I should have reviewed Billy Collins’s Nine Horses months ago, but I couldn’t stand the excitement.[1] Collins is that rarity among American poets, one with popular appeal, easy to read as a billboard, genial as a Sunday golfer, and not so awful you want to cut your throat after reading him. Many readers complain that poetry is difficult to understand, the way they grumble when an opera is sung in Italian or resent a Czech film with subtitles. Art isn’t supposed to be such hard work, is it? Billy Collins writes poetry for those people, and they appreciate it.
Collins specializes in goofy, slightly offbeat subjects. If you want a poem about mice who play with matches, or about that song repeating uncontrollably in your head, or about feeling sorry for Whistler’s mother, he’s your man. Angst is not a word he’s learned, or Weltschmerz (he may have learned Schadenfreude, but he’s forgotten it). What he loves is the cheesy sentiment of the everyday: “I peered in at the lobsters// lying on the bottom of an illuminated/ tank which was filled to the brim/ with their copious tears.” To the brim! Or worse, if anything could be worse than weeping lobsters, he loves everything—he’s got a heart big as all outdoors:
This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.
In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor’s window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.
You want to stop him before he becomes a public hazard. It’s tough to read a poet who has overdosed on some mood elevator, who is every goddamned minute “cockeyed with gratitude.”
Collins has been called a philistine, but you can read a lot of contemporary poetry without coming across references to William Carlos Williams, Coventry Patmore, Walter Pater, or Clarissa. He’s something worse, a poet who doesn’t respect his art enough to take it seriously. Once or twice an image makes you stop: a dead groundhog, say, like “a small Roman citizen,/ with his prosperous belly,// his faint smile,/ and his one stiff forearm raised/ as if he were still alive, still hailing Caesar.” Then it’s back to a kind of NPR commentary on contemporary mores, like the use of trompe l’oeil in your kitchen. Collins makes cheap art for the masses, like posters of a Monet. Once you’ve seen a real Monet, posters can’t compare.
The best poem here is about the afterlife. The skies there are sulphurous, the dead souls crowded into boats, bent over writing tablets, under the gaze of hellish boatmen. What are the dead working on? Poetry assignments.
how could anyone have guessed
that as soon as we arrived
we would be asked to describe this place
and to include as much detail as possible—
not just the water, he insists,
rather the oily, fathomless, rat-happy water,
not simply the shackles, but the rusty,
iron, ankle-shredding shackles—
and that our next assignment would be
to jot down, off the tops of our heads,
our thoughts and feelings about being dead.
In Collins’s last book, the best poem was also about a poetry assignment—why can he be hilarious about them and merely droll about everything else?
Collins never gets worked up over things—even faced with death, he makes winsome jokes, the kind morticians tell at undertaking conventions. He’s the Caspar Milquetoast of contemporary poetry, never a word used in earnest, never a memorable phrase. The moral revelation toward which his poems saunter always seems to be “See? I’m human too.” I read this as not joy but contempt. If such poems look embarrassing now, what are they going to look like in twenty years?
Yet readers adore Billy Collins, and it feels almost un-American not to like him. Try to explain to his readers what “The Steeple-Jack” or “The River Merchant’s Wife” or “The Snow Man” is up to, and they’ll look at you as if you’d asked them to hand-pump a ship through the locks of the Panama Canal. Most contemporary poetry isn’t any more difficult to understand than Collins—it’s written in prose, good oaken American prose, and then chopped into lines. Perhaps it’s self-absorbed, downbeat, even self-pitying, where Collins every morning throws open the drapes to greet the dawn, taking a deep breath of good suburban air. (You can imagine him hosting a health and fitness show.) If once in a coon’s age there’s a dark cloud on the horizon, if he gets a trifle gloomy or down in the mouth then, well, he’s rueful with a twinkle, damn it, the way a poet ought to be.
