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Number
288
August/September 2001
Tutti-frutti
RICHARD
SILBERG
Copyright
© 2001 Poetry Flash
THE SEVEN AGES, by Louise Glück, The
Ecco Press, HarperCollins Publishers, New York,
2001, 68 pages, $23.00 cloth.
WHY THE SHIPS ARE SHE, by Terri Ford, Four
Way Books, New York, 2001, 69 pages, S13.95
paper.
RADIO, RADIO, by Ben Doyle, Louisiana
University Press, Baton Rouge, 2001, 71 pages,
$22.95 cloth, $16.95 paper. Winner of the 2000 Walt
Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets,
selected by Susan Howe.
More and more I find myself comparing poetic
apples and oranges. In part, that's because of my
reading habits; I've always got five books going at
once. Key, though, is that contemporary American
poetry is so discontinuous, so many distinct
species sprouting in that garden, or wilderness,
vaguely bounded by the name.
I've become obsessed by these radical
differences, trying to measure, or bridge, trying
simply to understand them.
So here are three very different books. I've
picked them, for starts, because I think each is
interesting, substantial, worth talking about in
itself. But they're not randomly different. I've
picked them also because the line generated by
their three bright points stretches across a good
swatch of garden---not all the way across, far, far
from it; no diameter---still, they allow us to
travel, to take in a view.
One more concern, though, too. To change the
metaphor, William Carlos Williams famously talked
about the poem as a "machine made of words." And
who could deny that? You have simply to read
something like Williams's own "Poem" to see how
those few inert, printed words again and again
recreate the slender, hesitant downward movement of
the cat in and out of that flower pot. A small word
machine. Magical. But it's the magic that teases
me. I'd like to play with another idea, much more
impressionistic and arguable than Williams's, the
metaphor of the poem as a sacred machine.
Art has always been associated with the sacred,
with religion or magic, depending, the old
anthropological distinction goes, on whether the
power involved is 'personal', as in the
supplication, cajoling, appeasement of a god, or
impersonal, as in fetishes and spells, where the
power simply flows, not through divine will, but
for whoever knows the right words or possesses the
requisite magical objects.
So I'd like to look at these three books,
speculatively, in terms of their relation to the
sacred, as well. What kind of a conformation do
they suggest? Now, none of these three poets is a
religious or magical writer in any conventional
sense. The idea is precisely of the poem, itself,
as a machine of holiness in what each of these
poets seems to conceive of as a secular world. What
kinds of mechanisms are these? How and where, so to
speak, do they squeeze their sacred juice?
In my first dream the world appeared
the salt, the bitter, the forbidden, the sweet
In my second I descended
I was human, I couldn't just see a thing
beast that I am
I had to touch it, to contain it
I hid in the groves,
I worked in the fields until the fields were
bare----
time
that will never come again---
the dry wheat bound, caskets
of figs and olives
I even loved a few times in my disgusting human
way
and like everyone I called that
accomplishment
erotic freedom…
That's how Louise Glück begins The Seven
Ages, first half of what's also her title poem.
Note how plain, cut back her language is,
relatively unfigured, easy---at least on its first
level of signification---to understand. She ends
the poem with a beautiful couplet, like an
epigram:
Earth was given to me in a dream
In a dream I possessed it
Her language is traditional in several senses,
traditional in the sense that Glück is well
and closely read in the tradition of English and
American poetry, so that her words and phrases are
charged, speaking back and forth, with the poetry
gone before; but it's traditional, as well, in a
more general sense---I almost went ahead to say
that it 'means what it says'---but, of course, that
way lies madness and deconstruction. Let me more
judiciously say that she bends no rules of syntax,
floats no signifiers off their signifieds, avoids
any undue 'strains' in her wording. Glück's
early books of poems---it seems to me that the
turning point came in her fifth book,
Ararat---were written in a more densely,
gorgeously figured language, ambiguous and
paradoxical. Here the language seems limpid,
'transparent'. There is figuration, for instance,
in that Glück grew up as a sheltered, Jewish
girl on Long Island and to my knowledge worked in
no fields and hid in no groves. The reader must
deal with the question of "dream" in this poem: is
it figure, magical realism, metaphysical statement?
