Category: Reviews — Poetry

IN THE LIGHTS OF A MIDNIGHT PLOW
By David Hickey

In years gone by there used to be a lot of debate over what properly constituted poetic language. This could play out on the most basic level of the use of vocabulary or “poetic diction” – certain words, and even the spelling of certain words, being deemed either more or less poetic at various times – though it was also a matter of fitting style to form (both terms involving rules of technique). In his famous and highly influential “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth might have thought he was officially closing the debate, warning readers that they would find “little of what is usually called poetic diction” in the present volume, and trying to collapse any distinction between poetic and non-poetic language (or the language of poetry and the language of prose) by making poetry out of “a selection of language really used by men.”

But what men were these? Not professional or scientific men – since their language was apt to be as specialized and obscure as that found in the most decorous volume of verse – but primarily rural folk. “Low and rustic life was generally chosen” for his subject, and

[t]he language, too, of these men is adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the influence of social vanity they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions. Accordingly, such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets, who think that they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art, in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in order to furnish food for fickle tastes, and fickle appetites, of their own creation.

But that was 200 years ago. Is any reminder of Wordsworth’s rural universal – its natural imagery, folk rhythms, and colloquial expressiveness – still with us?

There are certainly moments in this strong new collection from David Hickey that suggest the spirit of those “simple and unelaborated expressions” has found fresh woods and pastures new.

     Not that it would
happen now, a tractor would scare us off a dozen acres before

 

it reached us, but a horse drawn blade has a way with
a pasture, and it came like a breeze to her ankle.

Or:

     It’s a hard cut,
he says, going from days to nights,

 

the body stretches out like a field losing
its sun, a landscape tired of its own, sad twilight.

Or even just:

     seasonal as the boys
who appear on the step, covered in field . . .

These are all great rural images, but the essence of it is the language. The images are not abstract but terse and evocative, with a verbal polish like that of wooden farm implements long used by hand (Wordsworth’s words of “repeated experience and regular feelings”). The blade that “has a way with a pasture,” the “field losing its sun,” the boys “covered in field.” This is what first catches your eye and ear, before you even get to the operation of the similes, the blade coming “like a breeze” and the body stretching out “like a field.” And it’s what makes me think that some part of Wordsworth’s natural language of men still remains, even in something akin to its original context.

Not that rural poetry is what Hickey is all about. This is a book that also has poems about phoning the Weather Hotline, the cloned children of Ted Williams, and the glass desert of Los Alamos. That voice of “simple and unelaborated expressions” is only part of it. The passages quoted show off certain elements of Hickey’s style, but his voice as a poet is something different. “It’s a hard cut,” is what “he says,” but the rest of the lines quoted are interpretation, evocation. The language is the same, but it’s not the direct speech of “It’s a hard cut.” The poetry here isn’t a poetry of speech, but measured observation. The relation of sounds becomes something almost tactile, like the changing of gears in a passing bicycle race:

     the bicycles
wag through the street, when a chain
slips into the last gear and the sound repeats
like a dozen mouth guards clicking,

 

then dances down the line: the pitch
almost as if a boy held a stick
on the side of the road, and for the first
time, the fence went travelling by.

Or take the short gem of an ode to silence, “Conception.” Here the poet’s parents are imagined as enjoying an utterly serendipitous moment of passion between the periods of a televised hockey game. The sense of quiet is wonderfully evoked, becoming something you can almost feel. Everything is so layered: from the sweatered hockey players almost lost in static, to the snow “porcelain thick” drifting outdoors, to the very ambiguity of what “maybe” happened, the vague annunciation of the poet coming “like the onset of thirst.” There’s no talking in this poem, simply a warm drawing together followed by a silent drifting apart. But if the rural language of pasture and field has an equivalent in household items and domestic gestures surely it is something like this:

     my father looking for a glass

 

and finding one in my mother’s hand,
the warmth from a lifted plate
spreading across their faces, the reflection

 

above the sink reminding them they’re alone

This is Hickey playing to his strength. Note how many active verbs are in the passage just quoted (looking, finding, spreading, reminding), and yet the dramatic action is something inexpressible, the recognition of a submerged shared awareness, a soundless kitchen-sink epiphany. In the real world there is a poetry of silence too.

The only thing I missed here was the rhythm (as opposed to what I’ve already noted as the units) of conversational speech, a stronger sense of the flow and forward energy of the line that comes with direct address. I’ve found the artificial strictures of free verse can restrain, and sometimes even pervert, this energy. But there is definitely an interest in more continuous forms – and a corresponding relaxation, I think, in the line – evident in some of the poems here, and especially throughout the accomplished and provocative sonnet sequence “River Liberties.” In fact the formal constraints in “River Liberties” are magnified as it nearly follows the strictures of the corona or “crown of sonnets” (a seven-poem sequence where the last line of each poem becomes the first of the next). The tone, however, is so placid and unassuming that these constraints are hardly noticed, and the repetition of language and image gives the series a quietly cumulative rhetorical surge.

For a first collection, In the Lights of a Midnight Plow makes for a very impressive calling card. As with any young poet, we can expect a rush of invention and exploration to follow. I’m confident the results will be worth attending.

Notes:
Review first published online December 22, 2006. David Hickey’s next book, Open Air Bindery, was indeed worth attending.

THE JILL KELLY POEMS
By Alessandro Porco

The thing about pop culture is that there’s so much of it. One of the effects this has is to make you feel like its message is inescapable, that there’s no way to shut it out. Another is the way its volume (that is, the sheer amount of it) turns everything it says into instant cliché. It becomes a kind of subliminal conditioning.

Alessandro Porco’s The Jill Kelly Poems seems at times to be built entirely out of such media clichés. There’s a rapper’s elegy (no “gettin’ jiggy”, but rather addressing Death with an authentic “What up, Dawg?”), an “Ode to Christina Aguilera” featuring some familiar words and music (“You complete me, Christina, like a genie in a bottle”), a sonnet on “Rudy”, Hollywood’s wannabe Notre Dame football star (“I’m Ready, Coach . . . Put Me In”) . . . and those are just the first three poems. What we have here is a sampling of sound bites, dealing with the likes of Rambo, King Kong, and the Bush Twins (the latter poem being a proud pastiche of cliché: “a cento composed of ESPN Sportscenter anchor catchphrases”).