Rosanna Warren has a warm, classical sensibility (if she has a chip on her shoulder, it’s a chip of Greek marble), and some of her poems are an atlas of Greek temples, a phone book of Greek gods. Though Departure is her fourth book, her imagination is not highly distinctive—she does what a lot of other poets do, often a little better, sometimes a little worse.[2] There’s a poem contemplating a Hellenistic head, poems about her dying mother, poems about gardening or a story by Colette or a landscape seen from a plane, even a poem that almost makes Boston a classical ruin (in a book that invokes the Iliad, it’s amusing to come across the lines “By beer bottles, over smeared/ Trojans”).
Warren has the disadvantage of being the daughter of two once well-known writers—when she mentions her father, it’s hard not to think, “But that’s Robert Penn Warren.” When her mother is ill, you’re tempted to cry, “But of course. Eleanor Clark.” Warren never drops names, but then she doesn’t have to. The children of writers must be aware that in their work biography intrudes more dramatically than for poets whose parents are anonymous.
The poems about her mother’s last years ought to be among the most appealing; yet, however carefully coddled, however dryly observed, they seem merely dutiful. Not dutiful toward her mother—dutiful toward poetry.
Your purpled, parchment forearm
lodges an IV needle and valve;
your chest sprouts EKG wires;
your counts and pulses swarm
in tendrils over your head
on a gemmed screen: oxygen,
heart rate, lung power, temp
root you to the bed—
Magna Mater, querulous, frail,
turned numerological vine …
With that sudden nod toward grandiloquence, all the heart seeps out of the poem. The description is good as such descriptions are, but with nothing stirring in the phrases—it’s life worked up into art; yet, while the strangeness of life has gone, the intensity of art has not arrived.
The most curious work here is a series of translations from the notebooks of a young French poet, Anne Verveine, who disappeared while hitchhiking in Uzbekistan. The poems themselves are stale and unprofitable—they seem, like so many translations, just the translator wearing a different suit of clothes. At times the Frenchwoman sounds more like Warren than Warren. This would be unremarkable, if Verveine were not completely imaginary. Having admitted as much in the notes, Warren oddly tricks her out with a dry biography (“She lived obscurely in Paris, avoiding literary society and working as a typographer”) and then smartly packs her off to her death.
It’s hard to know what to make of this convoluted business. W. D. Snodgrass published a book of poems under the pseudonym S. S. Gardons (a cheerful anagram), making his alter ego a gas-station attendant. The British poet Christopher Reid, twenty years ago, published translations of an imaginary Eastern European poet named Katerina Brac—some readers were convinced she was real. In recent decades, there have been examples enough of literary imposture, authors winning awards by impersonating an Australian aborigine or a Jew who survived the Holocaust. Warren’s “translations” give no special insight into Paris or the lives of young women. It’s strange to have gone to so much trouble.
In her own poems, Warren uses all the right devices—similes, metaphors, allusions, lists—in a slightly mechanical way. Her favorite method of construction is a violent turn or peripeteia, but such swervings often seem nervousness, not nerve. What salvages this book of intelligent, well-meaning poems, most of them conventional as cottage cheese, are one or two that rise from some dark source even the poet seems unsure about:
For six days, full-throated, they praised
the light with speckled tongues and blare
of silence by the porch stair:
honor guard with blazons and trumpets raised
still heralding the steps of those
who have not for years walked here
but who once, pausing, chose
this slope for a throng of lilies:
and hacked with mattock, pitching stones
and clods aside to tamp dense
clumps of bog-soil for new roots to seize.
So lilies tongued the brassy air.
This has the intensity missing elsewhere—the densities required by rhyme seem partly responsible. Whatever ritual the poet incanted, however she prepared for description so coolly rehearsed and a transcendence effortlessly reached some lines later, she ought to do it again and again.
Howard Nemerov, who died in 1991 at the age of seventy-one, wrote dry philosophical poetry with an air of maundering discontent and surly introspection (you can almost smell the martinis being drunk). Though his Collected Poems (1977) won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, he never enjoyed a commanding critical reputation—sometimes as the honors pile up a poet’s reputation withers. Nemerov is doomed to be remembered for the accident of birth that made him the older brother of the photographer Diane Arbus.