But in so far as the poem presents difficulties,
they begin not at the level of language but in the
thought and the emotional stances that the
language, mellifluously, plainly, communicates.
The Seven Ages is very much a book about
time and aging. We can feel that in the ending
couplet of the title poem above, the brevity,
irreality of life. Here's the ending of
"Aubade":
There was one love; he had many voices
There was one dawn; sometimes
we watched it together
I was here
I was here
There was one summer returning over and over
there was one dawn
I grew old watching
or perhaps even more startling, this ending
section of "Ripe Peach":
There was
a peach in a wicker basket.
There was a bowl of fruit.
Fifty years. Such a long walk
from the door to the table.
But these expressions of the evanescence of
human life are universal; virtually all aging
people experience that dizzy sense of
foreshortening. Glück is much more uncommon in
the extreme irony with which she views our lives
here and particularly the bitterness?
neuroticism?---I'm trying to be descriptive, not
critical in my use of these words---that center
around her treatments of love. We've already quoted
the line from her title poem above about how she
"loved a few times" in her "disgusting human way."
Here, in one of my favorite poems in the book,
"From a Journal," are two quotes that give a sense
of the irony and romantic---perhaps in both senses
of that word---futility that suffuse The Seven
Ages:
I had a lover once,
I had a lover twice,
easily three times I loved.
And in between
my heart reconstructed itself perfectly
like a worm.
And my dreams also reconstructed themselves.
After a time, I realized I was living
a completely idiotic life.
Idiotic, wasted---
And sometime later, you and I
began to correspond, inventing
an entirely new form.
Deep intimacy over great distance!
Keats to Fanny Brawne, Dante to Beatrice---
One cannot invent
a new form in
an old character. The letters I sent remained
immaculately ironic, aloof
yet forthright. Meanwhile, I was writing
different letters in my head,
some of which became poems.
................................
How sad to have lost you, to have lost
any chance of actually knowing you
or remembering you over time
as a real person, as someone I could have grown
deeply attached to, maybe
the brother I never had.
And how sad to think
of dying before finding out
anything. And to realize
how ignorant we all are most of the time,
seeing things
only from the one vantage, like a sniper.
And there were so many things
I never got to tell you about myself,
things which might have swayed you.
And the photo I never sent, taken
the night I looked almost splendid.
I wanted you to fall in love. But the arrow
kept hitting the mirror and coming back.
And the letters kept dividing themselves
with neither half totally true.
And sadly, you never figured out
any of this, though you always wrote back
so promptly, always the same elusive letter.
What personally interests me most in this
tragi-comic feast is the whiff of paradoxical
limitation, "ironic, aloof / yet forthright," "the
letters kept dividing themselves / with neither
half totally true," "always the same elusive
letter." Taking these limitations beyond the
romantic---perhaps running on my own here---I get
suggestions of meta-scientific 'laws',
impossibilities, curves and asymptotes, glimmers,
say, that approach is only possible through
distance---as she writes in another poem:
…the only constant
was distance, the servant of need.
Which was used to sustain
whatever fire burned in each of us.
The eyes, the hands---less crucial
than we believed. In the end
distance was sufficient, by itself.
(from "The Ruse")
or that in love, maybe in all language, honesty
is always doubled by dishonesty. I'm reminded here
of the grosser limitations with which she opens the
book: "I was human, I couldn't just see a thing /
beast that I am // I had to touch, to contain
it."
What I'm leading up to in this talk of human
limitations is the sacred in Glück's work and
my idea of her approach to it. Let me preface
that---because there's the powerful tendency for an
essayist to distort a poet's work in pursuit of the
thesis---with a quote from her poem "Summer Night,"
importantly placed as the penultimate poem in the
book:
Why not? Why not? Why should my poems not
imitate my life?
Whose lesson is not the apotheosis but the pattern,
whose meaning
is not in the gesture but in the inertia, the
reverie.
Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering
almond---
surely these are the great, the inexhaustible
subjects
to which my predecessors apprenticed
themselves.
I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as
convention.
Balm of the summer night, balm of the
ordinary,
imperial joy and sorrow of human existence,
the dreamed as well as the lived---
what could be dearer than this, given the closeness
of death?