Shoring fragments against ruin has been a valid poetic method for a while now, and it’s really only the nature of the material that is changing. Somewhat like a modern artist building statues or installations out of junk, Porco is trying to make something out of nothing (or material that is as close to nothing as you can imagine). One assumes from the weighty epigraphs and winking self deprecation (we are given a heads-up on one “imminent rhyme”) that he is aware of the poverty of his material. But at the same time, and this is the important point, he really likes this stuff. As Andy Warhol once said, “liking things” is what pop art is all about. And so Porco grooves to rap music, Christina Aguilera, ESPN, crappy movies, and, especially, porn.

Not sex. Sex is what the poets Porco quotes in his various epigraphs (Virgil, Herrick, Campion, Yeats) are talking about. Porn is not sex. Porn is mediated/media sex. This isn’t to pass any kind of moral value judgment on porn. It essentially built the Internet, so I’m not complaining. The thing is that when Porco writes about porn he isn’t really saying anything about love or sex or men and women. He’s still dredging pop culture for media bits (and “xxx lingo”).

Jill Kelly is a well-known porn star and porn producer. (Porco even has a poetic tribute to the contract girls of Jill Kelly Productions, describing them as a “League of Extraordinary Women”. The borrowing never stops.) As a Muse a porn star makes perfect sense: they are unreal and untouchable objects of desire, and of course totally inexpressive. And as a Muse of pop culture an “anal queen” is even more perfect, since the only thing she produces is shit.

But why write porn poems at all?

The question is worth asking because Porco isn’t saying anything about porn (or love, or sex, or women). Since porn, as we all know, is just something to get off to, he’s simply enjoying it. He rejects – what he feels “some critic might claim” (got me!) – that his pen is “unable to sustain / A poetic argument of ‘real’ value”. He revels in sheer boyish spunkiness, a “love of bib-bubs” expressed in what can be pretty juvenile verse:

We gulp, we plug, we jack & strap
Yo ho! A gang-bang on the seas

 

I’ll drinkum your jizzum like milkum

 

Scuttle me buttle
Piddle me paddle
Tickle my piggle
Twattle my twiddle

It’s hard not to like this, at least on one level. The baby-talk rhythms are strong, there is a liberating sense of playfulness in the language, and Porco’s sheer enthusiasm for his subject is infectious. It’s dirty and explicit without being smutty or dangerous. But that’s also the problem. It’s that same generic quality to his material – is any media form more clichéd than porn? – that effectively neuters these poems. It’s hard to make something out of nothing, especially the nothing that is pop culture. One wishes for more authentic, unmediated stuff, like the terrific poem “My Sweetest Bi-curious,” than all of the versified television and singing the body digital.

Art can, and should, respond to pop culture. And The Jill Kelly Poems is a response. But poets have to make the culture too. That’s the next step.

Notes:
Review first published online May 23, 2005.

THE NEW CANON: AN ANTHOLOGY OF CANADIAN POETRY
Ed. by Carmine Starnino

Anthologies of contemporary poetry are essential. This is not just for the obvious reason that good poetry needs every platform and venue it can get these days, but because with so much poetry being published a critical selection is of real assistance in providing an introduction to the best of what’s out there.

And it’s not just a question of sorting the good books from the bad. The threshing continues even within the slenderest of volumes. Books of poetry are a bit like CDs – a few hits, some B-sides, and then a bunch of studio filler. Now I should say right away that there isn’t anything new about this. Shakespeare had some good sonnets, some bad sonnets, and a lot that were pretty mediocre. Go through the Collected Poems of the greatest poets who have ever lived and you’ll find plenty of junk to skim over. But in our time, with the almost complete extinction of the long (that is, book length) poem, the fallout from Poe’s Poetic Principle (“I hold that a long poem does not exist”) is perhaps more obvious. As Scott Thompson recently put it while discussing the inclusion of a book of poetry on the Canada Reads shortlist, “a poem doesn’t have any business being longer than a page.” He would not object to reading a poem (at least one no more than a page in length), but “would never read a book of poems.” And this, I might add, was in reference to a book – Al Purdy’s Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets: Selected Poems 1962-1996 – that was already a sampler. Thompson confessed himself a vulgarian and Philistine, but I’ve found myself making the same sort of point the last couple of years during the Runaway Jury deliberations, an automatic acknowledgment that each book under consideration did, indeed, “have its moments.” Even in books that I didn’t like very much I could usually find one or two poems that might have been considered among the year’s best. If only we had them all together in an anthology . . .

I’m happy to say that with The New Canon, edited by Carmine Starnino, we have such a collection, featuring the work of fifty Canadian poets born between 1955 and 1975. Yes, the poems are short, typically only a page in length. Even the excerpts from longer works are of individual parts of poetic sequences, which is something other than a long poem. But more on that later. This is still one of the best anthologies I’ve read in a long time, a refreshing and inspiring mix of energetic, optimistic, and finely crafted poetry that should inspire even the Scott Thompsons of this country (which is to say, all of us) to read the whole book.

Starnino is an able editor, poet, and critic who has made a name for himself in recent years by being a bit of a poetry polemicist. He begins his Introduction in this mode, claiming that The New Canon will not be just another “pluralistic, broadly-based, non-partisan anthology” but rather a “justification of prejudice.” It is part of an ongoing debate over Canadian poetry, arguing with earlier anthologies such as (most notably) Dennis Lee’s The New Canadian Poets.

As he proceeds there is some attempt to soft-shoe the rhetorical edge. Nevertheless, he does lay down certain positions. The main problem with anthologies like Lee’s is that they are without a guiding principle – “anything goes.” A stark contrast to this approach is announced with Starnino’s title, which, in addition to assuming the existence of the canonical, brings in the adjective to further “activate the meaning of canon as ‘tenet’ or ‘rule’.” These tenets and rules are gathered from the poems, not forced upon them. And the spirit of the age is clearly drawing strength from traditional forms. It moves ahead by looking back: “I regard this book as the most concrete evidence yet of a new principle at work in our poetry – or better yet, an old principle now resurfacing.” Consider that “better yet” well.

