More than fifty years ago, during the Truman administration, Sharon Olds’s parents tied her to a chair, and she has been writing about it ever since. The Unswept Room[1] revisits the realistic dioramas of her childhood, pays homage to the frequently dusted waxwork head of that villain her father—you think you’ve stumbled, not into some strange museum of natural history, but into Madame Tussaud’s.
Olds writes lines of clean American prose, the kind poets chop up in order to call it poetry. Such lines have an artful plainness, like that of Shaker furniture, but also a spiritual dullness—she seems to suffer through the exposition to get to the good bits. Say she has the uncomfortable feeling that she’s just met someone. Someone foreign. Or someone dead, then alive. No, not Jesus—she saw Jesus last night on the ceiling. No:
Whom had I found who had been lost to me? I
could not think—and then, I remembered
the round, plump, woven-silver
mirror, which I had held, this bright
morning, between my legs, I had seen,
for the first time, myself, face to feral face.
Oh, of course, her own vagina. The grammar of her last sentence is shaky, but the set-up is as impeccable as the bad taste.
As performance artist, drama queen, heiress to the extremity of Plath and Sexton, Olds has long been anything but a poet. There really ought to be another name for what she is. At sixty, she has made this odd mixture of revulsion, false modesty, and self-aggrandizement her own. She understands that poetry is responsive to emotion; but, as she tears her hair and bares her breasts and shows you her vagina, you think, How pathetic, not What remarkable poems. She has made her private pathologies the gossip of the pavement; yet, as she has become more fluent and more practiced (the poet of Satan Says, her debut volume of almost a quarter-century ago, was fiercer but more brittle), her persona has grown glassy-eyed, begging for attention, pleading for sympathy. The poems are now ground out like sausages. Olds once said in an interview that she lays aside her first drafts until she can work them into finished poems, and that she was then fifteen years behind. You wonder if they’re in mini-storage somewhere.
To every boy ever deprived of dinner, every girl who has had her mouth washed out with soap, her poems say, “There, there. One day you can turn all this into poetry.” Few poets have examined their bodies more minutely (you feel she hides a speculum in her purse) or taken more childish satisfaction in announcing everything they find. No matter the subject (menopause, masturbation, abortion, teenage lesbianism), no matter how intimate the anatomy, it is discussed in the same reasonable, droning Surgeon General monotone. Olds has watched herself grow old, with mingled fascination and dread:
Yet when
I look down, I can see, sometimes,
things that if a young woman saw she would
scream, as if at a horror movie,
turned to a crone in an instant—if I lean
far enough forward, I can see the fine
birth skin of my stomach pucker
and hang, in tiny peaks, like wet stucco.
She loves being gruesome under the guise of being honest (how finely observed those details are); yet she’s honest only in humdrum, approved ways. When her father dresses up as a woman for a costume party, with tennis balls for breasts, she pictures him with loving exactness (it’s as close to loving him as she comes): “he leaned against a bookcase pillar/ nursing his fifth drink, gazing/ around from inside his mascara purdah/ with those salty eyes.” Then she sinks, with just a trace of irony, into the tired psychobabble of identity (“as if sensing his full potential”). Later, with smug self-righteousness, she lectures her aged mother on racism. (You wish the old bird would slap her in the face.) The reader has to suppress considerable Schadenfreude when Olds’s daughter, reading one of the poems in Satan Says, takes her to task for calling herself a Jew.
Olds writes so often of birth, of children, of vaginas (particularly her own vagina), it’s no surprise that she’s creepily obsessed by death—literature may provide a necessary catharsis for our fears, but it doesn’t end those fears. (After seeing Lear, who is more resigned to death?) Yet the deaths in her poems rarely matter—they serve merely to focus the spotlight firmly back on Sharon Olds. The reader should be warned that in her new poems the mortality rate among friends, relatives, and total strangers is astronomical. The Unswept Room begins with the “little family my relative/ killed, when he was drunk, with his car.” Pages later, Marcus Crassus crucifies six thousand former slaves, the army of Spartacus. Then there’s a woman with her leg torn off and her neck broken in a car accident. A few pages afterward, a little girl and her mother die after spraying a Christmas tree with lead paint in a closed garage. Then, of course, there’s the Holocaust, and after that I lost count.
