Mark Doty’s easy, gaudy style loves whatever the eye happens to light upon; his short lines and shorter stanzas are seduced by the surface of things. There were Renaissance artists who specialized in a particular effect—the drape of fabric, say, or a haunting smile—and, if you want all that glitters, Doty is your man. He has a genius for the rhetoric of light—at first this was method; now it’s compulsion. The poems in Sweet Machine show no restraint in their devotion.[1] Even decay has its gorgeousness:
When he mingles disgust and the aesthetic, you think, Ronald Firbank, look out!
rotting palaces flung straight
up from the sea, yellow
of mummy wrappings,
coral and rose
moldering now, faded
to precisely these
bruised and mottled
rusts; acid, lichenous
greens: vitriolized,
encrusted, pearled.
Occasionally, Doty makes some gesture toward the depths beneath surface (“art’s a mercuried sheen/ in which we may discern,/ because it is surface,/ clear or vague/ suggestions of our depths”), but his heart’s not really in it—he can’t wait to get back to describing those glamorous surfaces again. The book begins with lusters, sheens, marbled light, lustrous, scarab-gleam, glaze, sun-shot, halos, sunbeams, illumine, burnished, glaze again, gleaming, and that’s only two pages into the first poem: the sunshine comes wholesale. Two poems addressed to recent criticism of his work—poems that may have originated in stray remarks of mine—are highly defensive about this love of the light show. The superficial doesn’t have to be superficial, but it’s not enough to say there are depths; sometimes you have to show what those depths are.
A lot of Doty’s poems are about objects— art nouveau vases, a scribble of lilies by Jim Dine, a paneled screen, a dead friend’s objets d’art. If all this light recalls the world’s transience, its shallow glamor as well as its promise of transcendence, such objects suggest how desperate we are for possession and how unlikely to obtain it (to write of beauty is another way of possessing it). Doty’s poems are acts of celebration when they’re not elegies (sometimes these are almost the same thing), and, as in previous books, AIDS stands in the shadows. The elegies show little emotion; they’re just one more excuse for worshiping the world’s variety, and they do it as if paid by the prayer.
Doty is one of the more talented younger poets, full of the pizzazz of language, but you can take only so much pizzazz. At the drop of a hat he’s seized by rapture—and that’s just in daily life. When it comes to sex he’s Judy Garland bursting into song:
Viva Las Vegas! The campy tone (“God, my dear … , is in the damages”) grows insipid fairly quickly, as does the handkerchief-grabbing sentiment—some poems are so life-enhancing they need their own twelve-step program. I love the showy, luminous effects, but too often they just stay effects: a Bellini-like master of color needs subjects as strong as Bellini’s.
You enter me and
it’s Macy’s,
some available version of infinity;
I enter you and I’m the grass,
covered with your shock
of petals out of which you rise
Mr. April Mr. Splendor
climbing up with me
inside this rocking, lilac boat.
There’s no telling where Doty’s gifts might lead. A poem in the voice of a swan has more immediacy and compassion than any of his poems for humans (his version of city life is like a set for West Side Story). Alas, there’s also an awful sonnet spoken by a dog, and a poem just as bad about a dog pound (“O Lucky and Buddy and Red,/ we put our tongues to the world”). It’s not that Doty doesn’t learn from his mistakes; he doesn’t learn from his successes. There’s too much Up with People rapture here—even Dante had to go through the Inferno and Purgatorio first.
J. D. McClatchy’s Ten Commandments[2] has a clever Procrustean scheme: for each law (Oh, those commandments, the reader will say), three poems explore, often in slightly droll fashion, the modern incarnation of old sin. Our culture is steeped in its love of sin —literature is little more than the dirt of sin and the dust of redemption, and has always found the drama of sin its raison d’être. McClatchy has used these ancient schemes of religious order to cast a moral light on what otherwise might be mere autobiography. When the Bible says, “Thou Shalt Have None Other Gods But Me,” it doesn’t have in mind a boy met in a Gents room— and yet these poems remind us that idols are not just golden calves we fall on our knees to worship. Idols are everywhere.
