Rita Dove’s slickly written poems are professional in a completely professional way. Her poems have a message, though rarely a subtle message—more often it’s a billboard or full-page ad. I understand why Black poets, particularly ones as venerated as the former poet laureate (sixteen honorary doctorates and counting), are under pressure to be Role Models and write Public Poetry that will instill Ethnic Pride and Celebrate Diversity (such poets’ dreams are in Capital Letters). On the Bus with Rosa Parks is less a book of poetry than a public relations exercise.[1]
When you live the public life too long, when you’re used to standing on stage with celebrities speaking to celebrities, receiving Glamour magazine’s Woman of the Year Award or the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement (can such a thing exist?), when university presidents practically hurl themselves beneath buses attempting to give you honorary degrees, it’s easy to forget how easy it is to write bad poetry, that the best intentions, in this best of all possible worlds, won’t help when the words lie dead on the page. You might want to write a poem that will encourage children to read, and you might go about it like this (the poem is titled “The First Book”):
Open it.
Go ahead, it won’t bite.
Well … maybe a little.
More a nip, like. A tingle.
It’s pleasurable, really.
You see, it keeps on opening.
You may fall in.
Sure, it’s hard to get started;
remember learning to use
knife and fork? Dig in:
You’ll never reach bottom.
It’s not like it’s the end of the world—
just the world as you think
you know it.
I had to quote the whole thing, because who otherwise would believe it? I love the smirking condescension of “Sure, it’s hard to get started.” Any self-respecting child would rise up with knife and fork and stab the speaker in the eye. Children know when they’re being condescended to; it’s only adults who’ve forgotten. But has the poet, cozy in her family-values truths, even tried to recall what it was like to learn to read? You have to be taught what letters are, and how they sound; you have to sound out each word, painfully and slowly. It’s a tedious, frustrating miracle, earned by hard graft. Dove’s smug, soothing rendition is a fairy tale, where you swallow a little cake and Presto! you can read.
The main subject of Rita Dove’s new poems is the life of Rita Dove (once there were confessional poems—now there are publicity releases). Not just the life of Rita Dove, but The Amazing and Remarkable Life of Rita Dove, starring Rita Dove, written, produced, and directed by Rita Dove, with special effects and additional dialogue and music composed by Rita Dove. It’s hard to remember that Dove was once a poet of modest but real talent (it’s said no matter how badly Jorie Graham and Rita Dove now write, Helen Vendler will find a way to praise them). When she celebrates breast-feeding, in the general inflation of effect she’s attended not by a nurse but by an “African Valkyrie.” A sequence honoring Rosa Parks uses her quiet bravery as just another chance for the poet’s self-serve opportunism.
Only a couple of odd, allusive poems remain to suggest what gifts this poet has lost. “The Camel Comes to Us from the Barbarians” is called an “allegory,” though it’s not clear why at first. It’s dryly funny, and works by sidelong glances; but then you realize it’s not about camels—it’s about slavery (“A rare commodity, these beasts—// who cannot know/ what beauty wreaks, what mountains/ pity moves.”). In the dumbing down of Dove’s verse, it reminds you that this poet once had sly intelligence.
How could most poets resist the clamor and boosterism Dove enjoys? You’re asked, say, to write a poem to commemorate the restoration of the statue of Freedom on the Capitol dome, so you write about a bag lady, because Freedom might walk among us ugly and ignored. It doesn’t even occur to you it’s a fairly dopey idea.