The sort of language that we find in this debate between tradition and “the new” is full of such political overtones. You can hear it in words like “radical,” “conservative,” “reactionary,” and “avant-garde.” I myself have had occasion (justified, I think, given the context) to refer to Starnino as a neo-con (in a review of A Lover’s Quarrel). The usual way the debate runs is to oppose the avant-garde, the “freakish postmodern” experimentalist “speaking-in-tongues” poetry typically (but not exclusively) associated with the LANGUAGE movement, with a more traditionalist aesthetic of craftsmanship. As Starnino points out, correctly, this is a misleading characterization, as the “new principle” that is at work in his poets is progressive and experimental, adapting a poetic past – that is inescapable anyway – in bold new ways. However, knowing something about the landscape of the divide does prepare you a bit for who’s going to be in and who’s going to be out of this anthology. Yes, Christian Bök is included, but nothing from Eunoia. And are you surprised? The poets here, Starnino tells us, regard poetry “as a major form for the examination of ideas, but consider it first and foremost a form (emphasis in the original).” Elsewhere he writes that with this group of poets “formal poetry has returned to the fore.”

To attempt to avoid the label of formalism then, and say that Formalist poetry (with a capital-F) does not exist, strikes at least one reader as trying to have one’s cake and eat it too.

Now personally I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this game of ins and outs. Unlike some commentators, I tend to feel that a confrontational mindset can be healthy for poetry. It’s good to write against something, if only as a means of clarifying one’s own ambition and aesthetic. We need the Other. If Starnino, following in the footsteps here of figures like David Solway, places a paranoid conspiracy-theory gloss on the Canadian scene, imagining “cabals” and “clans” of insurgents at the University of Calgary and the Kootenay School of Writing, then so be it. Everybody wants to be an outsider railing against an entrenched elite, especially in the arts. And it’s natural for a poet to feel marginalized since poetry itself only exists on the margins. I’m just not sure it bears much looking into. The roll call of New Canon poets includes numerous creative writing teachers, journal editors and prize winners. And while the Jubilate Circle may have been one of Solway’s inventions, might we not, after looking at the Index of Authors here, posit a Montreal Mafia?

All in good fun, of course. Starnino is a good example of the kind of critic he says that poetry requires, one capable of both recognizing and commenting on formal innovation: “critics who not only write with wooing detail of such minute structural irregularities, but recognize those irregularities as a platform for radical achievement.” As I’ve said before, great poetry needs great critics. Or, as Philip Marchand put it in a recent column: “Mainstream poets need rigorous, intelligible, smart commentators and critics and literary journalists. The actual poems need to be reviewed, explained, elucidated, argued over and occasionally dismissed by people who know good verse when they see it, in newspapers and periodicals that are actually read.”

My only quibble with Starnino’s writing is its wordiness. One appreciates the energy (oh how it is appreciated!), but one has the sense of someone who talks very quickly. I don’t, for example, see the distinction he makes between craft and style, or between poetry that develops vs. poetry that evolves. In the latter case he defines development as a breaking of bonds and a striving for the untested. Evolution is identified as “grow[ing] by mechanisms of mass extinction and replacement.” This is a weird way of characterizing both of these concepts. I would argue that poetry does in fact evolve, defining evolution as the dominance of more-or-less randomly generated mutations better adapted for survival, with the occasional eruption of long-recessive genes. The narrative epic in verse is thus a species of dinosaur; anecdotal free verse lyric the ubiquitous urban cockroach.

But I haven’t even talked about the poetry yet!

Reviewing any kind of anthology is difficult because there’s no way you can make generalizations that will apply to the entire selection. This is especially so with an anthology such as this. As noted, however, radical or experimental poetry is clearly out. What’s in is form. What this means is that qualities like rhythm and rhyme are, indeed, “in saddle.” Take the following stanza from David O’Meara’s “Letter to Auden” (which, at seven pages, is the longest poem in the book):

Attending, at last, to what is most commonplace:
Unbounced cheques, our neighbours’
Warm affection, the friendship of rooms
With sun and hardwood floors,
(If only life could arrange itself neatly as a rhyme,
Or the balanced way we climb
And relax inside a hammock)
But nothing we’ll ever know is that
Patly epigrammatic –

What a magnificent merging of form and content! The poet questions life’s ability to arrange itself neatly as a rhyme, and our inability to reduce our knowledge to pat epigrams, in as neatly rhymed and patly epigrammatic a stanza as you’ll find anywhere. Now: Ask yourself where that image of the hammock came from. The poet’s imagination yes, but wasn’t it found by the poem’s form? It occurs in parenthesis, so we have the idea of getting “inside” something already. Then we have the rhyme scheme, which forces O’Meara to find something to work (neatly) with “epigrammatic.” And finally there is the rhythm, which swings freely – in balance – without being disjunctive. The regular accents in the lines containing the image highlight internal repetitions in sound, the echoing of long “i”s and flat attacking “a”s:

Or the balanced way we climb
And relax inside a hammock

It’s not a particularly striking image or metaphysical conceit, but it’s the right image. And it’s the right image because it grew, consciously or not, out of the poem’s form.

This isn’t to say that all of the poems here are so driven. Nor that the most formally interesting or exact ones are always the best. Michael Crummey’s talent, for example, is better represented in his blank verse than in a banal formal exercise like “Artifacts.” For the most part these are poets at play even in their most serious moments, not just in their obvious exercise of verbal wit but in their handling of the line and sound effects. The New Canon is a book infused with the spirit of recreational invention. Nearly identical lines are repeated with words added or taken out. Alien voices are adopted in various dramatic monologues. A whole poem becomes an exercise in simile (“What the Magdalen Islands Are Like”). And then, if the stars are aligned, an image falls into place. Like the hammock, or in Karen Solie’s “Java Shop, Fort MacLeod”, something even more elegant:

Nostalgia is a prettier season. Leaves
fall on the river and a few are the colour of wine.

Beautiful stuff. But who’s reading it?

About five years ago I posted an essay online titled “The Morning After.” It was about how little poetry is appreciated these days, and gave some reasons for why this was so. I remember one of Canada’s best poets e-mailed me saying that the situation wasn’t really so bad. Poetry was in better shape than fiction, he said.

The thing is, he might have been right. We complain a lot about the state of poetry, but I’m not sure literary fiction is doing any better. In fact, I’m not even sure if it’s selling any better (which truly is remarkable given its increased visibility). But still you have to ask the question of why poetry, like oil painting or carving lifelike figures out of marble, has fallen into such obscurity and general disrepute. In my essay I blamed its dullness. This was a response to what Starnino criticizes as the “ruling aesthetic” in poetry since the 1970s – “the plain, the soft-spoken, the flatly prosy, the paraphrasingly simple, the accessibly Canadian.” The poets in The New Canon aren’t like that. And yet I suspect they will continue to struggle to find an audience. Why?