1955. A scratchy waltz
Buzzed over the ice rink’s P.A.
My classmate Tony, the barber’s son: “Alls
He wantsa do is, you know, like, play.”
Bored with perfecting my languid figure eights,
I trailed him to a basement door marked GENTS
With its metal silhouette of high-laced skates
(Symbols, I guess, of methods desire invents).
Tony’s older brother was waiting inside.
I’d been “requested,” it seemed. He was sixteen,
Tall, rawboned, blue-eyed,
Thumbs hooked into faded, tightening jeans.
I fumbled with small talk, pretending to be shy.
Looking past me, he slowly unzipped his fly.
That sexual irony penetrates our wayward modern souls—McClatchy’s graven images (the ones the second commandment gets upset about) aren’t garden ornament Baals, they’re the wrinkles on his face and an x-ray. Not all the commandments find their sins so revealingly explored. The scheme sits heavily upon them—wasn’t one sin worth more than three poems; wasn’t one worth fewer? (Some sins are a lot more interesting than others.) The book is torn between private confession and public accusation. Poems on Nero, Eichmann, and Iago (sinners all) and imitations of Ovid and Horace show the richness of implication within a poverty of moral action. The private studies lack only the guilt, the flinched-from responsibility that made Lowell’s Life Studies so disturbing.
McClatchy is one of the wittiest of our contemporaries, and a few poems have the glibness of the born comedian (“half wound, half wisecrack,” he says, but you forgive the wisecracks because they come with the wounds—indeed, the wisecracks may be wounds themselves). Despite their natty urbane surfaces, the poems often turn bleak and unforgiving, as if the beginnings were by Merrill and the endings by Hecht. There’s a lullaby made vicious, a poem applying a Vietnam motif (from Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”) to a room abandoned by lovers, and a poem that moves Proust from parlor respectability to a bedroom of caged, tortured rats.
The frank homosexuality—an advance on the quiet sidestepping of Auden (otherwise a brooding presence here)—is not the point of the poems, it’s their medium. Scholars have only begun to study what men are, what “constructs” the male, what a male point of view or a male literature might be. These questions are not equally arresting, but the answers are not identical to what history and psychology and literary studies were before feminism. They are terra incognita. Given the pieties of the academy, which believes women’s studies legitimate but men’s studies not, such questions will be addressed only through the secret door of homosexuality. In their unapologetic maleness, McClatchy’s dark and satisfying poems suggest the answers are not necessarily pleasant, just necessary.
Marie Ponsot’s dry, delicate talent is hard to place: at times she sounds like that rarity, a good translation from French. Among our women poets the tradition of eccentrics starts with Emily Dickinson and includes Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, even Amy Clampitt. Whitman was an eccentric, and so was Pound, and so is Ashbery; but women kept their subjects withheld and domestic, their poems more primly minded, more decoratively hedged. Only close reading showed the terrors within.
The poems in The Bird Catcher tend to be small and lightweight, whimsical (well, occasionally preachy in a whimsical way), confident in their innocent unselfconsciousness.[3] Ponsot’s a poet better quoted than described. Here’s a sonnet on folk tales:
I like this better every time I read it—that beast who’s a secret logician, that careful placement of “pack” (like a motherly reminder), and the hut on chicken legs, as weird as anything in Auden, or weirder! “The tale has bends in it” perfectly describes her narrative method.
The tale has bends in it. What can it mean
that he leaves on a quest for a talking horse
but comes back with a princess? In between
she gives him falcon-power, but remorse
starves him since he won’t kill small game.
(He’d feast
if the hut on chicken-legs hopped a snow-hid
course
twirling before him through the woods.) He
runs east,
west, sleep deprived till he finds the last word
for sleep, but forgets it when a wakeful beast
proves to him his mother tongue’s absurd.
It’s about what all stories are about,
the bargain they offer or deny the heart:
to get home, leave home; pack; at dawn set out
on a trip dusk closes where it started.