Kevin Young is a hep cat. The idiom he’s cooked up in Jelly Roll,[2] his third book, is partly inspired by, partly pilfered from, that most American of moods and musics, the blues. (When Dickens toured America in the 1840s, he noticed how dour our countrymen were—they were suffering an early spell of the blues.) Robert Johnson’s lines, quoted in the epigraph, still cast a spell: “Oh babe/ Our love won’t be the same// You break my heart/ When you call Mister So & So’s name.” Compared to most lyric poetry, they retain the raw wounds of betrayal. To match your talents against lyrics so pithy, bawdy, colloquial, so deft and democratic, is a dangerous game, one that few modern poets, apart from Bishop and Auden, have attempted with success.
It can be difficult to be a young black poet now. You’re courted by publishers and anthologists, by the halls of academe; yet post-colonial and subaltern and diaspora scholars, who fight turf battles over what to call themselves, tell you what to write and how to write it, questioning your language and your motives (or, worse, applauding them) before you’ve written a line. Easier, I suspect, to be a young poet everyone is ignoring. Young has faced the challenge with panache, testing his literary ear in one line and his sidewalk slang the next (the diction can plummet from set theory to street talk very fast); but he never finds how to make the idiom sustain the ambition.
In blues songs, you know what’s going on beneath the metaphors—usually something deliciously filthy. Young rarely gets beyond a chaste kiss (there’s an awful lot of kissing in this book, and very little of anything else)—the dirtiness is mild and suburban. The hither-thither scat of his syntax at first looks radical, then desperate, then tedious. It’s like watching a man going through an identity crisis in a falling elevator. At times the lines slip into a word order Milton would have smiled benevolently upon (“the ants// who my house invaded,” “when far// forever from me you went”) or descend so deep into the syllables they become near gibberish:
Speakeasy she.
Am sunder.
Are.
She pluck
herself, songing—
I strum. Am.
Strut, straggle,
hum.
This invented patois is not far distant from Berryman’s minstrel talk in The Dream Songs. I’m all for a language that straddles and questions, dirties and deceives; but Young can’t quit playing to the crowd. Though the demotic coarsens the simplicity of his lines (“kudzu takes you all/ a sudden,” “clean// as a broke-leg dog”), it quickly decays into the joke demotic of worser, everythang, bidness, and what might be called orthographic slang: thru, tonite, yr, bldg, &, wreckt. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the slang from the outright mistakes: “to … loose track/ of time,” “the dog …/ lays down,” “to slow” (for “too slow”), “none reads// nor believes,” and, weirdly, a “six-alarm// APB” (Young seems to confuse the police with the fire department). Without the minstrelsy and winsome wordplay (“raining dogs/ & meows,” “Hottentot to trot”), he might have to attempt, in his sophisticated way, what blues musicians did so simply and painfully: mourn losses nearly unbearable, with a wryness that cannot soften misfortune.
There’s far too much jive in this dispiriting and undernourished book (blues singers didn’t need a back slap or a high five), and only rarely the wit of which this poet is capable, or his delicate ear for mood, tone, and half-rhyme. Young can write a couplet Seamus Heaney would admire (“The narrow hollow/ of her spine, lying fallow”) or imitate the soul of the blues: “Creek done risen/ Creek done rose// It ain’t the creek that/ took off all them clothes.” Among younger poets, he’s trying to make a different noise, but the reader hears only the echo of what that might be. Young seems more comfortable being the darling of a coterie, a young academic poet who has already held a prestigious fellowship, edited two anthologies, and been seated cozily in a named chair. His ingenuity is wasted on the sappy, lovelorn sentiments that are his idea of the blues:
I have folded instead
my sorrows like a winter
garment—moth-filled
unwashed—I will
no more wear.
I wonder what Robert Johnson would have made of that.