Two things I'd like to highlight there. First
"to which my predecessors apprenticed themselves,"
just as brief textual support for my earlier
assertion that Glück is a "traditional" poet,
one who sees herself leafing from that wide, green
trunk of the written past. But it's the
"apotheosis" I'm mainly going for. In the poem she
denies it, like Prospero renouncing his
magic---she's placed a brief epigraph from The
Tempest on her frontispiece. And surely she's
smart enough to know what she's doing. Yet I would
argue, in good Freudian fashion, that she "protests
too much."
For me, apotheosis lies near the heart of
Glück's poetry, and through it, through the
writing, she escapes for eternal moments from these
limits of being human. Let's go back to the opening
of The Seven Ages---her title is another
borrowing from Shakespeare, from Jacques speech on
the vanishing stages of human life. "I descended,"
she says, "I was human." And where else, of course,
could she be descending from but some poetic
heaven? Glück's humanity is shut up within the
beastly, within neurotic impossibility. Poetry,
more specifically irony, is the key that lets her
out, irony which works in two levels of knowledge,
as, for instance, when we, the audience, know the
'truth' that Oedipus doesn't. Through poetry
Glück generates that superior knowledge,
through it she becomes prophet, even god.
Here's the end of her beautiful poem "Ancient
Text":
How simple life became then; how clear, in the
childish errors,
the perpetual labor: night and day, angels
were
discussing my meanings. Night and day, I revised my
appeals,
making each sentence better and clearer, as
though one might
elude forever all misconstruction. How flawless
they became---
impeccable, beautiful, continuously misread. If
I was, in a sense,
an obsessive staggering through time, in another
sense
I was a winged obsessive, my moonlit
feathers were paper. I lived hardly at all among
men and women;
I spoke only to angels. How fortunate my
days,
how charged and meaningful the nights' continuous
silence and opacity.
One last quote from Glück, the final brief
poem, following "Summer Night." Maybe her 'denial'
has been artful after all:
FABLE
Then I looked down and saw
the world I was entering, that would be my
home.
And I turned to my companion, and I said Where
are we?
And he replied Nirvana.
And I said again But the light will give us no
peace.
Then again, maybe not.
Terri Ford's Why the Ships Are She is, as
promised, a whole different bag. For one thing,
whereas The Seven Ages is Glück's ninth
book of poems (not counting the recent reissuing of
her first four books in a single volume) and
Glück is an accomplished, indeed a major
American poet and Pulitzer Prize winner, this is
Ford's first book of poems. Terri Ford, though, is
I think an excellent poet, someone who right off
demonstrates considerable poetic chops. What I want
to focus on is, not levels of accomplishment as
implied by publications and prizes, but rather that
Ford enacts a very different idea of poetry than
Glück's as embodied in a very different
language.
WHEN HE DRINKS
I am left on shore when the barge
shoves off. I am the man in iron shoes, tamping
down wet concrete. I am a dog
in the pound, I am orchards oppressed
by rain, bird feathers, blood,
refrigeration, oar
lock, ice. When he tries
to be absent, I'm like Whitman fallen
in his locked bedroom, unable to move
or to call out. I don't stand
for anything, back to the locked
sodden room of the kid
that I was once, whirring,
passed over,
out
If Glück's language is bell-like, both in
its grace and ease, and in its quality of being
open at the bottom, resonating with "predecessors,"
in that sense bottomless, Ford's language is
grounded in the contemporary. Her first real track
switch comes at the first words of the second line.
Till "shoves off," the "barge" could still be, say,
Cleopatra's. But "shoves off," with its hint of
double meaning, both motion of the barge and
something like, 'Shove off, buddy!' cuts us from
Egypt and Shakespeare. Suddenly we're not reading a
'traditional' or 'academic' language; the poem
shunts into street, maybe beat, even rock'n'roll,
"dog / in the pound" as in junkyard dog. And
while the feel of Glück is elite, poetic
patrician, the feel here is demotic. That's belied
by certain of Ford's tones and phrases, like
"oppressed by rain" or "fallen in his...bedroom,"
which hint, for me, at the sensitive, the
high-toned, but the poem as a whole, including its
reference to Whitman, he of the "democratic vistas"
and "barbaric yawp," and particularly the beginning
and the end, feels rough, 'down'.