Ponsot’s first book, True Minds, was published in 1957, her next not for almost a quarter-century. You want to reward her for her modesty, for constructing her poems like no one else—their freshness is a kind of courage. It’s easy to teach young poets how to write like other poets; but the result, as you page through magazines forlornly, and finally with dread, is that too many sound as if they’d measured rhetoric from the same bolt and bought subjects from the same catalogue. You can’t teach them how to be original; you can’t even teach them to want to be original.
Ponsot writes on the mysteries of motherhood, on food, gardens, women writers, on children and divorce, subjects common enough and usually dull enough. But her poems start in odd places, and she’s in love with unlikely words and unexpected rhymes. She writes to a rhythm unheard by other poets; her canter’s so unusual, in meter her ungainly sentences are sweetly blind to their lack of grace, like the tutu-ed elephants in Fantasia:
In for the winter, your Christmas Cactus
shouts “Rose” & shoots its flame-seek
flowers out
in doubles at the end of each dark stem.
I can’t copy such plenty. But I can
proclaim how well its structure celebrates
the lived poetic all your born days state.
I’d go through pages of Ponsot’s childish, or plain, or plain childish poems, the occasional banality, the evasive distractedness, to get to the dozen or so that live in their own small magics. Her delicacy is rich with the tact of perception—it makes the reader feel like a pocket Croesus. Rather than praise her further, I’ll just quote another sonnet that ought to be in anthologies:
That remarkable line about Eve (how complicatedly moral it makes anatomy), the offhanded use of “misappropriated” and “smoulder” and “nag” and “guts,” and that sharp Donne-like ending! The parenthesis declares its relation to the dry-eyed catalogue of loss in Bishop’s “One Art,” but this poem takes a darker turn. Some of Ponsot’s poems stump me—I can’t imagine why anyone would write them (that’s the way I feel about Auden’s early work)—but you never know what you’ll find when you turn the page, and it’s scary.
It haunts us, the misappropriated flesh,
be it Pelops’ shoulder after Demeter’s feast
or Adam’s rib supporting Eve’s new breasts,
or the nameless root of Gilgamesh.
Who am I that a given beast must die
to stake the smoulder of my blood or eyes?
Were only milk, fruit, honey to supply
my table, I would not starve but thrive.
But then the richer goods I misappropriate
(time wasted, help withheld, mean words for
great)
would blaze forth and nag me to repudiate
the habitual greed of my normal state.
My guts delight twice in the death I dine on,
once for hunger, once for what meat distracts
me from.
Deborah Garrison’s A Working Girl Can’t Win arrived in a glaring arc-light of publicity—a review in Time and a full-page photograph in The New Yorker, where she works.[4] With much current poetry reduced to minor domestic trauma, you can see the appeal of working life, even if the life is spent moaning in Manhattan coffee bars. A working girl is not quite a working man (a movie titled Working Man would be Stakhanovite romance or merely ironic) and does not declare lost youth as “career woman” does. I’m not the only reader who hears “working girl” and thinks Holly Golightly, and there’s something sprightly and fortiesish about these poems. They know breakfast at Tiffany’s is good, but lunch and dinner even better. The title sentiment is therefore revisionist—a working girl can’t take herself seriously, even if she takes feminism for granted, so much for granted that a little old-fashioned self-pity is allowed to leak in.
New York has been a distinguished ground for poets, from Whitman’s Brooklyn ferry to Hart Crane’s Brooklyn Bridge, from Elizabeth Bishop’s run-over hen to James Merrill’s blown-up townhouse; there must be a dangerous surplus of unemployed poets in New York at any time. Garrison is never unemployed—she’s too busy whining about her work life, her married life, her old boyfriends, and dashing off sketches of the local scene:
No Talk of the Town piece would be quite this unfocused or collegiate, this reminiscent of the notebooks of Sylvia Plath during her Mademoiselle phase. It’s not that these poems are bad, though they’re bad enough; it’s that they’re not sure what poems do, so they fall back on perky diary jotting, full of adolescent malaise and ressentiment.
I trample the scraps of deli lunches
some ate outdoors as they stared dumbly
or hooted at us career girls—the haggard
beauties, the vivid can-dos, open raincoats aflap
in the March wind as we crossed to and fro
in front of the Public Library.