You write it, and it’s printed the same day in the Congressional Record. Then it’s published in a fine-press edition, “commissioned as the four millionth volume of the University of Virginia Libraries” and made “globally accessible by the University of Virginia in a multimedia version on the Internet.” After all that, who has the heart to tell you it’s awful, that it’s written in slogans, that you’ve forgotten completely what words can do?
consider her drenched gazeher shining
brow
she who has brought mercy back into the
streets
and will not retire politely to the potter’s field
having assumed the thick skin of this town
its gritted exhaust its sunscorch and blear
she rests in her weathered plumage
bigboned resolute
don’t think you can ever forget her
don’t even try
she’s not going to budge
no choice but to grant her space
crown her with sky
for she is one of the many
and she is each of us
I could almost review Adrienne Rich in my sleep (sometimes, reading her, I feel I am asleep). I know more or less what she’s going to say and how she’s going to say it. Like Ashbery and Merwin and some other older poets, she’s past wrestling with her art: a modern Narcissus wants to be loved for herself alone. Rich settled for the seduction of style long after her style was seductive anymore—it’s a generation since her poems disturbed despite their ideology (or, briefly, because of it). The feisty, troubled poet of Diving into the Wreck (1973), however starved and predictable the verse looks now, was still alive to her art.
Midnight Salvage[2] uses all the sad properties of Rich’s recent work: the fragmentary sentences of a decrepit Pound; the reckless phrasing (“my art’s pouch/ crammed with your bristling juices”); the clumsy typographical invention, by Cummings out of Chrysler; lines vain with vanity (“wanted for the crime of being ourselves”), or stiff with cant (“Art doesn’t keep accounts/ though artists/ do as they must// to stay alive”), or like shop-soiled Whitman (“what humiliatoriumswhat layers of imposture”); the breast-beating of sour radicalism; the lists of capitalism’s disjecta membra.
Her language, at times pitched unfashionably toward beauty, is everywhere undermined by the coarseness of her politics, the anaesthesia of party-platform emotion. Rich is by now so suspicious of beauty she can hardly let a few phrases of description pass without guiltily whipping herself. Too often the subjects, however distant from her little world, are forced into its convent-cell conventions. A poem on René Char, a poet who served in the French resistance, sits humiliatingly within Rich’s “vigil” in California. You want to remind her that California isn’t at war, that nothing could be less relevant than her irrelevance. The photographer Tina Modotti’s life gives way— must give way—to the poet’s auto-hagiography. “These footsteps I’m following you with/ aren’t to arrest you,” she says unctuously (you’d think she was campaigning for canonization). Rich possesses these artists like a slumlord his properties.
Surprisingly, here and there the poetry is stirring again, like Lazarus. There’s never a whole poem (that would be too much to hope for); but, in these lines sneering at her former, well-paid professorship at Stanford, you begin to remember why Rich wrote poetry in the first place.
How razor-edged that “marxist-on-sabbatical”! Suddenly a world primly divided between good and evil looks uncertain again —she seems ashamed of her old Manichean stridency (at one time she refused to admit men to her readings). Ideologues always excuse past excesses by claiming they were “necessary.” Rich hasn’t quite reached that embarrassed state of contrition, though she seems aware apology might be appropriate.
Under the conditions of my hiring
I could profess or declare anything at all
since in that place nothing would change
So many fountains, such guitars at sunset
Did not want any more to sit under such a
window’s
deep embrasure, wisteria bulging on spring air
in that borrowed chair
with its collegiate shield at a borrowed desk
under photographs of the spanish steps, Keats’
death mask
and the english cemetery all so under control
and so eternal
in burnished frames : : or occupy the office
of the marxist-on-sabbatical
Of course, soon she’s back spouting a martinet version of Marx, scribbling more postcards from the war against whatever it is the war’s against—racism, sexism, every -ism but the -ism of -isms. She’s the self-medaled, self-beribboned witness of the century’s wrongs, even if the radical leanings of her work have become ever more regressive, frozen into rhetoric. Only for a brief moment, in a passage about dating a paraplegic veteran while she was a student at Radcliffe, does the fog of politics lift and a life emerge, a life of doubt and girlish insecurity, a life with tremors of regret. In those scattered lines, you see someone drowning beneath the surface of this awful verse. You know someone’s down there, something terrible’s happening, and that there’s nothing you can do.
The blood-soaked, rain-drenched history of Ireland is torn to its root with guilt as deep as religion. Ireland has a past coiled in its present, and Irish poets may be forgiven for wanting to stand apart from bloodied ground. Many have taken their language into exile (one of the guilts is that for so many the language is English), and often into the well-upholstered exile of the foreign university: Seamus Heaney at Harvard, Seamus Deane at Notre Dame, Tom Paulin at Oxford, Paul Muldoon at Princeton, and Eavan Boland in the Stanford professorship once held by Adrienne Rich.