There's another difference between the languages
of these two poets, one that points to a core
characteristic of Ford's style. Where Glück's
pace is measured, stately, Ford's is headlong,
hell-bent. Her language has the quality of skip and
skid, of blur. That's created in part by the fast
listings, and in part by the way she breaks her
lines. Her breaks, like the one we touched on
above, "...barge / shoves off..." or "...oppressed
/ by rain..."---especially "...oar / lock, ice..."
which takes the one word 'oarlock' and makes,
simultaneously, two separate words out of it so the
list moves even faster, "oar" and "lock" and
"ice"---are 'projective', give the poem an abrupt
jumpiness. Then, there's a punning quality here,
the compression and speeding of two meanings at
once. "Shoves off," as we said, ghosts a second
meaning; the line (or 'stanza') break "...I don't
stand // for anything..." puns by splitting the
phrase, so that at first we read that the speaker
is 'unable to move, call, stand' before we get the
second, vernacular phrase 'don't stand for
anything'. And, of course, the end, which brings it
home, shotguns 'passed over', 'passed out', 'over
and out' at us along with subtler, deeper meanings
I won't even try to go for here.
In and beyond these specifics of lineation and
language, though, Ford is just moving very fast in
this poem. She races from a rocky relationship
through a landscape of feelings that seems both
inner and outer to an old, helpless Whitman to an
unhappy childhood and back to the relationship
again, the guy passed out, blotto, gone. A major
train trip in not many words.
Terri Ford, demotic speedster, is not ironic.
She doesn't have Louise Glück's fatal
knowledge. She doesn't rise up out of life in a
kind of sibylline paralysis. She may get a little
cynical, sardonic, brown around the edges, but she
doesn't slide too far in that direction. Rather,
she seems to me someone who's right down in it,
like a healthy poetic dog, a setter, lovely bird
dog, sniffing, dashing back and forth, finding
everything out. Or she seems to me like a slightly
ditsy entertainer, trailing feathered boas, juggled
balls, on the way to a boffo encore.
FIXATION
As soon as he starts in with the kissing, I
think
of geometry, how its many faces divide, subdivide
in
unstoppable certitudes and of course that is
reductive. I think of Einstein
on the beach, that famous hair
blathering, the endearing whiteness
of his legs, elemental, and what he said once:
Why is it that nobody understands me and
everybody
likes me? I hear hounds crashing
through the brush. Am kissing
him back. This physical landscape attaining
such needling levels of noise and of danger, I want
to hover
above the trauma of bodies, leave
this room or transfer as out of a class to
another poem --- a poem wearing huaraches
and snoring --- but I'm being pulled under by
other
wants in the throat of me, belting, gravitational.
Do not think
of the active underlanguage of fuck, of
shucking
or muddy, and stuck. Say no low words, not
lotion, not mount. Pretty soon I can stop this
with the mouth I use for interruptions and sit in
my hands
over here. So. With this poem the held breath of
the page
begins. Now the landscape is getting
some sky, some constables, a bird,
and some insistence one sees in clouds whiffing
over
the pare of a moon.
"Fixation" flashes many of the same features as
"When he drinks," the lightning pace, jumpy breaks,
that slippage and bellying out of the language so
that the poem begins in one place and ends
someplace quite unexpectedly else. "Fixation" is a
bigger poem, so the detour and sail is made more
apparent. But, beside the charm and vertigo of the
poem itself, there are a few new things I want to
point out here.
Glück is not funny. When we think back
through English literature, the Modernists in
America, funny poems are hard to come by, and, with
some exceptions, like Robert Pinsky's sublime
recent poem about the death of Eliot Gilbert,
collected in The Figured Wheel, contemporary
poets writing in what we might call 'the
tradition', Robert Hass, Alan Williamson, and
others, aren't funny. But that new wide-open genre
of several decades' vintage, 'standup poetry'---I'd
say Terri Ford fits in there---is often very funny,
and not just funny funny, but savage funny, sad
funny, serious funny, etc. "Fixation" is
thoughtfully funny, from that beginning, shticky
language of "as soon as he starts in with the
kissing," through Einstein, the "huaraches and
snoring," virtually to the end.