“Please Fire Me,” the poem’s called, and you think of Whitman’s copy of Leaves of Grass in his desk at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which did get him fired. No one reading these poems would sentence Garrison even to an hour at the water cooler.
Here comes another alpha male,
and all the other alphas
are snorting and pawing,
kicking up puffs of acrid dust
while the silly little hens
clatter back and forth
on quivering claws and raise
a titter about the fuss.
The poetics of office life ought to be worth melancholy study. Melville saw the comic tragedy in Bartleby, and, in his flawed Something Happened, Joseph Heller knew what happened to his soldiers when they disappeared into the lonely crowd. Boredom, anomie, loneliness—Garrison understands the emotions of city life, but not that having emotions isn’t the same as writing poems (most of her poems seem like ad layouts for poems). She suffers all the hapless phrasings of a beginner (“the sun’s fuzzy mouth sucking the day back/ in through the haze”), while adding a cheery self-hatred and self-pity of her very own. Garrison’s poems touch the surface of suffering, of lost chance and lost love, and then they gossip about it.
Andrew Hudgins has been writing paeans to the South all his career, the sort that made Confederate soldiers weep around campfires—they’re polished, they’re professional, they’re about as authentic as Burl Ives (but then much of the South was never authentic; it was a compulsion of inauthenticities, like most cultures). The blurb’s genial public hypocrisy has reached new heights when fellow poets can say Babylon in a Jar “sounds like the voice of creation itself. His genius is undeniable” or “Andrew Hudgins has become a national treasure.”[5]
Hudgins loves the moral precisions of family life and the immoral residue of a history that can neither forget nor be forgiven. Grackles flee from a chinaberry and to the poet it’s a “miracle”; a copperhead strikes his rubber boots and he feels pleasure in its hatred of his “advancing paradise”; daffodils break through winter ground and Nineveh falls. At times his life is so full of meaning, it crowds out the poetry—poetry isn’t just a life squeezed until the tears start. The poems make more of these moral anecdotes than they deserve, as if to shove the reader’s face in them and shout, “This! This is poetry!”
It’s a general rule that when the leaves start singing the reader should look for the emergency exit.
… my life, which I had not yet lived,
clung to those oaks and hickories—my life,
my parents’, brothers’, everybody’s lives—
clung to green twigs while the wind was
claiming us,
though only I, I thought, only I saw it
and I kept silent… .
But I was not the wind, or the leaves wholly,
riding without knowing what it was,
the in-breath or out-breath of the Lord,
and as I stood beneath them, listening,
the leaves sang, dying, Don’t die, and I’ve
obeyed them.
The stoic certitudes of Ransom and Tate have become the milky suspensions of many Southern poets—either the South is getting weepier by the minute (you expect Hudgins to whip out a banjo and strike up “My Old Kentucky Home”) or the achy-breaky hearts of country music have begun to wander into poetry. When Hudgins writes that a drunk’s eyes “flooded with love” or “our eyes brim/ with easy, pleasing tears,” or wonders “if sentimentality were my reward/ for living my life well,” one man’s reward is everyone else’s punishment.
Every formal decision in these poems seems directed at getting the most out of mawkishness (the dropped indentations of Pound’s juddering thought and Williams’s imagistic phrases just give Hudgins an opportunity for teary enjambment of emotion). Every anecdote is scrubbed into bright homily—you end up feeling you’ve walked out of a particularly nasty Sunday school class. Oddly enough, invocation of those old Biblical sites often clears the air. Hudgins is given to linking plant life to the fall of cities in a time-honored preacherly way, but when he turns to history he sometimes forgets all about his South. He gives a reading of contemporary Russia as dry-eyed as any politics in Auden, and an anecdote out of the Gallic Wars as brutal as any murder in Hecht.
Such lines contain more poetry than the crippled yearnings of domestic life (everyone’s South is different: even Hudgins’s Cincinnati has seceded). When the South is one day no longer the South, you can water his poems with tears and watch the magnolias grow.
We plowed our charred fields, using each
other as oxen.
Some of us found new gods, and some of
those gods were Roman.