Here is one critique.

I think that perhaps we have set the bar too low. In the column by Philip Marchand already quoted he writes “that poetry is the means we have to renew language. Since language is vital to human survival, this task is important enough. We need constantly to fight against imprecision of language, language used to mystify rather than clarify, language that dulls rather than rouses the imagination. Poets are our first line of attack.” This is, of course, a riff on Eliot’s call for poetry to “purify the dialect of the tribe.” The same idea is expressed at the end of Starnino’s Introduction, where he tells us that “these poems matter not because I believe them appropriate at the present moment. They matter because, each in their own way, they keep the English language alive. We read good poems to read good poems.”

I disagree. This may be one reason why poets write poetry, but is that enough? Starnino emphasizes at one point that this anthology is “about what happens the next time we, as poets, sit down to write a poem.” Who is this “we” being addressed? I agree with Marchand and Starnino that poetry helps keep language alive. But this seems more a justification for writing poetry than reading it, and not an entirely persuasive one at that. Poetry shouldn’t be a civic duty.

But what does today’s poetry offer aside from its specialized use of language? Not enough. I’ve already quoted Starnino’s line about how these writers see poetry “as a major form for the examination of ideas, but consider it first and foremost a form.” My own sense is that form is indeed “first and foremost”, and that “the examination of ideas” has really fallen off the radar. Critics like Starnino tend to disparage “thematic criticism”, but this is because a lot of thematic criticism, at least in the last fifty years, has found itself with less and less to write about. Poetry had become all about effect, and themes (or ideas, or thought) were incidental. We didn’t read poets for what they had to tell us about the way we live now, but for the quality and expression of their observations. Which brings us back to the divine Edgar. The “Poetic Principle” is the manifesto of form for form’s sake, a marginal aestheticism, a poetry of effect championed by a connoisseur of moods and impressions. And, for god’s sake, no long poems!

But it has always been the long poem, the epic, that most directly addressed, allegorically or otherwise, our deepest political, religious, intellectual, cultural, and social concerns. And I see no reason why we shouldn’t have our own Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, Prelude, In Memoriam, or even Waste Land, today. The non-narrative, non-thematic, non-intellectual (indeed anti-intellectual) poetry of epiphany and observation, no matter how exquisitely crafted and brilliantly realized, is no replacement. Our horror of the didactic has led to an anodyne product that oftentimes isn’t about anything at all. As for a common mythology, embodied in a structure of belief and symbol with any popular resonance . . . well, there’s always what’s on TV.

I’ve often heard it remarked how few people are able to recite contemporary poetry. I can always find people who can quote reams of Tennyson or Shakespeare, but the same people can’t remember a single line of today’s verse (I mean, of course, among those who have read it). I don’t think this has as much to do with the quality of the writing as the fact that people no longer find in poetry the sort of thought or meaning that helps them understand their world or their lives. I can appreciate the kind of critic Marchand and Starnino both want to see, someone with the ability to explain how poem’s work. But that’s only going to take us so far. After you’ve explained how a poem works – or, perhaps even better, before – it might be worth explaining what it’s trying to say.

No doubt all of this sounds a bit old-fashioned. But it is one attempt to understand why poetry is widely perceived to be in such a rut. If nothing else, The New Canon provides ample evidence that it’s not due to any lack of talent. If you’re looking for poets who are making it new we might take another cue from Pound, point to this book, and say “Dig here.” And if it’s the health of the language you’re worried about, rest assured it’s in good hands. These poets have the tools to build Jerusalem.

And, should they get ambitious, we still have all the forms.

Notes:
Review first published online April 25, 2006.

NIGHT STREET REPAIRS
By A. F. Moritz

“Wandering between two worlds, – one dead,
The other powerless to be born.” – Matthew Arnold

There’s nothing particularly Arnoldian about A. F. Moritz’s latest collection, Night Street Repairs, but that sense of being caught between two worlds is front and center. So much is over. “The infinite erotic civilization we created/ is declining now” (so much for being infinite). “An age of anxiety was ending.” The revolution has come and gone, but what is this space between? The Wall has fallen, but that “waiting/ for something else, waiting so long/ it seemed no change could ever come” has only been replaced with an emptiness. This is an in-between, twilight realm Moritz likes to identify with shadows. Here, for example, is an “Architect Examining an Old House”:

Not yet torn down, forgotten somehow, its grey
façade of the last century

 

stands, a shadow, between clear glass and chrome
developments, beside the doming and arching
of reminiscent designs, unprecedented,
that suddenly came to us

 

as we trailed after the modern, wanting to be
more modern.

Not yet torn down, but just give it time.

And then there is a very Arnoldian first cricket of the season, “lost as you are for this moment in this silence/ of your dead of a season ago, and your yet unborn.” The artist (here a singer of cricket “cantos”) is obviously feeling very un-attached to the zeitgeist. He is dissatisfied. He is a “thing unjoined”.

He is in the mood for a good argument with the universe.

Some would say it’s the role of a poet to have a bone to pick with the dominant culture. And in Night Street Repairs A. F. Moritz, who has long been one of Canada’s most rewarding poets, is at his most questioning, hectoring, and intellectually aggressive. In an “Ode to Don DeLillo” it even seems at first blush as though the poet is trying to pick a fight with the novelist. Just what is the relation between writing and our experience of life’s misery? Moritz wants to know. And his Ode is an interrogation.

Being argumentative isn’t just about tone. It means you have a point to make. This makes some of the poetry here difficult, because Moritz is an abstract poet (or, perhaps more accurately, a poet in an abstract mood). Abstract in that his images seem to work backward, going from universal to particulars. The landscape is inscape – there is little difference between what he sees and what he imagines. The world is “only a voice” (take away the poet’s universe and he still has his gorge). The material world, in turn, seems generic and prop-like. There are bridges, doors, sidewalks, and dumpsters (Moritz, like most good poets, walks), but these have the feel of symbols without symbolic weight.

And not all arguments convince. The poem “On a Sentence About the Ancient Maya” is an example. The sentence referred to in the title tells us that the art of the Maya created their reality in a way more powerful than we moderns can imagine. Moritz rejects this with a flat “No” (told you he was feeling chippy). No, it is the reality of the present that is the product of an art so powerful the imagination can’t get out. From the plastic spoon you eat your yogurt with to the grooves on a steering wheel, ours is a universe of inescapable design. And design is art.