Again, Glück and other 'traditional'
writers, only a few of whom I've touched on just
above, tend to write a reposeful language, in the
sense that their words are unforced, used simply
within the eloquence, association, aura that
they've accrued through hundreds of years of
writing, "wheat," "caskets," "groves," "earth,"
"joy," "sorrow." But "Fixation" is all
pyrotechnics, Einstein's terrific "blathering"
hair, the "trauma of bodies," the "active
underlanguage of fuck," "pare of a moon." And we
could take this same distinction of repose versus
pyrotechnic from the level of language to the
structural levels of Glück's poems as compared
to Ford's. Glück's poems sail, graceful,
stately, within their premises; Terri Ford's are
all pizzazz and show biz, surreal, self-reflexive,
moving in swift, erratic leaps.
With all kinds of exceptions, because I'm trying
to make broad distinctions here, we can take
Glück as representative for a traditional
poetics and Ford for standup. We call both types
'poetry', but in truth they're like different
dialects of a language, often even mutually
incomprehensible dialects, because while poets and
readers within each group understand the dictionary
meanings of each others' words, they often don't
appreciate, don't 'get' each others' poetry. There
are many more such poetic dialects we could
identify---I'm going to move shortly to a third as
'represented' by Ben Doyle's new book---so that our
poetry today looks like rough, craggy country with
difficult traffic back and forth across the valleys
between hills and peaks.
But what about Terri Ford's sacred machine?
AGNES
I try to conjure up a young Agnes, but the only
picture
I get is the one in Lives of the Saints who
holds her breasts out
on a plate: the hated breasts she now
can miss she offers out in concentrics, halo,
deep dish. Desire must be a terrible thing
like an egg, it must be round, protruding, near
the source. Cut, she said
to herself and ran empty, now
she is planed level as lawn or surface of water.
God
swims alone. His lake is rockless and full
of hooks, all the losses
sink. How she wanted
her deliverance, but she will miss her breasts,
parental and
sexual. I will miss them --- for this poem
is clearly not about Agnes, nor any other saint
that I know.
I should confess that I'm picking one type of
Ford's poems to look at here. There are some list
poems in the book, many slimmer more linear poems.
But these are my favorites, the slippers, the
belliers. They seem to me to catch her poetry at
its deepest. She uses these poems like ouija boards
to let the spirits speak. Or the unconscious, as in
the 'religion' of analysis, Freudian, Jungian. And
what they discover is never actually said. Behind
"desire," "cut," the casually terrible
"planed level as lawn or a surface of water" her
nameless God skinnydips.
From The Selected & New Stories of S.
The Mailman [from
Worldworks]
A one with a thousand zeroes after it
is such an infinitely tiny number I can't
even believe we're discussing it, he said,
moving his mouth. Terrible, terrible mouth.
I thought he was gonna pull me on top
of him & try to kiss me. That's not my bag.
I was made to please the ladies.
I had all these little skeletons in my
pockets.
So I began to count zeroes silently,
deep inside my cloroxed skull.
And wait for him to relax. He's right,
it's hard to count zeroes, even if
you make up a little story a mnemonic device
about the zeroes like this zero
went to the park & took off all
her clothes except her golden bra.
Underneath the bra her breasts
were like two perfect zeroes,
breasts we had hidden in the park
like ground spiders to gaze upon.
Just then the skeletons began to strum
their ribs together, a riotous music they made,
the egg the mailman was sitting on
hatched into a spray of green wires
& he ran back into his idling white hearse,
a zero wrapped inside a larger one.
We seem to be gazing here into the yawning
("Terrible, terrible mouth") zero of no God at all.
The poem is part of a series---there are five---of
these offerings "From The Selected & New
Stories of S."---in one of these S. is
identified as "not the author, not me" (page
38)---and this one, the first, is the only one that
seems to be any kind of a 'story' at all. Here's
the beginning of the last:
NEW STORIES
I
The new stories are like the old ones
only smaller.
II
The new stories are like the old ones
only less ambitious.