We paid our grain levies and, when he
demanded them,
we sent our sons to Caesar and he made them
soldiers… .
and then, in Alesia, we heard they’d kept him
caged six years,
six years in a cage, our handsome king, our
famous warrior,
six years before they dragged him through
their capital,
some gray barbarian from some forgotten
war, our handsome king,
our well-nigh savior, a relic from an old war
six years settled.
Mark Strand ought to be the poster boy for postmodernism—in Blizzard of One a poet’s dry, devious authority is under constant threat, his nihilism full of the death rattle of self-mockery.[6] In some poets authority is the manifestation of doubt: they live within the design of their limitations (too often they become their limitations). Robert Lowell’s or Geoffrey Hill’s doubts control the theology of argument; but Strand has always been, despite his hollow-voiced booming, a more puckish and slippery character.
No poet who hopes to retain an undertaker’s mien could title a poem “The Great Poet Returns” and begin it like this:
This isn’t just self-referential (few would mourn the loss of most poems about poetry), it’s hilariously suicidal. Poets are allowed to be larkish if their larks are clearly stamped, like Eliot’s Practical Cats; but to destroy the portentous authority of the poetic voice in one poem is tricky if you want to use it in another. Too much of our poetry has become professionally rueful, as if the middle-class were incarnate tragedians—take out the garbage cans and you’re Philoctetes. Strand favors coolly flat statements, near-depositions of the ordinary, but always with a touch of the numinous:
When the light poured down through a
hole in the clouds,
We knew the great poet was going to show.
And he did.
A limousine with all white tires and stained-
glass windows
Dropped him off. And then, with a clear and
soundless fluency,
He strode into the hall. There was a hush.
His wings were big.
How gorgeous that “Sea of Something,” that “cold,/ Watery foliage.” There’s scarcely an adjective in sight; it’s all simple nouns and verbs and generic chains of dependent clauses and prepositional phrases. When you read Strand you think of moody realists like Edward Hopper and William Bailey, painters who light the world in strangeness; it’s no surprise he’s written on both and was an art-school classmate of Bailey’s. And just when Strand seduces you with such language, he’ll throw in five poems about dogs that deflate the poet’s Romantic struggle. (“I roam around and ponder fate’s abolishments”).
Out of what place has he come
To enter the light that remains, and say in the
weightless
Cadence of those who arrive from a distance
that the crossing
Was hard with only a gleam to follow over
the Sea of Something,
Which opens and closes, breaks and flashes,
spreading its cold,
Watery foliage wherever it can to catch you
and carry you
And leave you where you have never been . . . ?
Strand has the mythic impulse worse than most poets of his generation (thirty years ago young poets were eagerly devouring Merwin’s The Lice and Strand’s Reasons for Moving, and many wrote bad imitations for years thereafter); but he withholds, like an immoral God, the confidence that the creator isn’t kidding. Strand has often been underestimated—Blizzard of One has pages of gloriously austere, patrician sentiment: poems of aging and death, an elegy for Joseph Brodsky and a premature elegy for Octavio Paz. Strand could write such lines all day, in his torpid, beautifully passive manner, and they would mean almost nothing to him. (I’ve heard he can do that manner in conversation, as a party piece.) He lives beyond the horizon of emotion.
Strand seems desperate to show that the poet’s magic is just a few foolish tricks, a slight catch in the throat, nothing a professional can’t manage offhandedly—he’s never taken in by such tricks himself, and seems almost condescending toward those who are. Yet that moody voice is so seductive, so rich with elegy and denial, even a wary reader can find himself taken in. In a giddily overwritten pantoum, Strand pictures his friends waltzing, waltzing; and the form has them come and go, go and come—it’s all campy and trivial; and yet, when the sons and daughters of the couples come waltzing on, the dance floor swells with that sense of loss, of life passing, that the poem until then had successfully withheld. I’m charmed by such a moment, and hate myself for being charmed.