Karl Kirchwey might have been happier had the Roman Empire never fallen. The poems in At the Palace of Jove[3] are stuffed with ancient statuary and fallen myths, like the classical wing of the Louvre. He’s serious in an old-fashioned way (and old-fashioned in a serious way), hopeless as Larkin’s “ruin-bibber, randy for antique”; but beneath their marble surfaces his poems have a bleak modern sensibility. A rich man, Vedius Pollio, has invited the Emperor Augustus to dinner:
the Emperor smiles appreciatively at
the sow’s vagina stuffed with figs, the dancing girl,
the Falernian pale in a crystal beaker …but then a young slave’s hand slips; the glass shatters
on the mosaicked floor. There is a silence,
and Pollio says —Let him swim with the carnivorous eels.
Before he can be dragged away, the boy kneels
at Augustus’ feet.
It’s not the slave whom Augustus punishes. Kirchwey loves the sudden accession of the past—readers not of a historical temper may still find it heartening to know that fools weren’t suffered gladly, even two millennia ago. Those who do not learn from history, it’s sometimes said, are doomed to repeat it next semester—yet I have trouble convincing students they should study anything not immediately relevant to their lives. I asked a class that had just read a selection by Whitman, as well as a long biographical note, to tell me his birth date, within ten years. The guesses, and they were guesses, ranged from 1840 to 1920—this might seem highly flattering to Whitman’s modernity, but to college students 1920 comes just after the Middle Ages.
Perhaps the Greeks and the Romans are dead to us—I had a student, only last fall, who thought the Greeks themselves were myths. The class laughed, and I laughed, but there was more than a little truth to her belief. Kirchwey will seem mildewed and musty to such students: he wants to write about Goethe, about St. Augustine, wants to retell an anecdote about Mozart or compose (like a literary Mozart) variations on a postcard by T. S. Eliot. He’ll quote Sir Thomas Browne, or Aristotle, or Pliny, or St. Paul, always with a sense that the past does not merely console us; it humbles us. Not all poets want to be humbled by what they cannot change.
Kirchwey’s poems have settled into a rhetoric increasingly stately and commanding, inheriting the mantle of formal poets like Hecht and Wilbur while only rarely taking on the burdens of meter and rhyme (others might call them freedoms). His poems on modern subjects have a grace, even a graciousness, learned from the antique in different measures and very different modes. A satire on the Midas myth (“my husband’s Chair of the Greater Phrygia Bank./ Why don’t you bring your kids down sometime to look// at our gold?”) mocks the vanity of poets; but an elegy for an uncle, a World War II pilot killed in the Pacific, reminds us that we live only by the sacrifice of the dead, and therefore in their shadows.
Shadows fall frequently over these poems, from lives corrupted, crippled, or destroyed (Kirchwey makes reading seem our moral duty to the past). His gravitas is not the fashion now (perhaps it will never be the fashion again); such poetry recalls, not just how much we owe the past, but that without it our lives are meaningless. As a poet he’s far from perfect—some of his endings harrumph in a peremptory way, while others drift off half-heartedly or in dreamy distraction. One or two poems are sillier than the porter’s jokes in Macbeth. Yet few poets now can manage a tender scene without bringing along a sack of handkerchiefs to mop up the tears. Here the poet watches the little girl (he’s an observer, not a voyeur) in Chardin’s “The Morning Toilet”:
There is a gilded missal on the chair,
and, lying half-on, half-off, a crumpled muff,
as if after a sexual encounter.
The girl’s blue cape lights the severities of
her mother’s regard, a celestial blue,
the Virgin’s color. She stands very still
so she won’t be scolded, but steals a glance
into the mirror where the fabrics crowd,
their nap and sheen of penitential love,
her glance, hooded but palpitant and yearning,
which asks, across the ticking silence, Will
I be desired? Will I be beautiful?
It is her first glimpse of herself dawning,
and standing between her and the answer
is the candle her mother has just extinguished,
smoke rising in a desultory curl.
A poet who can return the past to such purposes needs no apologies for not being up to date.
Les Murray’s outsize character suits the outsize country (but miniature continent) from which he comes. The thin rim of civilization along Australia’s shores conceals a vast emptiness within. People keep telling me, like proud parents, how wonderfully grown-up Murray’s poems are, how soon they will win the Nobel Prize; but such praise ignores the un-toilet-trained creatures his poems often are. The beady-eyed concentration of Poems the Size of Photographs[4] is a departure—almost all Murray’s new poems are shorter than sonnets.