The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov[3] is an honorable attempt to make a case for a connoisseur of margins and glooms, of grand illusions and middle-class mortgages. Nemerov came to poetry almost fully formed, for a long while writing pentameter so stiff it seemed to be wearing a neck brace:
The dry husk of an eaten heart which brings
Nothing to offer up, no sacrifice
Acceptable but the canceled-out desires
And satisfactions of another year’s
Abscess, whose zero in His winter’s mercy
Still hides the undecipherable seed.
Abstractions were Nemerov’s best friends (and therefore worst enemies)—he could cram so many into a poem, they looked like frat boys stuffed in a phone booth. The language here has congealed into a diction and pace all too familiar in the thirties and forties (Yeats was responsible, but what for him was a medium of banker’s marble was linoleum for anyone else). Yet the lines above were published not in the forties, but in 1960, just after Lowell’s Life Studies had made that style out of date as a velocipede.
Though Nemerov’s poems grew more colloquial as he aged, he was never comfortable with what the age demanded (he roared against it like the last tyrannosaur), withdrawing into rote performance—like a singer forever giving his farewell concert, Nemerov perfected the dying fall. Misanthropes are agreeable enough, if you share their misanthropy (no one has ever founded a Misanthropes’ Club, because they’d murder each other trying to write bylaws). Nemerov’s poems suffered not because they were forbiddingly deep or abstruse, but because he couldn’t end them without buttonholing the reader with stilted, crackjawed observations:
To translate the revolving of the world
About itself, the spinning ambit of the seasons
In the simple if adamant equation of time
Around the analemma of the sun.
Was analemma really the best word available? A poet who wants above all to be taken seriously usually ends by pricing himself out of business.
Though Nemerov managed to temper his bad habits (the passive constructions, the cholesterol of “to be” verbs, the curiously submissive speakers), he couldn’t avoid a moral coldness. Writing sourly of Christmas, he refers to the “alien priest/ Who drenches his white robes in gasoline/ And blazes merrily in the snowy East.” The image is appalling—irony has crossed into hatred. (If this is Vietnam, why the snow?) Two decades later, the poet writes about the Challenger disaster: “The nation rises again/ Reborn of grief and ready to seek the stars;/ Remembering the shuttle, forgetting the loom.” To end a poem of mourning with dreadful puns reveals a tone deafness that would have crippled even a great poet.
The pleasures of reading Nemerov are fugitive and coarse (even in his grander poems something is withheld): a poet of bilious emotion and narrow technique is better off writing epigrams, where dyspepsia is a recommendation, even an advantage.
Their marriage is a good one. In our eyes
What makes a marriage good? Well, that the tether
Fray but not break, and that they stay together.
One should be watching while the other dies.
The fondness here has been cloaked, but then misanthropes are often misanthropic because of a sentimental streak.
A few war poems not included here, all published forty years after VJ Day, suggest the poet he might have become, had he been willing to write more about the combat missions he flew in World War II. As belatedly as Anthony Hecht, he could have been an exception in a war where the best verse was written by men (Randall Jarrell, Richard Eberhart, Henry Reed) who did not see combat. Nemerov was one of the most intelligent poets of his generation; yet, for all the austere and noble lines, his high-sounding phrases (and occasional low jokes), the verse is mostly dead to its language, as strewn with salt as the ruins of Carthage.
Sometimes a poet of whom the world has taken only minor notice begins to write more provocatively in middle age, as if it took decades to rub away the burrs of apprenticeship. (What remains is a glimmer of youth irretrievably lost, rather than the glare of youthful hubris.) Sherod Santos, a mild-mannered poet now in his mid-fifties, at first seems a bard of the suburbs, a poet of domestic certitudes and muted despairs (few Americans admit to being middle-aged; fewer confess to living in the suburbs—our prejudices are shallow as the Great Salt Lake). In The Perishing,[4] his idea of a wild time is waking to what sounds like a rain shower, but turns out to be a neighbor’s sprinkler:
Across the street, our recently widowed neighbor
Had left her garden sprinkler on, its standing water
Here and there welling up over the concrete curb
In loose, collected rivulets of wet, a moon-lit runoff
Less like spilled water than the dispossessing ghost
Of water sluicing down the gutters and away.