Or is it? I have my doubts. I’m not so sure that “we have imagined an art so powerful.” We have mass-produced our designs to the point where “art” is all-pervasive, but this strikes me as something different than creating a new reality through art. And the imagination involved seems minimal indeed. The Mayans had creation myths . . . and we have yogurt spoons? It seems to me that this is the real Ode to Don DeLillo. We live in a world we made, culture is our nature, but is our inner life – our imagination – trapped by these mundane aspects of product design? Or does it live elsewhere?

It is this sense of fullness and cultural exhaustion that is the old world dead. The classical gods – Mayan or erotic – have passed away. We exist now in a limbo, like flies stuck in a mass media amber, “almost insensible, almost impotent, yet alive/ by the sufferance of our young.” The next age will turn us all into shadows. But then, the next age will have no imagination.

Night Street Repairs is a thoughtful, thought-provoking collection that only rarely captures the ease and beauty of Rest on the Flight Into Egypt. Moritz’s dissatisfied questioning trickles down (or up) to the writing itself. There are a number of passages where the expression seems overly worried and qualified. Too many commas suggest overwritten or misdirected composition, an absence of grace. Lines like

Now, after years, one wall falls, in Berlin,
and they wake there, childhood gone, . . .

 

So my first, simplest
songs, a child’s shouts, nothing but life, soaked,
buried and smothered in life, lost in life’s thorax,
were wrong.

There is something anti-poetic about this, though perhaps it is intentional. Still, one misses the visionary images (as opposed to arguments made of metaphors), the playfulness, the sound of words,

the flap-snap-flop of the laundry of the future

 

strung out the windows of tropical highrise slums.

Notes:
Review first published online May 19, 2004.

POETRY AFTER 9/11: AN ANTHOLOGY OF NEW YORK POETS
Ed. by Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians

“O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometimes sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.” – Hart Crane

Despite its distinguished pedigree – commemorating the achievements of athletes, the deaths of schoolmates, the triumphs of heads of state – occasional verse doesn’t enjoy much of a reputation today. We tend to roll our eyes at the odes composed by poets laureate to celebrate inaugurations and royal birthdays. For writers fighting to distinguish their trade from the black arts of advertising and propaganda, sincerity has become the chief virtue of what it means to be literary. And sincerity is divorced from public speech.

At first glance, Poetry After 9/11 may seem similarly tainted. But this would be a mistake. The events of September 11, 2001, and in particular the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City, only provide a context for the poetry. The poems show the influence of 9/11, but often indirectly. Though similar in form to most contemporary poetry – the short, free verse lyric is still the dominant form – it is their occasional quality and their relationship to public events that open them from the inside.

There are two reasons, aside from the quality of the writing itself, why such an anthology works. In the first place there is the very public nature of the events the poetry responds to. Much of today’s poetry is characterized either by the banality of its anecdotal thought and observations or the obscurity of its personal references. That self-oriented, confessional impulse is still going strong here (Alicia Ostriker is moved to ask “do they hate me”?), but the events of 9/11 also give these poems a public, tangible frame of reference. That these events were experienced, in large part, through the lens of television is the second reason they are so effective. Poetry is made out of images, and it has often seemed to me that poetry is better suited to the modern mind because of this. Exploding planes and falling towers, all to the fragmented rhythms of MTV, are more a part of the vernacular than prose narrative.

Of course the reason they are more a part of the vernacular is because of the dominance of the image in our culture. That a number of these poems make references to CNN or Hollywood only confirms this. In David Trinidad’s “Adam and Eve on the Hollywood Treadmill” the images are drawn directly from film culture: “Think Faye Dunaway . . . Think Kate Winslet . . . Think inexplicable pop phenomenon Celine Dion” (some idea of just how free the verse is can be measured by reading that last line aloud). Another poem, “Mortal Remains” by Kimiko Hahn, begins with the connection between one of the victims and John Travolta “hustling his ass off” in Saturday Night Fever. “Freedom is the capacity to remember that it’s a movie,” Geoffrey O’Brien writes in his sonnet “Techniques of Mass Persuasion.” But this kind of freedom is a drug, Eliot’s world of might-have-beens. We can always change the channel.

While broadly similar in form, the poems vary quite a bit in rhythm and tone, from breathless rattling pieces by Eliot Katz and Norman Stock, to playful chains by Anna Rabinowitz and Paul Violi, to broken elegies by Jean Valentine and Rachel Hadas. What they share is a need for something, in Kimiko Hahn’s phrase, “More immortal than the movies.” Hart Crane found in the Brooklyn Bridge a form of architecture that stood for what he labeled a “Myth of America.” For these New York poets the great architectural symbol of the World Trade Center is another postmodern present absence. Instead of a bridge or a tower there’s a hole in the sky. Instead of religion (those “bygones of bearded beliefs”) there is a skepticism called freedom. As Katz’s movers put it, “The world has changed, bro.”

Notes:
Review first published online September 11, 2002.

BLACK RIVER
By Kenneth Sherman

A river is perhaps the most conventional of all poetic symbols, and almost certainly the longest lived. “riverrun” past Eve and Adam’s and irrigated all human literature. By the banks of Ontario’s Black River Kenneth Sherman hears the “high hollow whistling” through the branches of the massive willows and is transported in imagination to another Old Testament landscape:

Is that what the psalmist meant
by his ‘harps upon the willow’?

 

Those captives
weeping by the rivers of Babylon . . .

This music by and of the waters is a living tradition, one that Sherman fills with references to Jordan and Lethe and severed heads singing down the river to the sea (prefiguring modern types like Celan and Woolf – “Any river becomes black / when it drowns a poet”). The water sound is of continuity, not changelessness. What is eternal is the flow. As the familiar epigraph from Herakleitos has it, “Everything flow; nothing remains.” This river is not the Jordan and the water-strider is “not the Angel of Redemption” because the only redemption possible is “perhaps” in the very rush. Otherwise: Only water under the bridge: “no river flows backwards. / No river resuscitates its dead.” There is only the continuity of loss.

All around you, the discontinuous.
But you continue, dark river, while the gods
and goddesses
fall from the void like shredded texts –

Neither the gods nor their texts remain. Mere allusive “notes persist.” Everything flows.