Boland’s new book, The Lost Land, lives in a luminous realm of Irish mist—the language is so thick with the impasto of the past, her Ireland is more a painting than a place (you’d never guess she spends her days in sunny California).[3] The book divides its exile between a long poem on native ground and a scattering of poems haunted by Irish memory (memory is a lost land, but the title’s a wicked pun—there’s land in Boland, too). The long poem, “Colony,” begins at the end of bardic poetry, with the knowledge that English colonization was the death of such poetry and the implication that this poet means to revive it. Colony is an important word in academic life—even if you speak the language of empire, in Colonial Studies you side with the colony.
Ireland is so rich in conflict you’d think Irish poets just wade into a bog and spout poetry. It’s true—prick Heaney or Michael Longley or Derek Mahon and they bleed verse as Yeats did. None may be quite the poet Yeats was, but you see in them a bartered, battered inheritance. In too many of her poems, Boland tries to wrap herself in the fashionable cloak of tradition without the tedium of writing poems; and indeed much of her work is about writing poems, a process psychologists used to call compensation. (No one wants to hear how difficult writing is. It sounds like whining, or bragging.) Boland may want to bleed poetry, but often she just leaks self-importance: “I am your citizen: composed of/ your fictions, your compromise, I am/ a part of your story and its outcome./ And ready to record its contradictions.”
Ireland’s contradictions are only gestured toward (there’s a lot of heated arm-waving in these poems). Boland likes to work by visual nuance, by words in their mythic aftermath; but image is useless when the politics act so vague and complacent (or, worse, so humorless). There’s no sense of a moral topography that would set Ireland’s wrongs against Ireland’s rights.
Often Boland borrows Heaney’s props without paying interest on them. She loves being professionally Irish—she’ll end a poem referring to “losses such as this:// which hurts/ just enough to be a scar.// And heals just enough to be a nation.” That’s what happens when vanity meets lack of irony—a poetry far too impressed with itself.
When her bardic imagery collapses into such portentous gravity (and unconscious hilarity), the poet must think the reader stone deaf or quite stupid. Boland is capable of striking phrases (“the faraway,/ filtered-out glitter of the Pacific”), and one or two remind you how dyed in metaphor real history lies: “The patriot was made of drenched stone.” But then it’s back to her numinous, theatrical rhetoric (all her poems seem delivered by Mrs. Patrick Campbell), the one-sentence stanzas and stubby sentences. That stop. And go. Or are fragments.
I have immortal longings in me, you half-expect her to say, then clutch the asp and die.
I have two daughters.
They are all I ever wanted from the earth.
Or almost all.
I also wanted one piece of ground:
One city trapped by hills. One urban river.
An island in its element.
So I could say mine. My own.
And mean it.
Reading Louise Glück’s new poems is like eavesdropping on a psychiatrist and a particularly agon-ridden, myth-spouting, shape- shifting analysand (her story could be told only by Ovid, and it wouldn’t be pleasant). The discomfort in Vita Nova[4] is not lessened by the suspicion that the psychiatrist may also be the patient, that all roles may be one role to this quietly hand-wringing play-actor, the only shakes-scene in a country. Like Shakespeare, she’s part-owner of her own theater, and playing tonight and every night is The True Tragedy of Louise Glück. (Given the competition from Rita Dove’s movie at the multiplex across town, you wonder how tickets are selling.)
Vita nuova was Dante’s story of his love for Beatrice, love that became a faith nearly erotic—passion began on the cross, but now it ends in the bedroom. There are offhand references to love in Glück’s apologia pro vita sua, but the outside world has vanished (in her last book, Meadowlands, there were horrifying comic dialogues with a husband, but he’s been written out of the script). Instead we return to the myths of Aeneas and Dido, of Orpheus and Eurydice (in Meadowlands the dominating tale was the return of Odysseus; but any tale will do, as long as it makes your private tragedy public and classical). The poet is always wronged Dido, but sometimes she’s also lyre-strumming Orpheus and sometimes doomed-to-hell Eurydice. It doesn’t seem to matter—every role Glück chooses has its star turn.