There’s nothing wrong with this, and nothing very right, either—it’s an instant well-described, touched with the music of sadness and a twitch of regret, the sort of thing John Updike might have done a thousand times in a novel. Santos loves such moments, which hover between sentiment and sententiousness. After a dozen of them you want to put your hand into a lawnmower blade.
Not all Santos’s suburban poems are dull as a sack of mulch, hedging as hedge-clippers; but they love garden-variety transcendence almost as much as they’d love, say, Irish peat moss. Santos’s life doesn’t lend itself to drama (most lives don’t—they’d sell themselves to drama for pocket change). There are love poems of a dispiriting sort, homages to his wife’s naked body, things a mature poet can write almost without thinking, but with what Henry James called “finish.” Such poems live the way cakes do behind the plate-glass window of a bakery—they live in plaster.
Many poets now write of domestic routines, which may take the adage Write what you know to the point of fallacy, or suicide. In the odd limbo of the suburbs, that zone once merely the spillage of the city into country, now a center of its own, what’s lacking is intensity (many suburban poems seem muffled or padded, as if they spent their afternoons training attack dogs). I can imagine the poems Larkin would have written, had he lived in Levittown—they’d have been just as morose as those he wrote in Hull. Americans seem unable to catch the rage at the heart of Larkin’s verse. Perhaps as a country we’re not repressed enough.
You can go a long way in Santos to find the mildest fracture in his suburban pastoral, but then he’s another poet altogether. When he was thirteen, a woman entered his bedroom during a party and, opening her blouse, drew his hand first across her breast, then across her mastectomy scar. Instead of becoming a paean to an older woman’s beauty and need (the seduction that follows seems almost incestuous), the poem questions all the love he has known since. Santos has seen certain abysses and not drawn back from them.
Most of the poet’s past work has been easy-going as conversation, colloquial as a coat of paint, but the new poems sometimes require a different register:
When my father broke his family’s counsel
And re-upped for the airlift into Germany,
He stormed the black capital like Ecgtheow’s son,
His tonnage downgraded to anthracite
From Amatol and TNT, such payloads
As custom still meted out to a city Grendeled
In the underworld of incendiary smoke.
This growls out Germanic myths like an Anglo-Saxon scop, the savage names—Amatol and TNT—sounding like Beowulf’s companions-in-arms. In half a dozen poems, Santos portrays a world the suburbs try to forget—the world where people starve, or are beaten and tortured.
One evening, for the benefit
Of three mothers who’d been summoned
To watch through the open window
Of a barber shop, a badly beaten
Milicias youth was carried inside, stripped
Of his clothes, and bound spread-eagle
To a tabletop. They’d thought, at first,
He might be the one-armed riverman’s son,
The one who trapped chameleons
He’d then sell for coins in the village square.
That note of irrelevance, even of mild comedy, rescues what might remain of the human. Santos does not yet have Anthony Hecht’s brutality or grace; but, in a time when poems are more politicized than political, he accepts the homeliness of evil. If he sometimes makes his points too plainly (there’s an egregiously silly poem about dictators), if he doesn’t quite know how to finish what he’s started, beneath the surface of his tranquil suburban tracts something brutish has begun to stir.
Carolyn Forché writes hushed, whispery, numinous lines, the kind that emerge from a blank page held over a candle flame. Blue Hour[5] is troubled, haunting, stained with the salts of European poetry (Forché loves Desnos, Char, Jabès), and it’s possible to let her poems mesmerize you for a time.
In the blue silo of dawn, in earth-smoke and birch copse,
where the river of hands meets the Elbe.
In the peace of your sleeping face, Mein Liebchen.
We have our veiled memory of running from police
dogs through a blossoming orchard, and another
Of not escaping them. That was—ago—(a lifetime),
but now you are invisible in my arms.