A modern interpretation, then: The river as cable, the stream of data on (what used to be called) the information superhighway. Culture as stream, electronic current, flow. Can we be good poets without God? Can we have art without eternity? Is art even possible on the Internet, that “Dark Net” that parodies the Black River with its “vast, anarchic, pornography / of Gallup”:

But how to be God-centered
with Google, as if deadpan glass and hard-drive hum
could be any long-term consolation?
Lovely the way it flows onto the screen
though you are unlikely to download
Eden or Zion from this Net so easily accessed
and deluged with everyday demons.

Hypnotized by the lovely flow we hardly realize we are drowning. But we are. There are no gods but the gods of the Net. There is no form. No content. Only traffic. Only flow.

And dissolution of identity in the ocean of democracy. Which is where William Carlos Williams’s filthy Passaic emptied out too. Williams, however, saw that loss of identity as part of a cycle. His river is redeemed. Sherman’s final image of the “wake” is less hopeful. The river as a human life – the poet’s “inner river,” whose “bloody rivulets” mosquitoes drink – only runs down. As “wetware” the river fails to make the usual connections between the past (upriver) and the present (down), the subconscious (deep water) and consciousness (our perception of the surface). The past – “(ties, vests, bustles, corsets)” – is another river. Natives and nature have been displaced. History is just another shredded text:

Here memory is short-lived.
Shallow land, rock too close to surface.
And our river – an amnesiac:
her biography, mere movement.

Only flow. A flow of surfaces, because that is all we have time to notice. And it isn’t pretty.

The brackish surface
a deep bottle green breeding algae on the bleached banks,
cotton-like strands melting to slime
between trembling fingers.
Our horror ditch.

It’s not often in this book’s pared down verse that you get a line as rich in echoing sound as “a deep bottle green breeding algae on the bleached banks,” so when it arrives it forces you to note how the language mirrors the rotten fecundity of the polluted river. And then to follow it with such an exact and magically tactile image of the weird melting beauty of that pollution as it passes through a hand dipped in the water shows a rare touch indeed.

Black River is a masterful example of what can still be achieved in a long, meditative poem. Sherman takes the conventional image, and form, of the river and re-imagines it in language and thought that are thoroughly contemporary. Of course the cultural river will keep on flowing, sweeping all before it along with “Award-winning poets who can’t rhyme a line of verse. / And worse.” But one hopes that at least this text, these notes, will last.

Notes:
Review first published online June 6, 2007.

THE ESSENTIAL GEORGE JOHNSTON
Selected by Robyn Sarah
THE ESSENTIAL P. K. PAGE
Selected by Arlene Lampert and Théa Gray
THE ESSENTIAL DON COLES
Selected by Robyn Sarah

It is a truth pretty much universally acknowledged that even the greatest of modern poets, meaning poets working since the advent of the lyric dispensation announced by Wordsworth and Coleridge, have a high chaff-to-wheat ratio. In the case of Wordsworth, I have a copy of Volume Two of the Yale edition of his Complete Poems – it runs to 1100 pages – that I think I have only opened once. Homer may have nodded, but Wordsworth throughout most of his writing life walked in his sleep. And he was not alone. The Collected Poems of Dickinson, Yeats and Frost are heavy tomes, but a competent selection from any of these authors will come in under 100 pages with room to spare, and still contain all the good stuff. Scholars may want to savor every syllable of genius, but the rest of us just want the greatest hits.

Enter Erin publisher The Porcupine’s Quill and a new series of Essential Poets “whose aim is to offer the best possible introduction to the preeminent figures in Canadian poetry.” The inaugural volume on George Johnston (born in Hamilton in 1913, died in 2004) is a good example of the treasures in store. Introducing her selection, poet Robyn Sarah remarks that Johnston “flew beneath the radar in Canada during his lifetime.” Which is true for most poets, but is surprising in Johnston’s case given the broad appeal of his earlier work. Perhaps the avant-garde did not care for the jingly graveyard thoughts in the poem “Bedtime” – “Toads are asleep and so are bugs and snakes; / Millions of things are asleep in the icy lakes” – but in lines like that we can hear a bit of Auden’s magic.

That P. K. Page (born in England in 1916, arrived in Canada three years later) is still writing poetry at an age when few of us can expect to be drawing breath is grounds for wonder. That she is still such a good writer, clear, earnest, and engaged with everything from environmental issues (hearing “the planet’s message, dark, admonishing”) to contemporary poetry (a brilliant series of poems expands on samples of lines from other poets), is nothing short of amazing. “Every other day I am an invalid,” she writes in “The Selves,” lying back on her pillow with her hair brushed out “like a silver fan” while the nurses humour her. But “Every other other day I am as fit / as planets circling,” hair brushed out into “a golden sun.” This rich-haired youth of morn gives birth to the poet who, ageless, “stands unmoving, mute, invisible, / a bolt of lightning in its naked hand.”

Don Coles (born in Woodstock, 1927, currently living in Toronto), writes poetry as generally accessible as his fellow essential poets, but with a stricter feel to his language. His claim to have been influenced by the “Hardy-Larkin line” isn’t as convincing as it would have been if made by Johnston or Page, in part because Cole’s lines seem more determined by sound values and sentence structure than regular verse rhythms. Natural, everyday images are made weird by a penchant for what are almost metaphysical conceits: “a girl whose nakedness is endless in our bed,” an aging face that “in sprinting patches rusts / towards” death.

All three books offer an excellent range of selections, and each concludes with a brief biography and bibliography. Robyn Sarah has also written helpful introductions to the Johnston and Coles volumes. The Essential P. K. Page has a very odd Foreword instead, the editors claiming, I think absurdly, that the poetry of P. K. Page “needs no introduction.” Of what poet today can that be said? Even wonkier is their decision to eschew a chronological sequence of poems in favour of alphabetical order, since for Page “time is not linear and she places little value on such distinctions.” While acknowledging Page’s own affection for alphabetical books, the fact is every poet develops and a chronological presentation in this case would have made more sense. But the order is not, in the end, vitally important. And the hope the editors express that their book “will make its way into backpacks, carry-on luggage and doctors’ waiting rooms” is one that is easy to share for all of the volumes in this already essential series.

Notes:
Review first published June 20, 2009.

GLIMPSE: SELECTED APHORISMS
By George Murray

An aphorism is a condensed bit of wisdom or insight that aspires to the burr-like mental stickiness and staying power of poetry and proverb. Poet George Murray brings together 409 such nuggets in Glimpse, sometimes to great effect but too often with uneven results.

