language her earlier poems knew by heart. The not-so-quiet point in Sea Change is that time is running out—the waters are poisoned, the ground is polluted, and it’s all our fault. Messages are very difficult in poetry if you’re not witty and Augustan or you don’t work for Western Union.

  Poetry is a graveyard of talent destroyed by ambition, yet ambition is rarely ruined by talent. Graham has long taken the medium for the message, shifting her style from book to book, adopting a new punctuation mark or changing the movement of her lines (peculiar mid-word enjambments are the hallmark here). Sea Change alternates lines very, very long with lines very, very short; this drama of displacement might be effective if the reader didn’t suspect there was a secret purpose behind it. Graham bared all in a recent issue of Poetry :

  [The poems] marry the long line of Whitman to the short line of Williams, two poets convinced that their extreme lines—very long, very short—were generative instruments for a music that would explore and enact the idea of, and sensation of, “the democratic experience.” Of course these are poems being written at a time when much of what might have been imagined to be “a democracy” has failed. These utopian poetics …

  but perhaps I should leave her in full flow. What such lines have to do with democracy (and Williams didn’t always use very short lines) is beyond me.

  Whatever the change of form, the style of thinking is exactly the same, a fretful record of the mind’s hesitations and repetitions (call it the idling of consciousness)—we used to refer to it as dithering. The poems are busy with their own business, flighty, intensely and doggedly and wearyingly serious, with a breathless delivery full of its own importance:

  &what is the structure of freedom but this, & grace, & the politics of time—look south, look

  north—yes—east west compile hope synthesize exceed look look again hold fast attach speculate drift drift recognize forget—terrible

  gush—gash—of

  form.

  Having made your way through the thickets of style, often you discover that Graham is saying something rather banal—the great maze has only a mouse in the middle.

  If ecology is the subject, more or less, some of these poems become lectures by a latterday Mr. Wizard (“which also contains / contributions from the Labrador Sea and entrainment of other water masses, try to hold a / complete collapse, in the North Atlantic Drift, in the / thermohaline circulation”). However worthy the sentiments, the poem is no more interesting than a pile of scrap metal or a mound of compost, fascinating though these might be to the chemist or the art critic. It’s hard for Graham to complete one thought without being distracted by another, as if she suffered some form of poetic ADHD. The gushing is awful enough; but, every time I think she has written as badly as she can, she exceeds my expectations: “breathing into this oxygen which also pockets my / looking hard,” the “very fact of God as / invention seems to sit, fast, as in its saddle.”

  The disparity between what Graham believes she’s doing and what the reader sees on the page is enormous. Perhaps these rambling, doddering, lifeless poems are “crucial,” as she claims; yet it’s as if all their imaginative energy went to “enact the idea of, and sensation of” writing the poem itself. I’m not sure aesthetic choices should be justified in philosophic terms, because it makes matters of taste seem conditioned or inevitable (taste can have philosophical carriage, but perhaps it takes a century or more to discover it). Her language, so slack and unbearable now, doesn’t possess the resources of Williams or Whitman, whose arguments lay in language, not the length of line. Graham can chatter in the latest philosopher’s mode but can’t compose a good metaphor.

  It’s hard to say to a poet that her career has gone off course, especially when she has been showered with awards for just the things that seem disastrous. Graham was once a poet of magnifying charm and an appealing wildness; but her editorials are so at odds with the evenhanded articulation of thought, she has lost almost all the graces of language that once graced her work. The poems have become elegies to their own progress. Some poets are born dull, some achieve dullness, and some have dullness thrust upon them.

  The Forgotten Masterpiece of

  John Townsend Trowbridge

  John Townsend Trowbridge (1827–1916) was born two years after the opening of the Erie Canal and died during the First World War. The friend of Longfellow and Holmes and Whitman (at a time when Longfellow and Holmes refused to meet the author of Leaves of Grass), he wrote gouts of poems, a string of popular plays, and at least forty novels, including more than one best seller. Having started with hack work in New York, with hack work he continued, growing so impoverished in the Grub Street of the day that at one point he took to the business of engraving gold pencil-cases.

  The literary odd-job man, who turns his hand to whatever a hand can be turned, has long been nearly extinct (perhaps the sole example remaining, like a last elegant dodo, is John Updike). From such a writer, poems and stories and plays and novels come, now like a freshet, now like a flood—many of them bad, or bad enough, some of them good, or good enough, and perhaps in a life one or two with the flare of brilliance.

  Born in a cabin in the wilderness west of Rochester, which was soon to be a boomtown, Trowbridge grew up a plodder, a dull student who all his life suffered from chronic eye-inflammation. He might have become a hardscrabble farmer like his father had he not been shocked into curiosity at about fourteen, according to his autobiography, by a “list of foreign words and phrases” in the back of his spelling book. He turned himself into a lover of Byron and Pope and Shakespeare (however much he liked the Bard’s tragedies, however, he was never able to get through Love’s Labour’s Lost) and eventually taught himself Latin, Greek, and French. Some of his earliest verses were composed behind a plow.

  Having come from almost nothing, Trowbridge cast a critical eye on the foolishness and self-deceptions of the social world of New York and Boston, the city where he eventually settled; and he was deeply roused by injustice. The American Sentinel, the paper of which he was temporary editor in 1851, may have been hurried into failure by his satirical leader on the Fugitive Slave Law. His pseudonymous novel Martin Merrivale, published the same year as Leaves of Grass, remains one of the ra
re back-alley accounts of the antebellum writing trade. A few of Trowbridge’s poems betray a rueful view of literary fame.

  “Brilliant Success !” the play-bills said,

  Flaming all over the town one day,

  Blazing in characters blue and red,

  (Printed for posting, by the way,

  Before the public had seen the play!).

  The lines were based on experience.

  Trowbridge’s poetry, like Trowbridge’s work in general, suffers from all the literary sins of the mid-nineteenth century—the ready-to-wear adjectives, the sentimental climate, the shelf of sympathies and pieties that look like so many dusty knickknacks now. If there was a right side, however, he was on it—years before the Civil War, he wrote an abolitionist novel compared to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. After the war, he toured the broken battlegrounds and wrecked cities of the South and reported on the appalling devastation. Yet such gifts as he had, deformed or coarsened by the demands of his readers, produced a row of works more or less successful to the degree they were untouched by a hint of original imagination.

  All this provided enough for the applause of his time, if too little for a later century to hear it. The sharp ear for grievance, a confidence in his critical judgment, a willingness to back the long shot (as with Whitman), and a highly developed sense of amusement at human weakness suggest that a more reckless talent lay largely untapped. Had he given way to his taste for mocking the hypocrisies around him, he might have written something less dependent on melodrama or moral authority, something that whispered of the psychology of a world in argument with itself.