Such death-hunted lines pay homage to half a century of poetry wounded into speech by Fascists, Nazis, Communists, and many a murderous government since. That poetry is inadequate to such politics is a commonplace: the tormented phrases of Paul Celan were little better than a suicide note. That does not make the attempt to speak against injustice less noble (however ignoble most poems about politics are). Forché once wrote poems passionate with righteous (and self-righteous) anger; but, in her last book, The Angel of History (1994), she lost her taste for lyric or narrative and took up a style of tesserae and ostraka, Eliot’s “fragments I have shored against my ruins.”
The Angel of History was an original work, pretentious and disturbing, opportunistic, vampirish, soiled in its own sorrows and everyone else’s. Forché’s new poems, if poems they are, continue this disjointed, fragmented manner in ways sometimes alarming. Blue Hour consists of ten short poems and an immensely long one, less a poem than a shopping list of images. Her shorter pieces establish the atmosphere of, the sense of foreboding in, secrets kept and pain suffered. Forché wants to do something different from her contemporaries, without sacrificing the beauty of lyric. (The death of the lyric is announced as often as the death of the novel, the press release usually read out by someone who wouldn’t know a lyric if it ate him.) What this means in practice are vague and portentous lines by the barrelful, lines whose gestures toward meaning are rhetorical nudges. When the poet writes, “An abandoned house, after all, will soon give itself back, and its walls become as unreadable as symbols on silk,” something beautiful has been said, but said in half-thoughts.
That such partial, undecoded meanings are in essence religious is nowhere clearer than in the forty-page poem that closes the book. The notes inform us that it is based on gnostic abecedarian hymns that “date from the third century A.D.” These thousand lines are meant to render the last images passing through the mind of someone dying—that’s the dust jacket’s opinion (how it can tell, I’m not sure).
bone child in the palm a bird in the heart
bone-clicking applause of the winter trees
bones of the unknown
bones smoothed by water
book of smoke, black soup
born with a map of calamity in her palm
A stanza of this is unsettling, a page tiresome, forty pages nearly unbearable agony. I don’t know if thoughts like these will pass through my mind as I die (though I hope not), but I’m sure they won’t pass through alphabetically. (I’ll probably be thinking of the unpaid gas bill and the cock I owe Asclepius.) I read every line, as a reviewer is obliged to do, and I must report that I shouted with delight when I got past the letter a. Whatever the gnostics saw in this form, it must have been one of the reasons they died out.
Religions love to call tedium ritual, and I see advantages to using repetition to numb the chanter to the torments of his day. It’s hard to know what to make of such lines as a poem—you get snapshots of horror, fresh as the daily news; lines that hint at secrets, searches, refugees; and images that might have come from Freud’s secret dreams. It’s as if the poet had for a decade stored up surplus images in a carton and one night dumped them out and arranged them in alphabetical order. The problem with these contextless phrases is not that they don’t let tragedy in, but that they don’t keep comedy out. This poem is the graveyard where unused lines go to die.
I can’t resist quoting some of the blurbs, which take a kinder view: “an uncanny mixture of peace, beauty, and cruelty. If you ask, ‘Which country is it?’ the answer is, ‘This country called earth’”; “a masterwork for the twenty-first century”; “wise beyond any possible taint of a false or assumed innocence”; “Carolyn Forché, my hero.” Even in this country called blurbdom, these have drunk too long at the bar. Forché wants to write a wisdom book, haunted by all the misery that is the world. I had complaints about her early poems, chiefly that they were sentimental, but I have more complaints about poems that aren’t poems, just do-it-yourself kits of New Age gnosticism, some assembly required, batteries not included.