The form is the problem, since it sets the bar so high. In writing that is this pared-down we expect nothing but zingers, pure gold, pensées that will have the sudden impact of Zen koans. There is simply no excuse for the odd dud, as we would forgive an occasional bad line in a long poem. This emphasis on pruning and discrimination is heightened by the subtitle, which tells us that these are “selected” aphorisms. Selected from what? Just how many aphorisms has Murray written? An introduction setting out his approach and goals would have helped.

The aphorisms, usually only a sentence in length, appear five to a page. They are numbered, but otherwise there doesn’t seem to be any method to their arrangement. The typical form they take is that of a definition: “X is . . .” The X is usually an abstract noun like beauty or truth, allowing for an imaginative gloss that can go in almost any direction. It all sounds like this: 129: Death is a relinquishing of the prerogative to object. 130: Time is a tea through which your life’s water is only run once. 131: Embarrassment is regret in its youth.

Lightning does strike. Murray is capable of lines that tease the reader out of thought, like “Lies are not the opposite of truth; ideas are.” And there are also arresting moments that scratch at imagistic expressiveness: “To the wind, an open window is a drain,” “Mist is a rain that can’t agree with itself.”

But then there are the throwaways, the glib, banal, and cutesy singles that should not have made the cut. Aphorisms often strike us with the force of truth, or at least an arresting aptness, but they shouldn’t come as obvious as “The first choice is not the choice, but the choice to choose,” or “Sleep is the rough draft of death.” And for some reason vulgarity brings out the worst in Murray: “DNA rhymes with T and A,” “On the highway of life each tongue is an on-ramp, each asshole an exit,” “Those who cannot hear Nature’s call end up pissed.” Brevity, yes. Wit? That’s stretching things.

In other words, as with most poetry collections, there are at least as many misses as hits. Given the nature of the exercise, however, one might have expected a better ratio, strained through a more discerning process of selection.

Notes:
Review first published August 13, 2010.

OPEN AIR BINDERY
By David Hickey

I’m always interested to see particular images recurring in a poet’s work. Not in a signature, grand thematic flourish, like with Yeats’s gyres, but in subtle, leitmotif fashion, in ways that the author may not even be conscious of. In a novel such repeatedly struck notes are easier to spot, and usually they appear for a more obvious purpose – often, for example, being used as shorthand to represent a character’s habit of mind. But in a collection of poems, especially of the contemporary, confessional lyric sort, one can’t help feeling a bit like a Freudian analyst, taking notes on a symbolism that the poet chatters at his fingertips.

I don’t want to throw David Hickey on the couch, and in any event his new book, Open Air Bindery, doesn’t have a hidden agenda. The title itself alerts us to what will be the dominant pattern of imagery: one associated with inner and outer states, the open and the bound. The first poem, “Open Voyage,” is one of the most inviting introductions to a book of poetry you’ll read and immediately establishes the ruling conceit of systole and diastole, with a painting of a boat on the Nile magically expanding outward – “the figure living within its framed wooden borders” pushing herself beyond the picture frame and cruising around the poet’s room – and then receding inward (“her small ship gliding into the painting’s / canvas, into its beginnings”).

We might flag those two words “living within.” The next poem sets before us another picture, an x-ray, which reveals the author’s inner being or “essential self” nestled within “the wetsuit of my body.” The poem after that, “The Garden Shed,” begins with the poet asking of the title structure “Could I live in this / thing?” But while both of these poems evoke the notion of containment, neither expresses feelings of confinement. Indeed quite the opposite; the effect is expansive. Every work of art is concerned with getting things in – not just employing techniques and devices, but putting the universal in the particular, somehow containing life itself. There is the canvas, the unexposed film, the blank, white page. Now: how do I live, put life, in this thing?

And so all art is a sort of life within, one that, like the boat on the Nile, takes on a life of its own. The concluding series of poems, “Snowflake Photography,” plays with the question of what the world looks like inside of a snowflake: a “short lifetime / framed in a frozen / ecology.” Within that single crystalline particular may in fact reside a world, “the universe’s tidy / store of time tucked inside”:

it’s without
pictures or words; just pages

 

and pages of white,
which is what the world

 

looks like where
you’re sitting: pages

 

pages and pages of white,
the work of some careful

 

pressman minding
his craft

 

as he lays
out the fields below.

This Unwritten Book of Snowflakes is a fascinating meditation on art. Of course it is written, snowflakes are something made, but like the book of moonlight (subject of another poem), whose pressman also works in “an open air bindery,” the life within has no fixed meaning and no frame. No two editions of it are alike.

All of this could get to be a bit metaphysical if it weren’t grounded in Hickey’s grasp of the particular, the feel of kitchen tiles under bare feet and the familiar squeak of floorboards. Expanding that notion of domestic ground just a bit one might even see in the leitmotif I’ve been focusing on an island aesthetic. Hickey is a native of Prince Edward Island, and when he writes about how “blue edges a map of land” he we see him imagining another fluid frame around a life within. Those blue edges are like the incongruously watery shores of suburbia in another poem, or even the “rivered grain” and “wooden channels” of a tabletop that the poet’s books seem to float upon. This is the poetry of endlessly rocking tides: lapping up the land, and then retreating to borderless geographies.

Notes:
Review first published online July 25, 2011.

PURE PRODUCT
By Jason Guriel

Take, for example, the poem “E.g.”:

The first principium tends to bore us.

Which it does. The stuffy “principium” usually having the connotation of a first or essential principle, a “first principium” adds to our sense that the line is meant to be a mouthful. But by breaking the ice in such a self-conscious way – it is the first line of the poem – it works as intended. This is a poem that announces itself as being aware of matters having to do with order and form. That it is also a sonnet, that most readily identifiable and familiar of all poetic forms, also helps. Sonnets, as I had occasion to remark in a review of the Jailbreaks anthology, make the perfect vehicle for meta-poetic musings. You can never not be aware that what you’re reading has been built to a set of established specifications which, in turn, become part of the poem’s subject matter. And so this is the first principium: the general form of the sonnet that precedes the existence of this particular instance.