III
The new stories are like the old ones
only more concise.
IV
The new stories are more representative
of the mind at work: a small, indolent, brief
mind.
There are twenty-three sections in that poem,
and---you guessed it---none of them tells any of
these "new stories." But, to return to the first,
it's the poem that sold me on the book, pulled me
through the mind boggle of this writing, which is
essentially 'about' itself, its own language, its
own endlessly parodic invention---although I'd be
hard put to say precisely what's being
parodied---any writing that is about
something?---an outer universe that outabsurds even
this inner universe? I think Ben Doyle knew he had
to hook a simple-minded reader like me with a poem
ostensibly about something---the mailman, sex,
skeletal music, and all these deadly zeros---in
order to reel me in, and in and in. I'm attracted,
finally, to the danger of the poem, a kind of a
subversive radioactivity, the way it blooms like a
wasp on a piece of meat.
Ben Doyle's book, Radio, Radio, like
Terri Ford's, is a first book, and he comes,
significantly, I think, out of the Iowa Writers'
Workshop, which has been one of the hottest writing
programs in the country for a very long time but
seems in recent years to be specializing in the
training of literary subversives. I'm thinking of a
number of brilliant younger writers from there,
like Joshua Clover, who won the Walt Whitman Award
a few years ago, D.A. Powell, Sam Witt, Tessa
Rumsey, and others.
Doyle's writing in this book seems most closely
allied to the writing of Mr. Postmodernism,
himself, John Ashbery, or perhaps James Tate. Doyle
feels edgier, though---as befits a young writer
with great 'predecessors' to shoot at---and there's
a strain of gigantism that runs through the book,
like the "thousand zeros" just above; or "Make that
a billion pandemoniums, each the size/ of a panic,
an attack, the echoing decay; an idea." from "Still
Life," Radio, Radio's first poem. Maybe the
best example of that, a visualization of it, is
"Years of Age," a sestina that begins:
Years of age pullulate like the elections
again
& no idea where to register & one fool or
another.
Like kids' games since the resplendent creation
Of injection-molded plastics. They send out
shoots.
It's like you miss someone you've never met
So you buy some calligraphs & begin writing
Epistles to a specific no one but soon you're
writing
To all of mankind, which you keep inside a shoebox
against
The closet wall. Each page a year of age. Well
met,
Mr. Doyle. Absolutely what the world needs:
another
Sestina about time which uses its end-words to
shoot
Itself in the randomly-running foot re-creation
Of how our days get spent…
But the lines get longer as the poem moves along
so that it has to be printed sidewise to fit on the
pages, a grotesque sprouting between flush left and
the sestina's end words, pushed dangling towards
the top of the page, which makes everything look
big, dizzying, disorienting.
There's also, as in this sestina, a fair amount
of play with form, "Dark Lantern," written in
rhyming quatrains, or "Immortalities (dance
remix)," which is set up like a very short-lined
sestina, but instead of the six repeated end words,
he mono-rhymes the whole thing, A,A,A,A, etc.
Here's the first sestet, mainly for the deliciously
foolish koan at the beginning:
Nothing was happening and
then it stopped. The charges &
temperatures were dropped. My hand
was an unfamiliar and
how it waved me hellos and
also how it caught & fanned
In the short space remaining, let's look a
little at Doyle's language, specifically at the
last half of the poem "Forensics," which seems to
be dealing with the world of a crime case or cases,
that odd small planet created by a trial, whirling
around its poles of 'true' or 'false', 'innocent'
or 'guilty' (but, then, who am I to tell you what
this wacky poem is about?):
3
Try to create an own legend
to gloss the map that extends
strangely understep. The grass
is browning swinging on the
roof of. The ceiling.
The pavement hard & heading
between bent buildings.
An ice atom atoms are even
in the tugging air. Northwards
towards the axis pin. I am
a sling dusting for whorls.
Hundreds. Hair in a hanged man's
mouth a vernacular of fiber
a punctuation of blood, roots.
The map has no legend is only
a square of white fur. Outside
the square: the wall,
the wall, the cold wet red wall
4
Flowers. Dew hardens on & on &. How many
first frosts
on us. Underfoot a rug of brittle plantbones.