Paul Muldoon is our poetry’s Don Quixote, his lance a leaky pen. Hay is his latest installment of glibly rabid raptures, adventures in the rough trade of language, the poet rescuing sonnets in distress, tilting at titling, his faithful cat Pangur Ban at his side.[8] Muldoon is notoriously gifted and just as notoriously difficult to measure. At times he seems a suitcase surrealist in the manner of Ashbery, at times a defrocked priest of Oulipo or a disinherited successor to Heaney and all that is Irish. (Muldoon’s jacket photo, which makes him look like a dyspeptic frog, is pointedly captioned with the information that he has become an American citizen.)
The book opens with a phantasmagoric vision in the mudroom of Muldoon’s Princeton home and ends with a thirty-sonnet hayride through a restaurant in Paris. Poems shift and ratchet, one time slipping into another, one place substituting for another, scenes turning themselves inside out, lines jolting and stuttering, mysteriously repeated according to some Masonic code, subject to sudden outcries of “hey” or “wheehee” or “tra la.”
It’s a paean to bourgeois accumulation, the little-valued objects of storage and discard viewed through the archeology of other civilizations: Muldoon sees the ruin of cultures past where an outsider would see just a wheel of cheese or jars of birdseed and soy sauce. There’s a “ziggurat/ of four eighty-pound bags of Sakrete,” a “shale outcrop” of old record albums. It’s a tour de force, both bewildering and wearying, like so much in Muldoon, the present built on the ruins of the past, but the past contained in the present. That, of course, is the way poetry builds on poetry.
There a wheel felloe of ash or sycamore
from the quadriga to which the steeds had no
sooner been hitched
than it foundered in a blue-green ditch
with the rest of the Pharaoh’s
war machine was perfectly preserved between
two amphoras,
one of wild birdseed, the other of Kikkoman.
Muldoon is in love with the mortal dreck and drainage of culture, in love (not wisely but too well) with language itself—having Auden’s taste for the obscure and Heaney’s for dialect, time and again he’s victim of “the froufrous, the fripperies, the Fallopian/ tubes of a dead cow in the Philippines.” Too often the result is tedious foolery, the language run amok with Jabberwocky possibility (words, words, monotonously inbreeding), as if possibility were reason enough for the doing: “there was a glimmer …/ that lit his glib all glabrous with Brylcreem,/ all brilliantine-brilliant,/ that glinted and glittered and gleamed as from Elysium.”
It’s just his father’s hair, but a reader wants to cry, “Hold! Enough!” And yet there’s always more, not just a little more but a toxic spill of more: twenty-one poems about record albums, or ninety haiku (oddly enough, in the eyeblink haiku Muldoon’s life, the real life, is most imaginatively present). If you don’t like one page, he’ll throw something different at you on the next: a ghazal, a pantoum, a riddle, an errata slip alarmingly like a well-known poem by Charles Simic.
It’s not that jokes and japes and irritating asides don’t have a point (what Muldoon’s poems don’t have is enough plot or plan or argument), but that the point is little more than the absurdity, the wit in withholding. The frippery turns the poems into performance, with all the layers of egotism that implies, the lovely layers and the unlovely ones. And yet, just when I’m annoyed with the tom-(and dick- and harry-)foolery, just when I grow furious at the lavish wasting of such gifts, a few poems almost redeem the whole collection. It shouldn’t be surprising that Muldoon’s finest work is about the Troubles: “Long Finish” turns the sights of love to the sites of war, “Third Epistle to Timothy” is a moving meditation on the poet’s father, and “Aftermath” (perhaps the closest in spirit to his teacher, Heaney) works its changes on images of terrorism.
“Let us now drink,” I imagine patriot cry to
patriot
after they’ve shot
a neighbor in his own aftermath, who hangs
still between two sheaves
like Christ between two tousle-headed thieves,
his body wired up to the moon, as like as not.
The serious work needs the license Muldoon grants himself for the bad (he’s a little factory of poetic license, and his good poems borrow the manners of his worst), but I can’t help wishing he found more use for the serious. Everyone interested in contemporary poetry should read this book, fresh and freshly irritating, a pretty ruin of intentions, giddy and so rarely grave (how I wish it were the other way around). In our time of tired mirrors and more-than-tiresome confession, Muldoon is the rare poet who writes through the looking glass.
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 17 December 1998, on page 69
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