It’s hard to convey the oppressive weight of these doomed, sacrificial poems (how proud Glück is of her Freudian stigmata). Their naked interiors, bleached in disappointment and sterilized by despair, are monastic as much as masochistic. My pain is so much more painful than yours, each poem says in a shiver of pride.
Note how all those other illnesses are implied, not just to be suffered but possibly suffered still. Glück is too canny not to recognize how vain this sounds, how vengeful and unsympathetic self-pity is— when she strips away her flesh, like some vision of Vesalius, she enjoys it.
I believe my sin
to be entirely common:
the request for help
masking request for favor
and the plea for pity
thinly veiling complaint.
So little at peace in the spring evening,
I pray for strength, for direction,
but I also ask
to survive my illness
(the immediate one)—never mind
anything in the future.
I make this a special point,
this unconcern for the future,
also the courage I will have acquired by then
to meet my suffering alone
but with heightened fortitude.
What rescues her from creepy self-indulgence (the longer the book goes on, the less it’s rescued) is the saintly purity of her lines. The hollow echo of her nerveless inexorable need recognizes that no language will forgive these bitter sins or ameliorate such pain (her bloodless expression avoids the peacock chatter of Plath). Glück knows that in her Flatland world she’s reduced everything to two bland dimensions—when she mentions cherries, it sounds like a psychic breakthrough.
Despite the flaws of her poetry, airless self-importance and pretension chief among them (at times you feel she’s just discovered we’ll all die one day, and rushed to let us know), the stark lines have the frigid emptiness of a Pinter play, everything a destructive shimmer of pronouns. She knows she’s “cold at heart, in the manner of the superficial,” knows her moodiness is stifling, knows she loves to stop short for the Freudian truism (“Everyone afraid of love is afraid of death”) or close with the unfor- giving statement: “Bedtime, they whisper./ Time to begin lying.” She adores leaving the cunning pun buried there. If you wait, hungry for the textures of the world, for some noun like pheasant or brick or rutabaga, she’ll quiver in self-satisfaction and say, “I thought my life was over and my heart was broken./ Then I moved to Cambridge.” It takes the whole pinch-mouthed book to make that funny.
Frieda Hughes’s Wooroloo[5] is less a book of poetry than an act of fiction, the fiction of inherited characteristics. The children of great poets never become great poets, and even a mediocre hack has trouble passing along his tiny hoard of talent—regression to the mean is the usual, cruel inheritance of children. No Lamarck chopping off mouse tails (or Mendel counting peas) ever indulged more headily in romantic wish than those who hope literary talent can be passed from parent mouse to child mouse.
Frieda Hughes, the daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (on the jacket she’s coyly described as a “writer of unusual literary pedigree”), writes big, sleepy, wallflower lines, lines mostly innocent of literary expression. She can bash out a simile whenever she wants to, but her damp clichés of feeling and blood-filled ideas act poetic for a line or two, then start faking it. She arrives at a subject and then grinds the images out like sausages.
Some of the images are good, many bad, most indifferent, but they overwhelm their subjects—the poor subjects are just the excuse. You can tell when Hughes has been reading her mother, when her father, though she hasn’t really read either of them—she’s just absorbed their gestures in passing. Now she adopts the fox as her familiar, now she whines at her mother for committing suicide; but Hughes wants to be a poet a lot more than she wants to write poetry.
Hungry water has unrolled the wallpaper
Like tongues, and the ceiling full of heavy juice
Has fallen. The sofa floats.
Oranges are planets in the fireplace,
And the last of her son’s books[,]
Left in his old bedroom,
Have opened like sea anemones.