As form alone, however, it bores us (with the “tends” adding a nice touch of the blasé). In several other poems in Pure Product Guriel closely associates the idea of form – or more properly its absence – with boredom. “When Walking Next to Chain Link Fences” is a jaunty formalist manifesto: the strictly ordered wires and posts of “these braided harps” are the source of the poet’s music, clattered out with a broken branch. Absent form/fence, there is only the boredom of Frost’s tennis court stripped of its net:

But when these fences give
way to boundless lawns
my hand becomes the sieve
that can’t contain my yawns.

More akin to the first principium is the “Shopping Cart, Abandoned on Front Lawn.” The cart here is abandoned form, a structure “out of its element” and unable to perform any worthwhile function. Even the local kids grow “bored” with it as a plaything, abandoning it to rust. And yet even so it has a kind of poetic value to it, as form alone. It “stupidly sifts” the sunlight, creating a shadowy grid of subdivision beneath it. And

Still, it’s sturdy enough. Sound.
If only some Duchamp would rope it off
and declare a readymade Found.

The final rhyme insists on the value of the shopping cart’s embodiment of order, of Sound. Form cannot be abandoned. It is a first principle.

If we squint, force1 flies like an arrow . . .

Of course we have to do some work when reading poetry. But the form is always there. As noted, with a sonnet it is pretty obvious. Sonnets can be diagrammed through their rhyme scheme, in the case of “E.g.” a standard Elizabethan: ababcdcdefefgg. This is one way of representing, schematically, formal elements, just like the “force1” and “fig.1” in “E.g.”. The arrow is also a nod to time’s arrow, at least as understood in terms of cause-and-effect. And time’s arrow is a metaphor for temporal asymmetry, the fact that time (like language) only goes one way. This is traditionally understood as a function of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which tells us that the universe is not only expanding but losing cohesion. Increasing in entropy. Losing form.

. . . and dots in fig.1 flame into Taurus.

The reason form cannot be abandoned is that it is inherent to thought. The mind is not just a blank slate recording a chaos of sensation, but is preloaded with the Kantian categories of time and space that is uses to order and give form to experience. But while the form is there, it takes the imagination to generate something from it. Time and space exist, like the fence and the shopping cart, but we have to strike a music from them (“Taurus” boldly rings in the poem’s first rhyme). We have to make form fly and flame. Otherwise time is only entropy and space a scattering of stars.

Still, we crave the fleshed-out example.

“Still” being used here not to introduce a qualification (“But still . . . “), but rather, I think, with the meaning of “as always.” A sonnet need only be ababcdcdefefgg – after all, it rhymes – but this is only a schematic skeleton, an abstraction. It needs to be fleshed out with “thinginess.” Pure form is without thinginess – the boring shopping cart abandoned on the lawn, the fence without the stick to play on it. Thinginess is measure, “the width / times length / times height,” pure product, something made. And in the poem “E.g.” the generation is explicitly sexual, a craving for the flesh. Taurus is, after all, a bull. And when the poem flows on with

Flo’s
gross of apples less twelve for Tom;

we get the first of two boy-girl pairings, their shopping carts filled with concupiscent fruit: the gross of apples with its connotations of vulgarity and Original Sin, and the fuzzy, vulvic peach of juicy chins, uneaten by Eliot’s repressed Prufrock (a figure directly invoked in the next poem, which is a companion piece). After all, what are Dick and Jane doing taking

two trains
departing Duluth at noon, and in each
dining car, each storybook plate, plain Jane
and her Dick, longdividing the one peach.

The fleshed-out example of romantic assignation isn’t just imagery, it’s narrative. Which is another kind of engine driving language forward, the trains departing Duluth being an industrial version of time’s arrow. This is a train heavy with thinginess. Only compare the feline that follows:

But only a cat pads through our primers,
neutered by cold clip of that article.

The primer takes us back to the first principium, a Platonic form of cat that is to the flaming bull of Taurus what Leonardo’s Man (“like Man in vintage medical posters / in wait rooms”) is to Dick, separating his peach in a railway dining car. Indeed, we don’t even know if it (the cat) is a Tom. Where is his thinginess? Where is his thing?

What Guriel is getting at here is something that a lot of recent formalist poetry tries to deal with. What is the relationship between form and thing? What is the status of the image? In a review I wrote a few years ago of The New Canon, an anthology of new Canadian poetry edited by Carmine Starnino, I ended by questioning Starnino’s notion that poetry be “first and foremost a form” insofar as it had the effect of pushing other concerns too far into the background. A fixation on form becomes self-regarding, a way of turning inward and away the world. Now I want to emphasize this isn’t the case with all formalist poetry, especially historically – and I won’t even try to nail down the label – but I think it is an occupational hazard today. The subject of such poetry increasingly becomes poetry itself. In Pure Product this is obvious in the many self-referential asides as well as the lightly concealed essays on poetics (some of which I’ve already mentioned). “Less,” to take another example, is an exquisitely crafted poem that threads together a chain of images illustrating what appear to be nothing more than platitudes: that less is more, that mountains can be made out of molehills, that a little goes a long way. Read literally, the poem seems to be saying nothing at all. And so we are invited to interpret it as another poem about poetry – taking “less is more” as a minimalist aesthetic. The images are mere figures, illustrations, of no importance in themselves.

Guriel can be quite self-conscious about this. In one poem, “Empty Nests in Leafless Trees” he even turns on his own wonderful imagery

especially at sunset
when leafless trees become
their silhouettes
and empty nests
tend to stand out
like mashed clots
in a fine nest of capillaries
or ink blots
in failed calligraphy –

denying in the final part of the poem that the empty nests are either similes or metaphors “or, for that matter, / even matter.” They are only black holes, a sort of anti-image image that denies nature and the world entirely. Leaving us with the poem finally pointing to nothing outside itself. It is similar to what happens at the end of “E.g.”, with the neutered Man

proof of the universal,
genitals a generalization,
airbrushed, buffed to the point of abstraction.

A disappearing act that brings the poem full circle, back to the dull first principle. Universal Man is a vanishing “point”: a mere location or set of coordinates on a diagram. With the airbrushing and buffing of Cat and Man, the poem dissolves like the shrinking dot on an old-style television set. But then, how “real” were Dick and Jane?

Pure Product is an excellent book. In particular Guriel demonstrates a real mastery of the short line. As a statement of poetic principle, however, it doesn’t quite resolve what it wants to do with things. More generally the question might be asked: What, from the formalist perspective, is the world for? Less than essential, but more than mere decoration, does its invocation signify anything more than an endearing human weakness for things of the flesh?

Notes:
Review first published online September 28, 2009.