It took me a long while to realize there were two Murrays, one (the good twin) who loves to wrap a mystery inside an enigma, like a chocolate bonbon. That Murray writes lines with a delayed charge, so you’re deep into the next poem when the Semtex goes off. You wish he could write whole poems with the cunning violation of lines like “people/ who first encountered roses in soap,” or “waterbirds had liftoff as at a repeal of gravity,” or, describing a cemetery, the “absorbed marble chess of the dead.” English poetry hasn’t enjoyed an intelligence as idiosyncratic since Auden, yet the mad-professor metaphors sometimes go awry:
Trees, which wrap heights in pages
self-knitted from ground water and light
are stood scrolls best read unopened.
By the time you unknot (or unknit) the images, you’ve lost the point—and the cleverness comes at a price, the price of accuracy. Wood pulp isn’t knitted into paper (that’s too orderly); and growth rings are concentric, not spiraling like scrolls. Even if his defenders love his sloppy, booming ways—he’s a real roarer—such knowing metaphors invite the salt of pedantry.
Murray has an anti-romantic, even antagonistic relation to his art (a curious aesthetic for a Christian). Like William Carlos Williams, he’ll make poems from whatever comes along, from ideas scrawled on the back of matchbook covers. If he found himself on a desert island with nothing but spit, candy wrappers, and fish bones, he’d make a poem out of them. Such a contingent imagination takes the whole alien world as its subject, but risks the self-parody and boorishness of trivia. At their best, the poems force the present to remember the unhealed tragedies of the past:
Out on the fells and low fields
in twilight, it was the Satanic mills
come again: the farm beasts of Britain
being burnt inside walls of their feed.
The judgment is visually dramatic, a quiet indictment of factory-farm ethics—the burnt corpses of Britain’s mad cows are laid at the doorstep of Blake’s Satanic mills.
Just when you think you can’t resist a poet capable of such darkly moral observations, up saunters the other Murray, the loutish twin who loves dumb jokes and galumphing rhymes like “Hoon, hoon, that blowfly croon:/ first a pimp and then a goon./ Sound of a prop plane crossing the moon.” Or poems whose very idea is the wrong idea, like “The Engineer Formerly Known as Strangelove”:
I’ve also quit the White race. The ac-
cident of pallor became not worth the flak.
I won’t join another. Race is decadent.
I lay this wreath on your unknown grave, mein Führer.
In my third sunrise century, Germany
has re-conquered Europe on her knees.
Fighter planes still pull gravities, not levities
but the flag of the West is now a gourmet tablecloth.
The Cold War is a Dämmerung long since of dead Götter
but I am still in cutting-edge high tech.
In a think-tank up to my neck
I rotate, projecting scenarios.
It’s almost a parody of the hamfisted poems Joseph Brodsky wrote in English. Can it get worse? Of course it can. Consider “The Great Cuisine Cleaver Dance Sonnet”: “dock pork slice slice/ candy pork mouth size/ heel-and-toe work walk/ thru greens wad widths/ bloc duck bisect bone.”
Love me for my flaws, such laborious jokes seem to say. Murray’s childishness reminds me of Roethke’s, and like Roethke he has no ear for tone. The thumb-sucking rhymes and formula jokes (the sentences piled up like building blocks) are proud of their immaturity. They have nothing to offer poems more guarded in instinct and gesture, many of which show off his love of a country still odd and colonial and undeveloped—surely the only country to have produced great movies about sheep-shearing and Coca-Cola.
Henry James wrote a story called “The Private Life,” set at a Swiss inn, where the novelist Clare Vawdrey, beloved for his charm and ease around the dinner table, is not the Clare Vawdrey who writes—no, that Clare Vawdrey, his secret twin, stays upstairs in the hotel room scribbling away. The evil Murray, the buffoonish and lumbering gladhander, gets the attention of the crowd. How much I would give for more of that mysterious scribbler upstairs.