She likes to strike a pity-me tone; yet when you get beyond her frantic image-making you find nothing but static, lifeless observation, often about carnivorous animals or frail women with psychiatric problems (her sensibility is both childish and affectless, like that of a girl raised by wolves). Hughes is a bright woman playing at writing poems, though that doesn’t mean she’s always terrible—she has a natural sense of the balance and weight of a line, and might in time find something to put in her lines (recall that her mother started slowly and was as contrived as an air compressor). You end up feeling some editor waited close to forty years for these half-formed, unlovely things (you can almost hear the pitch: “So the little girl grows up, see, and she becomes a poet!”). Frieda Hughes had the benefit of both nurture and nature, and still can’t write a good poem.
Mary Jo Salter’s mousy, tense, off-kilter poems disturb me more than I think they will and disappoint me more than they should. A Kiss in Space[6] is full of honest, dutiful poems a housewife would write, if there were such a thing as a housewife anymore; they revel in domestic certitudes, the cozy rendering of a nuclear family out of Fifties advertisements, an all-electric house with a place for everything that has a place. Sometimes it seems such fastidious, well-made poems (you can see the dust-free cupboards, the gleaming refrigerator) lack nothing but a soul.
Just when you buy that homespun complacency, she writes of watching some old movie about the sinking of the Titanic. Wife and husband and daughters are “warm beneath one blanket flung/ across a comfy sofa in/ the lifeboat of our living room” (“ever so comfy,” as Auden once said) —“lifeboat” might be an unconsidered metaphor, but she notices how the movie family (also wife, husband, two children) is divided, some to live and some to die. She sees how phony it is, soon-to-be-drowned actors singing “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” but it troubles her:
I think she means each other’s arms, but it’s a disconcerting throwaway moment. It doesn’t quite move you, and isn’t quite meant to—it’s “nothing spectacular” after all, just the first small sign of deaths to come.
Oh, you and I can laugh. But having
turned off the set, and led the kids
upstairs into dry beds, we sense
that hidden in the house a fine
crack—nothing spectacular,
only a leak somewhere—is slowly
widening to claim each of us
in random order, and we start to rock
in one another’s arms.
Salter finds more in the domestic than the domestic seasonably contains—she notices the symbols daily life ignores (when she’s abroad, she can’t help seeing the diminished worlds the world makes—“dozens of tiny,/ tin Eiffel Towers glint at our feet”). The poems don’t always come to much—you want her to have the courage of her convictions. You want her to have convictions. Instead you get a hostess-like sincerity, sometimes with a barely detectable sneer, a chilliness she probably doesn’t even notice (that makes it slightly erotic—the erotic is the missing substance here). There’s a pleasantly sour anxiety beneath this prom-dress exterior, and here and there it breaks through.
Feigning normality. Suddenly all that white-knuckled normalcy is explained--how lovingly she modulates from Elizabeth Bishop-like tidiness to that jarring “poison,” the half-life of a half-life (that “half-” so thoughtfully enjambed). The annunciation is quiet, as so many in poetry are not. You have to work not to overlook Salter, she’s so eager to be overlooked, to be thought garden-variety wholesome (in a hilarious poem she gives an au pair’s bewildered view of this repressed college-town life). The good poems are few enough—there’s a hardshell elegy for Louis MacNeice, not a poet who’d seem to have much to offer her, and everyday poems about a robin’s nest or an injured hand that turn innocence into grounds for despair. Salter doesn’t take chances, and settles too easily for well-mannered, well-manicured poems (at least she knows how to make them, in this ill-made time—but it’s not enough). She gives a splendid imitation of a normal wife and mother, but under her clothes there’s something unmentionable and I wish she’d let it out.
From up here, the insomniac
river turning in its bed
looks like a line somebody painted
so many years ago it’s hard
to believe it was ever liquid; a motorboat
winks in the sun and leaves a wake
that seals itself in an instant, like the crack
in a hardly broken heart.
And the little straight-faced houses
that with dignity bear the twin
burdens of being unique and all alike,
and the leaf-crammed valley like the plate
of days that kept on coming and I ate
though laced with poison: I can look
over them, from this distance, with an ache
instead of a blinding pain.