At ten, I saw a man in a whitecoat pinch
a red rubber ball with steel tongs & dip it in
a bowl
of steam. He hurled the ball wallward & it
shattered like glass. Was glass. Red glass, slowly
melting
soft in the science center. We went to the
aluminum
cone to watch the girls touch it. Eleven, their
hair floats
like big wings up & everywhere. The electric
surge
in the heart if I touched it---giggling, the girls
are giggling.
Someone's intestine in a silver saucepan. Eager I
look for
traceable blade ruts & fold it into a plastic
bag.
Evidence hardens in or around us. Twelve,
a room an open wound, frothed with clues.
I want to focus, really, on two aspects. The
first is the effect of disorientation, disjunction
in the language, particularly in the short- line
section 3, an effect that I associate with the
experiments of Language poetry. In part this comes
from the jumpy breaks, breaks like those in Terri
Ford's work, but where she uses them largely for
speed and punning, Doyle seems to be using them
primarily for shock, jump cut, "...on the / roof
of." "...Outside / the square:" Then there are
ellipses, like that "roof of. The ceiling." and
sentence fragments, most radically "Hundreds."
punctuated as a 'sentence'. And finally there's
actual bending of syntax or usage as in "Try to
create an own legend" or "An ice atom atoms are
even / in the tugging air." These combine to create
Doyle's language from Mars, a language full of
twitches, illogicalities, mystery, seeming
mistakes, so that the reader begins to doubt his or
her sanity or, maybe more to the point, the sanity
of any 'serious' project in writing.
I'd like to look, also, at the end of each
section. Section 3 ends with that enigmatic,
"...the wall, / the wall, the cold wet red wall,"
whose mystery is obviously not explicable, but
which seems to me to be a mocking enactment of
rhetorical effect. Doyle focuses us on this wall,
as, perhaps, the prosecution or the defense might,
and he stretches it out, "cold," "wet," "red," as
if to say, "Observe, reader, this march of
senseless language that is achieving, nonetheless,
its mesmerism, its poetry."
If the ending of 3 can be taken as a
demonstration of skill, the ending of 4 seems one
of the strokes of pure talent and inspiration with
which Radio, Radio is packed. For me, that
phrase "a room an open wound, frothed with clues"
explodes the passage, gives it an effect of hurtle
that both bleeds back into what's already been said
and echos on ahead into white space.
One last quote from this hallucinatory book,
just to put it before you, small, self-contained,
for its mockery, sadness, and its strange, pure
lyricism:
RECESS IN THE FOREST
There was a small disaster,
west of here, minutes ago,
I know there was: a pink
& gold ribbon blew from
a schoolgirl's hair & deep
inside a thornbush. A timid
half-wild Appaloosa kept its
distance on the other side
of the planet, slowly licking
rainwater from inside a tire.
The tractor splayed on its back
at the bottom of a mooncrater.
Alas! if only I was there now,
I could name that very horse,
give it a shard of saltrock.
I could easily turn that tractor upright---
so small the gravity is there.
But I am here: thorn through
my tongue, thorn through my temple,
thorn in my thigh dreaming.
Then, to fulfill my project, there's the
question of sacred machineness. What's Doyle's
relation to the sacred here? I'd say that it's
'unholy'. Again, as with Glück, I'm trying to
be descriptive in what I'm saying, not judgmental.
The Renaissance, in a religious analogy, used to
call the artist 'dio e creatore' of the
work, 'god and creator', and I think that's how
Doyle is setting himself up in Radio, Radio,
irreligiously and in spades. He's rivaling creation
or mocking it. There's a touch of the Faustian
here, magic, the work of a poet sorcerer.
So, that's it, three books of poems, quite
different, apple, orange, mango. My aim has been to
praise and explicate in hopes that the reader might
be moved to buy one, or two, or three, to chew them
well and be blessed in their savory juices.
Richard Silberg is Associate Editor of
Poetry Flash. His new book of poetry,
Doubleness, is part of the California Poetry
Series from The Roundhouse/Heyday Books. He teaches
"Writing and Appreciating Contemporary Poetry" for
UC Berkeley Extension, the next session begins in
September.
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