Marie Ponsot had the misfortune to publish her first book with City Lights just after Howl, and she’s still sometimes included in anthologies of Beat poets. Early readers must have been bewildered to find her on the shelf next to Patchen, and Rexroth, and Ferlinghetti. What did they make of her? What did she make of herself? She wasn’t as original as Elizabeth Bishop, whose early poems had been admired by Jarrell and Lowell (not just because the poems were wonderful, but also because they didn’t seem threatening—if only the men had known!). Ponsot’s poems were perhaps too off-beat and whimsical to catch the eyes of critics—I suspect she was ignored at first because she was a woman, and later because she wasn’t the right sort of woman. She didn’t publish another book for a quarter-century.
The delirious, off-kilter poems in Springing: New and Selected Poems[5] reveal that Ponsot sprang fully formed into poetry. From the beginning, she looked at the world with a tilted head and a bright eye, like some rare cockatoo. If her sprightliness and prickly delicacy are indebted to Moore and Auden (with the graced touch of Hopkins), she followed her own inclinations, even when they were nobody else’s. (A poet has to be beyond mockery, if not self-mockery, to write a sestina on residual polio paralysis.) Like Moore, she has a mind always darting in unexpected directions; and she is not afraid of seeming ridiculous.
I’ve been pole when some asked, so they could vault
supported, high as they like, letting me drop
intact, and roll safe to a grassy stop.
We’ve gone our ways with pleasure and without fault,
they to the next race, I to the next use
poles are put to by the great competitors.
No poet of any vanity could write such naked verse, touched uncomfortably with pathos, yet brutal. She ends the poem with a line about sharks and poison and likes it so much she repeats it, in French! Then you realize the French was meant to be the title (the real title is “The Title’s Last”) and that it deliberately spoils what would have been a perfect sonnet.
Not much happens in Ponsot’s poems. They’re about family, or work, some odd thought she had, stray regrets, a book she’s read—they’re so quietly proposed (and so angularly disposed), you’re surprised she’s rarely tedious. It’s difficult to convey the complicated surprises and reversals embedded in her lines—she has sonnets like little stories by Chekhov, who would not have disapproved of her uses of moral comedy. She’s therefore weakest when her poems succumb to her sense of injustice.
You start a Ponsot poem not expecting to be surprised, and end surprised that you were surprised. Poets try to shock you so often now by placing a whoopie cushion on your chair, or emptying a bucket of water on your head (we have a poet laureate who does little else), it’s good to remember what a twist of syntax can do, or the right wrong word. Ponsot throws poems together out of any old garments lying around—they’re like Matisse’s late collages, apparently done with an intelligent pair of scissors. Perhaps more poems should be about quiet off-center things—hers feature no cut thumbs, no car crashes, no buildings razed by explosion, no partings of the Red Sea. Many poets believe they’re Cecil B. DeMille, with special effects budgets that would beggar the book of Genesis.
Ponsot’s poems are content with the homely movements of one woman through the world—a woman tentative, alive to her losses, always willing to make less of things. She finds more drama in spending a day at the beach, or telling a story to some sleepy youngsters, than most poets could in the fall of Troy. There are sorrows, as in any life; but her poems about a parachutist dead in World War II, or a boy who commits suicide, have less inside to compel them—they’re formed too stiffly by the imposition of their subjects. Here’s a sonnet that might be a feminist plaint if it didn’t seem personal:
Little Jacqueline Pascal played with Blaise
re-inventing Euclid (Papa told them to).
While he made up conic sections, she wrote plays
& got papa out of jail when Richelieu
liked her long impromptu poem in his praise.
I haven’t read her verse. It’s not in print.
Blaise invented: the wristwatch, a kind
of computer, fluid mechanics, the hint
for digital calques, probabilities,
the syringe, space as vacuum, the claims of lay
theologians. He thought (he thought) at his ease.
In her convent Jacqueline kept the rules.
On or under every desert there are pools.
I keep thinking that should be “broke the rules”—but the girl chooses to accept them, despite the desert of intellectual imagination (yet perhaps spiritual grace) they promise. It’s like finding out that, after the witch had been shoved in the oven, Hansel became a jet propulsion engineer and Gretel slaved in a bakery. But the poem isn’t really about the Pascal children. If Ponsot’s modesty sometimes looks like cowardice, it’s her gift to make you think, then make you think again.