James Fenton, the best poet of his generation in Britain, is still too little known in our country. He has spent long periods of his life not writing poetry at all, having been, at various times, a foreign correspondent in Europe and on the Pacific rim, a London theater critic, an explorer in Borneo, and the Professor of Poetry at Oxford. He grew rich, it is said, writing the lyrics for Les Misérables, though his songs were never used (this suggests the importance in life of having a good agent). If Fenton wrote a novel on the back of cereal cartons, or made a model of St. Paul’s from matchbooks, the results would be worth seeing; but, if a man does some work brilliantly and the rest half-heartedly (his Oxford lectures on poetry, for instance), shouldn’t he do only what he does well? The same question hovered over the late career of a greater poet, T. S. Eliot.
The Love Bomb[6] consists of two libretti and an oratorio, all commissioned, labored and fretted over, but only the last performed. Fenton has a witty introduction lamenting the librettist’s life (“Nobody would believe that the dog ate my homework. But that the dog ate my opera house —twice—might well be believed”). The Love Bomb starts with a terrible handicap: to enjoy a libretto properly, the reader ought to have a CD of the music—or, better, at an appointed hour a tenor, a soprano, and a man with a boom box should show up on your doorstep. On the bare page, words are stripped of much that would have made them interesting on stage—costume and voice, gesture, the emotive color of music, all the things that clothe the naked word. Without them the emperor is often, well, naked.
In “The Love Bomb,” a young man tries to rescue his former girlfriend from a religious cult. The cult plots to recruit him, as well as—here’s the twist—his boyfriend. This began in a reading of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, and soon enough you wish it had stayed there. Even the most awful opera plot can be rescued by words and music, but the words here aren’t doing a very good job:
Don’t go down the towpath, Anna.
Don’t go along the canal.
That’s where all the accidents happen.
Treat me to an accident. Be my pal.
’Cos one door opens on love
And one door opens on death.
And one door opens on the lift shaft.
Turn the handle. Hold your breath.
The Audenesque strain isn’t nearly strong enough. Where Auden was clever, Fenton is callow and cliché-ridden—it would be hard to sit through a performance without snickering. The first act is much worse than the two that follow; yet the whole is leaden, not because it has ideas (as Auden’s work so often did), but because it lacks them. Everything about colloquial language that Fenton has turned to advantage in his poetry has turned against him here.
The second libretto tries to make an opera from Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the children’s book by Salman Rushdie. A storyteller loses his wife and, with her, his ability to tell tales—without his stories, he may soon lose his tongue. His son must journey to the Sea of Stories to set things right. (Rushdie worked some typically inventive if irritating turns on eastern folk tales). It’s hard to imagine this as opera, not just because the tale has such sentimental notions of story-telling, but because it’s a fantastic childlike adventure with Arabian Nights effects, including water genies and floating gardeners and talking hoopoes, as well as a kidnapped princess about to be sacrificed by the Prince of Darkness and Arch-Enemy of All Stories.
The poetry is no better than before (it’s a pity Fenton didn’t take more delight in names like Snooty Buttoo, Prince Bolo, and the Shah of Blah). There’s a moment, late in this silly business, when W. S. Gilbert seems to come to the rescue. It’s only one song, and wouldn’t seem much if quoted; but, after eighty or so pages of chewing shoeleather, it tastes like caviar. You realize then that Gilbert took sillier ideas and made genius of them.
About the best that can be said for Fenton’s oratorio, “The Fall of Jerusalem,” is that it contains some passable light verse and some awful free verse: “God it was who gave us our minds,/ Minds that scorn death,/ Scorn to live in slavery/ Under a Roman yoke.” Fenton was once able to handle both with dexterity and wit—he has written some of the most sensitive war poems of the last half century. In this long and wearying book I felt his talent engaged by a single couplet, “Something better than those nefarious gymnastics/ With coked-up blokes in various elastics.” Cole Porter and W. S. Gilbert and even Auden might have smiled over such lines, but there’s nothing else like them. Readers who want to know what this remarkable poet can do should read his early collection of poems, Children in Exile; his book of theater criticism, You Were Marvellous; his essays on art, Leonardo’s Nephew; or his book of reportage, All the Wrong Places—and then send Fenton a postcard pleading with him to get back to work.
Notes
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William Logan will have a volume of early selected poems out in the spring
more from this author
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 22 December 2003, on page 85
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