Sometimes, off my guard, I half-
remember what it was to be
half-mad: whole seasons gone; the fear
a stranger in the street might ask
the time; how feigning normality
became my single, bungled task.
Twice last fall I tried to read Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, but its Erector Set construction and sweetly harebrained narrative kept putting me off.[7] This darkly layered original work deserves readers willing to put up with a good deal of flimflam for the pleasures of a poetry oddly conceived. Carson is a classical scholar addicted to showoff learning (I happen to like showoff learning myself). Autobiography of Red is a modern renovation of an obscure Greek classic that survives only in fragments, the Geryoneis of Stesichoros.
Geryon was a monster slain by Herakles (Hercules) for his cattle (it was the tenth of Herakles’s labors). Mentioned in the Aeneid, he pretty much disappears from literature after being used as a shuttle bus by Dante and Virgil in the Inferno. The original Geryon had three bodies and three heads, but Carson reincarnates him as a contemporary boy, a winged boy and colored red: the ultimate outsider. This “novel in verse,” as the subtitle hopefully describes it, works by gestures more than incident, though the incidents are quickly told. Sexually abused by his bully of a brother, Geryon withdraws into a strange world of photographs and autobiography (which Carson’s book purports to be, though the point of view is too worldly). Still a boy, he falls in love with a handsome young rough named Herakles; they visit Herakles’s grandmother in her hometown of Hades and later walk the dead surface of a volcano. Herakles ends the affair. Years later, in Buenos Aires, Geryon meets Herakles by accident and falls into a destructive ménage à trois.
The poem straggles to an unconvincing end, without ever coming to the moment, often foretold, when Herakles must slay Geryon. What supports the rather preposterous premise is Carson’s exact eye for the travails of childhood—the longings, disappointments, thwarted triumphs, and hot disasters that make childhood (even for a winged monster) both mystery religion and failed quest. The self-justifying monologues of the adults and angular dialogues between Geryon and Herakles, fraught with the tensions of the unsaid, ground a book likely to spin off into the philosophy of perception or odd facts about volcanos (I liked learning the air above volcanos can be so hot it sears the wings off birds).
Carson’s ambitions are larger than her material, and her attempt to link this dysfunctional childhood to notions of “redness” or volcanos is comically strained. The adolescent homosexual love affair is touching (as Geryon’s abuse is not), and you wish Carson had made more of it, as you wish she’d made more of Geryon’s being a monster. The book is top-heavy with its absurd apparatus (the sort of thing classical scholars must make up as a party game)—a potted biography of Stesichoros, a “translation” of the surviving fragments of the Geryoneis (taking liberties with them must be her idea of a hot time), three whimsical appendices on whether Helen blinded the poet, and a bedraggled interview with him.
Carson’s hokey gestures toward the “outsider,” toward “identity” (Geryon has a lame “Who am I?” moment), make a little of her philosophizing go a long way—you shudder at the identity politics behind a phrase like “everyday life as a winged red person.” At times Autobiography of Red seems like Pynchon on an off day, particularly when Geryon meets a tango dancer/psychoanalyst at the “only authentic/ tango bar left in Buenos Aires.” At others, her jaunty intemperate lines go off like fireworks. Here’s Herakles’s granny:
I have it from Virginia Woolf
who once spoke to me at a party not of course
about drowning of which she had no idea yet
—have I told you this story before?
I remember the sky behind her was purple she
came towards me saying Why are you alone
in this huge blank garden
like a piece of electricity? Electricity?
Maybe she said cakes and tea true we were
drinking gin
Autobiography of Red shares blinding self-indulgence with any number of greater books (The Cantos, Life Studies, Ariel) as well as hordes of failures. Carson has found the means of her story in the blank matter of existence—any number of scraps must have come directly from her life (in roundabout commentary, perhaps, on the fragments of Stesichoros), but the classical frame allows her a distance wholly refreshing. Though the poem must be judged a failed narrative, any reader will be grateful for such failures at a time when poetry risks so little. This is a child novel born in the Inferno.
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 June 1999, on page 60
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