Henri Cole’s Middle Earth[6] is an autobiography in lightning flashes. Groping its way forward image by image (his weakest poems seem nothing but images), brutally revealing, addicted to the beautiful and sickened by it, this is the most intimate book in American poetry since Plath’s Ariel. The poems, most of them brief, sonnet length while refusing to be sonnets, are an inner monologue performed before the shadows of parents, lovers, anyone who has seen the outer surface of the man and mistaken him (Cole is an observer any former lover would fear, but it’s himself he lashes). He faces the world wearing a mask, as if to protect the world from his moral ugliness and himself from the world’s sorrows: “This is the world God didn’t create,/ but an artist copying the original”:
In the alps, a little trolley grinds its gears,
floating into the valley, where heavy droplets fall,
as the farmer’s wife hurries—like a moving target
or a mind thinking—to unpin her laundry
from the wet white clothesline, and the farmer,
in the granary, stifles the little cries
of the neighbor girl parting her lips.
If the meaning of life is love, no one seems to be aware,
not even Mary and Joseph, exhausted with puffy eyes,
fleeing their dim golden crib.
Little … little. Even in such miniatures, the poet measures the malfeasance of parents; yet his poems rarely accept the easy j’accuse that animates, even dominates, most poems on Freud’s family drama. The poet elicits the reader’s uneasy sympathy by his plangent self-hatred, which rises to the surface of his poems like a corpse from the bottom of a lake. His mother and father rule like distant, irrational gods—he is angry at them the way a child is, out of ritual obeisance.
Cole is unusual among his contemporaries not only for his devotion to images violent with artistic occasion, redolent with the scent of great literature. (How many poets consciously challenge their ancestors—I mean distant ones like Milton and Shakespeare, not merely local demigods like Ashbery and Merrill?) He has committed himself to the scarifying honesties of his homosexuality—his scorched loneliness, his shivering anxieties—at a time when “queer studies” has overrun the universities with an upbeat version of what once was suffered in silence.
After the death of my father, I locked
myself in my room, bored and animal-like.
The travel clock, the Johnnie Walker bottle,
the parrot tulips—everything possessed his face,
chaste and obscure. Snow and rain battered the air
white, insane, slathery. Nothing poured
out of me except sensibility, dilated.
It was as if I were sub-born—preverbal,
truculent, pure—with hard ivory arms
reaching out into a dark and crowded space,
illuminated like a perforated silver box
or a little room in which glowing cigarettes
came and went, like souls losing magnitude,
but none with the battered hand I knew.
Little is a favorite word of a poet obsessed, like Elizabeth Bishop, with the particulars of shrinkage, wastage, disappearance (squalid and squalor are others). We reveal ourselves in our repetitions; and Cole returns again and again to primal scenes, not just preverbal but prelapsarian, Eden before Adam and Eve muddied it with their footprints. Cole has become one of our best poets of flowers (he is to botany what Sharon Olds is to vaginas), immersing himself in a world of apes, deer, carp, whales, elephants because no human can reject him there. (When he writes of wood storks, however, “soaring on thermals everywhere,” that is what vultures do, not storks.)
Such a poet welcomes his suffering, not because he prefers to suffer, but because suffering is the atmosphere he has learned to breathe. Yet even in small ways he shows how language brings the world so close it can almost be touched. When he writes, “The myth of love for another remained/ bright and plausible, like an athlete painted/ on the slope of a vase tying his sandal,” the image is resurrected from the dead air of museums. That the athlete is tying a sandal, rather than hurling a javelin, suggests the moment just before action, or just after, when like a lover he can be contemplated in repose—though such vases are usually behind glass.
Poetry is remarkable for the intimacies it allows. Shakespeare’s sonnets attract us still, not just because of their verbal splendors, but because his voice crosses the barrier of the grave. His poems, like Donne’s and Keats’s and Dickinson’s, have not drowned in the Sargasso of discarded poetic diction. (Table talk and letters sometimes bring even minor poets to our ears, when their poems no longer can.) To survive its passage down decades, the poetry of our new century will require a speech not already icy with habit. Henri Cole’s new poems, proud and knowing and wounded, archly suspicious, can be revealing because they guard their privacies so well. Middle Earth escapes all the praise I can heap upon it.
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 21 June 2003, on page 68
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